ESKIMOS NOT PRIMITIVE

Greymouth Evening Star, 11 March 1933, Page 11

ESKIMOS NOT PRIMITIVE

HAPPY AND HOSPITABLE A new conception of the native Eskimo people who inhabit Canada’s subArctic regions was given at Toronto by Mr. Richard Finnic, official photographer of the Canadian Arctic under the Federal Department of the Interior. “Eskimos.” he said, were not “refrigerated, blubber-saturated savages, but happy, intelligent and hospitable people, the finest, most generous and most likeable people of all uncultured races.” The Arctic climate, said Mr. Finnie —tilting at another popular belief —by no means was unbearable. The summers were short, but warm and pleasant. Winters were cold, but he had suffered far more with cold in civilisation when wearing “its ridiculously inadequate clothing.” Mr. Finnie predicted that within the next four generations towns and ■cities would grow up across the fringe of the polar ocean “to form the nucleus of a new empire.” The aeroplane had changed the whole situation in the Arctic. Among other tilings it had helped the tourist to discover the Mackenzie River, with its 2,000 miles of magnificent waiterway through unspoiled country.