As the first, frigid Arctic winds are beginning to wrap wintry tentacles around the Chicago area, they are coming from the frozen north with some surprising tips on how to cope with the cold:
Turn your back on the salad bar and the fresh-baked bread and sit yourself down instead to a big, fatty chunk of meat, preferably raw. Throw away those woolen longjohns and wrap yourself in real, glorious fur. And remember always that an igloo may be an ice house, but it is a nice house, cozy and warm.
Actually, those aren’t tips at all. They are just a way of life, or at least they used to be for the people we used to call Eskimos.
Their old and new ways of life are being chronicled in an exhibit opening Saturday at the Shedd Aquarium called “On Arctic Ice: The Inuit Hunters of Canada.”
It is sort of a tip of the hat from the aquarium to Inuit culture at Rankin Inlet, Northwest Territories, and Churchill, Manitoba, the people who collected the Shedd’s beluga whales.
They live in the world’s most severe climate, where winter reigns supreme for nine months out of the year. The summer is so short that very little in the way of edible fruit or vegetable matter grows there.
The Algonquin Indians from southern Canada, who first led European explorers into the frozen northern tundra, were the ones to call the nomads who lived there “Eskimos.” That means “eaters of raw meat” in the Algonquin language.
In today’s more politically sensitive times, the “Eskimos” ask the rest of the world to use their own name for themselves, “Inuit.” Pronounced IN-you-it, it simply means “the people.”
At least the Algonquins had the Inuit perfectly pegged. About 25,000 people strong living in an area roughly the size of western Europe, the Inuit quite literally are “eaters of raw meat.”
Conventional nutritional wisdom is turned on its ear when it comes to the Inuit, who thrive (or at least used to) on a single food group consisting of meat, fish and eggs.
For thousands of years until about 1950, when they began settling in permanent towns and villages, the Inuit moved across the arctic landscape year-round.
In summer, they lived in skin tents as they hunted and gathered caribou, musk ox, whales, walrus, birds and birds’ eggs, berries and roots. In winter, they lived in igloos and broke through the ice to fish and hunt seals.
We get our Vitamin A from things such as eggs and carrots. The Inuit got theirs primarily from raw beluga whale and caribou meat. We get Vitamin B from grains, bread and vegetables such as spinach. They got theirs from the livers and kidneys of animals. We get Vitamin C from fruits and vegetables such as oranges and broccoli. They got theirs from raw whale skin and seals’ livers.
“Early explorers and visiting European whalers found the Inuit to be extremely healthy people, even though they subsisted mainly on meat and fat and protein,” said Dr. Ronald Weber. An anthropologist at the Field Museum of Natural History, Weber worked as a consultant on the Shedd’s Inuit exhibit, which will run through March 31 at the Oceanarium’s MacArthur Special Exhibit Gallery.
“In fact,” he said, “a lot of the explorers and whalers were themselves suffering horribly from vitamin deficiencies that were causing things like scurvy, until they began following the Inuit diet.
“The early explorers, at least the successful ones, learned a lot from copying Inuit ways of doing things. The unsuccessful ones froze to death.”
The Inuit, living where the temperature hovers at 50 degrees below zero for months at a time, learned to live very well with very little.
Both their clothing and their housing, made from animal skins and ice blocks, were primitive by most cultural standards, but were models of efficiency based on the principle of air-capture.
Inuit clothing, for example, gave the world the concept of loosely layered winter garments that trap warm air between layers and can be shed or added to as temperatures rise and fall.
Animal rights advocates might now blanch at the thought, but their garments were made exclusively from dead animals. There was nothing else for them to use. Primarily they used caribou skin, sewn together with dried sinew from the same animal, using needles made from bones or tusks.
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Inner garments had the fur facing inwards, touching the wearer’s skin. The animal hair trapped and insulated “dead” air that warms up with the wearer’s own body heat.
Outer garments had the fur facing outwards to utilize properties as a natural windbreaker and water repellent. Draped loosely on the wearer, the skin outfits “breathed” so that perspiration could be vented off to avoid any accumulation of dampness on the garment.
Surprisingly lightweight, a skin winter outfit, with parka head covering, gloves and boots, weighs about 10 pounds. Inuits could move about freely and easily in the coldest of weather, allowing them to sit out the bitterest storm even if they were trapped far from shelter for several days.
By contrast, the early Europeans came to Inuit country in tight woolen garments that weighed 40 pounds dry. Under exertion, the same clothing began to add a pound a day in weight from perspiration, becoming increasingly clammy and cold in the bar-
`The early explorers, at least the successful ones, learned a lot from copying Inuit ways of doing things. The unsuccessful ones froze to death.’
Dr. Ronald Weber
gain, until the wearer was immobilized.
Igloos, made from a specific type of wind-packed snow shaped into blocks, followed the same air-capture concept.
“The igloo is a really neat device,” said Weber. “You had to enter it through a cold trap chamber, a snow tunnel leading to the living chamber that dipped down 2 or 3 feet before rising up again to the floor inside the igloo.
“That kept the cold air out. It took very little to heat the inside, maybe a candle and the body heat of the occupants. Often the interior was lined with animal skins to prevent any melt from dripping into the living chamber.”
Rarely used nowadays, there seems to be some dispute as to how warm the inside of the igloo became. Some maintain that interior temperatures rose only to the 30- to 34-degree Fahrenheit range, but that the Inuit are constitutionally fit to be comfortable in that range.
Others maintain that temperatures rose to the 50- to 70-degree range. Whatever it was, old photographs show Inuit occupants looking quite comfortable in light clothing, dandling babies naked as jaybirds on cold winter nights in their snug snow domes.
The vicissitudes of modern life, however, have taken their toll on the Inuit.
“Now they live in bigger houses and are dependent on imported fuel,” said Weber. “Their health was quite good until they met with European diseases, sugar and alcohol.”
Whereas they used to never have a problem with obesity, heart attacks or tooth decay, now they suffer more than Europeans from them.
The animals they once depended on, including whales, caribou, walruses, seals and polar bear, were nearly hunted to extinction by Europeans.
Now those animals are reaching healthy numbers so that the Inuit can hunt and trap again with carefully observed quota systems. But the animal rights movement has closed most of the markets that once supplemented their incomes at a time when Inuit unemployment runs at 80 percent.
“We’re hoping this exhibit tells a little bit of their story,” said Weber. “They aren’t self-sufficient anymore, and they are glued to radios, televisions, VCRs and welfare just like we are.
“But they also go out and hunt seals and walruses and whales from kayaks on the open water. They still have to hunt if they are going to remain there and remain being Inuit.
“I think it is too easy for people from outside an environment to look in and make harsh judgments of people. If Europeans impose too many restrictions on their life ways, if the Inuit are not allowed to hunt and use animals in their own, traditional ways, then they will be destroyed.”