Inuit

PRONUNCIATION: INN-oo-eht

ALTERNATE NAMES: Eskimo

LOCATION: Canada (Greenland); United States (Alaska); Aleutian Islands; Russia (Siberia)

POPULATION: 90,000

LANGUAGE: Inuit

RELIGION: Traditional animism; Christianity

1 • INTRODUCTION

The Inuit, or Eskimo, are an aboriginal people who make their home in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of Siberia and North America.

The word "Eskimo" was bestowed upon these hardy, resourceful hunters by their neighbors, the Algonquin Indians of eastern Canada. It means "eaters of raw meat." Recently, it has begun to be replaced by the Eskimos' own name for themselves, "Inuit," which means, "real people."

The Inuit are descended from whale hunters who migrated from Alaska to Greenland and the Canadian Arctic around 1000 ad. Major changes in Inuit life and culture occurred during the Little Ice Age (1600–1850), when the climate in their homelands became even colder. European whalers who arrived in the latter part of the nineteenth century had a strong impact on the Inuit. The Westerners introduced Christianity. They also brought with them infectious diseases that substantially reduced the Inuit population in some areas. When the whaling industry collapsed early in the twentieth century, many Inuit turned to trapping.

Wherever they live, the Inuit today are much involved in the modern world. They have wholeheartedly adopted much of its technology, as well as its food, clothing, and housing customs. Their economic, religious, and government institutions have also been heavily influenced by mainstream culture.

2 • LOCATION

The Inuit live primarily along the far northern seacoasts of Russia, the United States, Canada, and Greenland. All told, there are more than 100,000 Inuit, most of whom live south of the Arctic Circle. The majority, about 46,000, live in Greenland. There are approximately 30,000 on the Aleutian Islands and in Alaska, 25,000 in Canada, and 1,500 in Siberia. The Inuit homeland is one of the regions of the world least hospitable to human habitation. Most of the land is flat, barren tundra where only the top few inches of the frozen earth thaw out during the summer months. The majority of Inuit have always lived near the sea, hunting aquatic mammals such as seals, walrus, and whales.

3 • LANGUAGE

The Inuit language is divided into two major dialect groups: Inupik and Yupik. Inupik speakers are in the majority and reside in an area stretching from Greenland to western Alaska. Speakers of Yupik inhabit a region consisting of southwestern Alaska and Siberia.

4 • FOLKLORE

According to a traditional folktale told by the Tikigaq Inuit of north Alaska, the raven (a traditional trickster figure in Inuit folklore) was originally white. It turned black in the course of a deal it made with the loon. The two birds agreed to tattoo each other but ended up in a soot-flinging match that turned the loon gray and the raven black.

5 • RELIGION

Christianity, first introduced by missionaries, has largely replaced traditional Inuit religious practices. However, many of native religious beliefs still linger.

Many traditional Inuit religious customs were intended to make peace with the souls of hunted animals, such as polar bears, whales, walrus, and seals.

6 • MAJOR HOLIDAYS

Today the Inuit observe the holidays of the Christian calendar. Traditionally, a feast called a potlatch was held whenever a new totem pole was raised. The Inuit who held the potlatch would often give away his most valuable possessions at the ceremony.

7 • RITES OF PASSAGE

Traditionally, a feast was held when an Inuit boy killed his first seal or caribou. Women were married when they reached puberty, and men when they could provide for a family. The Inuit believed in an afterlife thought to take place either in the sea or in the sky. After people died, their names were given to newborn infants, who were thereby believed to inherit the personal qualities of the deceased.

8 • RELATIONSHIPS

Unlike many aboriginal cultures, traditional Inuit society was not based on the tribal unit. Instead, the basic social unit was the extended family, consisting of a man and wife and their unmarried children, along with their married sons and their families.

9 • LIVING CONDITIONS

The Inuit had several different forms of traditional housing. In Greenland, they often lived in permanent stone houses. Along the shores of Siberia, they lived in villages made up of houses built from driftwood and earth. Summer housing for many Inuit was a skin tent, while in the winter the igloo, or house made of snow, was common.

Today many Inuit live in single-story, prefabricated wooden houses with a combined kitchen and living room area and one or two bedrooms. Most are heated with oil-burning stoves. However, since the Inuit are spread across such a vast area, their housing styles vary.

