When people say Rest In Peace to a dead person, it isn’t just a burial word, it is a prayer that the dead rests well because many are of the belief that the dead are only resting.
Certain cultures and traditions will probably non-intentionally prevent the dead from resting in ‘peace’, see why. A rather well-known fact about Eskimos is their ritual (albeit incredibly rare and seldom practiced if at all anymore) of setting the elderly adrift on a floating iceberg when facing death or old age.
Eskimos believe in the afterlife for the dead, and this practice is a way of ensuring the elderly are not a burden on the family by sending them off in a dignified and graceful manner.
As the Eskimos believed that another world awaited their dead, they would not be sending the elderly off to die and disappear, but to move on to the afterlife. Beliefs aside, it is extremely important to understand how difficult survival was for an Eskimo family, and each person had to put their full attention toward their own survival.
Though tasks may be shifted around so that the women accomplished the household tasks for both women and men, and the men hunted for both men and women, the productivity equaled out to just about one person’s daily work to accomplish one person’s daily needs.
Children were seen as an amazing blessing, and thus would be provided for until they could begin to provide for themselves. Thus any surplus food and materials would be expended primarily on children.
But even children were not given a free ride; as soon as it was possible, young boys and girls were helping to take care of each other, maintain the living area, fashion clothing, and bring in the day’s hunt.
For the old to be sent out to sea could actually be a blessing, a way to gracefully exit without becoming a burden and a point of resentment. In a way, this allowed the elderly to be preserved, in the minds of the living, in a more ideal state untainted.
They would be spared disgraces such as senility and loss of bodily function, and would, in some sense, be granted an opportunity to die without first decaying.
So, the truth behind the popular myth is that the elderly and sick were taken care of if at all possible; when extreme circumstances pressed, some small groups of Eskimos would kill their elderly, though rarely actively, except upon the elder’s request.
The idea of the ice-raft is a romantic notion, only thinly based on facts. Even this rare practice does not exist in modern Eskimo culture, as pressure from missionaries and national governments, as well as improved economic conditions, have eliminated the dire circumstances that might lead to such a practice. The last reported case of senicide was in 1939.
