Inuit

• 1. Introduction

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  The great peril of our existence lies in the fact that our diet consists entirely of souls. That saying belonged to the Inuit, the Indigenous peoples who have lived for centuries across the Arctic and Subarctic of North America and Russia, from Greenland and Labrador to Alaska and the Chukotsky District of Chukotka. They built boats from sealskin that could right themselves when overturned. They sliced iron from a fallen meteorite and shaped it by smashing it with rocks. They placed a tiny ivory carving of a whale into a newborn's mouth, hoping it would make the child a good hunter. Who were the people they displaced, and what did the eastward spread across the ice cost? Why does a word like Eskimo cause offense, while Inuit means simply the people? And how did a self-sufficient people become, in roughly two generations, an impoverished minority dependent on an economy that was not their own? The answers run through giants in legend, a captured trio brought to England, families dropped onto barren ground in September, and a face tattoo tradition reaching back nearly 4,000 years.

• 2. Giants And Dwarfs

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  Inuit legends describe the Tuniit as giants, people taller and stronger than themselves, and less often as dwarfs. The Tuniit were the people of the Dorset culture, the last major Paleo-Eskimo culture, whom the Inuit displaced as they spread eastward. The Inuit are descendants of the Thule people, who emerged from the Bering Strait and western Alaska around 1000 CE. They had split from the related Aleut group about 4000 years ago, and from northeastern Siberian migrants. Researchers believe the newcomers held advantages. They had adapted to using dogs as transport animals, and developed larger weapons and other technologies superior to those of the Dorset. By 1100 CE, Inuit migrants had reached west Greenland and settled there, and during the 12th century they also settled in East Greenland. Faced with population pressures from the Thule and from Algonquian and Siouan-speaking peoples to the south, the Tuniit gradually receded. They were thought to have become completely extinct as a people by about 1400 or 1500. The story did not quite end there. In the mid-1950s, researcher Henry B. Collins studied ruins at Native Point, on Southampton Island, and concluded that the Sadlermiut were likely the last remnants of the Dorset culture. The Sadlermiut survived until the winter of 1902-1903, when infectious diseases brought by European contact led to their extinction as a people.

• 3. First European Eyes

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  Martin Frobisher's 1576 search for the Northwest Passage produced the first well-documented contact between Europeans and Inuit. His expedition landed in Frobisher Bay, Baffin Island, not far from the settlement now called Iqaluit. On Resolution Island, five sailors left the ship under his orders, told to stay clear of Inuit, and they became part of Inuit mythology. Oral tradition holds that the men lived among the Inuit of their own free will for a few years, then died attempting to leave Baffin Island in a self-made boat, and vanished. Frobisher, searching for his missing men, captured three Inuit and brought them back to England. They were possibly the first Inuit ever to visit Europe. This was not the earliest brush with outsiders. Their first European contact was with the Norse who had settled in Greenland, whose sagas recorded meetings with people they called skraelingar. By the mid-16th century, Basque whalers worked the Labrador coast and built shore stations, one of which has been excavated at Red Bay. Inuit raided these stations in winter, taking tools and worked iron and adapting them to their own needs. In the final years of the 18th century, the Moravian Church began missionary work in Labrador, supported by the British, who were tired of the raids. The missionaries could simply provide the iron and basic materials the Inuit had been taking, goods that cost Europeans almost nothing but meant a great deal in the Arctic. From then on, contacts in Labrador grew far more peaceful.

• 4. Dropped Onto Barren Ground

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  Apparently we have administered the vast territories of the north in an almost continuing absence of mind. So admitted Canada's prime minister Louis St. Laurent by 1953. World War II and the Cold War had made Arctic Canada strategically important to the great powers for the first time, and air bases and the Distant Early Warning Line in the 1940s and 1950s brought intensive contact with European society. In the 1950s, the Government of Canada undertook the High Arctic relocation, justified as protecting Arctic sovereignty, alleviating hunger in over-hunted areas, and solving the so-called Eskimo problem through assimilation. In 1953-17 families were moved from Port Harrison, now Inukjuak, Quebec, to Resolute and Grise Fiord. They were dropped off in early September, when winter had already arrived, onto barren land with only a couple of months above freezing and several months of polar night. The RCMP told them they could return home within two years if conditions were not right. Two years later, more families were relocated instead, and thirty years passed before they could visit Inukjuak. In 2005, the Canadian government acknowledged the abuses in these forced resettlements. By the mid-1960s, encouraged by missionaries, then by paid jobs and government services, and finally forced by hunger and the police, most Canadian Inuit lived year-round in permanent settlements. Regular doctors raised the birth rate and lowered the death rate, producing a population increase that made survival by traditional means harder still. The anthropologist Diamond Jenness predicted in 1964 that Inuit culture faced extinction. He was wrong, because Inuit political activism was already emerging.

• 5. The First Graduates

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  Aklavik, Iqaluit, Yellowknife, Inuvik, and Kuujjuaq were the sites of secular government high schools the Canadian government funded in the 1960s. Because the Inuit population could not support a high school in every community, students from across the territories were boarded together, brought into one place for the first time. There they encountered the rhetoric of civil and human rights that prevailed in Canada in the 1960s. It was a wake-up call, and it stimulated a new generation of young Inuit activists in the late 1960s who pushed for respect for their people and their territories. Shortly after the first graduates returned home, Inuit emerged as a political force. In 1971 they formed the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, the Inuit Brotherhood, today known as Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami. Region-specific organizations followed, including the Committee for the Original People's Entitlement for the Inuvialuit, the Northern Quebec Inuit Association, and the Labrador Inuit Association. In 1975, the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement settled land claims for Quebec Inuit, with a large cash settlement and substantial autonomy in the new region of Nunavik, setting the precedent for what followed. The northern Labrador Inuit filed their claim in 1977 but waited until 2005 for the signed settlement that established Nunatsiavut. The Inuvialuit received the first comprehensive land claims settlement in Northern Canada in 1984. The longest road led east. The Tunngavik Federation of Nunavut worked for ten years, reached a final agreement in September 1992, and saw it approved by nearly 85 per cent of Inuit voters in November 1992. On the 25th of May 1993, the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement was signed in Iqaluit by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Paul Quassa, enabling the 1999 establishment of Nunavut.

