Inuit

Inuit (singular Inuk) are a group of culturally and historically similar Indigenous peoples of the Arctic and Subarctic, from the Bering Strait coast of Chukotka and northern Alaska across northern Canada to Greenland. Inuit is the word for “the people” in Inuktitut and in West Greenlandic (Kalaallisut), and every Inuit dialect has a cognate of it. Many find the older umbrella term Eskimo offensive or forced on them in a colonial way, while the related Yupik and Aleut (Unangan) peoples generally do not call themselves Inuit.

Inuit descend from what anthropologists call the Thule people, who emerged from the Bering Strait and western Alaska around 1000 CE and spread east across the Arctic. By 1100 CE they had reached west Greenland, and in the 12th century they also settled East Greenland. A genetic study published in Science in 2014 found continuity between Inuit, the Thule and the Birnirk culture of Siberia, all very different from the Dorset people, whom they replaced some time after 1300.

The Dorset culture, the last major Paleo-Eskimo culture, lives in Inuit legend as the Tuniit, usually “giants” taller and stronger than Inuit. Researchers believe that dog transport and larger weapons gave the Thule an advantage. The Sadlermiut of Southampton Island, who died out from new diseases in the winter of 1902–1903, were once thought the last of the Tuniit, but a 2012 genetic analysis found no link.

Inuit were hunter-gatherers, semi-nomadic hunters and fishers of lakes, seas, sea ice and tundra. They hunted whales, above all the bowhead, seals, polar bears, muskoxen, caribou, birds and fish, and gathered grasses, roots, berries and seaweed in season. In the traditional diet about 75 percent of daily energy came from fat, and raw seal liver and whale skin (muktuk) supplied vitamin C. In winter hunters waited at an aglu, a seal’s breathing hole in the ice.

Family structure was flexible: a household might be a couple and their children, or include grandparents, adopted children or several siblings’ families, and each had its head, an elder or a respected man. Several families usually wintered together, and goods were shared within the household and to a large extent within the whole community. Men were traditionally hunters and women cared for children, sewed and processed food, but the division was not absolute: women also hunted, and men away from camp had to sew and cook.

Elders were the keepers of communal knowledge, and a European myth that Inuit routinely killed their elderly is not generally true. Governance gave elders great power, and justice could be harsh. Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, traditional law, set out maligait, what has to be followed, piqujait, what has to be done, and tirigusuusiit, what has to be avoided, though no known Western observer before 1970 was aware of any Inuit governance.

Inuit practised a form of shamanism based on animist principles: all things, humans included, had a form of spirit, and these spirits could be influenced by a pantheon of supernatural beings. The nearest thing to a central deity was the Old Woman, Sedna, who lived beneath the sea. Because animals had souls like those of humans, a hunt that failed to show respect and the customary supplication would give the freed spirits cause for revenge; a customary saying held that “the great peril of our existence lies in the fact that our diet consists entirely of souls”.

The angakkuq, the shaman, was not the community’s leader but a healer and adviser who tended wounds and called on the spirits to help people. Angakkuit were not trained; they were held to be born with the ability and were recognised by the community as they approached adulthood. After a birth an angakkuq might place a tiny ivory whale in the baby’s mouth so that the child would be good at hunting, amid loud singing and drumming. Some Inuit saw in the northern lights their family and friends dancing in the next life; others warned that whistling at the lights would bring them down to cut off one’s head, a tale still told to children.

In the 19th and 20th centuries many Inuit were systematically converted to Christianity, through rituals such as the Siqqitiq, and missionaries forbade Indigenous languages, dances and tattooing.

Inuit industry relied almost entirely on hides, driftwood and bone, with some tools of soapstone and knives of walrus ivory. For centuries Greenland Inuit also took iron from the Cape York meteorite, cold-forging slices of it with stones into tools. Clothing was sewn from skins with bone needles and sinew thread: the amauti, the women’s parka, had a pouch below the hood to carry a baby, boots (kamik) were made of caribou or seal skin, and snow goggles prevented snow blindness.

The qajaq, a one-person sealskin boat that could be righted even when completely overturned, was copied by others as the kayak, while the larger open umiaq carried people, goods and dogs. Sleds (qamutiik) were made of driftwood lashed with hide or baleen, or of bone, antler and even frozen fish. Inuit navigated by the stars at sea and by landmarks on land, raised an inuksuk where landmarks were lacking, and in Greenland made the Ammassalik wooden maps of the coast. In winter some lived in snow igloos, in summer in skin tents called tupiq.

Women’s face tattoos, kakiniit or tunniit, a practice nearly 4,000 years old, recorded where a woman came from, her family and her achievements, and are being revived today. Small carvings of animals and people in ivory and bone were followed in modern times by prints and stone sculpture, and Inuit art and throat singing are now known worldwide.

Inuit traded with peoples to the south, but boundary disputes were frequent, and the Chukchi, Siberian Yupik, Gwichʼin, Cree and Innu kept them from moving far south of the tree line. Almost all Inuit cultures have oral traditions of raids and vengeance, and in the Bering Strait region raiders went out in large skin boats while coastal communities built fortified settlements on high ground. Feuds between the Dene and Inuit were witnessed by Samuel Hearne in the Bloody Falls massacre of 1771; in 1996 Dene and Inuit held a healing ceremony at the site. The first Europeans Inuit met were the Norse of Greenland; later, Basque whalers worked the Labrador coast, and Inuit raided their stations in winter for iron.

Martin Frobisher’s voyage of 1576 made the first well-documented contact, and he captured three Inuit and took them to England. Diseases brought by whalers and explorers caused mass death: in the 19th century the Western Arctic lost close to 90 per cent of its people to tuberculosis, measles, influenza and smallpox. The RCMP enforced Canadian criminal law on Inuit, and missionaries preached a very different moral code.

In the 1950s Canada began to settle Inuit in permanent villages, at times against their will. In the High Arctic relocation of 1953, meant in part to assimilate Inuit and end their traditional culture, 17 families were taken from Inukjuak to Resolute and Grise Fiord; Canada acknowledged the abuses of these resettlements in 2005.

Inuit political activism grew in the 1960s, when young Inuit from across the Arctic met at boarding high schools in Aklavik, Iqaluit, Yellowknife, Inuvik and Kuujjuaq. In 1971 they founded the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, today Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami. The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement of 1975 set the pattern for land claims; the Constitution Act of 1982 recognised Inuit as Aboriginal peoples; the Inuvialuit Final Agreement followed in 1984; and the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement of 1993 led to the creation of Nunavut in 1999. In Greenland, Denmark ended colonial status in 1953 and granted home rule in 1979, and in 2008 self-government passed by referendum with 75 per cent approval.

About 155,000 Inuit live in Canada, Greenland, Denmark and the United States, 70,540 of them in Canada in 2021. Inuktitut is an official language of Nunavut, Kalaallisut of Greenland, and Inupiaq one of Alaska’s. Inuit still live 12 to 15 years less than the average Canadian and suffer high rates of tuberculosis and youth suicide.

The culture remains strong. Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2002), made almost entirely by Inuit of Igloolik, was the first feature film in Inuktitut, and artists such as Pitseolak Ashoona are widely known.