Topic: The Inuit

The Inuit are one of the world’s most remarkable cultures. Over thousands of years, they learned how to thrive under Arctic conditions and occupied the largest territory of any indigenous people—from the Chukchi Peninsula of Russia across Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. Their history begins with reindeer hunting Neolithic people of northeastern Siberia about 6000 years ago, whose descendants migrated across the Bering Strait to Alaska. In the process they created a very specific way of life as sea mammal hunters, establishing hunting territories and travel routes and creating communities across the North American Arctic.

Around 1000 CE they briefly met and traded with the Norse. In the 1570s they encountered Martin Frobisher’s English explorers seeking the Northwest Passage. But it was not until the early 1800s that massive change began with the arrival of European whalers, fur traders, missionaries, and government agents who brought new technology, cultural change, disease, and the name ‘Eskimo’ to a people who called themselves ‘Inuit’. ‘Eskimo’ probably originated as the Algonkian term ‘ayassimew’ designating Subarctic Indians and was later applied by Europeans to the Inuit. Despite hardships, Inuit communities endured and persevered. The use of the Western term ‘Eskimo’ continued to be used until it was termed offensive by the Inuit Circumpolar Council in 1977 and was replaced by ‘Inuit’, meaning ‘the people’.

Some of the earliest research on Inuit culture was conducted by Franz Boas, whose The Central Eskimo (1887) documented lifeways and material culture. Research into Eskimo origins began with Danish scholars on the Fifth Thule Expedition, whose archaeologist Therkel Mathiasen identified Alaska and the Bering Strait region as the Inuit birthplace. His colleague Knud Rasmussen documented Inuit linguistic and spiritual culture, and Hans Birket-Smith described the inland Inuit. In Alaska, Inuit culture was studied by the Smithsonian’s Edward W. Nelson (1899) and its origin 2000 years ago by Henry B. Collins in The Archaeology of St. Lawrence Island. These and other pioneering studies from Siberia to Greenland are presented in fine detail in the Smithsonian Handbook of Northern American Indians: Arctic, vol, 5 (1984). The Smithsonian’s Arctic Studies Center carries on the tradition of Inuit inquiries by conducting research on Arctic cultures around the globe and curating the Smithsonian’s voluminous Arctic archives. The Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College, through its Stefansson Archives, hold expedition records, fieldnotes, and photos that trace the long arc of academic interest and research on Inuit communities in Canada and Alaska. Many other institutions hold treasures reflecting the richness of Inuit heritage and the history of how that knowledge has been recorded.