Unit 2: The Arctic and the Inuit

(Grant Head)

It is generally accepted that North America was first populated by people from Asia. They crossed the Bering Land Bridge [1] at least 12,000 years ago, quite likely much before that. While this population flourished in the southern and mid-latitude parts of the continent, most of the far northern lands remained unpopulated.

By 3000 BC, the result of a further arrival of population, a culture adapted to the north had developed in Alaska, and a millennium later began to spread eastwards across the Arctic as far as Labrador and Greenland. These peoples, Paleo-Eskimo [2], hunted caribou, muskox and seals, and fished. They lived as small groups and, at least in the early years, were highly mobile.

This Dorset Culture [3] was able to maintain itself, even to flourish and to occupy lands to the south [4] abandoned by earlier native groups during a prolonged period of cool climate after 1800 BC [5]. Meanwhile, a more complex culture had developed in Alaska, hunting with harpoons from kayaks [6] and umiaks [7], living in permanent villages of wooden houses partly sunk in the earth. From here arose the Thule Culture, spreading eastwards in a period of moderating temperatures, pursuing whales using boats and harpoons, travelling the land with dog sleds, and occupying houses of stone and whalebone [8].

The new culture was more efficient in its resource harvesting than the Dorset, which it displaced. The Thule Culture [9] also flourished particularly well during another warm period in the second half of the first millennium AD [10]. Lifestyles changed again with cooling temperatures [11] after 1000 AD, and particularly with European contact after 1600, creating what we think of today as traditional Inuit. The lifestyles of the Inummariit ("the Real Inuit") were adapted regionally to the local resources. Somewhat different seasonal rounds had created interrelated groups of families, each regional group covering some thousands of square miles of Arctic land and sea [12] For all of them, though, movement, sea mammals and caribou were defining factors. Even in as short a period as a century, the balance in lifestyles had changed dramatically. To illustrate this we describe one subset of one group.

At the beginning of the Twentieth Century our sample area of about 200,000 square miles centring on Simpson Strait was inhabited by seven small groups [13] of population. Each had more-or-less discrete territories [14], largely defined by the use of the two prime seasonal resources: seal and caribou.

From December to May each group camped in snow houses [15] constructed upon the sea ice near to the coast, particularly at river mouths. Seals were harpooned (or, increasingly, shot with rifles) as they came to breathing holes in the ice [16]. Nearby concentrations of polar bears in their dinning or feeding areas, provided a secondary resource and were hunted with bows and arrows, spears, and then with rifles. In the spring, as the sea ice began to break up, the group packed and scattered to the inland lakes and rivers where they speared arctic char, trout and whitefish.

In summer the caribou came north from their wintering below the tree line to graze on the tundra as far north as King William Island, and there the small groups hunted them with bows and arrows. The major hunt, however, came in late August and early September as the caribou, now sleek from a summer's feeding, migrated southwards. Certain required water crossings made the great herds an easy target for waiting hunters in kayaks. Since the main crossings offered far more caribou than needed by one small group, several groups would often come together, as they did at Simpson Strait.

By the 1920s some major shifts in lifestyles were occurring. Fur trading posts were established in the area, offering rifles and metal traps in return for fox pelts. Now, the setting out of trap lines along the coast and up river valleys into the interior became a dominant winter activity, moving people away from their winter camps on the sea ice and away from their traditional "real" meat source. The caribou, too, seemed to have changed their habits, being year-round on the tundra, but less abundant. With rifles more effective than bows and arrows, they were pursued over larger territories. Fishing continued to be important in the spring and fall, but with a greater availability of nets, the number of catches increased. In summary, the territories had now shifted away from the sea and the reliance upon new technologies supplied by outsiders were gaining ascendancy.

Today the Inuit of the eastern arctic have their own territory [17] in which they form the majority of the population. Although many of the old earlier life styles are gone, this new found political control [18] of their traditional hunting region may encourage and foster some of their cultures to flourish again.