What do you eat? No supermarkets, right?

Nanook: Nope! When it’s warm, we gather berries, grasses, roots, eggs, and seaweed, but for ten months of the year, we eat one thing: meat! There’s also fish if you chop through six feet of ice to go fishing…

We hunt caribou, seal, walruses, polar bears, and whales. A bowhead whale can be 60 feet long, weigh 75 tons, and feed an entire community for a year! Meat is stored in sealskin bags underground (the ground is always frozen if you dig a few feet down!), so we can pull it out when we’re hungry. Because there’s very little fuel for fire, in the winter we almost never cook. The menu? Mostly raw meat! One of my favorite treats is a seal eyeball. Want one? From the face you’re making, I guess not.

Speaking of clothes!

Alasie: I’ll be your Inuit fashion consultant! Inuit clothing is sewn from animal skins. In the winter, we wear two layers of fur clothing. The outer layer is a large parka of caribou skin decorated with fur, and a warm hood surrounded by wolf hair to keep our faces from freezing. My mother’s hood (amauti) is extra roomy, so she can carry my baby sister, Lusa! Mittens and boots are made of waterproof caribou skin or sealskin stuffed with dried grass or moss to keep extra toasty. My father is a whale hunter, and every year that he catches a whale, my mother sews a band of white fur onto his boots, so everyone knows he’s a great hunter. Maybe someday his boots will be completely white!

Winter is long. How do you keep busy?

Alasie: Besides hunting and fishing, we sew clothes, carve weapons and dishes out of stone or ivory walrus tusks, tell stories, and enjoy each other’s company. I get together with friends, and we play storyknifing. We smooth out an area on the floor and use special knives to draw and tell a story of our scene.

Nanook: We also enjoy the bone game. There are two teams, and one person dumps a bag of small bones on the floor. They then create a shape, and the other team has to guess what it is. Guesses go back and forth between the teams until someone guesses right!

Alasie: The best game takes place in September. To celebrate a successful whaling season, we have the Nalukataq, or blanket toss. Everyone in our village holds onto a giant skin blanket and gets a chance to bounce on it. Whaling captains, like my father, go first, then the other men, women, and children. You should see how high I jump!

Nanook: Come back in July, and join the fun!

It sounds tempting — we’ll have to see!

Alasie and Nanook: We look forward to saying “tunngasugit,” “welcome,” when you return. For now, tavvauvusi! Goodbye!

Igloo How-To in 9 Easy Steps:

1. Find the right snow. If you can walk on it, and it doesn’t break, that’s perfect!
2. Using a sharp knife (Inuit use special knives), draw a circle on the ground.
3. Outline blocks of snow and cut them out.
4. Place the blocks on the outside of the circle you drew.
5. Put a second layer of blocks on top of the first, pushing them inward so they start to form a curve.
6. Keep going until there is only a small hole at the top of the dome.
7. Put a block into that last hole, also called a “king block.”
8. Fill in the cracks between blocks with more snow.
9. Cut a doorway (optional: cut a window hole and fill it with ice!).

Inuit Inventions

Sunglasses — The snow is extremely bright when the sun shines on it. The Inuit carved iggak, glasses, out of bone, antler, and ivory to protect their eyes. Those may have been the world’s first sunglasses!

Parkas — Created to keep the Inuit warm!

Kayaks — Originally qajaqs, these were small, one-person boats for hunting. The Inuit made them from watertight sealskin.

Dogsleds — No roads? Lots of snow and ice? Enter dogsleds, or qamutiks, which was the main form of transportation in the North. Sleds were constructed from driftwood and whale bones, and were pulled by teams of dogs.

(Originally featured in Treeo, Issue 992)