6. First Nations - North

From Canadian History Portal - HCO

A. Aboriginal Canada →→ 1. Turtle Island → 2. First Nations - East → 3. Daily Life - East → 4. First Nations - West → 5. Daily Life - West → 6. First Nations - North → 7. Daily Life - North →→ B. Early European Explorers

Linguistic Groups, Northern Canada

Today's Inuit - the name means "the People" - were formerly called Eskimos, a word that comes from the Cree, askimowew, which means "he eats it raw". They number almost 40,000 people in Canada, with over 30,000 cousins in northern Alaska, more than 40,000 in Greenland, and some more distant relations in Siberia and the Russian Arctic. Most of Canada's Inuit live in Nunavut, and the rest live along the coast of Northern Quebec and Labrador.

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The Paleo-Inuit and Dorset People

By about 2500 BCE, only Arctic and Alpine glaciers remained from the great ice sheets that covered most of Canada, and new groups of Arctic Small Tool Tradition (ASTt) people started crossing the Bering Strait in their skin boats and moved into the Arctic. We have artifacts from them dating from 1,700 to 800 BCE. They were highly skilled at crafting microblades - sharp slivers of stone - that were attached to hide-cutting bone knives, burins (bone-cutting chisels), and small triangular harpoon tips and arrowheads - they were probably the first people to use the bow and arrow in North America.

Arctic Small Tool Tradition (CMC)

These Paleo-Inuit or Pre-Dorset people came to populate the Arctic from Alaska to Greenland, living in small subsistence camps that were often wiped out by starvation. They were the first occupants of the Canadian Arctic coast and islands: the Independence Island people lived on the islands of the High Arctic in small, widely-scattered groups; and other Pre-Dorset people lived along the Arctic coast, northern Hudson Bay, and the southern Arctic islands. By 1500 BCE, they had reached into the Greenland Strait, and south to Labrador and even across the tundra into the forests of northern Manitoba and Saskatchewan. This was the greatest southerly extent of their domain.

In 800 BCE, a new Dorset culture emerged from the Pre-Dorset in northern Hudson Bay, Hudson Strait and Foxe Basin. The climate was colder at this time, and the Dorsets adapted better with superior tools & weapons. The Dorsets moved down the Labrador coast and crossed to the island of Newfoundland in about 500 BCE. The culture died out in about 1,000 AD, at the time of the Norse migrations.

Inuktitut Speakers

The Inuktitut-speaking culture of today developed in the Bering Strait and north west Alaska, during a warm period that lasted from 900 to about 1,200 CE. A cooling in the climate led to the disappearance of the bowhead from some areas, and those Inuit who depended on whaling were forced to adapt, and look elsewhere for food.

Inuit Man, 1500s

Inuit Woman, 1500s

Starting in about 1000 CE, these co-called Thule people gradually migrated east in small family groups, and within a few hundred years, they had supplanted the earlier Dorset inhabitants of the region, a now-extinct people known to the Inuit as Tunit.

The Inuit developed into nine regional cultures. The Mackenzie Inuit in the west continued to live in large driftwood, whalebone or sod house camps and hunt bowhead whales, using a newer technology of large harpoon heads and floats. Those who arrived at the rich whaling grounds of Baffin and Somerset islands, continued their whaling culture, but also lived on seals, caribou and Arctic char. The North Baffin Inuit, on the other hand, abandoned whale hunting and lived on seal, walrus and inland caribou, using igloos in winter and caribou skin tents in the warm season.

Bowhead Whale

By about 1250 CE, the first Inuit arrived in Greenland through Smith Sound area in the northwest of the island. Here they first encountered medieval Norse ("Viking") hunters coming from Eric the Red's grazing colonies in southwest Greenland. These Norse colonies disappeared in the so-called Little Ice Age that lasted from about 1300 to around 1500. The Inuit, who were far better adapted to Arctic life than the Norse, survived through their superior hunting technology and by moving southward into Hudson Bay, and down the Labrador coast.

After European contact, explorers from Martin Frobisher in the 1570s to the Franklin expedition in the 1850s provided the Inuit with metals for their harpoon points and knife blades, but otherwise they had little impact on the Inuit way of life. More important were the commercial whalers from Boston in the US and Peterhead in Scotland, who nearly wiped out the bowhead by the late 1800s. Many set up winter camps on the east coast of Baffin Island and on the coastline of the Beaufort Sea. The captains often hired Inuit as guides and crew, and some took Inuit wives.

The whalers were followed by the Hudson's Bay Company and Révillon Frères fur traders, who built small outposts all over the Arctic, trading guns, flour and tea in exchange for silver fox and wolf furs. Many Inuit gave up their traditional hunt to trap for the companies, so when fashions changed and fur prices collapsed in the 1930s and 1940s, they were left stranded, unable to return to the old ways. In the early 1950s many inland Inuit starved to death when the caribou failed to appear. The Canadian government had to step in to help, and since that time until the founding of Nunavut, the government presence has become more and more important.

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