Indigenous groups across the Americas had all encountered Europeans differently. But where other coastal groups such as the Haida or the Mi’kmaq had met white men who were well-fed and well-dressed, the Inuit frequently encountered their future colonizers as small parties on the edge of death.
“I’m sure it terrified people,” said Eber, 91, speaking to the National Post by phone from her Toronto home.
And it’s why, as many as six generations after the events of the Franklin Expedition, Eber was meeting Inuit still raised on stories of the two giant ships that came to the Arctic and discharged columns of death onto the ice.
Inuit nomads had come across streams of men that “didn’t seem to be right.” Maddened by scurvy, botulism or desperation, they were raving in a language the Inuit couldn’t understand. In one case, hunters came across two Franklin Expedition survivors who had been sleeping for days in the hollowed-out corpses of seals.
“They were unrecognizable they were so dirty,” Lena Kingmiatook, a resident of Taloyoak, told Eber.
Mark Tootiak, a stepson of Nicholas Qayutinuaq, related a story to Eber of a group of Inuit who had an early encounter with a small and “hairy” group of Franklin Expedition men evacuating south.
“Later … these Inuit heard that people had seen more white people, a lot more white people, dying,” he said. “They were seen carrying human meat.”
Even Eber’s translator, the late Tommy Anguttitauruq, recounted a goose hunting trip in which he had stumbled upon a Franklin Expedition skeleton still carrying a clay pipe.
By 1850, coves and beaches around King William Island were littered with the disturbing remnants of their advance: Scraps of clothing and camps still littered with their dead occupants. Decades later, researchers would confirm the Inuit accounts of cannibalism when they found bleached human bones with their flesh hacked clean.
“I’ve never in all my life seen any kind of spirit — I’ve heard the sounds they make, but I’ve never seen them with my own eyes,” said the old man who had gone out to investigate the Franklin survivors who had straggled into his camp that day on King William Island.
The figures’ skin was cold but it was not “cold as a fish,” concluded the man. Therefore, he reasoned, they were probably alive.
“They were beings but not Inuit,” he said, according to the account by shaman Nicholas Qayutinuaq.
The figures were too weak to be dangerous, so Inuit women tried to comfort the strangers by inviting them into their igloo.
But close contact only increased their alienness: The men were timid, untalkative and — despite their obvious starvation — they refused to eat.
The men spit out pieces of cooked seal offered to them. They rejected offers of soup. They grabbed jealous hold of their belongings when the Inuit offered to trade.
When the Inuit men returned to the camp from their hunt, they constructed an igloo for the strangers, built them a fire and even outfitted the shelter with three whole seals.
Then, after the white men had gone to sleep, the Inuit quickly packed up their belongings and fled by moonlight.
Whether the pale-skinned visitors were qallunaat or “Indians” — the group determined that staying too long around these “strange people” with iron knives could get them all killed.
“That night they got all their belongings together and took off towards the southwest,” Qayutinuaq told Dorothy Eber.
But the true horror of the encounter wouldn’t be revealed until several months later.
The Inuit had left in such a hurry that they had abandoned several belongings. When a small party went back to the camp to retrieve them, they found an igloo filled with corpses.
The seals were untouched. Instead, the men had eaten each other.
the fact that shakespeare was a playwright is sometimes so funny to me. just the concept of the "greatest writer of the English language" being a random 450-year-old entertainer, a 16th cent pop cultural sensation (thanks in large part to puns & dirty jokes & verbiage & a long-running appeal to commoners). and his work was made to be watched not read, but in the classroom teachers just hand us his scripts and say "that's literature"
just...imagine it's 2450 A.D. and English Lit students are regularly going into 100k debt writing postdoc theses on The Simpsons screenplays. the original animation hasn't even been preserved, it's literally just scripts and the occasional SDH subtitles.txt. they've been republished more times than the Bible
English: barn owl - uninspired and unimaginative, 3/10
Czech: sova pálená, literally singed, burnt owl (because of the markings on its head) - creative, unique, 8/10
Slovak: plamienka driemavá - the sleepy little flamey (not kidding) - somebody looked at the owl and went “aww eepy flame babey :))))” and I think that’s amazing, also it sounds super cute, 11/10
Time Travel Question 50: Early Modernish and Earlier 4
These Questions are the result of suggestions a the previous iteration.This category may include suggestions made too late to fall into the correct earlier time grouping. In some cases a culture lasted a really long time and I grouped them by whether it was likely the later or earlier grouping made the most sense with the information I had. (Invention ofs tend to fall in an earlier grouping if it's still open. Ones that imply height of or just before something tend to get grouped later, but not always. Sometimes I'll split two different things from the same culture into different polls because they involve separate research goals or the like).
Please add new suggestions below if you have them for future consideration. All cultures and time periods welcome.
Don't make fun of any accents, ever, for any reason.
The person on the receiving end will most likely fall in at least one of three categories:
Second language
Regional accent
Speech impediment
1. Second language
This person is probably speaking in this language to you because either you don't speak their mother tongue or you speak it worse than they speak the language you are speaking. They are making an effort for you. An accent doesn't make you dumb.
Making fun of someone for attempting to communicate in another language is the height of assholery.
2. Regional accent
Half the time you make fun of regional accents, you make fun of historically disenfranchised accents.
Southern accents? Congrats you're making fun of the way rural, usually poor, people speak. Their speech was highly influenced by black people.
Don't even get me started on making fun of AAE.
Again, an accent doesn't make you any less intelligent.
3. Speech impediment
They know they have a speech impediment. They are probably trying very hard not to sound like that. It is literally not their fault. They have had to deal with people making fun of it their whole life.
A speech impediment doesn't make you less intelligent either.
She says that she thinks that the thing that is in the screen is two people kissing.
At first I thought she was crazy but then she send me this video
And I was like "Omg yes you are right "
And Then I ask her who she things it's the two people kissing and she told me "idk but it looks kinda like Joyce and hopper" and I told her "I dont think it's Joyce and hopper, joyce's hair its not that short" and then my other friend said "maybe its byler because That looks like will" and I was like "OMG yes" but then I was like "wait, How do we know that's 2 people kissing?" And my friend said "because it looks like is a kiss its so obvious" And I was like "Hmmn idk maybe we are just making things up ".
Guys idk but I think that me and my friends are crazy Because that shit doesnt look like a kiss.