The Arctic Cultures: Lament for the Dorsets

Americas migrated here starting around 40,000 years ago. Most are believed to have arrived by crossing over from Russia to Alaska. At one point, this region was covered in ice enabling the migrations across a land bridge. Later the migrations were by boats. Recent fossils in New Mexico suggest that some migrations also arrived here from Europe by crossing via Iceland and Greenland. A small group may have even crossed over from Easter Island and the Polynesian islands.

The migrations were not steady and they were not always by the same cultures, but most continued to spread hunting, gathering, fishing and eventually farming the entire Americas. These waves of migrations spread and separated into many diverse and exclusive tribes and cultures. Over time, at least a thousand different indigenous languages were spoken in the Americas. These inventive and resourceful people learned to stay cool in the intense deserts and tropical regions while others learned to stay warm in the frigid arctic regions.

So, if the main migrations stemmed from the northwest across the Bering straights, does that make the “Eskimos” the oldest cultures in the Americas? Oddly, no. It appears that the cultures of the Arctic region, the Aleut, the Iglulik, Inuit, Inupiat, Inuvialuit, Netsilik, Unangan, and Yup’ik appear to have come from the most recent migrations.

Note: the term Eskimo, used to describe these peoples collectively by Canadians and in the U. S. is an Algonquin term meaning “Eaters of raw meat”. It is similar to the way “Anasazi”, a Navajo term, came to be used to describe the ancient puebloan people and is not the term used by the people or their descendants to describe themselves.

These Arctic cultures, in fact, appear to be no older than around 2,000 years. The present-day Inuit are descendents of the Thule Culture that replaced the Dorset culture around 1,000 A.D.. The Dorset people are a mysterious people arrived around 500 A.D. They were described by Inuit legends as giants who scared easily. They were immortalized in the Al Purdy poem (1968):

Lament for the Dorsets (Eskimos extinct in the 14th century A.D.)

–Al Purdy

Animal bones and some mossy tent rings scrapers and spearheads carved ivory swans all that remains of the Dorset giants who drove the Vikings back to their long ships talked to spirits of earth and water – a picture of terrifying old men so large they broke the backs of bears so small they lurk behind bone rafters in the brain of modern hunters among good thoughts and warm things and come out at night to spit on the stars

The big men with clever fingers who had no dogs and hauled their sleds over the frozen northern oceans awkward giants ……………………..killers of seal they couldn’t compete with the little men who came from the west with dogs Or else in a warm climatic cycle The seals went back to cold waters and the puzzled Dorsets scratched their heads with hairy thumbs around 1350 A.D. – couldn’t figure it out went around saying to each other plaintively …………..’What’s wrong? What happened? …………..Where are the seals gone?’ And died.

Twentieth century people apartment dwellers executives of neon death warmakers with things that explode – they have never imagined us in their future how could we imagine them in the past squatting among the moving glaciers six hundred years ago with glowing lamps? As remote or nearly as the trilobites and swamps when coal became or the last great reptile hissed at a mammal the size of a mouse that squeaked and fled

Did they realize at all what was happening to them? Some old hunter with one lame leg a bear had chewed Sitting in a caribou skin tent – the last Dorset? Let’s say his name was Kudluk carving 2-inch ivory swans for a dead grand-daughter taking them out of his mind the places in his mind where pictures are He selects a sharp stone tool to gouge a parallel pattern of lines on both sides of the swan holding it with his left hand bearing down and transmitting his body’s weight from brain to arm and right hand and one of his thoughts turns to ivory The carving is laid aside in beginning darkness at the end of hunger after a while wind blows down the tent and snow begins to cover him