Title: The American Museum journal
Identifier: americanmuseumjo18amer (find matches)
Year: c1900-(1918) (c190s)
Authors: American Museum of Natural History
Subjects: Natural history
Publisher: New York : American Museum of Natural History
Contributing Library: American Museum of Natural History Library
Digitizing Sponsor: Biodiversity Heritage Library

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;3()S THE AMEIUCAN MUSEUM JOURNAL
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The hood of tlie Eskimo woiuaus coat has been the Eskimo bab.v's cradle for more centuries than history can tell. This is the little Eskimo boy, Tah-tah-rahq, when two years old (1916) with his mother Ahnee-nah. The baby's bare body rests against his mother's back, he wears a short shirt of young blue foxskin and a tiglit-fitting sealskin hood edged around the face with blue fox tails. A family is especially proud of its boys, for they will grow into great liunters, the heroes of the Eskimo race some of US always could find time to play with them. My little playmate was Me-gis-s'oo, eight years old. She would stand as much petting and kissing as any little American girl of her age, Ijut I never could teach her to kiss me in return. The Eskimo suh- stitute for kissing is rubbing of noses. Tah-tah-rahq and Ig-loo-suah-mi were three-year-old boys who loved to get underfoot, and many were the perfectly natural contests l)etween them over blocks or other playthings that we let one or the other of them have. The girls begin early to help their mothers. Almost the only item of housekeeping in an igloo (winter house of stones and turf) or toopik (summer tent of seal skin) that requires any skill is the tending of the flame of the native stove-lamp. This is a shallow, oval-triangular pan or dish, somewhat like a big clam shell in shape, although not so deep, from twelve to eighteen incites across carved out of soapstone. When in use it is propped up on edge on stone supports on a special platform at one side of the bed platform. It is ))rovided along its lower edge with a wick improvised from dried moss, which sucks up the oil that gradually tries out of the lumps o'f blubber placed in the upper part of the contrivance. The object is to obtain the greatest pos- sible amount of flame for liglit and lieat, with the smallest possible amount of smoke, and it requires some knack and much training to pat the moss into ))roper shape for this with the curved l)ranch of a willow l)ush that is used for the purpose. Then the girl must acquire skill in the use of the oo-Ioo, or woman's knife, shaped like an Ameri- can chopping knife, M'hich is used in cleaning, scraping, and cutting skins for the making of garments, and for all other purposes for which the Eskimo woman uses a knife. Ah-nee-nah, Me-gis-s'oo's mother, had many fox traps placed along the hill slopes up Foulke Fjord from Etah, and she used to take the little girl w^ith her when she went out to examine them. Thus was the child trained in know- ledge of the habits of the ti/-ing-nee-a)i, or blue and white foxes, which furnish the l)est material for hooded coats and

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