Page:Material Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos.djvu/42

whereas others remove to Kûk and Tunermiut, hunting seal and walrus in open water; the young men go caribou hunting. In spring the older men move to a salmon lake, especially Hansine Lake and Qeqertauarlik. The winter is spent in the interior, hunting the caribou, especially round about Kirchhoffer River, and it is from there that they move out to the coast (Nias Island and Bear Island) in March-April, when the sewing of caribou skins is completed and seal hunting can commence; at these places they make depots of blubber and meat. which can be fetched during the winter. During the half year I lived on the island, the removal from Nias Island to Kûk took place in the middle of August. At the end of August three young men and their families were put ashore on the coast south of Cape Welsford, where they hunted caribou and only rejoined the other families at Kirchhoffer River in the middle of December. On October 3rd we moved from Kûk in to Hansine Lake, whilst another family went to Qeqertauarlik, and on October 26th we left with supplies of blubber for the interior where, on November 19th, at Darkness Lake, Kirchhoffer River, we met the people from South Bay. We lived there until our departure from the island on February 15th.

The Iglulik Eskimos proper may geographically be divided into three groups which, previously at any rate, seem to have had a certain independence: 1) The inhabitants of the big bay on the east side of Melville Peninsula; of these the term Amitsormiut is often used. after the old main settlement Amitsoq. 2) The inhabitants of Iglulik and Pingerqalik. 3) The inhabitants of Steensby Fjord, Kangerdlugssuaq, and the coast to the east of it towards Piling, often called Kangerdlugssuarmiut; apparently they correspond to Boas' Pilingmiut and Sagdlirmiut;^[1] both Piling and the island Sadleq are now uninhabited, however.

The Amitsormiut now only comprise a few families. In March 1922 we met three families at Ingnertoq, they having sejourned in that neighbourhood the whole year; in summer in tents at Ingnertoq near the winter settlement, whence they hunted the walrus in boats; later in the summer they had been caribou hunting on the mainland within the spot where their autumn house stood at Kingatjuaq: when the sewing of caribou skins was over in February they moved to Ingnertoq, where they spent their time walrus hunting from the ice edge until in April they went on a trading journey to Repulse Bay. When we returned from Iglulik at the end of May we met them