Inuit from the rugged coast of the Labrador Sea were among the first Eskimo-speaking peoples to be "discovered" by the outside world. Largely because of their early exposure to Euro Canadian influences, the life of the Labrador Inuit had already been greatly modified long before the development of ethnography, the scientific description of human cultures. Therefore, the traditional culture of the Inuit of the Labrador Sea is not nearly as well known today as that of their relatives in the Central Canadian Arctic groups like the Copper and Netsilik Inuit who remained isolated until relatively recent times. To fill this gap and rediscover many of the long forgotten aspects of Labrador Inuit culture, we must now rely heavily on archaeological and archival source materials.
Origins of the Labrador Inuit
Prehistoric ancestors of today's Inuit may have arrived in northern Labrador some time between A.D. 1300 and 1450. They brought with them a way of life, known to archaeologists as the Thule culture, which seems to have developed in the western Arctic some three or four centuries before spreading eastwards across the Canadian Arctic to Greenland and Labrador. As the Thule Eskimos were a maritime people, skilled in the use of kayaks and umiaks, they would have had little difficulty crossing over to Labrador from Baffin Island. Their first landfall may have been at the tuo'jat(stepping stones) islands near Killinek, the northeastern tip of Labrador. Though it is impossible to know the exact circumstances surrounding their first discovery of Labrador, we can conjecture what their initial impression might have been.
The rugged Torngat Mountains rising from the northeast coast of Labrador would have seemed familiar to newly arrived Thule people accustomed to the high peaks of eastern Baffin Island. A closer view would reveal that most of the lichens, mosses, grasses and flowering plants common to the Arctic also occurred along the Labrador coast. A major difference from the treeless north would have been the spruce and tamarack forests that cover much of the Labrador interior, but these would not have been immediately apparent to the initial wave of immigrants as the tree line is a few hundred kilometres farther south.
In Labrador the Thule hunters encountered the same species of animals that they and their ancestors had relied on for their livelihood. In addition to the walrus with its dangerous but useful tusks, there were many kinds of seals: big bearded seals with thick, tough hides, and smaller harbour and ringed seals. In late fall, harp seals and Greenland whales would appear on their migration south just before bays and inshore waters froze into a narrow band of coastal fast ice. Inland, on the high rolling plateau, were roving caribou herds and lakes rich in trout and char.
The Thule ancestors of the present day Inuit were not the first people to settle in Labrador. For several thousand years before their arrival the coast was occupied by alternate waves of Indians and Palaeo-Eskimos. Perhaps the first humans the Inuit encountered in the new land were the last remnants of a Palaeo Eskimo population once widespread throughout the eastern Arctic and parts of Newfoundland and known to archaeologists as the Dorset people. It is possible that these Dorset people were the tunit who figure prominently in Inuit legend and whom the Labrador nut claim to have finally driven away after a period of conflict.
More unfamiliar to the Thule Eskimos than the Dorset people must have been the adlat, Algonquian speaking Indians who lived in the forest. Inuit and Indians traditionally regarded each other with mutual fear and suspicion, and each may have avoided the other as much as possible. Tensions between Inuit and Indians, occasionally erupting in conflict, were probably intensified during the early years of contact with another foreign people, the kablunat.
Preliminary European Contacts
It is impossible to say exactly when the Inuit of Labrador first caught sight of Europeans, the people they called kabluna!. The earliest Europeans to reach Labrador were probably Morse explorers from Iceland and Greenland whose sagas, dating from around A.D. 1000, tell of encounters with a people they called Skraelings in a place named Markland. Whether "Skraelings" were Indians or a Palaeo Eskimo population like the Dorset people is still a matter of debate, but it seems likely that the Labrador Inuit, descendants of the Thule Eskimo migrants, did not meet with Europeans until several more centuries had elapsed. Initial contact between Europeans and historic Inuit in this area probably awaited the end of the fifteenth century when John Cabot and others began to explore the coast, drawing fishermen and whalers to the rich waters of southern Labrador.
Early fishermen and whalers kept few written records of their contacts with the natives of Labrador, and those documents that have survived are sometimes even more vague than the oral traditions of earlier Viking visitors. The account of John Davis' 1586 voyage tells us, for example, that two of his men were killed by native archers near Hamilton Inlet, but it lacks sufficient detail to determine whether the people referred to as "wicked miscreants" were Inuit or Indians.
Written eyewitness accounts of Labrador natives remained vague throughout most of the seventeenth century. We can guess that the "flat-nosed" people who killed two of John Knight's exploration party in 1606 were probably Inuit, as were the people who traded sealskins with French explorers Groseilliers and Radisson, when they put ashore in 1683 en route from Quebec City to Hudson Bay. Both of these encounters seem to have occurred in the Main-Okak region of the central coast.