In recent years, dogsleds have been replaced by snowmobiles as the main mode of transportation for many Inuit.

10 • FAMILY LIFE

Family ties—both nuclear and extended—have always been of great importance to the Inuit. Having a large family was always considered desirable.

Traditionally, women have often assumed a secondary role in Inuit society. At mealtime, an Inuit woman was required to serve her husband and any visitors before she herself was permitted to eat. But at the same time, a common Inuit saying extolled women in this way: "A hunter is what his wife makes him." The women were the ones who gathered firewood, butchered the animals, and erected tents in summer and igloos in winter.

11 • CLOTHING

Traditional Inuit clothing was perhaps the most important single factor in ensuring survival in the harsh Arctic environment. Its ability to keep the wearer alive in sub-zero temperatures was of prime importance. The Inuit made all their clothing from various animal skins and hides. In winter they wore two layers of caribou skin clothing. The outer layer had the fur facing out, while the fur of the inner layer faced in. The outer garment was a hooded parka.

Today a variety of shops sell modern Western-style clothing to the Inuit. Like their counterparts in cultures throughout the world, young people favor jeans, sneakers, and brightly colored sportswear. However, both old and young still rely on traditional Inuit gear when confronting the elements in any extended outdoor activity.

12 • FOOD

The traditional Inuit dietary staples were seal, whale, caribou, walrus, polar bear, arctic hare, fish, birds, and berries. Because they ate raw food, and every part of the animal, the Inuit did not lack vitamins, even though they had almost no vegetables to eat. With the introduction of modern Western-style food, including fast food, over the past two to three decades, the Inuit diet has changed, and not for the better. The consumption of foods rich in sugar and carbohydrates has resulted in tooth decay and other diet-related medical problems.

A tradional bread, bannock, was made while trapping or living in camps. The dough could be wrapped around a stick and cooked over an open fire. A recipe for bannock that can be prepared in an oven accompanies this article.

13 • EDUCATION

Most Inuit children ski or ride snowmobiles to get to and from school. They are taught standard subjects, including math, history, spelling, reading, and the use of computers. However, Inuit teachers are also concerned that the students learn something about their culture and traditions.

Recipe

Bannock

Ingredients

• 4 cups flour
• ½ teaspoon salt
• 5 teaspoons baking powder
• 1½ cups water

Directions

1. Mix ingredients together to form a stiff dough.
2. Sprinkle flour on a clean work surface. With very clean hands, knead the dough. Dust hands and dough with flour if the dough is sticky.
3. Form in a round loaf about 1 inch high. Bake on a greased baking sheet at 350°f for 30 minutes.
4. Serve warm with butter and jam or honey.

Adapted from Shlabach, Joetta Handrich. Extending the Table. Scottsdale, Penn.: Herald Press, 1991.

14 • CULTURAL HERITAGE

Considering that the Inuit inhabit an area covering more than 5,000 miles (8,000 kilometers), their culture is amazingly unified. From Siberia to Greenland, Inuit economic, social, and religious systems are much the same.

In addition to the prints and carvings for which the Inuit have become famous, dancing, singing, poetry, and storytelling play important roles in their native culture.

15 • EMPLOYMENT

Today most Inuit live a settled existence in villages and towns. They obtain wage employment or receive some form of social assistance. Major employers include the government, the oil and gas industry, and the arts and crafts industry. In addition, many Inuit are still involved in subsistence hunting and fishing at some level.

16 • SPORTS

The Inuit enjoy games that enable them to display their physical strength, such as weightlifting, wrestling, and jumping contests. They also play a ball game that is similar in many ways to American football. Ice hockey is popular as well.

17 • RECREATION

At traditional Inuit gatherings, drumming and dancing provide the chief form of entertainment. Quiet evenings at home are spent carving ivory or bone, or playing string games like cat's cradle. A traditional Inuit game similar to dice is played on a board, using pieces in the shape of miniature people and animals. The Inuit also enjoy typical modern forms of recreation such as watching television and videos.

18 • CRAFTS AND HOBBIES

Traditional Inuit arts and crafts mostly involve etching decorations on ivory harpoon heads, needlecases, and other tools. Over the past decades, the Inuit have became famous for their soapstone, bone, and ivory carvings, as well as their prints and pictures. Another artistic tradition is the creation of elaborate wooden masks.

