Word: eskimoes
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Word for Word. When the Anglicans began to work among the Eskimos in 1820, they found them more than ready for Christianity. The animist Eskimo religion is formidable with taboos, short on nourishment for the soul and solutions to community problems. Taboos often left an Eskimo physically as well as spiritually starved; for example, certain parts of an animal were forbidden to be eaten if a man had recently died in the community, other parts were forbidden if a woman had died, and frequently, when both a man and a woman had died, everyone went hungry...
...missionaries also found that the Eskimos easily identified themselves with Biblical situations. Says stocky. English-born Bishop "Donald the Arctic" Marsh, 55. whose diocese covers more than 2,750,000 square miles and who has spent 33 years there: "Living in a primitive society, the Eskimo had many of the same problems as the Biblical characters. To him, the moral background was perfectly understandable. A great deal of the conception of the Gospel was already there. Being a realist, he tried to put Christianity into practice, and he did it successfully...
Roman Catholicism has had relatively little success in the Canadian North, says Marsh, partly because of the difficulty of attending Mass, partly because the Eskimo is an individualist. "He just won't let anyone tell him what to do. He doesn't readily subject himself to the discipline required of a Catholic." The Roman Catholic mission at Pond Inlet, Baffin Island, has not made a convert in 30 years, and the Eskimos of northern Quebec, which is well saturated with Catholic missionaries, are 98% Anglican...
...Eskimos themselves do the main job of spreading Christianity. "The Eskimo has a fantastic memory," says Bishop Marsh. "He memorizes everything-most of them have memorized at least one book of the Bible. When a missionary comes in contact with a family, the Eskimo remembers what the missionary tells him and carefully repeats it word for word when he meets up with another family in his travels...
...small soapstone statuette of an Eskimo woman, possibly worth several hundred dollars, is still unclaimed, although a woman seeing a picture of it in Wednesday's CRIMSON told police she thought she remembered seeing it in Peabody Museum...