Introduction-E

snow yet, even though winter’s coming. There were joyous seasons such as ptarmigan
season. Ptarmigan is a priority over other birds as it is a delicacy. We eat it raw without
cooking it and we eat practically the whole thing. We cook the other birds that we eat.
It’s not a taboo, but that’s how we eat them. The ptarmigans are fat in the fall, when
everything seems fresh and fatter. There are beautiful parts to the fall in some ways.
Everything seems to be much more fresh and fattened up. It has its own beauty even
though it’s autumn.
The Inuit used to gather at Mittimatalik. Did they play games?
Elisapee: Absolutely. When the people gathered, children and young people would play
with a ball, though the adults weren’t involved, to my recollection. They used to have
up to four teams if there were a lot of people. Sometimes two teams would try to take
the ball from each other. The young men would have wrestling matches as well. They
never seemed to get angry at each other, even though they really tried hard to win, to
the point where their clothing was ripped when they tried to outdo each other. They’d
stop only if the ball was taken by a girl. Do you understand what I mean by wrestling?
We children also played a game called aattaujaq.
What do you mean by aattaujaq?
Elisapee: A form of playing ball, catching the ball and throwing it to your team
members, that’s called aattaujaq.
What about the games that are played today? Such as the game of
high kicking, when little seals made from skins are hung on a pole.
Do you recall those?
Elisapee: That was not played in our community. They’d play jumping games though,
trying to hang by their arms from a bar of wood. They would just play for fun and not
even worry about winning. It was just trying to outdo each other.
Was this at a special time of the year or was it just when it was daylight?
Elisapee: Anytime when it was not so cold anymore, usually in the early spring when
people gathered together, when they didn’t really have to worry about hunting, and
there was an abundance of food. When they had to worry about hunting, there was no
time for games. Just the younger people and children often played. We children had a
way of playing, too. Now that I look back, we were pretending to be adults. We’d
pretend to have babies. Our babies would go hungry and we’d feed them. They’d soil
Life Stories – Elisapee Ootoova 35