Identification

Until the early 1970s, the Inuit were generally known as Eskimos. This deprecatory or, at least, slightly contemptuous term had entered the European languages – seemingly through French Esquimaux – during the sixteenth century. It had been borrowed from an Algonquian language, most probably Innu-Montagnais, where it meant either “raw meat eaters” or “those who speak a foreign tongue.” The increasing use, among most Canadians, of the appellation “Inuit” stems directly from the growing political assertiveness of the natives of Canada’s Arctic.

In the language of the “Eskimos,” the plural word inuit (singular: inuk ; dual: inuuk ) simply means “human beings” or “people.” This is the term the Inuit have used to distinguish themselves from other types of sentient beings: the uumajut (animals), ijiqqat (invisible beings), allait, itgilgit, or unallit (the Indians), qablunaat, qallunaat, or tan’ngit (the Europeans), and so on. Today, however, when it is necessary to distinguish between human beings in general and the ethnic Inuit in particular, the Arctic natives may refer to themselves, in their language, as inutuinnait (“the only genuine human beings”: Arctic Quebec), inuinnait (“the genuine human beings”: Arctic coast); or inuvialuit (“the human beings par excellence”: Mackenzie coast and delta). The term Inuvialuit is the one under which the Mackenzie Inuit prefer to be known to English speakers.

The Canadian Inuit belong to a people who straddle the North American Arctic. In addition to the Inuit in Canada, Inuit can be found in the American state of Alaska (where they are known as Inupiat) as well as in Greenland, a self-governing territory within the kingdom of Denmark (where they call themselves Kalaallit). Proximate cultural and linguistic cousins of the Inuit, the Yupit (who, like the Inuit, are considered as belonging to the “Eskimos”) inhabit southwestern Alaska and the eastern tip of the Chukotka peninsula in Russia, while the more distantly related Aleut live in the Aleutian islands (off southwest Alaska). In 1991 the worldwide Inuit population was about 101,500, out of a total of 130,500 Inuit and Yupit “Eskimos” (plus some 2500 Aleut). Around 36,000 of them lived in Canada.

According to the census of 1991, 30,090 Canadian residents declared a single Inuit ethnic identity. Another 19,165 declared a multiple Inuit ethnic identity (for example, Inuit/English, Inuit/French, and so on). Since this last figure seems highly improbable (in 1986 less than 10,000 persons had identified themselves as part-Inuit), we consider here as genuinely Inuit only those 36,215 Canadians who, on the occasion of the 1991 census, simultaneously claimed both an Inuit and an aboriginal identity.

The vast majority (90.5 percent) of these people resided in the Northwest Territories (21,035), Quebec (7030), and Newfoundland-Labrador (4710), the balance (3440) being dispersed troughout the other provinces. The bulk of the Canadian Inuit population was thus to be found within its original territory of settlement ( Inuit nunaat or Inuit nunangat : “the land of the Inuit”): the coastal areas north (or at the fringe) of the tree line, along the shores of the Arctic Ocean, Hudson Bay, Davis Strait, and the Labrador Sea, between the Alaskan border and the Atlantic.

This territory was essentially the same as the one where the direct ancestors of the Inuit, the bearers of the Thule prehistoric culture, had settled some 1000 years ago. Like their predecessors in the Arctic, the so-called Dorset Eskimos (who became extinct one or two centuries after the arrival of the Thule), these proto-Inuit had migrated from northwestern Alaska, probably in pursuit of game. Both Dorset and Thule people belonged to the same ethnic stock: an Asian population particularly adept at reaping Arctic faunal resources, which had crossed the Bering Strait into North America some 8000 years ago.

All through the centuries, the descendants of these migrants preserved a remarkable cultural and linguistic homogeneity. Even now, for instance, the language of the Inuit remains practically the same from northern Alaska to Greenland. Called Inuktitut (or Inuttut) in the eastern Canadian Arctic, Inuinnaqtun on the Arctic coast, Inuvialuktun in the Mackenzie area, Iñupiaqtun in Alaska, and Kalaallisut in Greenland, it comprises several mutually intelligible dialects, ten of which are spoken in Canada.

