“The Top Notch of Manhood”
Euro-American colonialism in the north was for a long time limited by the tree line (Van Kirk 1980, White 1991). Few southerners could imagine settling in Inuit territories because of the cold and, moreover, hunting, whaling and mining were seen to be uneconomical, given the level of technology and means of transport. Beyond the tree line, as a result, treaties were seen to be irrelevant. Canada, for instance, had little interest in the Inuit until 1953 when it was pressured into forming an Eskimo Branch in the Department of Indian Affairs and Natural Resources. Nevertheless, some of the implications of an emerging empire were felt much earlier in the Arctic, through the presence of whalers, missionaries, anthropologists, and explorers. The western Arctic came into contact with American whalers almost exclusively out of San Francisco. The whalers followed the bowhead whale from Alaska to its spring feeding ground on the Mackenzie Delta.
In the course of Euro-American exploration of the Arctic, the lives of Inuit women were radically altered. The impact of Robert E. Peary’s expeditions (1890-1902) on the Inughuit women of Ellesmere Island and Northern Greenland (“Polar Eskimo”) is one illustration. Not only was there a shift in production from a family-oriented focus to the production of food and clothes for the expedition team, some members of Peary’s team became involved in sexual relations with local women. These relations were complicated by differences in power and sometimes they disrupted existing spousal relations of Inughuit men and women. Peary, as Dick points out (2001: 381), had an instrumentalist view of the sexual role of indigenous women, dispensing with them to his employees as if they were his personal property. Peary’s vision of the exploration party was metaphorically rendered in terms of the male body, “the physical structure of a tough, hardy man”:
[O]ne intelligent white man would represent the head, two other white men selected solely for their courage, determination, physical strength, and devotion to the leader would represent the arms, and the driver and the natives the body and legs (cited in Dick 2001: 382).
Significantly, the exploration “body” had no room for women. For Peary, however, the presence of women was essential, “an absolute necessity to render the men contented”. “Feminine companionship”, he went on, “not only causes greater contentment but as a matter of both physical and mental health and the retention of the top notch of manhood it is a necessity” (see Dick 2001: 382).
Many arctic travelers had children with indigenous women and usually the existences of their Inuit families were carefully guarded secrets outside the Arctic, in the world of whites. The shame and guilt this engendered often weighed like nightmares on the brain of their descendants and their families outside the Arctic. Sometimes, however, there was no secrecy. One of the images in Peary’s book Northward over the “Great Ice”—”a conventional pinup image . . . in which an odalisque pose is used to indicate sexual availability” (Bloom 1993: 104)—shows a young Inughuit girl, Allakasingwah, Peary’s mistress and mother of his son Karree. In 1998, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on “explornography”, focusing on wealthy, successful people risking their lives on adventurous expeditions (see Ortner 1999: 282). Peary’s writings, perhaps more than anything else, justify such a label.
