Customs concerning the dead
Abstentions
From the fact that we did not hear of any of the deaths until after their occurrence, we were able to learn very few of their customs concerning the dead. The few observations we were able to make agree in the main with those made elsewhere. For instance, we learned with tolerable certainty that the relatives of the dead, at least, must abstain from working on wood with an ax or hammer for a certain period—I believe, four or five days. According to Dall,579 in the region about Norton Sound the men can not cut wood with an ax for five days after a death has occurred. In Greenland the household of the deceased were obliged to abstain for a while from certain kinds of food and work.580
A woman from Utkiavwĭñ, who came over to the station one day in the autumn of 1881, declined to sew on clothing, even at our house, because, as she told Lieut. Ray, there was a dead man in the village who had not yet been carried out to the cemetery and “he would see her.” After consulting with her husband, however, she concluded she could protect herself from him by tracing a circle about her on the floor with a snow-knife. In this circle she did the sewing required, and was careful to keep all her work inside of it.
One of the natives informed me that when a man died his labrets were taken out and thrown away. I remember, however, seeing a young man wearing a plug labret of syenite, which he said had belonged to an old man who died early in the winter of 1881-’82. It was perhaps removed before he actually died.
Manner of Disposing of the Dead
The corpse is wrapped up in a piece of sailcloth (deerskin was formerly used), laid upon a flat sled, and dragged out by a small party of people—perhaps the immediate relatives of the deceased, though we never happened to see one of these funeral processions except from a distance—to the cemetery, the place where “they sleep on the ground.” This place at Utkiavwĭñ is a rising ground about a mile and a half east of the village, near the head of the southwest branch of the Isûtkwa lagoon. At Nuwŭk the main cemetery is at “Nexeurá,” between the village and Pernyû. The bodies are laid out upon the ground without any regular arrangement apparently, though it is difficult to be sure of this, as most of the remains have been broken up and scattered by dogs and foxes. With a freshly wrapped body it is almost impossible to tell which is the head and which the feet. We unfortunately never noticed whether the heads were laid toward any particular point of the compass, as has been observed in other localities. Dr. Simpson says that the head is laid to the east at Point Barrow.
Various implements belonging to the deceased are broken and laid beside the corpse, and the sled is sometimes broken and laid over it. Sometimes, however, the latter is withdrawn a short distance from the cemetery and left on the tundra for one moon, after which it is brought back to the village. Most people do not seem to be troubled at having the bodies of their relatives disturbed by the dogs or other animals,581 but we know of one case where the parents of two children who died very nearly at the same time, finding that the dogs were getting at the bodies, raised them on stages of driftwood about 4 or 5 feet high. Similar stages were observed by Hooper at Plover Bay;582 but this method of disposing of the dead appears to have gone out of use at the present day, since Dall583 describes the ordinary Siberian method of laying out the dead in ovals of stone as in use at Plover Bay at the time of his visit.
The cemetery at Utkiavwĭñ is not confined to the spot I have mentioned, though most of the bodies are exposed there. A few bodies are also exposed on the other side of the lagoon, and one body, that of a man, was laid out at the edge of the higher tundra, about a mile due east from the station. The body was covered with canvas, staked down all round with broken paddles, and over it was laid a flat sledge with one runner broken.584 At one end of the body lay a wooden dish, and under the edge of the canvas were broken seal-darts and other spears. The body lay in an east and west line, but we could not tell which end was the head. All sorts of objects were scattered round the cemetery—tools, dishes, and even a few guns—though we saw none that appeared to have been serviceable when exposed, except one Snider rifle. If, as is the case among Eskimo in a good many other places, all the personal property of the deceased is supposed to become unclean and must be exposed with him, it is probable that his friends manage to remove the more valuable articles before he is actually dead.585
The method of disposing of the dead varies slightly among the Eskimo in different localities, but the weapons or other implements belonging to the deceased are always laid beside the corpse. The custom at Smith Sound, as described by Bessels,586 is remarkably like that at Point Barrow. The corpse was wrapped in furs, placed on a sledge, and dragged out and buried in the snow with the face to the west. The sledge was laid over the body and the weapons of the deceased were deposited beside it. Unlike the Point Barrow natives, however, they usually cover the body with stones. In the same passage Dr. Bessels describes a peculiar symbol of mourning, not employed, so far as I can learn, elsewhere. The male mourners plugged up the right nostril with hay and the females the left, and these plugs were worn for several days. The custom of covering the body with stones appears to be universally prevalent east of the Mackenzie region.587
The bodies seen by Dr. Richardson in the delta of the Mackenzie were wrapped in skins and loosely covered with driftwood,588 and a similar arrangement was noticed at Kotzebue Sound by Beechey, who figures589 a sort of little wigwam of driftwood built over the dead man. At Port Clarence Nordenskiöld590 saw two corpses “laid on the ground, fully clothed, without protection of any coffin, but surrounded by a close fence consisting of a number of tent-poles driven crosswise into the ground. Alongside one of the corpses lay a kayak with oars, a loaded double-barreled gun with locks at half-cock and caps on, various other weapons, clothes, tinder-box, snowshoes, drinking-vessels, two masks, * * * and strangely shaped animal figures.” On the Siberian coast the dead are sometimes burned.591
Nordenskiöld believes that the coast Chukches have perhaps begun to abandon the custom of burning the dead, but I am rather inclined to think that is a custom of the “deermen,” which the people of the coast of pure or mixed Eskimo blood never fully adopted. Dall, indeed, was explicitly informed that the custom was only used with the bodies of “good” men, and at the time of Nordenskiöld’s visit he found it “at least certain that the people of Pitlekaj exclusively bury their dead by laying them out on the tundra.” The body is surrounded by an oval of stones, but apparently not covered with them as in the east.592 The Krause brothers observed by the bodies, besides “die erwähnten Geräthschaften” [Lanzen, Bogen und Pfeile für die Männer, Koch-und Hausgeräthe für die Weiber], “unter einen kleinen Steinhaufen ein Hunde-, Renthier-, Bären-oder Walross-Schädel.” This custom shows a curious resemblance to that described by Egede593 in Greenland: “When little Children die and are buried, they put the Head of a Dog near the Grave, fancying that Children, having no Understanding, they can not by themselves find the Way, but the Dog must guide them to the Land of the Souls.” The body is usually laid out at full length upon the ground. Among the ancient Greenlanders,594 however, and in the Yukon region the body was doubled up. In the latter region the body was laid on its side in a box of planks four feet long and raised on four supports595 or wrapped up in mats and covered with rocks or driftwood.596 The custom of inclosing the dead in a short coffin, to judge from the figures given by the latter writer in P1. VI. of his report, appears also to prevail at the mouth of the Kuskokwim. In the island of Kadiak, according to Dall and Lisiansky,597 the dead were buried.
Two lines near the bottom of the page were reversed in print: