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Stefansson's
expeditions |
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After receiving his first academic
degree in religious studies from the University of Iowa in 1903,
Stefansson became affiliated with the Anthropology Department and
the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. He planned an anthropological
field trip to Africa at the suggestion of his teacher, F.W. Putnam:
"Putnam pointed out that nobody connected with our department
has as yet made much of a study of Africa. What would I think of
that field?" (5). In 1906 Stefansson
planned to join a British Museum expedition destined for Central
East Africa. In the end, however, he chose the Arctic. |
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During the summers of 1904 and 1905
he voyaged to Iceland to study the relationship between health and
diet. In 1905 he became a teaching fellow, "looked upon as
the Anthropology Department's authority on the polar regions"
(6). Partly as a result of his early
article on the history of the Norse colony in Greenland (7)
he was invited to participate in an expedition to the Arctic, the
impressively named "Anglo- American Polar Expedition"
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That expedition was lead by the Danish
naval adventurer Ejnar Mikkelsen and the American geologist Ernest
de Koven Leffingwell. The main purpose of the expedition was to
look for undiscovered lands in the Arctic, north of Alaska. Mikkelsen
and Leffingwell, however, were forced to add an ethnographic dimension
to the expedition; they had difficulties in funding the expedition
and one backer requested that a qualified "ethnologist"
accompany the group to study any natives who might be encountered
on the way. Stefansson's role was to study the Mackenzie River Indians
and to collect artifacts for the Peabody and Royal Ontario Museums.
In 1906 the "southern" supplies on which the Inuit had
become dependent (mainly foodstuffs from white whalers) failed to
arrive and, as a result, the Inuit had to revert to their traditional
hunting practices. Stefansson felt, Diubaldo points out, that this
provided an exciting opportunity to observe the Inuit almost in
their "natural" state and, moreover, "living with
them was much better from an ethnological point of view than merely
living amongst them, as other white men had done" (8).
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Mackenzie Inuits. |
In August 1907, Stefansson severed
his ties with the Mikkelsen-Leffingwell expedition and began his
journey back home. He was not too impressed with the results of
his scientific mission. During his fieldwork, however, he became
committed to the ethnographic study of Inuit culture. At Herschel
Island he met captain "Charlie" Klengenberg who told him
an exciting story, claiming to have encountered and stayed with
native tribes who apparently had never seen a white man and yet
looked like white men in some respects. This mysterious story was
supported by a small collection of knives and other implements made
of native copper. While the story seemed almost too romantic to
be true, it provided a glimmer of success which drove him to organize
a second expedition to the Arctic. Stefansson confided to Putnam,
his mentor at Harvard, that he had evidence of truly primitive Eskimos
in Prince Albert Island. |
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Stefansson's first expedition was
relatively short and his ethnography, mainly among the Inuit of
the Mackenzie delta, was somewhat limited although it provided interesting
sketches of early fieldwork, Inuit society and relations between
"natives" and "whites." During this expedition,
other scientists and explorers employed Stefansson, in a secondary
role as an anthropologist and assistant, and perhaps partly for
that reason his ethnographic diary entries were rather brief. Nevertheless,
he provided interesting observations on Inuit society and relations
between Inuit and whites as the expedition moved on. Stefansson's
works on the Mackenzie Delta Inuit seem to have been underestimated;
he observed and recorded the end of a way of life described by the
late nineteenth-century explorer Émile Petitot. In the early
days of the expedition he tended to focus on the logistics of the
expedition, but later on his discussion of indigenous languages
and customs grew more detailed. The Arctic clearly appealed to Stefansson,
despite the difficulties it posed for Western travellers. Part of
its charm lay in its exotic property rights and communitarian ethic.
But while many of the early armchair anthropologists and evolutionists
had fabricated ethnography and history by postulating a utopian
primitive society without class divisions and private property,
Stefansson had found it alive and well. During the second expedition,
however, he observes that communism seems to be "disappearing
fast" (9). |
Map of Stefansson first expeditions 1906 - 1912 |
Stefansson was determined to return
to the Arctic for a second expedition, this time as the commander
of an expedition of his own. His main ambition was to locate and
observe the mysterious blond Eskimo he had heard about during the
first expedition and he felt confident that he would be able to
face the difficulties involved. His experience of the first expedition
and the sensational stories he had heard about Eskimos who had never
seen a white man helped to provide the necessary connections and
financial support. His popularised articles based on the first expedition
also outlined a new approach to arctic travel and exploration which
appealed to potential sponsors, a strategy also taken advantage
of by other explorers, including Robert E. Peary.'(Stefansson argued
that the costs of an expedition could be significantly reduced if
one was prepared to live as the Inuit did. These articles caught
the attention of the leading personnel of The American Museum of
Natural History, including Clark Wissler, Curator in the Anthropology
Department. After a series of negotiations, Stefansson was offered
a contract. A former fellow student at the University of Iowa, the
zoologist Rudolph M. Anderson, was appointed to join Stefansson.
Anderson, who at the time was working for a military academy, was
trained in biology and his scientific background and credibility
helped in providing funding for the expedition. |
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The stated purpose of the expedition
was threefold. In a commissioning letter to Stefansson, the American
Museum specified: "The intent of this commission ... is to
provide you with the means of pursuing fieldwork in anthropology;
of providing Mr. Anderson with the means of pursuing fieldwork in
zoology, and with the design to secure to The American Museum of
Natural History valuable collections in the branches of science
above mentioned"." An (apparently) somewhat earlier statement
from the American Museum describes the uniqueness of the Stefansson-Anderson
Expedition in the following terms: The present expedition . . .
differs essentially from ordinary Arctic ventures in this, that
where it is usual to take along with the party everything that the
party is expected to need during its stay in the field, in this
case there will be taken neither food, clothing nor house materials,
and there will be complete dependence on local resources. Seeing
the object of the expedition is (sic.) chiefly ethnological, it
is in a sense desirable that this should be so; for the only way
in which one can become familiar with the real life of a primitive
people is to live-,, with them in their houses, and as they do,
rather than to live near them in one's own 'civilized' way (italics
added). |
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Stefansson and Anderson left from
Toronto in April 1908, reaching Fort McPherson by early July. This
time the two of them spent four years in the Arctic, sometimes working
separately on different trails. The project turned out to be more
costly and time consuming than expected. Stefansson probably knew
all along that an ambitious project of this kind needed more time
than the contract with the American Museum specified. Understandably,
he was eager to pass on information about his successes, in the
hope that necessary funding would be maintained. In a letter to
Wissler at the American Museum he proudly announced the "discovery"
of non-Eskimo Eskimos: West of the Coppermine we found over 200
people who had never seen a white man, whose ancestors had never
seen one, who knew of no past relations with people to the west,
and whose territory was supposed by geographers to be definitely
known to be uninhabited (so labelled on official charts of the Canadian
Government).... The general appearance was non-Eskimo - a sort of
'portly' appearance . . .. It is hard to be specific in this matter,
but the general impression is definite. My Eskimo companion was
impressed no less than I. He said, 'These are not Eskimos, they
are just like fo'cas'le men' - he has worked many years 'before
the mast' as a whaler. (12) Wissler,
however, had doubts at this point about the scientific merits of
the results. (13) Although he would
publish extracts from Stefansson's diaries a few years later , at
this stage neither he nor anyone else knew how valuable Stefansson's
ethnography might be. In the middle of the expedition, the American
Museum withdrew its support. During the second expedition, Stefansson
occupied a leading position, in charge of both logistics and research.
Here he appears in the role of a more independent and alert observer
than during the first expedition, keen to note minute details important
for understanding social life in the Arctic. And in this case the
diaries are massive, with vocabularies, dictionaries, grammatical
notes, personal names, descriptions of events, ethnographic observations,
and drawings. Much of the text focuses on daily activities related
to the organization of camps, the collection and storing of food,
interaction with Stefansson's companions (including Inuit), and
travels across a complex and changing landscape. Several native
informants played a particularly important role for Stefansson's
ethnography, including Pannigabluk, Natk-usiak and Tannaumirk. |
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During the first days among the Copper
lnuit, Stefansson's note keeping is unusually detailed, with several
pages on the first encounter itself, as if he was driven by an ethnographic
compulsion. Stefansson's enthusiasm at this point is understandable.
For one thing, the whole expedition was justified by the attempt
to establish whether the rumors he had heard during the first expedition
about the existence of "blond" Eskimo were true or not.
Moreover, anthropologists have for a long time been fascinated with
"discoveries" of tribes previously unknown to "the
West," with people reported not to have seen a "white
man" (14), and Stefansson was
no exception. Not only were such lost or freshly-discovered tribes
seen as evidence of earlier modes of existence, of "disappearing
worlds" ready to be mapped and recorded before the final onslaught
of modernity, also the first encounter with such extreme isolates
in the cultural mosaic of humanity inevitably presented a "translation"
problem, a classic theme in Western thought. When Stefansson returned
to Seattle and New York in the fall of 1912, his story about the
"Blond Eskimos" (the Haneragmiut, Kanhirgimut, and Nuwukpagmiut)
caused quite a stir. The media reported that Stefansson had discovered
the descendants of the Norse colonists who had settled Greenland
from Iceland a thousand years ago. The disappearance of that colony
had remained a mystery and Stefansson's original reputation as an
Arctic scholar was, indeed, launched by his account of the case'
(15); later he would argue that
the Inuit had assimilated the Norse.' (16)
Stefansson complained that the newspapers had twisted his words
and exaggerated his statements. Nevertheless, he seems to have seriously
entertained such speculations from early on. In a letter to Wissler,
Stefansson drew attention to both the philological similarities
of Icelandic and the Inuit dialect in question and the physical
appearance already mentioned: "These are two points that suggest,
as far as they go, the possibility of some connection with the 3000
lost Greenland colonists". (17)
While critics accused Stefansson of vulgar sensationalism, others
saw his statements about the Norse Inuit as an interesting hypothesis
to explore. Interestingly, Stefansson's speculations about the Norse
ancestry of the Copper Eskimo may have been partly triggered by
his own involvement with the Inuit. A few months before he sent
his letter to Wissler, Alex, the son of Stefansson and the native
Pannigabluk, was born. Perhaps the physical presence of that Icelandic
Inuit, his own child, helps to explain Stefansson's enthusiasm about
the medieval Norse connection. For the rest of his career, his mixed
identity as scientist and showman was a repeated point of attack.
(18) |
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However distorted and unpleasant these
debates may have been for him, they established his fame which turned
out to be important for his career, for the funding of yet another
arctic expedition. The third expedition was an extensive one, spanning
five years, which is longer than most anthropological expeditions
either at the time or ever since. Here, however, Stefansson's role
as geographic explorer and adventurer takes precedence for a variety
of reasons, some of which have to do with the geopolitics of the
time and the constraints of funding large-scale expeditions, involving
teams of men and expensive equipment. It took long and complex negotiations
with a host of people and institutions to secure the necessary financial
support, including the American Museum of Natural History (his previous
sponsor), the National Geographic Society, and the Canadian Government.
In the process Stefansson had to sacrifice some of his ethnographic
goals. |
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During much of the third expedition,
then, Stefansson himself was experimenting with navigation and travel
routes and the mapping of particular regions of the Arctic while
Jenness worked on Inuit ethnography. Much of Stefansson's diary
entries focus on weather, hunting, travel across ice, inventories
of food and equipment, logistics, the daily activities of his team,
and his observations of his men. In this case, as a result, Stefansson's
diaries are more limited and less informative anthropologically
speaking than one might think. Stefansson's extensive published
narrative of the third expedition, The Friendly Arctic, is more
like a travel account than an ethnographic monograph. While he remains
fascinated by the Inuit - particularly the Copper Inuit with whom
he, again, spent some time - most of the volume deals with geographical
issues, the politics of exploration, and the logistics, mental attitude,
and technology necessitated by traveling on ice and in extreme cold.
The Inuit, in a way, have been removed from the center stage and
the Arctic, however "friendly," remains a natural space
to be explored, conquered, and domesticated by Western "civilization."
Stefansson concludes his account with a grand modernist vision:
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I shall offer here my opinion that
the most done. ... This expedition has contributed materially towards
making easy what once was difficult .... It is human nature to undervalue
whatever lands are distant and to consider disagreeable whatever
is different. But we have brought the North a good deal closer ......
(19) |
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Stefansson finally returned from the
Arctic in the spring of 1918. The expedition's geographical accomplishments
- the discovery of the world's last major landmasses - were seen
as a stunning success. In the following years and decades Stefansson
would draw upon his arctic experience and his reputation as an explorer,
lecturing and writing about the Inuit, geopolitics, health, and
a series of other issues. His career as an essayist and public speaker
on arctic issues was far from peaceful; repeatedly he was involved
in controversies with both anthropological colleagues (including
Jenness), fellow explorers (Anderson, above all), and politicians,
in Canada as well as the United States. He is reported, however,
to have captured his audience with skilful rhetoric and rich visual
material, in particular his hand-colored lantern slides. Photographs,
of course, are not only an important source of ethnographic information,
they also shed light on the ethnographer and his or her project;
thus, Sullivan shows how Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson used
photographs as rhetorical devices to present a particular image
of Highland Bali, exploiting the capacity of visual material "to
simultaneously illuminate and obscure, to simultaneously draw in
and stand apart" (20). Woodward
provides an interesting analysis of Stefansson's choice of images
and photographs, drawing attention to his focus on the "friendly"
Arctic (21). |
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