Leather pouch (mingulqrtqutiqarvik)

This little cone-shaped pouch is made of ringed-seal skin. Its exact use remains unknown.

By some accounts, the pouch may have been a container for either ointment or oil lamp fuel (oil or animal fat). Alternatively, it may have contained the blade of a harpoon head or been a thimble for the fingers of a seamstress. For Bernard Saladin d’Anglure, it represented the stomach of a dead person whose name had been given to a child. The pouch would be filled with pieces of meat that had touched the baby's lips, and the dead person's spirit would thus be symbolically fed. Once full, the pouch would be emptied into a crack in the sea ice. It was thought that the pieces would be reborn as sea mammals that would later offer themselves up to the same child — now grown up to be a hunter.