Inukshuk, towers of stone in the form of a human, were built as landmarks or as decoys for herds of caribou.

19 • SOCIAL PROBLEMS

Social problems include unemployment, underemployment, alcoholism, drug abuse, and a high suicide rate.

20 • BIBLIOGRAPHY

Condon, Richard. Inuit Youth: Growth and Change in the Canadian Arctic. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

Hahn, Elizabeth. The Inuit: Rourke Publications, 1990.

Philip, Neil. Songs Are Thoughts: Poems of the Inuit. New York: Orchard Books, 1995.

Shlabach, Joetta Handrich. Extending the Table. Scottsdale, Penn.: Herald Press, 1991.

WEBSITES

Canada. [Online] Available http://www.informatik.uni-kiel.de/~car/Canada.html, 1997.

Canadian Tourism Commission. Canada. [Online] Available http://http://206.191.33.50/tourism/, 1998.

Nortext. Exploring Nunavet. [Online] Available http://www.arctic-travel.com, 1998.

Inuit

CULTURAL ORIGINS

COLONIAL EXPERIENCES

CONTEMPORARY CONCERNS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Inuit make their homes in Chukotka, Alaska, Arctic Canada and Labrador, and Greenland, and are one of the several indigenous peoples of the Circumpolar North. The name Inuit (singular, Inuk ) has political as well as cultural and linguistic connotations. It means “the people” in Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit in Greenland and the central and eastern Canadian Arctic. Since the late 1970s the term has become the political designation for all of the peoples once known as Eskimos. The term Eskimo remains correct for archaeologically known populations.

Numbering approximately 150,000 people in 2006, contemporary Inuit are diverse in lifestyle, cultural practices, language, and economic and social circumstances. Within the broad political category Inuit, there are four major cultural divisions: Siberian Yupik, Alutiiq, Alaskan Yup’ik, and Inuit. Those who call themselves Inuit make additional regional, language, and cultural distinctions such that those in north Alaska are known as Iñupiat, while Inuit in Canada differentiate among Inuvialuit, Inuinnait, and Inuit. Greenlanders sometimes refer to themselves as Inuit, but also use the regional and cultural designations of Kalaallit, Inughuit, and Iit. While these contemporary distinctions have some basis in cultural, linguistic, and regional difference, the current divisions are also a result of colonial and administrative histories that reified some differences and denied others.

CULTURAL ORIGINS

Linguistic, cultural, and archaeological data indicate that the Inuit populations are related to the indigenous peoples of Siberia, and Inuit cultures most likely have their origins in Siberia or Central Asia. Archaeological evidence suggests that the ancestors of contemporary Inuit peoples moved across the Bering Strait in several waves, and probably in small groups, as early as 5000 BCE. These hunting peoples spread out across the North American Arctic, where they depended on both land and marine animals. Around 1,500 years ago, the maritime-adapted peoples in southwest Alaska began spreading north, establishing themselves as whale hunters in north Alaska. Contemporary Iñupiat are their descendants. Some of these northern Alaskans moved eastward into the Arctic Archipelago and Greenland during a warming period around 800 to 1000 CE, and are the ancestors of the contemporary Inuit of Canada and Greenland. The Thule Eskimos, as they are known, either replaced or absorbed the Eskimo cultures that had preceded them.

There are similarities as well as differences between the various Inuit peoples. The similarities, which are most striking in terms of language and traditional cosmological beliefs, are clearly due to the relatively recent geographic divergence between groups. Linguists distinguish at least two closely related languages, Inuktitut and Yupiaq, each with several distinct but mutually intelligible dialects. Inuit cosmology attributed a life force to all aspects of the natural world. Humans, in order to survive and prosper, attended to numerous taboos and engaged in morally correct behavior. Animals were said to give themselves to those hunters who were respectful, modest, and generous. Souls of the dead, both human and animal, returned to the world of the living in new bodies. Alaskan Yupiit (plural of Yup’ik), for example, celebrated a Bladder Festival each winter in which the souls of the sea mammals killed that year were feasted and then returned to the sea where they would be reborn. The recycling of souls is also reflected in human naming practices, which bestow the name, and thus the soul, of a recently deceased person upon a newborn infant. This tradition of naming children continues, and many contemporary Inuit contend that the name/soul chooses the child rather than being chosen for the child.

