Antlers

In movies, the wagon train moving westward across the desert would inevitably meet up with the skull of a cow lying bleached along the side of the trail. Its implications were obvious: beware, death is near.

Up here you run across many bones, most frequently caribou skulls and rib cages, and along the shoreline, the vertebrae of beluga whales which children often play with because they look like airplanes.

Unlike in the westerns, these bones mean life rather than death (at least from the point of view of humans): there presence implies someone has had a successful hunt, and there has been fresh meat on the table.

On the 1990s, there were several economic development projects aimed at collecting caribou antlers, either those shed or lopped off penned animals, for shipment to the Orient to be used in traditional medicines. Apparently, ingesting ground caribou antlers are believed to make men in China more sexually verile.

This market quickly dried up with the commercialization of Viagra in China and Korea. Maybe Inuit should start compensation litigation against Pfizer for destruction of economic opportunity.