One of the most well-known stories about Eskimos is the strange practice that they have adopted when facing death and old age.
According to the popular conception, Eskimos must work so hard to survive that they simply cannot manage to support adults who are no longer contributing to the well-being of the group.
Thus, when old-age strikes, rather than waiting around as they dwindle toward death, eating food their companions’ fight to catch and clothing their companions struggle to construct, the elderly Eskimos are taken to sea and set adrift on a floating iceberg.
Alone on their iceberg, the elderly must inevitably freeze or starve to death, facing their end, uncomfortable, and horrifyingly alone.
However, it is important not to instill modern Western values on the practices of another culture.
To see this as a disgraceful abandonment of those they should love the most is to fail to understand the dire circumstances which might lead to such a practice, as well as the spiritual understanding that might justify it.
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.