The differences between the various Inuit peoples, in contrast, are superficial and generally reflect differences in material circumstances rather than distinctions in life ways and social values. Many of the differences result from variation in the natural environment across Inuit lands, which encompass a number of ecosystems and climatic conditions. At the southern margin, Alutiit (plural of Alutiiq) and Yupiit lived in subarctic boreal forest zones, built sod houses in permanent winter villages, and had economic security provided by dependable stocks of fish and sea mammals. Farther north, Iñupiat reliance on bow-head whales enabled them to establish semipermanent villages of up to five hundred people. Large numbers of people living together and cooperating in subsistence whaling demanded a fairly formal political organization. Iñupiat were led by male umialiit (singular, umialik ; literally, “boat owners”) and their wives, who organized and directed whale hunting activities and later distributed the proceeds of the hunt. The Iit, who live along the narrow rocky coastline of eastern Greenland, in contrast, led a precarious existence and occupied multifamily longhouses of stone and sod.

Only Inuit in the central and eastern Canadian Arctic lived in domed snowhouses and hunted seals at breathing holes. This stereotype of Inuit life was true for them only during midwinter and early spring. They and Inuit elsewhere depended upon seasonally variable marine and terrestrial animals for food, clothing, and tools. All Inuit peoples in the various regions and ecosystems adapted their communities and developed sophisticated technologies in order to survive and prosper.

COLONIAL EXPERIENCES

Inuit in Greenland, and possibly those in Labrador and on Baffin Island, had some contacts with the Norse colonists in the tenth century. In 1576 English explorer Martin Frobisher (c. 1535–1594) encountered Inuit at Baffin Island while searching for a northwest passage to Asia. His was the first of numerous, sometimes sustained European encounters with modern Inuit. It was only in the early eighteenth century that Europeans successfully colonized Inuit lands. The Danes, hoping to restore contact with the lost Norse, established a colony on the west coast of Greenland in 1721. A few years later Russians, having already established trading colonies in Chukotka, began exploring and settling Alutiiq regions of Alaska. Both established trading monopolies and sought to convert Inuit to Christianity and to make them into reliable suppliers of fur and other renewable resources.

Inuit in other parts of the Arctic, though not directly subjected to colonizing settlers, experienced the disruptive influence of whalers, traders, prospectors, and missionaries. The purchase by the United States of Alaska from Russia in 1867 and Canada’s acquisition of British Arctic territories in 1870 and 1880 set the stage for those nations to administer Inuit lands and peoples. For the most part, however, both nations left the day-to-day administration to missionaries and traders. Inuit in both nations received the education, health care, and other public services provided to citizens of modern nation-states only after World War II (1939–1945).

Since the 1950s there have been dramatic changes in the social and material life of Inuit in all four nations. Some of the changes resulting from economic modernization and government administration have had positive consequences. Still, Inuit in all four nations have also suffered forced relocations, the imposition of alien cultural values and economic systems, and the reorganization of domestic and community life.

CONTEMPORARY CONCERNS

Today Inuit struggle to participate as citizens of modern nations while retaining a degree of cultural self-determination. There are concerns regarding resource development, economic and food security, education, language retention, health, and climate change. Greenlanders have succeeded in institutionalizing their language as the everyday vernacular of work and government, while the Siberian Yupik language is nearly extinct. The language situation in Alaska and Canada is mixed. Inuit have been required to adopt the political institutions and structures of their various nations. In all regions but Siberia, Inuit constitute a majority of the population in their traditional lands. Thus, they are able to maintain a measure of control over resource development, education, and other public services. This situation is recent. Struggles over resource development reached a climax in the 1970s and were catalysts for the settlement of aboriginal land claims in Alaska and Canada.

Hunting and the management of wildlife are also salient issues for contemporary Inuit. Although all Inuit live in modern communities, and many work for wages, they have retained a cultural identification with hunting. Having access to and eating traditional foods continues to be socially, emotionally, and culturally valued. This traditional activity appears to be threatened by global climate change, which has created unstable, unpredictable, and dangerous weather conditions in the Arctic and threatens the survival of many animal species. The Inuit Circumpolar Conference, a nongovernmental organization representing Inuit in international affairs, has taken on climate change as its central focus and has argued that global climate change must be considered a human rights issue.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bodenhorn, Barbara. 1990. “I’m Not the Great Hunter, My Wife Is”: Iñupiat Models of Gender. Etudes/Inuit/Studies 14 (1–2): 55–74.

