Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family by Jean L. Briggs

Author:Jean L. Briggs [Briggs, Jean L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Psychology, Developmental, Child, Social Science, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Indigenous Studies
ISBN: 9780674608283
Google: A9QuJjQbh7MC
Publisher: Harvard UP
Published: 1970-01-15T22:39:45+00:00

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1. A kin group, it will be remembered, consists of genealogical or adoptive siblings and the children of those siblings. See also section VI of the Introduction and Appendix III.

5

Nilak’s Family

During the months in which I lived as Inuttiaq’s daughter, the social world of my family was to a large extent my own world. Though for the sake of my work I made some effort to visit in other households more widely than my family did, the pattern of their associations could not help but influence mine: my visits were limited to the households that shared our camp, and I saw more of the people who visited frequently in our home than I did of others. Pala, with or without Ipuituq, was almost always with us, as was Piuvkaq until his death. Qavvik, on the other hand, almost never shared our spring, summer, or autumn camps; we saw him only in the winter, when all the households gathered in Amujat. Of the families who were not closely related to us, we were most in contact with Nilak’s.

It was a small family, Nilak’s, the smallest in the band. It consisted only of Nilak, his wife, Niqi, and their adopted daughter, Tiguaq, a girl of about seventeen; they had no children of their own. Nilak was the last remaining one of a group of brothers who used to camp together in Chantrey Inlet. Two of the brothers had died, and the third, crippled by tuberculosis, lived in Gjoa Haven, where life was not so rugged as it was in Chantrey Inlet. Niqi’s parents and siblings, too, had all either died or moved south to Baker Lake, so Nilak’s household was left without any close relatives at Back River. It was a lonely situation, and the loneliness was exacerbated by the personal peculiarities of Nilak and his wife. It was not that they camped far from other families, as I had been led to expect; they did not. Nilak was one of the “Itimnaaqjuk-people,” those who habitually camped at Itimnaaqjuk, the Rapids, during the summer, as did Pala and the two associated households of Inuttiaq and Piuvkaq; but his isolation was all the more visible for that very reason. It was especially visible to me the autumn I first arrived in Chantrey Inlet, when his tent stood alone on the far shore of the river, facing, across the rapids, the clustered tents of the other families a quarter of a mile away. The howling of his dogs came to us on the breeze, and we watched the household like puppets coming and going about their toy tent, gathering their fuel, fishing, and setting their nets on their own side of the river. Within sight, as they were, and yet out of the range of immediate neighborly contact with the other tents, they seemed more distant than if they had been miles away.

My first meeting with Nilak’s family occurred just a week after I joined the two elderly brothers, Pala and Piuvkaq, at the Rapids.

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