On the Origin of the Innuit

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This account of nineteenth century the theories regarding the origins of the Inuit people was written by American naturalist William Healey Dall . Dall led scientific expeditions to the Pacific Northwest, and published papers on a wide variety of subjects, including anthropology, meteorology, and the molluscs of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska.

The Inuit people, along with the closely related Yupik and Aleut people, inhabit the Arctic and Sub-Arctic regions from easternmost Russian Siberia, through Alaska and northern Canada, to Greenland.

The Thule, the ancestors of modern-day Inuit people seem to have originally lived in Alaska. From there, they spread eastward after around 1000 AD, settling across northern Canada and into Greenland by about 1300. The newer Inuit arrivals replaced earlier indigenous populations in Arctic Canada.

When the Inuit arrived in Greenland, the island was already inhabited by Norse, or Viking settlers. The Vikings, a seafaring people who originated in Scandinavia in northern Europe, began to leave their Swedish, Norwegian, and Danish homelands in the early middle ages. Some Vikings went east, into Russia. Others launched devastating raids into western Europe, including the coasts of France, England, and Ireland. Others went further west, settling the Orkney, Shetland, and Faeroe Islands north of Scotland and Great Britain. Scandinavian colonists sailed further west into the North Atlantic Ocean, settling Iceland, and then Greenland. From their settlements in Greenland, some Norse sailed to the islands around Canada. The earliest known European settlement in the Americas outside of Greenland was a Viking camp at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, dating from about 1000 AD.

The Scandinavians seem to have disappeared from Greenland sometime in the fifteenth century. The Greenlandic Norse began to decline in the fourteenth century. They abandoned their Western Settlement around 1350. The last written evidence of their occupation of Greenland comes from a marriage record in 1408. The last archaeological evidence of their occupation of the island dates from before 1450.

The decline and disappearance of the Scandinavians from Greenland seems to have been caused by cooling temperatures, which made it harder for the Norse to farm and maintain their livestock on the island. Some of the Norse in Greenland may have returned to Iceland or Europe. Others may have starved- excavated bones show signs of malnutrition.

As the Norse disappeared from Greenland, they were replaced by the more recently arrived Inuit people. The Inuit people made better use of maritime food resources, like fish and seals, instead of trying to grow food and raise livestock in the harsh Arctic conditions. These survival skills account for the success of the Inuit in the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions of North America.

Today there are more than 100,000 Inuit people, most of them living in Canada and Greenland. Others live in the United States , and Denmark. There are about 50,000 Inuit people living in Canada and Greenland, respectively. The majority of Canada’s Inuit people live in the Nunavut Territory, where they form over 80% of the population. 70% of Nunavut’s population speak Inuktitut, the local Inuit language that has official status there. Other Canadian Inuit communities are located in Nunavik in northern Quebec, Nunatsiavut in Labrador, and Inuvialuit in the Northwest Territories. In Greenland the main local Inuit language, Kalaallisut or West Greenlandic, is the official language spoken by more than 50,000 people. The Yupik people, who are closely related to the Inuit, live mainly in Alaska and Russia, while the Aleut people occupy the Aleutian islands of Alaska and Russia.