Briggs, Jean L. 1970. Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Damas, David, ed. 1984. Handbook of North American Indians. Vol. 5: Arctic. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution.

Fienup-Riordan, Ann. 2000. Hunting Tradition in a Changing World: Yup’ik Lives in Alaska Today. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

McGhee, Robert. 2005. The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Stern, Pamela R. 2004. Historical Dictionary of the Inuit. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow.

Pamela R. Stern

INUIT

INUIT. The northern indigenous peoples known as Eskimo or Inuit (not including the Russian Inuit and Yupiget) numbered approximately 143,582 in 2002. In the United States, Alaskan Eskimos (Inuit, Yupiit, Yupiget, and others) numbered 55,674 according to the 1990 census (U.S. Bureau of the Census, personal communication, May 2002). In Canada, Inuit numbered 41,800 in the 1996 census, while the nation of Greenland, formerly a Danish territory, had an Inuit population of 46,108 in 2001. Alaskan Eskimos live in rural coastal villages, along northern rivers, in isolated island or northern interior valleys and, increasingly, in regional population centers such as Anchorage, Barrow, Fairbanks, Kotzebue, and Nome. In Canada, despite rising migration rates to the south, most Inuit live in fifty-five rural communities located in Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, Quebec province, Newfoundland, and Labrador. In Greenland, too, Inuit live in coastal villages, although those who live in population centers such as Nuuk are increasing.

In Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, names such as Inuit, Yupiit, and Yupiget identify Eskimos as "the people" or "the real people." Regardless of location or name, food is a critical feature of identity for all. (The term "Eskimo" is used here because it includes all groups.) Identity is often expressed as a longing for locally harvested and prepared foods by those who find themselves separated from traditional homeland communities. Local foods are referred to as "our" food, "real" food, or, in Alaska, simply "Eskimo" food. In Canada, such foods are called "country" food. Among the Alaskan Yupiget of St. Lawrence Island, for instance, the term neqepik means "real" food, while imported foods are called laluramka or "white people's" food (Jolles, 2002).

Across the north, dietary habits and cultural meanings attached to food are similar, due partly to adaptation to a common arctic ecosystem and partly to similar socioeconomic conditions, which keep unemployment rates as high as 50 to 80 percent. Under such conditions, subsistence-oriented hunting, fishing, and gathering activities, vital to community survival, are performed year round. In Nunavut, Canada, alone, replacing subsistence foods with equivalent amounts of beef, chicken, and pork would cost an estimated $30 to $35 million annually.

Types of harvested foods depend on local environments and overall resource availability. In 2002, in Ingaliq, Little Diomede Island, Alaska, for example, severe weather plus political and physical isolation at the Russian-American border one mile distant necessitated a substantial dependence on local foods. Diomede subsistence resources include bearded seals, ringed seals, spotted seals, walrus, and polar bears. In summer, the community harvests migrating water fowl such as auklets, puffins, and murres, along with their eggs. In late summer, wild greens and berries are harvested and stored. In winter (December through mid-May), the community takes Alaska blue king crabs through the sea ice and trades a portion of the harvest with mainland Alaskan Eskimo communities for unavailable foods such as caribou. Altogether, Ingaliq subsistence foods include more than forty marine mammal, plant, avian, fish, and shellfish resources. Local harvests in Diomede and elsewhere in the North are supplemented with expensive, imported, commercially available goods from Native cooperative stores, Hudson Bay Company franchises, and other small multipurpose stores found throughout the north.

In Alaska, meat and fish are the centerpieces of Eskimo diets and constitute 90 percent of locally harvested foods. In addition, communities take several types of whales: bowhead, gray, minke, and beluga, or white. Reindeer (introduced in the late 1890s by the U.S. government and managed by local villages), moose, caribou, and a newly reintroduced resource, musk oxen (available to hunters in 1995) are also taken. Numerous migratory seabirds are hunted during late spring and early fall, as is the ptarmigan, a permanent resident. Fish are prominent in southwestern coastal diets, especially salmon. Herring, tomcod, Arctic char, grayling, flounder, sculpin, and halibut also contribute to the diet. Clams are taken from walrus stomachs. Ground squirrels, once commonly harvested for their furs and their meat, are seldom taken any more. While meat is the mainstay, wild greens and berries are much sought. At least thirty species of plants are collected for food purposes from the land and from the beaches (Jones, 1983; Schofield, 1989, 1993).

