The Mysterious Sivullirmiut

Words by Charles Arnold

One spring, about 2,500 years ago, a small group of people set up a camp near the mouth of the Masik River on the southern coast of Banks Island. It is not hard to see why they chose that area. Seals are abundant, caribou and muskox roam the area and are easy to spot in the wide river valley, and geese and other waterfowl are attracted to tundra ponds that dot the land to lay their eggs.

After the people moved on to other hunting grounds, the things they left behind – cooking hearths, bones of their prey, broken and lost tools – were gradually covered with sand and soil-blown in by the wind. The buried remains were gripped by permafrost, except in a few areas where frost heaving had churned the ground, bringing some of the remains to the surface, where they were spotted by archaeologists who were exploring the area in the late 1970s. The archaeologists were looking for evidence of an ancient lineage of Arctic-dwelling people who left traces of their existence throughout Alaska, across northern Canada, down the Labrador coast and in Greenland.

The nature of that evidence varies from place to place and over time, and archaeologists have used a variety of names for branches of that lineage, which can be confusing to nonspecialists and specialists alike. Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami has recently addressed this confusion and proposed that archaeologists adopt the name Sivullirmiut, or ‘First People’ in Inuktitut, similar to the way Inuit is used as a general term that includes many regional names such as Inuvialuit.

The artifacts that were exposed on the surface intrigued the archaeologists, and so they excavated parts of the camp – which they dubbed the ‘Lagoon Site’ – that were still buried in the frozen ground. The things that they found provide glimpses of a way of life that, although it is far in the past, beckons to be known.

The age of the Lagoon Site was determined through radiocarbon dating, which can give a reasonably accurate estimate of the time that has passed since a sample of organic matter, such as willow twigs that were burned in a hearth, ceased to be alive. To determine which season people camped at the site, archaeologists sought clues by examining the bones of ringed seals, muskox and snow geese that made up most of their diet.

A child’s kamik, Lagoon Site. (T. Macintosh)

Among the many ringed seal bones found at the site were some that came from unborn seals. Ringed seal pups are born during the period from mid-March to mid-April, so those bones show that several pregnant seals were hunted during late winter or early spring. During that period, when the sea ice is still frozen, seals can be hunted at birthing lairs, at breathing holes through the ice, on the ice when they come up through their breathing holes to bask in the sun and at open-water leads. Antler and ivory harpoon heads found at the Lagoon Site indicate that seals were hunted using harpoons.

The state of tooth eruption in jawbones of several immature muskox shows that they were hunted in late spring or early summer. One way of hunting muskox is to stalk a herd, just as wolves do. The adult muskox will form a circle around the calves, and may come out one at a time to threaten the hunters, whether they be wolves or humans – or humans with dogs – and can be dispatched with a spear. Bones from at least one (presumed) dog were found at the Lagoon Site, and several large points that had been skilfully shaped by chipping stone could have been tips for spears.

Snow geese arrive at their nesting grounds in the Arctic as early as mid-May, and fly south again in September. A look inside the normally hollow leg bones of snow geese found at the Lagoon Site helps to narrow down this period. Some of the bones were packed with calcium deposits that build up in the skeletons of female geese before they migrate to their nesting grounds, and which they draw upon to form eggshells once nesting begins. Snow geese normally finish laying their eggs by mid-June, so finding these calcium deposits indicates that the bones came from birds that were hunted during the period from May through June. No tools that could be specifically associated with hunting geese were found. However, snow geese moult soon after they arrive at their nesting grounds and are unable to fly until they grow new flight feathers, and a club or a snare may be all that is needed to hunt them when they are in that condition.

Hunting wasn’t the only activity represented by artifacts found at the Lagoon Site. Stone tools for scraping and cutting skins and needles for sewing skin clothing, so essential for survival, were also found, and are a reminder that survival required the efforts of everyone at the camp.

Archaeology focuses on tools and animal bones that survive the passage of time, and has limitations about what it can tell us about the people who lived at archaeological sites. We can only guess, based on what we know of survival in the Arctic, that the people who lived at the Lagoon Site consisted of one or perhaps several families who moved with the seasons to take advantage of changing hunting opportunities.

But we do know that this group included at least one young child. He or she left behind a kamik, a small skin boot about 15 centimetres long. When it was first removed from the ground where it had been frozen for more than 2,000 years, it appeared to be only a clump of folded skin. Through the

patient efforts of artifact conservators back at a museum, it was carefully unfolded and the original shape of the kamik was revealed. Those who have been fortunate to see this fragile item at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre, where it is being cared for in a controlled environment, have marvelled at the skill that went into making it. Some have asked the question: “I wonder where the other kamik is?”

Who were the people we call Sivullirmiut today? Pooling information from oral histories with archaeological evidence and the results of genetic studies, one picture that is emerging suggests that Inuit of today and Sivullirmiut of the past shared an ancestry that can be traced to people who lived in the Bering Strait region many thousands of years ago. According to this theory, while ancestral Inuit stayed in the area around the Bering Strait, the people we call Sivullirmiut spread eastward throughout Arctic North America and Greenland about 4,000 years ago, leaving evidence of their existence at small camps like the Lagoon Site.

According to this line of reasoning, over time the people who remained in the Bering Strait region developed the knowledge, skills and technology for hunting large sea mammals such as walrus and bowhead whales, and armed with those skills they expanded eastward about 1,000 years ago. It seems likely that the Sivullirmiut had disappeared from most parts of the Arctic by that time, although oral histories from some parts of the Arctic suggest these now-distant relatives may have met.

Only a few Sivullirmiut archaeological sites are known in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region. More archaeological work may yet tell us more about this era in the history of the Arctic, but even then we can only wonder about the songs, the stories and the experiences of this mysterious population that their artifacts alone can’t reveal.

Note: The author wishes to acknowledge the assistance of the late Andy Carpenter, Peter Esau and other residents of Sachs Harbour in finding meaning in the archaeological remains at the Lagoon Site.