#anyways if eva had just fucking registered them as 'Bryd Sled Dogs'

[darkwood-sleddog]

do you know also the origin of the word 'malamute'?

Malamute is a bastardization of the word “Malemiut”, after the Inupiaq people that reside in Alaska. Originally these people used Inuit sled dogs like we see more widely across the arctic. When white people moved north to America that is when the distinction began to be made. There is a really icky trend amongst the late 19th century/early 20th century in naming regional variations of the same indigenous breed after indigenous tribes. 

Hudson Stuck, a British missionary to Alaska and a mountain climber was amongst the first to popularize the term in his book “Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled”. Published in 1914 he states: “The malamute, the Alaskan inuit dog, is precisely the same dog as is found amongst the natives of Baffin Bay and Greenland. Knud Rasmussen and Amundsen together have established the oneness of the iniut from the east coast of Greenland all round to st. Michael; they are one people, speaking virtually one language. And the malamute dog is one dog.” so at this point it was another term for Esk*mo dog or Inuit sled dog and used interchangeably. 

In the 1920′s and 30s Inuit sled dogs were imported from Labrador, Canada to go on Byrd’s Antarctic Expeditions. These dogs were described to Eva Seeley (the mother of the registered Alaskan Malamute) as ‘malamutes’ by a mutual friend of her and Byrd’s. Now Eva would eventually begin breeding dogs specifically to go on Antarctic expeditions and those dogs would become the registered ‘Alaskan Malamute’. Even though Eva Seeley knew damn well where the dogs came from originally she would coin her line as being Kotzebue where the mythical ‘malamute’ is said to originate. A huge majority if not all of the founding dogs used for the breed came from Central-Eastern Canada and Greenland. 

There is one single dog we can say for certain today was actually a ‘malamute’ coming directly from western Alaska and referred to as such by those that were familiar with arctic dogs when the term ‘malamute’ was being first used and that is Hudson Stuck’s dog “Muk” whom Stuck describes has having parents from Kotzebue.