The Inuit are described in greater detail in the journal of Louis Jolliet who explored the coast as far north as the Main area in 1694. By this time, the Labrador Inuit were already well equipped with many articles of European manufacture, including wooden boats with sails and grapnels, barrels, sea chests, screws and nails, knives, cloth and some clothing. Jolliet, who purchased seals and seal oil from several groups, assumed that the Inuit did not have regular trade contacts with Europeans, and that they traded with fishing ships in Newfoundland only when the opportunity arose.
The Development of External Trading Relations
Rudimentary ship trade was further developed in 1714 when five Dutch ships landed in the Okak area and traded with natives for sealskins. By 1733 trading between the Inuit of Labrador and European whalers was an established tradition, with some Dutch ships making special journeys to Labrador at the end of each Greenland whaling voyage.
Between the European newcomers and the Inuit, mutual misunderstandings and open conflict were common. A cycle of bloodshed and retaliation developed in the Strait of Belle Isle area where shore stations of the French and Spanish "dry fishery" were concentrated. These stations, abandoned during the long winter season, provided the Inuit with a ready source of boats and equipment, including iron nails which could easily be obtained by setting fire to the fish stages. When they returned to Labrador the following summer, enraged European fishermen took their revenge on any Inuit who happened to come near.
The French settled on the Strait of Belle Isle near the St. Pauls River in 1702 with the establishment of Fort Pontchartrain as a base for fishing, trapping and trading. Annual reports of the first two seigneurs at the fort regularly mention Inuit summer excursions into the Strait of Belle Isle and to northern Newfoundland, where they travelled as far south as Port-au-Choix. Frequent hostilities in which Europeans and their Indian allies, both armed, drove groups of unarmed Inuit away from shore installations of the fishing fleet were also reported.
The French came to dominate the ship trade during the first half of the eighteenth century, and by the middle of that century, regular trade with French ships was fully established. The major trade staple supplied by Inuit at this time was baleen, long flexible "strainers" from the mouth of the Greenland whale which were used to make brushes and corsets and were then bringing extremely high prices on the world market. Most of the baleen was carried down to Hamilton Inlet from the north coast by Inuit middlemen, who had already developed a trade jargon for dealing with the French fishermen in southern Labrador.
Relations between Europeans and Inuit were temporarily disrupted in 1763 when Labrador became a British possession and the French were no longer allowed on the coast. The disruption was attributed partly to the inexperience of the British and Americans who attempted to take over the lucrative baleen trade. To end the open hostilities which had become commonplace once again, the Governor of Newfoundland attempted to negotiate a "truce" with the Inuit in 1765.
Although the treaty of 1765 did not entirely eliminate the misunderstanding and bloodshed, it was soon followed by the rapid expansion of white settlement along the coast of Labrador. European settlers concentrated in the area south of Hamilton Inlet, where they were frequently visited by. travelling Inuit whose regular homes lay farther to the north. At this time, the Inuit population of the entire coast consisted of about fifteen hundred persons.
Missionary Activity
The first non-natives to settle north of Hamilton Inlet were missionaries of the Moravian Church, a Protestant sect that traces its origins in Europe back to 1457. By the time they established their first Labrador station at Main in 1771, the Moravians were already active in other countries including Greenland. Their Labrador operations expanded with the founding of Okak (1776), Hopedale (1782), Hebron (1830), Zoar (1865), Ramah (1871), Makkovik (1895) and Killinek (1904). During the twentieth century the permanent settlements north of Main were gradually abandoned for various reasons and only three Moravian stations, Main, Hopedale and Makkovik, are still in operation on the Labrador coast. In 1957, the Moravians moved their headquarters to the new town of Happy Valley where several families of Inuit relocated after World War II.
Although the main concern of the early Moravians was the spreading of Christianity, they were involved from the beginning in many aspects of Inuit life other than religion. To the Inuit, who had by now come to depend on a wide variety of European goods, an extremely important feature of the early mission station was the trading store. Although the missionaries hoped that by providing trade outlets in the north the Inuit would no longer feel compelled to make regular journeys to European traders in southern Labrador, such trips continued to take place for many years. Even after 1784, when the Moravians finally gave in to Inuit pressure and agreed to sell guns and ammunition, there were many attractions, such as brandy, which only the southern traders were willing to supply. In 1925 the Moravians sold out their trading operation to the Hudson's Bay Company, which was in turn later replaced in most northern Labrador communities by stores operated by the government of Newfoundland.
Up until the present century the Moravian Mission was unquestionably one of the most powerful agents of cultural change among the Inuit of Labrador. Fortunately, the early Moravians left careful records of their life among the Inuit in the form of mission diaries and other documents. Mow preserved in Moravian archives in Germany, England and the United States these records, written mostly in German, contain a wealth of information on the history and traditional culture of the Inuit of the Labrador Sea.