For Canadian Inuit, diet in the early twenty-first century also consisted of two major classes of food, Inuit food or "country" food, and Qallunaat, or "white people's" food. "Country" foods include caribou, Arctic hare, ptarmigan, ringed seal, bearded seal, walrus, polar bear, beluga whale, migrating fish (Arctic char, Atlantic salmon, and Pacific salmon), and migratory birds (Canada goose, common eider, king eider, and black guillemots). "White people's" food includes items shipped from southern Canada and purchased at local stores, including fresh fruits and vegetables, canned goods, processed foods, and dry goods.

In Alaska, especially in the most northern communities, it was once common to consume uncooked meats. This has become less common with the introduction of such modern conveniences as microwaves, refrigerators, propane-fueled stoves, and the like. However, in Canada, the preference for uncooked meats is still a significant cultural feature. This practice became a powerful marker of Inuit identity in the post–World War II era as Canadian Inuit experienced more sustained contact with Europeans and Canadians of European descent such as missionaries, teachers, and administrators. Consumption of raw or frozen foods, a practice typically disdained by non-Inuit, intensified boundaries separating Inuit and non-Inuit (Brody, 1975), and fostered increased social unity and political activism among Inuit who sought to protect and promote their hunting and fishing rights and to achieve local resource management in Inuit homelands.

Greenland Inuit obtain their food from two major sources: local land, seas, and lakes (called "country" food) and through local store purchases and via mail order. The main subsistence foods are ringed seal, beluga whale, caribou, bearded seal, and polar bear as well as a wide variety of fish, including cod, capelin, Atlantic salmon, Arctic char, and Greenland halibut. One feature that distinguishes the Inuit of Greenland from Canadian and Alaskan Eskimos is the abundance of small-scale fisheries, which include fish plants that provide a number of settlements with seasonal employment (Dahl, 2000). In addition to subsistence production, many Greenlandic Inuit are also involved in large-scale commercial fishing operations, and fishing products, including shrimp, Greenlandic halibut and crabs are Greenland's major exports. Many of the companies are owned and maintained by Inuit. Finally, there are approximately sixty sheep farms in southwest Greenland that produce lamb and other products for both domestic and international markets.

Food management in Eskimo communities combines traditional practices with modern convenience. Subsistence meats are often "half-dried" on outdoor meat racks, cooked (boiled), and stored in containers of seal oil or, alternatively, stored in home freezers, either "halfdried" or fresh. Greens, roots, and berries are more often stored in freezers, although some residents also use seal oil. Traditional underground or semiunderground food caches are gradually becoming a part of the past, while home freezer storage and consumption of fresh frozen foods has become increasingly common. In the late twentieth century and early twenty-first, in spite of significant changes in food storage methods, locally harvested foods from the land and the sea remained a major component of Eskimo food consumption. However, while "country" food or "real" food still defines ethnic and cultural boundaries in the North, "white people's" food is increasingly popular among young people, whether in Alaska (Jolles, 2002), Canada, or Greenland (Searles, 2002). The presence of contaminants in locally harvested foods is a major concern in the Arctic, for example, PCP, and is under discussion in all of the affected regions. It is unclear how this information, along with changing lifeways, will modify Eskimo diets.

See also Arctic; Canada: Native Peoples.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, Douglas, Ray Bane, Richard K. Nelson, Wanni W. Anderson, and Nita Sheldon. Kuuvanmiit Subsistence: Traditional Eskimo Life in the Latter Twentieth Century. Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, 1977.

Brody, Hugh. The People's Land: Eskimos and Whites in the Eastern Arctic. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1975.

Dahl, Jens. Saqqaq: An Inuit Hunting Community in the Modern World. Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 2000.

Jolles, Carol Zane, with Elinor Mikaghaq Oozeva, elder advisor. Faith, Food, and Family in a Yupik Whaling Community. Seattle, Wash.: University of Washington Press, 2002.

