I’ve gotten interested inEskimo and Inuit ethnography, in some of the early accounts of hunting in someof the harshest environments on earth. What got me on this journey was a visitto the museum in Anchorage, which boasts of a magnificent display of Aleut andEskimo material culture. Anoraks made of bird membrane and seal stomach bags gotme into a quest for truly authentic accounts of hunting in the north and,almost immediately, to two books written by anthropologist Richard Nelson. His Hunters of the Northern Ice, publishedin 1969, is a study of Alaska’s Wainwright Eskimos at a time when manytraditional behaviors, hunting methods, and technologies were still in use. Hisessay on the qualities displayed by the hunter—collaboration, estimating risk, passingon information, and so on, go far beyond the sterile accounts of northernartifacts that you encounter in the works of earlier anthropologists likeCornelius Osgood. Osgood describes spears and awls, traps and houses, but yourarely get a sense of the people behind the artifacts. His books are like manymuseum displays—sterile and devoid of interest to anyone but a fellowspecialist. Even the people themselves would have had trouble deciphering his drearycatalogs. In Nelson’s study, the people and their frustrations, their successesand failures, come alive in a way that illuminates both present and pastbrilliantly.

He did a later studyof the Koyukon of the boreal forest, which is equally perceptive , as itrevolves around their world view. He describes how they would talk to bears asthey hunted them, of the great dependence of the people on caribou, of the traditionalpractices and beliefs that still were at the core of society.

Read Nelson and theclassic works of Farley Mowet. You’ll emerge with a profound appreciation ofthe skill and ingenuity of historic northerners. Not as sterile objects ofstudy, but as human beings. And where else will you learn that the best hidefor boot uppers comes from caribou legs?