PROPITIATING SEALS

Greymouth Evening Star, 10 December 1927, Page 4

PROPITIATING SEALS

, SCIENTISTS’ STRANGE STORY. On the barren island of Nunivak, off the coast of Alaska, scientists have discovered a bachelors’ paradise. For a period the entire male Eskimo population, from the “weaned infants to the oldest patriarch.” are separated from the women, for the singular rea- , son, given by the inhabitants themselves, that it ensures a good catch of seals, on which they are dependent for food, clothing and light. These facts are disclosed by Henry B. Collins. Smithsonian ethnologist, and Dale Stewart, of the Washington National Museum, who undertook an expedition to Alaska, in co-operation with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The only break in the banners of Nunivak’s “No Woman’s Land” is at meal times, when the women carry food to the Kazhoe, a semi-subterran-ean ceremonial lodge, where the men live during their exile. A feast, at which the bladders of all seals caught during the year are thrown back into the sea, to propitiate the seal tribe, concludes the male isolation, the scientists say, adding that numberless taboos as to hunting, skinning, and general handling illustrate the high re-

gard the Eskimos have for their watery prey. The United States Bureau of Education maintains a teacher and his wife on the island, and the only other representative of the outside world known to the inhabitants is a trader at. a village thirty miles away. Prior to the expedition, the Nunivaks had not been visited by a boat for two years. The island’s shores have never been charted. The natives -were found to be intelligent, tractable and friendly.