ESKIMOS. - Collective name for a group of small tribes inhabiting Greenland, Labrador, the Canadian Arctic as far as Alaska, and Siberia. The Eskimos were known to Europeans in the 16th century, when attempts were being made to find the northwest passage. They were thus named by the Algonquian Indians, who hunted them into the desolate regions of the north. "Eskimo" (agashimose) means: eater of raw meat; they themselves, however, call themselves Lunit (that is, "men").
The inhospitable regions of the Arctic north impose on the Eskimos a much more primitive way of life. They live in small groups of a few families and obtain their food by hunting and fishing. During the months of the brief summer they live under tents and during the winter under huts of ice and snow called igh. Their clothing is made from the skins of the animals they kill. Religious life consists of superstitious rites from birth to death, in which the arregono exercises a great influence.
All Eskimo tribes, except the Aleuts, who have a language of their own, speak the same language in different dialects. The language is synthetic, indeed polysynthetic, with declensions and agglutinations in the same word, rich not in distinct substantive ideas, but in all the nuances and immaterial relations of thought, and thus it is highly philosophical.
EVANGELIZATION
From 1721 the Norwegian missionary Hans Egede, later followed by the Herrnhut Society, spread Protestantism in Greenland, and from 1732 the mission was extended also to Labrador. The Russian Orthodox Church began missionary activity among the Aleuts in 1794. In the second half of the 19th century various Protestant societies and, on the Catholic side, the Jesuits began missions among the Eskimos of Alaska, after Alaska was sold by the Russians to the United States in 1887. The Jesuits founded several very flourishing stations. Among the Eskimos of the Canadian Arctic the Catholic mission was effectively established only in our century. It is true that the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, pushing northward, had already come into contact with the Eskimos more than once from 1880 onward, but the founding of a stable mission was impossible. Only in 1911 did Msgr. Gabriel Breynat, of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, apostolic vicar of Mackenzie, send the first missionaries, namely Fathers Jean-Baptiste Rouvière and Guillaume Leroux, for the purpose of founding a mission on the Coppermine River. The two missionaries, however, were slaughtered by the Eskimos in 1913. Later another missionary, Father Joseph Frappauce, drowned in Great Bear Lake; from 1920 the Oblates succeeded in establishing themselves solidly among the Eskimos on Great Bear Lake, on the Coppermine River and on Victoria Island. In the following years they also penetrated into the territories of the Mackenzie River delta and the islands opposite. In 1912 Msgr. Arsène Turquetil succeeded in founding the first mission among the Eskimos of Hudson Bay at Chesterfield Inlet. This mission was elevated in 1925 to an apostolic prefecture, in 1931 to the apostolic vicariate of Hudson Bay, and under the energetic direction of the same Msgr. Turquetil it developed excellently and was able to be extended as far as the most northerly regions. In the best years the Oblates also founded a mission among the Eskimos of the northern coast of Labrador. - See plate XL.
