Introduction-E

Were there a lot of people in your camp?
Elisapee: In 1936, there were seven adults in our camp. Sometimes there were other
people in our camp, and sometimes it was just our family. There used to be eight or nine
members in our camp.
When one was injured or cut, were you assisted by your relatives?
Elisapee: When we were children, we used to be attended to, if we got a cut. We would
be bandaged with cloth. I often received big, deep cuts when I was a child. One time, I
received a big cut. My father tied a piece of cloth around it and held it up so it would
stop bleeding. That was probably how they treated big cuts, tying them and holding
them up. My relatives weren’t prone to injuring themselves. It was me who often got
cuts, although I recall my brother, Asarmi, before he was a year old. He had a swelling
around his neck for what I think was a long time. My father made a small knife. It wasn’t
a pocket knife. He probably made it from a saw blade. It was small, and he made it really
sharp and put a wooden handle on it. He punctured my brother’s neck while he was
sleeping, as it was really swollen. Once he punctured it, the abcess really started to flow.
And soon after, it started to heal. I don’t recall too well, as I was only a child, but it must
have been hard for my parents wondering what was going to happen next. My brother
was really crying for a while and once he stopped, he started to walk around on the
floor. I’ve known of a person being punctured on more than one occasion.
There were no doctors?
Elisapee: Yes. Mittimatalik only got nurses in 1954. Not a doctor but a nurse.
Inuit were your only nurses. Did you ever hear that there were nurses
in other areas?
Elisapee: We did not hear of medical people. It was only in the 1960s that we got a radio.
I often listened to Greenland as we did not get any programs in Inuktitut. It’s only these
days that we can hear programs from other communities.
You shouldn’t be wary of asking us any questions as we are not at home. You can
ask us if we were really dirty as we did not have an abundance of soap, and you can say
we probably had a lot of lice even though we tried to remove them. What did we eat for
breakfast, what did we clean our hands with? We are not ashamed to answer those types
of questions.
16 Introduction to the Oral Traditions