Last Letters from Attu. Mary Breu

      I might as well say Merry Christmas now.

      Lots of love to all,

      Tetts

      6

       Kipnuk Culture

       1932

      In Kipnuk, Etta and Foster settled into what would be their home for the next five years. There were new people to meet and customs to learn. They shared with the villagers some of their own protocol as well.

      THE ESKIMOS WERE PEACEFUL, friendly, and full of fun. One wondered sometimes what they had to be happy about, they were so poverty-stricken. They were the warmest blooded people I ever met, and their fat cheeks, particularly the women, were so red, visitors usually asked what they used to paint their cheeks. Their black eyes sparkled with health and good spirits, their black hair glistened with natural oil, their whole bodies seemed to ooze oil.

      The villagers did not live under tribal rule. There was no chief. They seemed to be just a group of people who happened to live near each other, and they were constantly moving from village to village. While the village held about two hundred people when the school was built, traders familiar with this locality said there was a possibility that all might have taken up residence somewhere else, and the village site left empty. This was easy enough for them to do because they were in this spot only during the winter months.

      In the fall, they chose a spot for a house, made a sort of framework of driftwood by fastening longer poles together, tent fashion, then covered it with sod and moss, leaving a square opening in the roof for smoke to escape, but making a wooden covering for the opening to keep out storms. The entrance was dug, slanting down, so the dirt floor was below the level of the ground. Wooden platforms were built for their fur robes used as beds.

      They trapped fox and mink, which they exchanged with the traders for gingham, summer parkas, and a little underwear. They fished for food, and hunted walrus, seal, ducks, and geese for food and clothing. Their main article of diet was the needlefish, so called because of its sharp needle-like spines. The whole fish did not exceed an inch in length, and were eaten raw. In the fall, we noticed them putting little nets in tiny running streams to catch these fish. Children finding these nets would sit down on the ground and greedily munch the wriggling fish like our children eat peanuts. In the winter, holes were cut in the ice, and these fish were scooped up by a net attached to a long handle. Needlefish seemed to run in schools, and if the schools were running another way, there was no food that day, but usually they were lucky. The fish were dumped in heaps on the ice where they soon froze. Gunnysacks were filled with the frozen fish and stored for future use. As fishing continued, I have seen children run from pile to pile, choosing from the freshest pile, which were the most wriggly, then eating rapidly with grins of satisfaction. There was a particular way of swallowing them so the spines did not stick them going down. Two fish were put into the mouth at once, head first, and, with a crack of the strong teeth and a few crunches, the deed was done, grinding the backbone, making it harmless. White men have lost dogs that ate these fish. Evidently, the dogs did not know the correct way to eat them.

      Babies too young to walk sucked contentedly on hunks of raw seal fat. They never had more than two weeks’ food supply at one time. If storms came up that kept them housebound for more than a week, it was just too bad. They went hungry.

      Duck skins, especially loon, were made into warm parkas, but most of their parkas were made from reindeer skins, and a very few from the mountain squirrel, or ick-sick-buck. Only the most affluent could afford those. The women carried their babies on their back, and in cold weather under the parka. Their foot covering consisted of a piece of dirty rag wrapped around the foot, and then carefully covered with dry grass, over which was drawn the skin boot. The boot soles were made of moisture-proof sealskin, and the tops were reindeer hide or fish skin.