Inuit

The Inuit are an Indigenous people of the Arctic whose homelands stretch from northern Alaska across Arctic Canada to Greenland, with small communities in Chukotka in Russia. Descended from the Thule whale hunters who spread east from Alaska around 1000 CE, they number about 155,000 today. Inuit, meaning "the people", is the name they use; the older outsider term Eskimo is now widely rejected in Canada and Greenland.

The ancestors of the Inuit, known to archaeologists as the Thule, emerged around the Bering Strait and western Alaska and moved east across the Canadian Arctic, reaching Greenland by the thirteenth century. Along the way they replaced the older Dorset people, whom Inuit stories remember as the Tuniit. To the south their range was bounded by other nations, among them the Cree and the Innu in Quebec and Labrador and the Gwich'in and other Athabaskan peoples in the west. Relations with them mixed trade with frequent border disputes.

Inuit traditionally lived by hunting and fishing: whales, especially bowheads, several kinds of seal, walrus, caribou, muskoxen, polar bears, birds and fish, with berries, roots and seaweed gathered in season. Hunters used the one-person qajaq, which gave English the word kayak, and the larger open umiaq for carrying families and goods. In winter they waited at seals' breathing holes in the ice and travelled by dog sled. Snow houses served as temporary winter shelters in some regions, skin tents in summer, and sod or driftwood houses elsewhere. Stone cairns called inuksuit marked the land, and carvings in ivory, bone and stone were part of daily life. Women's facial tattoos, recording family, origin and achievements, are a tradition nearly 4,000 years old that is now being revived.

The first Europeans the Inuit met were the Norse of Greenland. Basque whalers were working the Labrador coast by the mid-sixteenth century, and Martin Frobisher's voyage of 1576 brought the first well-documented encounter in the Canadian Arctic. From the late eighteenth century Moravian missionaries worked in Labrador, and later the Hudson's Bay Company opened trading posts. New diseases caused great loss of life; the Western Arctic lost close to 90 per cent of its population in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century the Canadian state extended police, missions and schools northward. In 1953, in what became known as the High Arctic relocation, it moved families from Inukjuak to Resolute and Grise Fiord. Through the 1950s and 1960s most Canadian Inuit came to live year-round in permanent settlements, some moved against their will; in 2005 the government acknowledged the abuses of forced resettlements in Labrador, such as that of Hebron.

From the late 1960s a new generation of activists, many of them graduates of regional high schools, organised. Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, today Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, was founded in 1971. The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement of 1975 created the self-governing region of Nunavik, and the Inuvialuit Final Agreement followed in 1984. The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement, signed on 25 May 1993 and the largest in Canadian history, led to the creation of the territory of Nunavut in 1999. Labrador Inuit gained Nunatsiavut in 2005. In Greenland, colonial status ended in 1953, home rule came in 1979 and expanded self-government was approved in 2008, within the Kingdom of Denmark.

In Canada the 2021 census counted 70,540 Inuit, most of them in Inuit Nunangat: Nunavut, Nunavik, Nunatsiavut and the Inuvialuit Settlement Region. About 50,900 Inuit live in Greenland, and some 17,000 people of Greenlandic Inuit ancestry live in Denmark. Inuktitut is an official language of Nunavut, and Kalaallisut is the official language of Greenland. Inuit art, music and film thrive: Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner (2002) was the first feature film in Inuktitut. Internationally, the Inuit Circumpolar Council represents Inuit and related peoples on the Arctic Council.

Our 1492 map draws an approximate Inuit homeland across the Arctic, with areas labelled Nunavik and Inuvialuit. Earlier maps show their Thule forebears, and the related Iñupiat of Alaska appear on maps from 1492 to 1800.