Inuit

INUIT

INUIT. Inuit (people) is the collective name of a widely distributed group of people inhabiting the northernmost areas of North America and Greenland. "Eskimo," a term formerly used by outsiders, has lost favor because of its offensive origins in an Algonquian word roughly meaning "eaters of raw flesh."

Early European Exploration

Inuit were the first inhabitants of the Americas to encounter Europeans. Archaeological evidence suggests that groups of Inuit moved eastward from Alaska, inhabiting the entire Arctic coast of North America and portions of Greenland about a century before the explorations of the Greenland coast by the Viking Gunnbjörn Ulfsson around a.d. 875. Eric the Red established settlements

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in southern Greenland in 982 or 983. Contact between the Norse colonies in Greenland and the Inuit was uneasy and major conflict seems to have ended the Viking colonization of Greenland in the fifteenth century. Danish colonization began with the arrival in 1721 of missionaries, who pressured the Inuit to adopt European customs and language.

The first appearance of Russians took the form of an expedition of explorers to Alaska in 1741 led by Vitus Bering. The Russians subsequently claimed all of Alaska by virtue of their colonies on the southern coast. Russian contact with Inuit was limited to the area of these settlements; Inuit in northern Alaska had only indirect contact with Russians and their trade goods through trade by northern Inuit with their neighbors in southwest Alaska. British and American whaling ships began hunting the Arctic and wintering in northern Alaska in the late 1840s and Russia sold its Alaskan claims to the United States in 1867. Inuit east from the Mackenzie Delta to Hudson Bay did not meet Europeans until the late nineteenth century.

Pre-Colonial Inuit Society

The primary mode of Inuit settlement has been the village, although until recently relations between villages were not socially fundamental. Rather, power manifested itself mostly within the village. Men hunted and fished, women cooked and skinned animals; family cooperation was essential to survival. Social networking within the extended family and between extended families within the village served as the mediator of power. More recently, Inuit people began to organize themselves at the village level, the regional level, and the international level in order to interact with their colonial governments, but the importance of the family persists.

The Inuit economy before European development was one of subsistence. Sea and land mammals, including whales, walrus, seals, and in some areas, caribou, were the staple targets of hunts. Most Inuit technology, including harpoons, stone oil lamps, dogsleds, skin boats, water resistant boots, and tailored clothing, served either the tasks of the hunt or the tasks of the home. Individual contribution to the hunt, proper sharing of the yield with the elderly and infirm, honesty, and other forms of cooperation for the common good were enforced by general approval or disapproval through social networks rather than by a government or corporate apparatus. Economic life, like political life, centered on the family's internal networks and its connections to other families.

The Impact of Colonial Status

Ongoing colonial status has brought changes to Inuit communities. Missionaries have proselytized among them, anthropologists have studied them, governments have imposed laws and regulations on them, and corporations have pressed them to enter the capitalist cash economies of the modern nation-states in which they have found themselves. The colonial relationship between the modern nation-states and Inuit communities across the Arctic has been and is the overarching problem with which the Inuit and their southern neighbors must cope.

The social problems of colonization manifest themselves most strongly among the Inuit in politics and economy. Caught up in the drive to advance the frontiers of "civilization," Inuit people have sometimes willingly appropriated economic, political, and social structures from their colonizers, and sometimes those structures have been imposed. One important event in this process has been the discovery and exploitation of the petroleum resources in northern Alaska. Through legal intricacies, Alaskan Inuit and other Native Alaskans were deprived of enforceable legal claim to their lands and resources. Most petroleum-bearing lands in northern Alaska were acquired by the state in the early 1960s, and then leased to a group of oil companies in 1969. Afterward, in the Alaska Land Claims Settlement Act of 1971, the U.S. Congress acted to settle Native Alaskan groups' land and resource claims, awarding a relatively large cash and land settlement and creating regional-and village-based corporations to administer it. The imposition of corporate structures was supposed to help draw Native Alaskans into the American economy, but instead most of the corporations have been unable to turn profits.

Inuit people often are eager to take advantage of snowmobiles, motorboats, rifles, and other technological advances that can make their ways of life less difficult and dangerous, but such items are only available from within the American cash economy. From the perspective of the colonizers, the question was how to compel Inuit to labor and create surplus value, thereby establishing wage relations, and it was answered with a host of vocational training programs. However, the contradiction between the American corporate expectation that Inuit work regular schedules and the Inuit social expectation that able-bodied men hunt to provide subsistence for their families creates obstacles to Inuit employment in non-Inuit-run corporations in the Arctic. Thus, the petroleum industry has not employed many Inuit.

In Canada and Greenland, governmental attempts to deal fairly with Inuit have differed from the approach taken by the United States. Greenland acquired home rule from Denmark by popular referendum in 1979, and governs itself by parliamentary democracy. Canada has passed claims settlement acts like that of the United States, but in 1993 the Canadian Parliament voted to partition the Northwest Territories and create a new territory called Nunavut (our land). The population of Nunavut is around 85 percent Inuit; thus, the Inuit of Nunavut enjoy a measure of home rule within the Canadian nation. These developments in Alaska, Canada, and Greenland have succeeded in large part because of organizing and pressure by Inuit themselves. On the international level, Inuit in all three countries joined in 1977 in a statement of common interest to form the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, a United Nations NGO (nongovernment organization).

Political and economic interactions illustrate the fundamental problem of colonialism, the answer to which will continue to be worked out in the future. To what extent will Inuit culture be characterized as "traditional" in distinction to "modern," such that Inuit must inevitably adopt modern customs, like working regular schedules for wages, and to what extent will Inuit culture be characterized as an identity to be formed by Inuit themselves, regardless of what customs they choose to adopt?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Burch, Ernest S. The Iñupiaq Eskimo Nations of Northwest Alaska. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1998.

Chance, Norman A. The Iñupiat and Arctic Alaska: An Ethnography of Development. Fort Worth, Tex.: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1990.

Dorais, Louis-J. Quaqtaq: Modernity and Identity in an Inuit Community. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997.

Jorgensen, Joseph G. Oil Age Eskimos. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Frank C. Shockey

See also Alaska ; Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act .