Naskapi Erotic

Naskapi is a name someone else handed them. It comes out of Innu speech, its meaning is disputed and was probably never flattering, and traders and southern neighbors applied it to the bands who lived furthest into the interior, past the last decent stands of spruce, out where the barrens start. Those bands call themselves Innu, as do their relatives across the rest of the Quebec-Labrador peninsula. The Naskapi Nation of Kawawachikamach kept the outsider's word mostly because a century of paperwork had already fixed it to them. What actually set them apart was caribou. Their year moved with the George River herd across a country of rock, lichen, black spruce and lake that supports very little else in quantity. They hunted it, ate it, wore it, slept under hides of it, and cut their tools from its bone. When the herd shifted its migration route in the early twentieth century, people at Fort Chimo and Fort McKenzie starved.

The most remarkable thing they made was clothing. Naskapi men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries wore caribou-hide coats painted in red and yellow with fine parallel lines, double curves and lattice fields, laid down by women using antler and bone tools and paint bound with fish roe. The surviving coats sit mostly in museums now, and nothing else in the subarctic looks like them. They were hunting garments, made to please the animal and its master, Papakassik, who decides what a hunter is permitted to take. So was scapulimancy: a caribou shoulder blade scraped clean, held over coals until it scorched and cracked, the burn pattern read as a map of where to go. Anthropologists spent decades arguing over whether randomizing the search that way was, in practice, sound strategy. Anglican missionaries reached the northern bands through Fort Chimo, which is why the Naskapi are largely Anglican while the Innu to the south are Catholic, one of the sharper lines between two peoples who otherwise speak dialects of a single language. The twentieth century moved them repeatedly, ending in the 1950s at the iron mining town of Schefferville, whose mine shut in 1982. They signed the Northeastern Quebec Agreement in 1978 and built their own village a short way up the road. About a thousand people live at Kawawachikamach today, running their own school and police force, and still speaking Naskapi, written in syllabics and passed on to children at a rate few other Indigenous languages in Canada match.