What do you think about mysterious Eskimos disappearance of anjikuni village?
Do you think it has logical explanation or supernatural explanations?
What do you think actually happened?
It is certainly an interesting story, and an intriguing mystery. it is strikingly similar to the Roanoke village disappearance as well. Except the Roanoke was a larger colony, and the entire place was ripped down to the ground as if it was disassembled.
To have a sudden disappearance of a community, with all of the supplies, goods, housing, and equipment intact is very unusual and opens the door to a lot of possibilities. but it was so long ago, investigation would be difficult let alone verifying the story as told by the trapper who found the village to begin with. My own logic of it can only narrow down a few ideas.
First, two basic options on what happened. Either a state of sudden emergency for every member of the village to make them immediately drop what they were doing, or a gathering that was meant to be short and nearby so that people would be returning to what they were doing within a few minutes.
Second, lack of damage or blood means that whatever happened was likely done without resistance. That would take a unified and synchronized show of force and intimidation to gain compliance, or a collective voluntary decision- however swiftly it had to be made.
Third, if the person who found the site as it was is to be believed, and a professional trapper familiar with bush survival could not locate tracks or sign of travel over land, then the most likely point of exit was by water. Even if there was snow or rain to obscure tracks and travel, there would be other signs left behind by a large group travelling in the same direction closely together. And considering the rapid and sudden nature of the event, this is especially true as emergencies breed careless action, running, and panic.
I am not sure of the size of the lake they were settled on, but if you had to get away fast, boats and water would be a better bet. Woodland and forest might give cover, but for raw speed water is better. And unless whatever they were running from had boats as well, it would be difficult to follow.
My assumption is sudden arrival and capture. Some other group would have arrived on shore by boat, given a show of overwhelming force (Guns drawn, large numbers, orders to immediately surrender), subdued and loaded them on to their boats, then left. In a matter of hours the water would have wiped away any shoreline marks from the boats on the beach.
Well the Canadian police would be really dumb, the dumbest on earth to dismiss such writings as nothing more than legend if it was verifiable that the supposed community had some 'supplies, goods, housing, and equipment' still intact. That is what I had in mind when I wrote my first response.
lots of what-ifs with that though. Like whether they felt there was cause to investigate. if there was no sign of struggle, no blood or evidence of attack or harm, then there is nothing to say the community just inexplicably left. Then there is culture clash to take into account. Especially back then. Just like in the states, Canada and Aboriginals haven't always seen eye to eye. And in fact still don't on a lot of subjects.
Also the expense and manpower of sending an investigative party to an area that can not be directly accessed by roads or trail. Again, even today there are entire areas of northern Canada that are only accessible by ice-road during winter months, or by helicopter or light plane if a landing area can be made/found. Two technologies not entirely available at the time. At least not as casually available as it is today. So unless there is a definitive cause worth the expense, it would have likely been left up to local communities to handle or investigate until such a time as it became evident something more involved would be needed.
Besides. it is still fun to theory-craft and explore the what-if's. I am not even sure if any recent explorations have been made. Like a historian or sociologist/anthropologist trying to find the location and see what there is to be found.
trust me untdkngdm33 it's not stupidity of our police force as much as deep seeded distaste for the indigenous nations of Canada. look up residential schools, Louis Riel, the highway of tears or the missing indigenous woman for a mere taste of what we deal with. [heck, many reservations don't have safe drinking water, and the suicide rate is staggering] everyone sees Canada as this beautiful perfect country, and while i wouldn't give up my citizenship for anything in the world, there are messed up stuff our country won't address and in the case of racism, the vast majority of Canadians like to go 'there's no racism, this is Canada' but there is, and a large chunk is handed to indigenous groups. [stems back to when the nation was founded, eventually to solve the problem we put them on reservations and finally residential schools which only recently closed down. the last one closed in 1996, i'm related to people who went to them, all i can say is there's a lot of healing needed as a community]
regarding your question, i'm not 100% on the story, but basically a whole town mysteriously vanished right? i think it's just an urban legend. [also, 'eskimo' is a slur, they're Inuit] i've got a feeling it was something like they had to move on for some reason [say hunting or something] and the explorer couldn't find any life, so he reported the incident, they couldn't find an answer, and over time pieces were added like dead dogs and burnt food for dramatic effect. i don't know too much about Inuit culture, but they are hunters, so perhaps they went deep into the ice to hunt seals or to fish and the town was abandoned for some time. i'm from up north and i know many families with big hunt camps in the woods who would take a week to go fishing or whatever and take the family.
So there's a lot going on here. You are quite right the police could have debunked the story because there were no links to crime, there's no doubt about that or they may have arrived at the scene years later when there were no more 'remains'. But we still have to account for the other side as well, and that is there is a chance the story was made up in the original article. Nonetheless it is still worth the thought. Well Nekoshema I did not know about these things. The residential schools sound a little horrible for me.
Canadian heritage moment we choose to ignore. [Trudeau actually recently asked the Pope to address what happened and to give a formal apology.]
well regarding the graves, i chalk that up to an addition to the story because [again i'm no expert on Inuit culture] i don't think they had graveyards as we know them back then. culturally they're nomadic and their location would change with the migration of the food source. when an Inuit died, i don't think they would bury them because they would have to dig through permafrost [aka the worst job in the world. especially with ancient tools. you'd be out there for days] more likely they'd do some form of tree and scaffold burial like many tribes/regions did. in many indigenous nations it was believed scavengers took the soul to 'heaven' [afterlife to be with the ancestors] so they wouldn't bury their dead, but have somewhere they would hold a ceremony and place the body high up on a wooden platform so the vultures could carry the spirit away. they thought burying bodies were a bad thing because you're trapping the spirits. [and again i go back to the amount of effort one would go through to bury someone in the frozen ground is astounding. first you dig through 6 feet of snow depending on time of year and location, then you would have to dig 6 feet into the ground which would be like a giant rock, and instead of an excavator or something you've got a flat stone on a stick]
far more likely since this story is 1930, it was a group that wasn't permanently settled in one location who left to go hunt and would be back in a few months. the whole place was deserted, the trapper was worried, they launched an investigation [and this being 1930 lets pretend these were pro-Inuit RCMP who ran out and did a thorough investigation] and concluded they had vanished. over the years people must of retold this story and questions were raised like 'where were the dogs? if the dogs were gone they must of gone hunting' so to make it more interesting the storyteller would go 'oh, they had starved to death. and their supplies were packed up and ready to go, but no one took them which means they didn't go hunting'