Traditional Subsistence Patterns
On the basis of information contained in Labrador mission diaries, it is possible to reconstruct the "annual cycle" of economic activities during specific periods in history. Here, we shall trace a typical annual cycle of the 1770s when all subsistence activities were carried out with traditional hunting and fishing equipment. The Inuit did not acquire guns until 1784.
Most Labrador Inuit spent the autumn and much of the winter in settlements that were located at the mouths of fiords or on some of the more sheltered of the seaward islands. There they built themselves semi subterranean sod and stone houses into which they moved around the middle of October, about two months before the sea was frozen into a coastal rim of fast ice. The size of autumn-winter settlements averaged thirty-six persons.
Men in kayaks hunted available game such as the harp seal, which migrates south in November and December. A hand-thrown harpoon about two metres long with a removable toggle head made it possible to secure the seal. Tension on a long skin line attached to the centre of the harpoon head caused it to twist and lodge in the animal's body. At the other end of the line was a sealskin float and round drag anchor to impede the escape of the wounded prey, which was normally dispatched with a thrust of a lance.
At this time of year many Labrador Inuit hunters also pursued the huge Greenland whales which migrated southwards from summer feeding grounds in the high Arctic. The whaling harpoon was twice as long as the sealing one and was used with a huge drag anchor and two or three floats. It was thrust into a sleeping whale from the bow of an umiak, a large open boat paddled by about a dozen men. Sometimes two or three umiaks co-operated in the capture of a single whale which could supply a settlement with food and fuel for several months.
With the freezing of the sea in mid-December, whaling ceased and seals had to be harpooned at breathing holes in the new ice. Although seals taken in this manner included a few migratory harps caught inshore by sudden ice formation, the most frequently killed were the non-migratory bearded and ringed seals. Sealing on new ice was extremely productive. For the first few weeks after freeze up seals were so abundant that it was often possible to cache some for later use. At this time of year, men and boys might leave their winter camps for several days to find areas that had just frozen over.
As sea ice thickened and became covered with deep snow it grew more difficult to capture seals at breathing holes. After the middle of January, most sealing was restricted to patches of open water in the vicinity of strong currents and to the ice edge where breaking and refreezing sometimes created patches of new ice. In favourable weather, basking seals were hunted by crawling within harpoon range, a method known as uuttuq, meaning lazy seal. In northern areas, walrus were important as they appeared in open water off the ice edge in February and March.
While sea mammals provided the bulk of food and fuel, many alternative food sources were available for variety and sometimes as emergency rations. For example, sea-birds such as dovekies, eider ducks, guillemots and puffins concentrated at the ice edge and around areas of open water in January and February. In March and April holes were chopped in the ice to allow jigging for rock cod in salt water and the spearing of arctic char in fresh water. During hard winters stored meat, including caches of whale, seal, caribou and fish, was the sole protection against famine. Towards the end of winter some people left their sod houses to build snow ones closer to better hunting and fishing grounds.
As the sun grew stronger near the end of April, both sod and snow houses were abandoned in favour of tents. In May and June most people moved out to islands where they hunted seals, beluga, and eider duck, and gathered ducks' eggs. In the ever expanding patches of open water, most hunting was done from kayaks. Harp seals returned from the south, and food was often so plentiful that stone caches could be filled again with stores for the following winter.
As the fast ice broke up in June, families from the wide spread camps on the outer islands made their way to summer gathering places in the bays. Seals and beluga, which re-entered the bays at this time, continued to be the chief food source. Hunters also went after sea fowl, black bears, polar bears and any caribou that strayed to the coast. Hooks as well as leisters were used to catch arctic char which came down to the sea from the freshwater lakes of the interior. Along the southern part of the coast Atlantic salmon, migrating in the reverse direction, were taken with the same techniques.
In early August, when caribou hides were at their best for winter clothing and bedding, most families stored their umiaks at the heads of fords and bays and trudged inland across the plateau with tents, kayaks and dogs to intercept migrating caribou herds. Before the acquisition of guns, the most productive hunting technique was to drive the caribou into lakes or rivers where they could be lanced from kayaks. In October, when hunters returned to the coast to prepare their houses for the coming winter, the annual round of subsistence activities had come full circle.
Social and Religious Life
In addition to documenting economic activities, early mission records are also a good source of information about social and religious life. The main fabric of traditional Labrador Inuit society consisted of the bonds between individuals, primarily kinship ties. In the absence of any overall political or tribal organization, it is not surprising that kin and family groupings were key social units.
A good example of such a unit was the extended family, which typically consisted of about twenty people sharing the same sod house during autumn and winter. In other seasons members of the extended family often travelled in the same boat and pitched their tents near each other. Such a group might consist of an older married couple together with married sons and daughters and their families, but other combinations of relatives and occasionally non-relatives were also possible.
