Stalking Seal on the Spring Ice
Part 1 (25 min)
The family is on the shore of Pelly Bay in May-June. A seal basks beside its hole under a warming sun. The hunter stalks the seal, kills it and drags it to the family camp on shore. Man and wife skin the seal, cutting the hide into rings that girdle the body. Stripped of blubber, the rings are then cut spirally into long thongs. The boy plays on the shingle imitating the circling gulls, while the man stretches his thongs between rocks and scrapes away the fur. The woman dresses the seal, wasting nothing, braiding the intestines.
Part 2 (34 min)
A seal is seen nosing from a snow-melt pool. The hunter sits at the door of his tent shaping a new bone tip for his harpoon. The woman is in the tent sewing a fur mitten. They eat a little frozen fish; then the hunter finishes his harpoon and sets out after seal. After a long imitative stalk, the hunter moves too soon, alerting the seal, and his harpoon misses. In camp the woman skins a flipper and the boy plays. The hunter prepares for a night vigil at the breathing hole of the seal. Next morning the woman scrapes a seal skin, the boy plays on shore, and the hunter still waits for the seal. When again he fails, he turns to egg collecting on the cliff where the gulls nest. Finally the family packs its belongings on a bear skin and shifts along the coast to another area.
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.