Subject: Re: Inuit way of life

From: [email-masked]
Date: 13 Jan 95 13:14:15 EST

Bill,
	People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
If you are going to correct others be sure you have all *your*
facts straight.  In your first post about Eskimos/Inuit you
mention that they eat fish and animals.  Fish *are* animals.
As are birds and insects.  I don't understand the tendency
for many people to equate mammals with animals and to think
that anything that is not a mammal is not an animal.

	Also, wolverines are not rats nor are they even closely
related to rats.  I'm not sure without looking it up what their
closest relatives are but I would guess the weasel family.  In
any case they are not rodents.
Kate

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From: [email-masked] (Bill Stuart)
Date: Sun, 15 Jan 1995 08:50:47 GMT

> that anything that is not a mammal is not an animal.

	I apologize. Most people think of animals as mammals or reptiles.
It's a minor point in any case. 
	The tendancy comes, in my opinion, from our racial habit of
andromorphing (i think that's the right word, it means assigning human
charecteristics) everything.

> any case they are not rodents.

	The point is, no one eats them. 
	
--
"When once creates phantoms for oneself, one puts vampires into the world,
and one must nourish these children of a voluntary nightmare with one's
blood, one's life, one's intellegence, and one's reason, without ever
satisfying them."	-Eliphas Levi

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From: [email-masked] (Matthew Hill)
Date: Sun, 15 Jan 1995 17:24:03 GMT

>any case they are not rodents.

The Inuit, as they prefer to be called in Canada, or Eskimo, as they
happily call themselves in Alaska, ate quite variable diets, depending
upon where they lived.  Those who lived inland had far less access to sea
mammals, fish and seaweed than those who lived on the coast.  Caribou
gut contents would have provided some vegetable matter in the form of 
partially digested lichen. 
They ate meat both raw and cooked, the claim
that Eskimo means Eaters of Raw Meat usually invokes one of the languages
of adjacent non-Inuit peoples as the source.  According to one of my
local authorities, however, no known source for the term has been found. 
 
Failure to eat raw meat seems to have been one of the reasons for the
failure of early European expeditions to the Arctic.  They lacked the
nutritional qualities it provided.  
 
One of my professors used to tell about the annual visits to Harvard
of one of the great Arctic explorers of the 20th century whose name
I cannot recall.  That gentleman was experimenting with a strict meat
diet and when providing his annual report seemed to manifest the best
of health.  
 
As with many hunting and gathering folk, increased access to the 
'benefits' of imported foods as well as turning many of them into 
economically disadvantaged -i.e. poor- adjuncts to a world economy
has severely compromised their nutrition. 

Matthew Hill  ([email-masked])

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From: [email-masked] (Jody C. Patilla)
Date: 16 Jan 1995 11:30:02 -0500

>any case they are not rodents.

	Wolverines are among the largest members of the mustelid family,
which includes otters (including giant Amazonian river otters, which weigh
in around 80-100 pounds), weasels, ferrets, stoats, mongeese and minks.
They are considered to be the most vicious predator on the North American
continent. I can't imagine that the meat would taste very good, frankly,
although people in Africa and Asia eat otter and don't seemto mind the
muskiness. (personally, we feel that persons who eat otter should be
reincarnated as earthworms, but that is just our personal and highly
subjective opinion.)

-- 

jcpatilla					[email-masked]
Otter, otter, otter! Floating on the sea!
Eating fish and urchins, happier than thee....

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From: [email-masked] (Roots)
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 1995 16:38:32

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Jody C. Patilla) writes:
>From: [email-masked] (Jody C. Patilla)
>Subject: Re: Inuit way of life
>Date: 16 Jan 1995 11:30:02 -0500

>reincarnated as earthworms, but that is just our personal and highly

The Inuit definately hunted (and hunt) wolverines but NOT for the meat.  The 
wolverine's fur is unique in that it does not frost.  This makes it a primo 
pick for the fur on the hood as it won't get frosty from the wearer's breath.

This was told to me by an elderly woman in Chesterfield Inlet,  
NWT who had sewed many parkas.

.

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From: [email-masked] (John Kohnen)
Date: Thu, 19 Jan 1995 00:22:58 GMT

In article <[email-masked]>,
[email-masked] (Matthew Hill) wrote:
> ...

The explorer was a midwesterner named Vilhjalmur Stefansson. He wrote
several books about the arctic, the best known is probably "The Friendly
Arctic", or something like that, the theme of which was that the arctic is
really a quite nice and healthy place to live. The experiment you mention
involved feeding American volunteers nothing but slightly cooked (boiled)
mutton for months on end and monitoring their health. Stefansson claimed
that the volunteers were healthier after the experiment than before. I
think he himself may have been one of the subjects, but I'm not sure.
Stefansson suffered badly from heart disease in his later years and died in
his early seventies. His autobiography is a good read for anyone interested
in arctic adventures, Eskimos, and the diet of the far north.

    John Kohnen <[email-masked]>                       The Eugene Free Net

      One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell by
                    Dickens without laughing. <Oscar Wilde>