Iñupiat

The Iñupiat are the Inuit people of northern and north-western Alaska, whose lands run from Norton Sound on the Bering Sea north and east to the Arctic coast near the Canadian border. Their name means "the real people". Like other Inuit they descend from the Thule culture, and today they live in 34 villages and in Alaska's towns and cities, still closely tied to whaling, hunting and fishing.

Iñupiat is the plural; one person is an Iñupiaq, a word also used for the language, which speakers call Iñupiatun. Communities traditionally take names ending in -miut, "people of", and the Iñupiat include several regional groups: the Bering Strait people, those of the southern Seward Peninsula, the Malimiut of the north-west, the coastal Taġiuġmiut of the North Slope and the Nunamiut, the inland caribou hunters of the mountains.

Their ancestors, the Thule, developed a whaling way of life around the Bering Strait before some groups moved east across Arctic Canada to become the ancestors of the Canadian and Greenlandic Inuit. The Iñupiat stayed in the west, some in settled coastal villages and others moving with the seasons. Before colonisation they governed themselves through their own social order. Trails they shared with Athabaskan peoples such as the Dena'ina later formed the basis of the Iditarod Trail. After the United States bought Alaska from Russia in 1867, outside rule brought new pressures. Between 1890 and 1910, amid starvation and an influenza epidemic, most Nunamiut left the interior for the coast; some returned to the mountains in the 1930s, and by 1950 most had gathered at Anaktuvuk Pass, though a few stayed nomadic into the 1950s.

Subsistence remains central. Coastal communities hunt bowhead and beluga whales, walrus and seals, and inland people hunt caribou, Dall sheep, moose and bears; fish, birds, berries and roots complete the diet. A landed whale is divided by a customary formula so that every household shares, including relatives living far away in cities. Hides and furs become parkas, mukluks and gloves, and walrus ivory and whale baleen are used in art. Each spring the Nalukataq festival celebrates a successful hunt and honours the whale's spirit with songs and dances. Elders in Kotzebue drew up the Iñupiat Ilitqusiat, a statement of shared values including respect for elders and nature, sharing, cooperation, humour and humility.

The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 set up regional Native corporations, three of them in Iñupiat lands: the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, the Bering Straits Native Corporation and NANA. Oil from Prudhoe Bay has been a major source of revenue since the 1970s, though drilling can conflict with whaling. Village and regional tribal governments, federally recognised since 1993, run services such as housing and education.

Children in boarding schools were punished for speaking Iñupiaq, and today only about 2,000 of roughly 24,500 Iñupiat speak it, most of them elderly. Revival efforts include the Nikaitchuat Iḷisaġviat immersion school in Kotzebue, founded in 1998, university courses, a dictionary of more than 19,000 entries published by Edna Ahgeak MacLean in 2014, and community language camps since 2017. Iḷisaġvik College in Utqiaġvik is rooted in Iñupiaq culture. Communities now face thinning sea ice, coastal erosion and rising rates of chronic disease. The 2000 United States census counted more than 19,000 Iñupiat.

Our maps from 1492 to 1800 draw an approximate Iñupiat territory in northern Alaska, labelled Inupiaq or Inupiat. To the south lie the Yupik peoples, and to the east the Inuvialuit and the Gwich'in.