Nunani: In the bones of the world (Part seven)

When the Thule, successful sea-mammal hunters that they were, moved into the lands occupied by their Dorset cousins, they found that those people lived a very different existence. The Dorset culture was, by Thule standards, quite primitive.

Over the centuries, the Thule who settled in Dorset lands gradually developed the customs and dialects that we today know as pre-colonial Inuktitut. In essence, they became Inuit.

The Dorset people pretty much stayed Dorset, but Inuit called them “Tunit.” The actual “Dorset” term was coined by the anthropologist Diamond Jenness (who, in my opinion, is to be most commended for his extraordinary collections of traditional string figures, some of which have been lost to modern Inuit).

In 1925, Jenness received some odd artifacts from Kingait — odd because they seemed to derive from an especially ancient lifestyle, unlike that of Inuit. Because Kingait was called “Cape Dorset” at the time, Jenness called the mysterious people that produced the artifacts the “Dorset” culture, and the hunt to find more evidence of this people has been on ever since.

If you stop to think about it, you might notice a peculiar irony here. Inuit have fought so many political battles over that one word: “traditional.”

And yet, in the story of Inuit meeting Tunit, west meeting east, it is the Tunit who are most “traditional.”

It is the Thule — the Inuit — who are the younger, innovative culture here; the developers of cutting-edge ideas and technologies. It is they who pioneer a new homeland in another people’s traditional lands.

The Thule may have become Inuit, but the Dorset people — the Tunit — never became much of anything, because they went extinct. The reasons for the Tunit extinction is unclear. It has been suggested that the Tunit (I’m going to stick with the Inuktitut term) simply starved to death due to their own inefficiency, but this idea is absurd.

The Tunit way of life was undoubtedly very harsh, since they seemed to have lacked dogs, toggles, boats and other technologies that make life easier, but their culture nevertheless persisted for many, many centuries. They thrived.

It seems most likely that the Tunit, once they had lived among Inuit for a time, simply began to recognize a good thing. Inuit were able to demonstrate a great deal of success with their sea-mammal hunting lifestyle. Hunger is hunger and meat is meat, and the Tunit probably began to recognize that they could subsist better by adopting some of the Inuit hunting strategies and technologies.

As technology changes, culture changes with it. I recall a paper written by an anthropologist living among some islander tribesmen in Southeast Asia — he was lamenting that they were always trying to get mosquito netting from him.

The tribesmen traditionally lived in elevated bungalows, above the height that most mosquitoes fly, but these people recognized that netting would work better. They were beginning to feel the anthropologist was being stingy, and many were withholding anthropological information in order to pry the netting out of him.

But the anthropologist had this problem: if he gave them their netting, they would no longer find it necessary to build traditional bungalows. In other words, by giving them what they wanted, even such a trifle as mosquito netting, he would irreparably alter their culture.

I find it likely that Tunit did indeed adopt some aspects of Inuit culture, causing them to change with time, to become more and more like Inuit. As they began to enjoy the benefits of “Thule” cultural innovations, they essentially became assimilated into Inuit culture.

A change in culture is rarely a rapid one. The Tunit would have had their own dialects and ways, those that they clung to even after the “Inuit revolution.” This would have kept them culturally distinct from Inuit for some time, but the Dorset cultural distinctness was probably beginning to fade from the time that it met the Thule. Probably, neither Tunit nor Inuit ever noticed this happening, not even when the process became impossible to reverse.

Would Inuit have even cared? It is possible that many of the Tunit themselves did not care, embracing the Inuit lifestyle until the end; until those last few Tunit wept when they could no longer remember the old songs sung by their great-grandparents.

(Continued next week.)