QUEER CUSTOMS IN THE ARCTIC REGIONS.

Poverty Bay Standard, Volume IX, Issue 932, 6 April 1881, Page 1 (Supplement)

QUEER CUSTOMS IN THE ARCTIC REGIONS.

Lieutenant John Schwatka says:— 41 There are no wedding ceremonies among the Esquimaux, and hardly anything like sentiment is known. The relation of man and wife is purely a matter of convenience. The woman requires food and the man needs someone make his clothing and take charge of his dwelling while he is hunting. Marriages are usually contracted while the interested parties are children. The father’ of the boy selects a little girl who is to be his daughter-in-law, and pays her father something. Perhaps it is a snow-knife, or a sled or a dog, or, now that many of them are armed with firelocks, the price paid may be a handful of powder and a dozen percussion caps. The children are affianced, and when arrived at a * proper age they live together. The wife then has her face tattooed with lamp-black and is regarded as a matron in society. The method 3of tattooing is to pass the needle under the skin, and as soon as it is withdrawn its course is followed by a thin piece of pink stick dipped in oil and rubbed in the soot from the bottom of a kettle. The forehead is decorated with a letter V in double lines, the angle- very acute passing down between the eyes almost to the bridge of the nose and sloping gracefully to the right and left before reaching to the roots of the hair. Each cheek is adorned with an egg-shaped pattern, commencing near the wing of the nose and sloping upward toward the corner of the eye. These lines are also double. The most ornamental part, however, is the chin, which receives a gridiron pattern; the lines double from the edge of the lower lip, and reaching to the throat towards the corners of the mouth, sloping outward to the angle of the lower jaw. This is all that is required "by custom, but some belles did not stop here. Their hands, arms, legs, feet, and in fact, their whole bodies are covered with blue tracery that would throw Captain Constantinus completely in the shade. lonic columns, Corinthian capitals, together with Gothic structures of every kind, are erected whereever there is an opportunity to place them, but 1 never r»aw aiijr at letup Lw at figure or animal drawing for personal decorations. The forms are generally geometrical in tiesign and symmetrical in arrangement, each limb receiving the same ornamentation as its fellow. None of the men are tattooed. Some tribes are more profuse in this sort of decoration than others. The Iwilliks ■and Kinnepatooes are similar, and as . I have described, but the Netchillik, Ookjolik, and Ooquesiksillik women have the designs upon their faces con structed with three lines instead of two one of them being broader than the other. The pattern is the same as that of the Iwilliks and Kinepatoos, with the addition of an olive branch at the outside corner of the eyes and mouth. Marriage with them is not the sacred institution of civilization, but exchanges are very common. If a man who is going on a journey has a wife encumbered by. a child that would make travelling unpleasant, he exchanges wives with some friend who remains in camp and has no such inconvenience. Sometimes a man will want a younger wife to travel with, and in that case effects an exchange, and sometimes such exchanges are made for no especial reason, and among friends it is a usual thing to exchange wives for a week or two about every two months. Unmarried men who are going on a journey have no difficulty in borrowing a wife for the time being, and sometimes purchase the better-half altogether.