Individual family units making up the extended family were usually larger than mere nuclear families of just a husband, wife and children. Other members might be mothers or widowed sisters of either spouse or, as was frequently the case, additional wives. Polygyny was a source of great prestige among the Inuit, and leading men might have two or even three wives. To satisfy the demand or marriageable females, brides were ordinarily taken in their early teens.
While leadership was usually strong within nuclear and extended family units, it was distinctly weak in multihousehold settlements and weaker still above the settlement level. Activities requiring numbers of people greater than the extended family were sometimes supervised by temporary advisers who were chosen by the people for their wisdom and ability. However, leaders lacked the authority to force their will on others, and conflict between opposing factions could and often did end in bloodshed. Since it was the duty of the next of kin to avenge the murder of a relative, murders frequently led to lengthy blood feuds.
Religious leadership was vested in the angekut (plural of angekok), influential men and women who controlled the spirits that could bring success or disaster. In times of famine, storm or sickness the Inuit looked to the angekutto find out what had been done to anger the spirits and what could be done to put things right. The angekut, in turn, looked for guidance and help from their own guardian spirits, invisible to others and known as tornait (plural of torngak).
During the shamanistic performances in which angekut sought to influence their guardian spirits, tents and houses were kept in darkness. Ceremonies aimed at increasing hunting success or at predicting and controlling the weather were done as a public service, whereas a heavy payment was usually demanded for efforts to cure the sick. Some angekut claimed the ability to injure and kill their enemies by means of sorcery.
A Changing Culture
The culture of the Labrador Inuit has undergone numerous transformations in the past two centuries. One of the earliest changes in the annual subsistence cycle was the introduction of an inland caribou hunt during late winter and early spring. This development followed the adoption of guns in the late 1780s, an innovation that made it much easier to stalk caribou on the frozen tundra. As the new winter-spring caribou hunt gained in importance it gradually replaced the traditional hunt of late summer.
By the early decades of the nineteenth century, whaling was no longer important and seals were pursued with guns and nets. Subsequent technological innovations, as well as the rise and decline of commercial trapping and cod fishing, the recent expansion of salmon and arctic char fisheries, and an increase in imported foodstuffs, all resulted in even more dramatic changes to the economy of the present day. Nevertheless, wild game is still highly valued as a food source, and the Labrador Inuit continue to derive satisfaction from a good catch.
Many of the traditional religious practices and beliefs of the Labrador Inuit were modified or suppressed by the persistent efforts of early Moravian missionaries. Among the Moravian traditions adopted by the Labrador Inuit are special festival days for the separate groups based on age and sex, called "choirs," into which each congregation is divided. Another is the strong love of church music. Most of the Inuit choirs, brass bands and string ensembles of the present-day mission stations had their beginning in the early part of the last century.
Following the first baptism at Main in 1775, the missionaries continued to seek new converts until 1935, when the last group of non-Christian Inuit became nominal members of the Moravian congregation at Hebron. By this time Inuit at the other mission stations had already been practising their version of Moravian Protestantism for several generations. The first of the Labrador Inuit to become an ordained minister, Renatus Hunter, is currently in charge of the Moravian Church at Main, now the most northerly village on the entire coast of Labrador.
The movement of people from traditional winter settlements to Moravian mission villages heralded changes not only in religious matters but in social organization as well. One result was a decline in the importance of the extended family, which coincided with the adoption of single family housing during the nineteenth century. Mew associations were created, however, and these helped to give some cohesion to mission villages that often included several hundred inhabitants. One of the oldest political associations is the governing board that was established by the missionaries at the Moravian stations. It includes several "elders," that is, men elected by the people of the community for a three-year term. Mow many local concerns are handled by elected community councils, made up of not only Inuit but also people of mixed ancestry descended from both Inuit and European fishermen-traders and referred to in Labrador as settlers.
There are also a growing number of organizations that, in scope and membership, go beyond the individual settlement. One is the Labrador nut Association, established in 1973 and affiliated with the national organization Inuit Tapirisat (Eskimo Brotherhood). From its headquarters at Main, the Labrador Inuit Association strives to further the interests of all Inuit residing in the province of Newfoundland-Labrador in matters such as language, education, hunting regulations and political representation.
In spite of all the previous alterations in their way of life and the present pressures for further change, the Labrador nut have nevertheless retained their language and a strong sense of cultural identity. In a recent publication of the Labrador Inuit Association, Our Footprints Are Everywhere, one Main resident expressed his hopes for the future in the following words:
Our identity as Inuit should not get lost -- because we are Inuit It would be best if our children were taught the language and way of life all the time. We are real Inuit, and our forefathers were real Inuit.... This should not disappear.