Traditionally, the Canadian Inuit were subdivided into about ten different groupings or “tribes” (Mackenzie, Copper, Natsilik, Caribou, Aivilik, Southampton Island, Igloolik, South Baffin, Arctic Quebec, Labrador), which generally corresponded to dialectal subdivisions and relative genealogical discreteness (few marital unions occurred between members of different “tribes”). Currently, however, regional (for example, Arctic Quebec, Labrador, Baffin, Keewatin, and so on) and local identities are more relevant than the traditional ones.

Most of the present-day Inuit nunaat was already occupied by the Inuit at the time of their first sustained contacts with Europeans, over two hundred years ago. Only a few areas have since been added to this original territory. These include parts of the Mackenzie delta, as well as the southeastern coast of Hudson Bay, around Richmond Gulf and Great Whale River. Some Inuit also resettled near the trading posts of Churchill (Manitoba), Fort George/Chisasibi (Quebec), and Northwest River (Labrador), or – after World War II – at Happy Valley (Labrador), a few kilometres from the Goose Bay air force base. In the early 1950s, the Canadian government induced several Arctic Quebec and north Baffin families to move to Resolute Bay and Grise Fjord, two newly established communities on the high Arctic islands of Cornwallis and Ellesmere.

The traditional Inuit, whose culture was described by ethnographers such as Franz Boas, Émile Petitot, Lucien Turner, Knud Rasmussen, and Diamond Jenness, were nomadic. During spring, summer, and fall, they lived in small camps comprising between two and six families each. In winter, however, people gathered in larger camps which, at some periods, could consist of more than twenty-five families. Camps changed place according to the seasons, their members moving to locations where the different species of game or fish were known to be available. In Keewatin (west coast of Hudson Bay) and Arctic Quebec, many families went inland at the end of the summer to hunt caribou, returning back to the coast when the snow cover was thick enough to enable sled travel. In both regions, several people stayed inland year-round, subsisting on a diet of fish and caribou meat.

Migrations did not occur at random. The same locations – or ones close by – were visited year after year, with the result that many families spent most of their life within a circumscribed area. Hunting territories had no fixed boundaries and quite a few people occasionally moved to another district. Such moves, however, rarely transcended the limits of the dialect groups, which thus constituted the largest social and residential units.

With the founding of trading posts, Christian missions, and police detachments, a new type of settlement pattern rapidly emerged: semi-nomadic camps situated in the vicinity of Euro-Canadian installations. After World War II, with the establishment of federal schools, nursing stations, and administrative offices, the population was strongly encouraged to settle in a limited number of permanent villages. Some regions such as the northernmost part of Labrador, inland Keewatin, and the Arctic Quebec hinterland were then depopulated. At the end of the 1960s, a few camps were still to be found in Arctic Canada, but ten years later everybody was living in villages (with one exception, in the Bathurst Inlet area). The traditional snow igloo or semi-subterra-nean sod hut had definitively been replaced, as a permanent winter dwelling, by prefabricated wooden houses.

In 1991 Inuit nunaat comprised a total of forty-six communities with a majority native population, plus eight more settlements where a sizable Inuit minority lived among a European and/or Indian majority. As a last vestige of nomadism, most of these towns and villages had outlying camps, where people resided for short periods at various times of the year. The regional distribution of these fifty-four settlements was as follows: Northwest Territories, thirty-three; Arctic Quebec, fifteen; Labrador, six.

By southern standards, Inuit communities are small. In 1991 only 15 of them had more than 1000 residents. The largest one, Iqaluit (Frobisher Bay), did not exceed 3550 inhabitants (2250 Inuit and 1300 non-natives), while the smallest, Bathurst/Baychimo, held only some 80 people. A majority of villages were ethnically homogeneous, with the proportion of Inuit residents hovering between 90 and 95 percent of their total population.

Despite their size and isolation (with a very few exceptions, no roads link them with the outside world or neighbouring communities), the Inuit settlements now possess most of the amenities found in southern Canada: schools, stores, telephone, television, and the like. This may partly explain why the vast majority of the Canadian Inuit still live and work in their original territory. No more than 10 percent of them reside outside Inuit nunaat , many of these emigrants being either students or individuals holding a temporary job at the Ottawa, Montreal, or Yellowknife headquarters of a northern organization.