Jones, Anore. Nauriat Nigiñaqtuat: The Plants That We Eat. Kotzebue, Alaska: Maniilaq Association, 1983.

Searles, Edmund. "Food and the Making of Modern Inuit Identities." Food and Foodways 10 (2002): 55–78.

Carol Zane Jolles Edmund Searles

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

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 alsoAlaska ; Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act .

Inuit (Canada) A word used to designate the aboriginal people living in the Arctic regions of Canada. The Inuit speak six dialects of a common language, Inuktitut, and are divided into eight main tribal groups. Never exposed to the same degree of contact with Europeans experienced by more southern native peoples, the Inuit were more or less officially ignored until 1939, when a federal court ruled that they were a federal responsibility. Never subject to the Indian Act, they receive funding from the federal government for housing, education, and other basic programmes. Most of the Inuit converted to Christianity in the twentieth century.

After World War II, when the Canadian north was opened up to development and mineral exploitation, contact with non-aboriginal Canadians increased, and the traditional nomadic way of life became less common. Partly as a result of this increased contact some Inuit began to develop an artistic industry in soapstone carving and printmaking, which has brought greater economic self-sufficiency to many communities.

In the early 1970s a national organization, the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, was founded to protect Inuit cultural and individual rights. The organization also includes in its mandate the negotiation of land claims (including the Nunavut agreement) and the protection of the Arctic environment. Although most Inuit now live in permanent communities rather than following a more traditional, seasonally nomadic lifestyle, their distinctive culture persists in their language, family and cultural laws, attitudes, and art.

Inuit (or Innuit) A member of a North American people that inhabits Alaska, Nunavut region in northern Canada, Greenland, and eastern Siberia. A semi-nomadic hunting and gathering people, they were noted for their adaptation to a harsh environment and were sometimes called Eskimos. Their languages belong to the Inuit-Aleut family and are divided into two main branches: the Inupik or Inuk (spoken in Greenland, Labrador, the Arctic coast of Canada, and northern Alaska) and the Yupik or Yuk (spoken in southern Alaska and Siberia). There are approximately 40,000 Inuit-speakers in Greenland, 25,000 in Alaska, 15,000 in Canada, and several hundred in Siberia.

Inuit the members of an indigenous people of northern Canada and parts of Greenland and Alaska.

The peoples inhabiting the regions from NW Canada to western Greenland prefer to be called Inuit rather than Eskimo, and this term now has official status in Canada. By analogy, the term Inuit is also used, usually in an attempt to be politically correct, as a synonym for Eskimo in general. However, this latter use, in including people from Siberia who are not Inupiaq-speakers, is, strictly speaking, not accurate.

In·u·it / ˈin(y)oō-it/ • n. 1. (pl. same or -its) a member of an indigenous people of northern Canada and parts of Greenland and Alaska. 2. the family of languages of this people, one of the three branches of the Eskimo-Aleut language family. It is also known, esp. to its speakers, as Inuktitut. • adj. of or relating to the Inuit or their language.

Inuit Collective name for the Eskimo people of Nunavut, Greenland, and the Northwest Territories, Arctic Québec, and n Labrador areas of Canada. Many Inuit still live by the traditional skills of fishing, trapping and hunting.

Inuit see Eskimo .

Inuit •acquit, admit, backlit, bedsit, befit, bit, Brit, Britt, chit, commit, demit, dit, emit, fit, flit, frit, git, grit, hit, intermit, it, kit, knit, legit, lickety-split, lit, manumit, mishit, mitt, nit, omit, outsit, outwit, permit, pit, Pitt, pretermit, quit, remit, retrofit, shit, sit, skit, slit, snit, spit, split, sprit, squit, submit, tit, transmit, twit, whit, wit, writ, zit •albeit, howbeit •poet •bluet, cruet, intuit, suet, Yuit •Inuit • floruit • Jesuit •Babbitt, cohabit, habit, rabbet, rabbit •ambit, gambit •jackrabbit • barbet • Nesbit • rarebit •adhibit, exhibit, gibbet, inhibit, prohibit •titbit (US tidbit) • flibbertigibbet •Cobbett, gobbet, hobbit, obit, probit •orbit • Tobit •cubit, two-bit •hatchet, latchet, ratchet •Pritchett •crotchet, rochet