• 6. The People, Not Eskimo

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  Eskimo is considered pejorative by some Canadian and English-speaking Greenlandic Inuit, and many who would historically have been called by that term find it offensive or colonial. The word likely derives from an Innu-aimun, or Montagnais, term meaning a person who laces a snowshoe. A folk etymology in the Cree language renders it as eater of raw meat, but that reading has been discredited. In Canada and Greenland, Inuit is preferred. It is the Eastern Canadian Inuktitut and West Greenlandic Kalaallisut word for the people, and because those are the prestige dialects, their version became dominant. Every Inuit dialect uses cognates from the Proto-Eskimo root, so that people is inughuit in North Greenlandic and iivit in East Greenlandic. The name carries a boundary. Inuit, in its ancient self-referential sense, includes the Inupiat of the Bering Strait coast of Chukotka and northern Alaska, the four broad groups of Inuit in Canada, and the Greenlandic Inuit. It has long excluded closely related groups such as the Yupik and the Aleut, and those peoples, at an individual and local level, generally do not self-identify as Inuit. In Alaska, the picture has shifted. Lawrence Kaplan of the Alaska Native Language Center wrote in 2011 that Inuit was not generally accepted there as a term for the Yupik, and that Eskimo often filled that role. He has since updated that view to note that Inuit has gained acceptance in Alaska.

• 7. A Diet Of Souls

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  Seventy-five percent of their daily energy came from fat, on average, in the traditional Inuit diet, which was high in protein and very high in fat. Inuit hunted whales, especially the bowhead, along with seals, polar bears, muskoxen, caribou, birds, and fish. Plants could not be cultivated in the Arctic, so they gathered grasses, tubers, roots, stems, berries, and edible seaweed. In the 1920s, the anthropologist Vilhjalmur Stefansson lived with a group of Inuit and observed that their low-carbohydrate diet had no adverse effects on their health, nor on his own. He found that adequate vitamin C could come from raw meat such as ringed seal liver and whale skin, called muktuk. His findings drew considerable skepticism, but were reaffirmed in the 1970s and more recently. Belief shaped the hunt as much as appetite. Inuit practiced a form of shamanism based on animist principles, holding that all things had a spirit, including animals. Any hunt that failed to show appropriate respect would give the liberated spirits cause to avenge themselves. The angakkuq, or shaman, was not the community's leader but a healer and a kind of psychotherapist, born with the ability and recognized by the community as they approached adulthood. The nearest thing to a central deity was the Old Woman, Sedna, who lived beneath the sea. Some Inuit looked into the aurora borealis and saw family and friends dancing in the next life. Others believed the lights were sinister, and that whistling at them would bring them down to cut off your head. That tale is still told to children today.

• 8. Marks, Boats, And Iron

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  Kakiniit, the face tattooing of Inuit women, dates back nearly 4,000 years and recorded where a woman came from, who her family was, her achievements, and her position in the community. Christian missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries forbade the practice, along with Indigenous languages and dances. It is returning now through modern Inuit women reviving their ancestors' traditions, and through the Inuit Tattoo Revitalization Project. The traditional method used needles of sinew or bone soaked in suet and sewn into the skin. Today they use ink. The Inuit shaped their world from animal hides, driftwood, bone, and worked stone such as soapstone. They hunted from the qajaq, a single-passenger sealskin boat so buoyant a seated person could right it even when fully overturned, a design copied by outsiders who still make it as the kayak. Their larger open boat, the umiaq, ran 6-12 metres long with a flat bottom to come close to shore. In winter they crossed land and sea ice by dog sled, the qamutiik, pulled by teams in tandem or fan formation, sometimes built from bone, antler, or even frozen fish when wood was absent. Iron came from an unlikely source. Inuit used the Cape York Meteorite for centuries as a primary source of iron, cold forging it by slicing a piece and smashing it with rocks into shape, until Robert E. Peary sold it to the American Museum of Natural History in 1883.

  Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, the first feature film in Inuktitut, was released worldwide in 2002 to great critical and popular acclaim. It was directed by Zacharias Kunuk and made almost entirely by Inuit of Igloolik. In 2009, the Greenlandic-language film Le Voyage D'Inuk was directed by Mike Magidson. Inuit art, carving, print making, textiles, and throat singing are popular far beyond the Arctic, and the inuksuk served as a symbol at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Cape Dorset was hailed in 2006 as Canada's most artistic city, with 23 per cent of its labor force employed in the arts. Politics has its milestones too. On the 30th of October 2008, Leona Aglukkaq became the first Inuk to hold a senior cabinet position when she was appointed Minister of Health. Jordin Tootoo became the first Inuk to play in the National Hockey League in the 2003-2004 season, with the Nashville Predators. Today about 155,000 Inuit live across Canada, Greenland, Denmark, and the United States. Their numbers are growing, with 70,540 people identifying as Inuit in Canada, up from 65,025 in the 2016 census. Yet old grievances still find resolution. In 1996, Dene and Inuit representatives took part in a healing ceremony to reconcile feuds centuries old, the kind of violence the explorer Samuel Hearne witnessed at the Bloody Falls massacre in 1771.