Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/226

who already had a boy of four or five, sold a son of nine months to a rather elderly man at Ponds Inlet who already had two children, the price being a rifle for the father and an accordion for the mother. A young woman at Ponds Inlet sold her newly born son for a large soapstone lamp. One of the cleverest hunters on Southampton Island had only one of his own children; he had given a son to an old, childless couple at Repulse Bay, another to a man on Southampton Island who already had two himself and one adopted child. In many cases it seems to have been done merely for the sake of friendship or kinship; often the payment is not at all in reasonable proportion to the "value" of the child. At times it is almost a matter of charity, as in the winter of 1924 when a couple who were blind were given an infant child. Parry,^[1] too, mentions the general spread of this custom and says that it is nearly always sons who are given away. This, however, does not apply now; although the new parents would rather have a boy, the actual parents prefer to keep them. Adoptive children are treated exactly as the family's own children.

For the children themselves this adoption is mostly a bad exchange; as a rule they cannot, of course, get milk and therefore they have to be brought up on soup or chewed meat, which they suck from the mother's mouth, and of course a large number of them die of it. An adoptive child, eleven days old, at Pingerqalik was fed on caribou fat and blubber; twice a day two other women in the house, who were nursing, pressed a little milk out into the lid of a gut-skin box and this was poured into the child; at twelve days old it already began to get cooked meat. Adoption undoubtedly is very greatly to blame for the terribly high infant mortality.

The child spends the first part of its life in its mother's back-pouch, where at first it lies in the bottom, stark naked; by means of the wide shoulders of the frock it can be put to the breast without being taken out into the air, as Lyon also mentions.^[2] As soon as it grows a little and receives its first garment, it is allowed to put its head out of the pouch. When it can sit up, it is often taken out of the pouch and sat on the platform in its combination suit. The mother has an astonishing faculty for knowing when the child wishes to relieve itself, and takes it out of the pouch and holds it the while. Big children, up to three or four years, are also carried in the back pouch on journeys.

It is surprising what infants are exposed to as regards cold. In a snowstorm and severe frost the head is often protruding out of the pouch, with the result that the mother is unable to turn her hood up.