ABC Wednesday, L for Life in the cold Arctic Climate

 Glaciers are getting smaller and smaller all over the world.

 This is the Supphellebreen  in Norway on

                                           the northern hemisphere.

                                         

New Zealand , South Island,

Franz Jozef Glacier

 on the southern hemisphere.

On a glacier in New Zealand

Several years ago  I went to Leiden to the Museum for Cultural Anthropology, to see an exhibition about the Arctic regions.The residents of the Arctic live in Alaska, Siberia, Canada, Greenland, and Lapland. The people are called the Inuits ( Greenland), the Unangan ( Alaska), the Sámi (Lapland). They are now called First Nations, as Leslie remarked.

Clothes made of intestines are waterproof and wind-tight

They used to live from fishing and hunting. Everything of the animal was used either for food but also for clothing, and the oil of course among other things, for lamps.
 

The animals in these areas are the polar bear, the snow fox, sea lions, the seal, the walrus. Their skins, and intestines were also used for clothes. Their bones were important for the production of tools. Nowadays many of these people live like we do with clothes of the same material we have. I found the clothes made of intestines of animals, very strange, but interesting .
These clothes were waterproof , because the seams were sewn with a waterproof stitch. Prepared intestines of sea lions, seals, walrus, otters, or bears were sewn in horizontal strips to each other.

 The kamleika has its strips in a vertical direction.
 A kamleika is an Aleut robe made from sea mammal (mostly sea otter) intestine, which was light and waterproof. They also sometimes had robes to protect against threats such as heavy wind and rain. They were sewn with grass, and each took around a month to make.
 It was worn by men as an outer layer of clothing while kayaking. In the village also a jacket made of intestine protected the fur or bird skin clothing underneath against snow and rain. Intestine kamleikas fell out of use in the early twentieth century.



Even windows were made of intestines.

The Arctic is warming up quickly, faster than other places on Earth. People who live there have been noticing the change. Because their culture is adapted to the Arctic’s cold climate, global warming is making it difficult for them to continue their traditions. 
Therefore it is time to try and stop the rapidly change of climate.



ABC is created by Denise Nesbitt.For more lovely and interesting ABC posts click on the logo in the
 sidebar. This week we are looking for words beginning with "I".

The arctic regions