ESKIMOS HEARER POLE

Evening Star, Issue 22805, 13 November 1937, Page 13

ESKIMOS HEARER POLE

GAME MORE ABUNDANT More Eskimos- will live this year closer to the North Pole aa a result of decreasing game and farther north occupation of Canada’s Arctic by Government officials. The administration, of the North-west Territories has the past few years been experimenting with the northward movement of Eskimos in the Eastern Arctic, and this year will continue the northward trek. The past few years families of Eskimos from Southern Baffin Island, where game is becoming scarcer, have been taken aboard the annual supply ship with all their belongings and transported to police and trading posts on Devon and Ellesmere Islands. There these families have acclimatised themselves and found better hunting both for food and the fur trade. Only the younger natives are picked for the northward trek, and the proposition is carefully explained to them, so that they are free to take advantage of it or refect it. Work is given them at the police and fur posts farther north, which is an inducement, as the more southern posts have too large a community to give everyone work. At the northern posts there are many chores to be done; for the men guiding winter patrols and food hunting, for the women sewing and cooking. All northern posts have Eskimo helpers. Formerly Eskimos used to bo brought over from Greenland to work at the more northern posts in the Eastern Arctic.- But now that Canada’s Eskimos are becoming more numerous in the Hudson Straits area it is no longer necessary to hire Greenland Eskimos, and there are few of them left now in Canada’s Eastern Arctic. In addition to the placing of the Eskimos in new regions where game is more abundant and work more regular, there is the angle of occupation of the country now that aerial routes, mineral developments, and other reasons make possible the claims of other countries to part of Canada’s Arctic, which now roaches to the North Polo. To forestall any such future claims _ the dominion is occupying the Arctic island to within nearly 700 miles of the North Pole.