Note 1434 — Chapter XVII · —The Influence Of Climate

Owing to the inexorable restriction of their natural resources, contact with European commerce has impoverished the Hyperborean natives. It has caused the rapid and ruthless exploitation of their meager resources, which means eventual starvation. So long as the Ostyaks, before the coming of the Russians, were sole masters of the vast forests of the Obi Valley, they commanded a supply of fish and fur animals which sufficed for their sparse population. But the greed of the Russian fish dealers and fur traders, and the devastating work of the lumbermen have made double war upon Ostyak sources of subsistence.1434 The appearance of the white man in Alaskan waters was the signal for the indiscriminate killing of seal and other marine animals, till the Eskimo's supply of food and furs has been seriously invaded, from Greenland to the outermost Aleutian Islands. In all this wide territory, climatic conditions forbid any substitute for the original products, except the domesticated reindeer on the tundra of the mainland; but this would necessitate the transformation of the Eskimo from a hunting to a pastoral people. This task the government at Washington has undertaken, but with scant success.