At the Spring Sea Ice Camp
Part 1 (27 min)
Two families travel across the wide sea ice. Before night falls they build small igloos and we see the construction in detail. The next day a polar bear is seen basking in the warming sun. A woman lights her seal oil lamp, carefully forming the wick from moss. The man repairs his snow goggles. Another man arrives dragging a polar bear skin. The boy has made a bear-shaped figure from snow and practices throwing his spear. Then he tries his bow. Now, with her teeth, the woman crimps the sole of a sealskin boot she is making.
Part 2 (27 min)
The men are hunting seal through the sea-ice in the bleak windy weather. The wind disturbs the "tell-tales," made of eider down or a hair loop on a bone, that signal when a seal rises to breathe. A hunter strikes, kills and drags his catch up and away. At the igloo the woman scrapes at a polar bear skin and a man repairs a sled. In the warming weather the igloo is topped with furs and a snow shelter is built to hide the sled from the sun. Now a seal is skinned, the polar bear skin pegged out to dry, and the people stop for a snack of good red fish from the cache.
Part 3 (27 min)
The hunter is traveling alone with sled and dogs. There is a sharp sound and he sees a ground squirrel, sets his snare and soon catches it. He kills it by crushing the skull with his foot, leaving the skin undamaged. Skirting bare ground, he comes to a fish cache and loads his sled, feeding the dogs some morsels. The sled appears to drag, even on the harder snow of the sea ice. In camp a woman sews, a girl hangs fish on a line, and all stop to eat. Now the disintegrating skin sled is dismantled and the polar bear skin serves for conveyance. They break camp, moving ashore to put up their tents for summer.
About the Netsilik series
These films reveal the live reality of traditional Inuit life
before the European acculturation. The Netsilik of the Pelly Bay region
in the Canadian Arctic had long lived apart from other people and had
depended entirely on the land and their own ingenuity to sustain life
through the rigors of the Arctic year.
The filming was done during the summers of 1963 and 1964 and in the
late winter of 1965 under the ethnographic direction of Dr. Asen
Balikci of the University of Montréal, assisted by Guy Mary-Rousseliere,
O.M.I., both anthropologists of wide Arctic experience. Quentin Brown
was Producer-Director, and Kevin Smith the Executive Producer for the
series. A minimum of cultural reconstruction was required during the
filming; the Netsilik families readily agreed to live in the old way
once more and showed considerable aptitude in recalling and representing
the earlier ways of life.
Note on Term "Eskimo":The films in this series make use of the name "Eskimo." While once broadly applied, it is a perjorative term and considered offensive. While the inception of the word is a matter of debate, it is no longer used or applied in our film catalog. The context in which the term appears in this series is an acknowledged relic of a colonial past, presented in its original version. DER apologizes for any offense caused.