Disc Number
Disc numbers, or ujamiit or ujamik in the Inuit language, were used by the Government of Canada in lieu of surnames for the Inuit and were similar to dog-tags.
Prior to the arrival of European customs, the Inuit had no need of family names, and children were given names by the elders. However, by the 1940s the record-keeping requirements of outside entities such as the missions, traders and the government brought about change. In response to the government's needs, they decided on the disc number system.
Read more about Disc Number: Disc, Project Surname
Famous quotes containing the words disc and/or number:
“Perhaps all music, even the newest, is not so much something discovered as something that re-emerges from where it lay buried in the memory, inaudible as a melody cut in a disc of flesh. A composer lets me hear a song that has always been shut up silent within me.”
—Jean Genet (1910–1986)
“This nightmare occupied some ten pages of manuscript and wound off with a sermon so destructive of all hope to non-Presbyterians that it took the first prize. This composition was considered to be the very finest effort of the evening.... It may be remarked, in passing, that the number of compositions in which the word “beauteous” was over-fondled, and human experience referred to as “life’s page,” was up to the usual average.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)