Inuit: The People of The Arctic

Inuit: The People of the Arctic

The native people that live in the Northern-Polar Regions of the world refer to themselves as "Inuit", or as Americans like to call them "Eskimos." The Inuit are nomadic tribes who live their life's very different from the rest of the world. They base their life on beliefs, customs, habits, traditions, and culture that are very different from the American culture. The culture of the Inuit is a very miss-understood culture and it is proven in this essay that the Inuit are more than just savage, seal, killing Indians, that sleep in ice houses, live in below freezing weather and only kiss with their noses.

"Inuit" is a word that means "the people", which is how they refer to themselves. Until recently outsiders called the Inuit, "Eskimos" which means "eaters of meat." Scientists have placed the Inuit in a separate anthropological category, while the Inuit are closely related to the native of Northern Asia, which is were they originally came from. Language provides an important insight into the lives of the Inuit. For example they must spend hours on end tracking caribou for many km or sitting by a hole in the ice waiting for a seal to show itself. The Inuit have no need to describe the past or future in great detail so they have no word for history. Another extreme is snow. There are many different words for many different types of snow. For example, aput is the the general word for snow. Snow that has recently drifted is akeolrak, but drifted snow is perksertok. The Inuit language is made up of words for the things that are important to the Inuit way of life (Halderson 2-7).

Beginning about a thousand years ago, the early Inuit began to spread into the Arctic of Canada, across the great land bridge known as the Bering Straight, which no longer exists. The Inuit eventually spread over 6000 km, from the Soviet Union to East Greenland. Within a few hundred years, they had replaced the earlier inhabitants of the region. The migration across the land bridge was not a single mass event, but it was probably dozens of parties of perhaps twenty to thirty people moving east in search for a better life. A particular goal for making the great migration seemed to be richer whaling waters along the Baffin and Somerset Islands, and the always necessity for more space, soon after that whaling villages and small camps sprouted along the coast, while in-coast camps relied on seal and caribou (Halderson 2-7).

The Inuit gradually spread across the arctic regions settling in four countries: The Soviet Union, The United States (Alaska), Canada and Greenland. According to Archaeological research, the first Inuit settled on the frozen tundra and the chilly sea coast. The Inuit have very distinct characteristics. Their height and weight varies, just, like in any culture. Their skin is tanned from the sun as dark as leather. The hair on their head is dark black and straight and the face grows hardly any facial hair. Their eyes are dark and almond shaped, a small almost bridge-less nose with large flared nostrils, a very strong jaw, that came about from generation and generation of eating almost nothing but meat, and they have a distinctively high and round zygoma bone. It is often stated the physical characteristics of the Inuit came about, due to their adaptation of the cold weather. For instant: A flat face and small extremities are easier to keep warm. The fold in their eyes keeps the eyes from freezing and in the spring in blocks of some of the glare on the bright sun that reflects of the snow. The lack of facial hair keeps ice and condensation from building up from the breathing. And the very tough jaw comes from the very tough diet, which regularly includes raw, frozen meat or walrus hide (Morrison and Germain 12-13).

The cold water of the Arctic provides the Inuit with all types of food. The single most important part of the Inuit diet is the seal. There are six type of seal that the Inuit hunt for food: the Ringed Seal, the Harbour Seal, the Harp Seal, the Grey seal, the Bearded Seal and the Hooded seal. The fish hunted for food are mainly cod and salmon. Whales that were killed for food include the Bowhead whale, the Narwhal and the Beluga, and another important part of their diet is the almighty walrus. The land animals that provide the Inuit with food are the Polar bear, Caribou, Musk-Ox and the smaller game includes Arctic wolves, foxes and hares, also ground squirrels and brown lemmings. The birds that pose for prey are the ducks, geese, swans, loons and even the eggs of the birds in the early summer months. The Inuit favorite food was usually seal, caribou, walrus liver and the skin of whales. The hunts in the winter months included polar bears, arctic foxes and arctic hares, and the hunts in the summer months usually included caribou, geese, and walrus. The animals are not wasted once stripped of all their meat. Almost everything on the animal is put to some sort of use. The pelts of the bigger and smaller animals are used for clothing and shelter from protection of the cold weather. The antlers of the caribou, the ivory of the walrus tusk and the bone of the whale and musk-ox can be used for knives

and harpoons(Morrison 64-137).

In order to find those animals it was necessary for the Inuit to live a wondering life, following the migrations of the herds. Generally the Inuit would have a summer home and a winter home. In the summer months the Inuit tend to build houses made of sod which was supported inside by drift wood of occasional tree branches. Tents made of animal skin were also built and set up for the summer. The tents made it easy for the Inuit to follow the migration of the animals, with an easy take-down and put-up technique. In the winter months the Inuit built sod houses and the world famous "Igloo." An igloo is a domed shaped house that was built for temporary shelter for hunting and traveling. This ice house would consist of blocks of ice cut from the snow, that were built upward in a spiral shape. The igloo consisted on an underground entrance, a window made of a block of ice, and a ventilation hole. Inside a family of three to six Inuit would live. The family shared the crowded space with a meat drying rack, cooking pots, cooking fire, the light from the fire, storage area for outside hunting and snow gear and it also had room for the families to sleep (Morrison and Germain 106, 36).

Animal skins provided clothing for the Inuit. Their favorite was caribou because tit was warm and light weight. If caribou was lacking the Inuit would settle for seal, polar bear and arctic fox. A single layer of clothing was worn in the summer months, but in the winter months a double layer was worn. A man normally owed at least two sets of outer clothing