Inuit: Encyclopedia II - Inuit - Inuit since the arrival of Europeans

Inuit - Inuit since the arrival of Europeans

Inuit - Canada

The lives of Paleo-Eskimos of the far north were largely unaffected by the arrival of visiting Norsemen except for mutual trade (McGhee 1992:194). In the centuries to follow Inuit contact with explorers varied across the Arctic. Labrador Inuit have had the longest continuous contact with Europeans (Kleivan 1966:9). After the disappearance of the Norse colonies in Greenland, the Inuit had no contact with Europeans for at least a century. By the mid-16th century, Basque fishermen were already working the Labrador coast and had established whaling stations on land. The Inuit appear not to have interfered with their operations, but they raided the stations in winter for tools, and particularly worked iron, which they adapted to native needs.

Martin Frobisher's 1576 search for the Northwest Passage was the first well-documented post-Columbian contact between Europeans and Inuit. Frobisher's expedition landed on Baffin Island, not far from the town now called Iqaluit, but long known as Frobisher Bay. This first contact went poorly. Martin Frobisher, attempted to find the Northwest Passage. He encountered Inuit on Resolution Island. Five sailors jumped ship and became part of Inuit mythology. The homesick sailors tired of their adventure attempted to leave in a small vessel and vanished. Frobisher brought an unwilling Inuk to England, doubtless the first Inuk ever to visit Europe. The Inuit oral tradition, in contrast, recounts the natives helping Frobisher's crewmen, who believed they had been abandoned.

The semi-nomadic eco-centred Inuit were fishers and hunters harvesting lakes, seas, ice platforms and tundra. While there are some allegations that Inuit were hostile to early French and English explorers, fishers and whalers, more recent research suggests that the early relations whaling stations along the Labrador coast and later James Bay were based on a mutual interest in trade (Mitchell 1996:49-62). In the final years of the 18th century, the Moravian church began missionary activities in Labrador, supported by the British who were tired of the raids on their whaling stations. The Moravian missionaries could easily provide the Inuit with the iron and basic materials they had been stealing from whaling outposts - materials whose real cost to Europeans was almost nothing, but whose value to the Inuit was enormous - and from then on contacts in Labrador were far more peaceful.

The European arrival caused a great deal of damage to the Inuit way of life, causing mass death through new diseases introduced by whalers and explorers, and enormous social disruptions caused by the distorting effect of Europeans' material wealth. Nonetheless, Inuit society in the higher latitudes had largely persisted in isolation in the 19th century. Hudson's Bay Company opened trading posts such as Great Whale River (1820), today called Kuujjuarapik, where whale products of the commercial whale hunt were processed and furs traded. The British Naval Expedition (1821-3) led by Admiral Parry, which twice overwintered in Foxe Basin, provided the first informed, sympathetic and well-documented account of the economic, social and religious life of the Inuit. Parry stayed in Igloolik over the second winter. Parry's writings with pen and ink illustrations of Inuit everyday life (1824) and those of Lyon (1824) were widely read (D'Anglure 2002:205). Captain Comer's Inuit wife Shoofly known for her sewing skills and elegant attire (Driscoll 1980:6) was influential in convincing him to acquire more sewing accessories and beads for trade with Inuit. A few traders and missionaries circulated among the more accessible bands, and after 1904 they were accompanied by a handful of policemen. But, unlike most Native Canadians, the lands occupied by the Inuit were of little interest to European settlers. While southerners consider the Arctic as a hostile Hinterland to the Inuit it is their Homeland. While many southerners enjoyed lucrative careers as bureaucrats and service providers in the north, very few southerners chose to retire there. In the early years of the 20th century, Canada, with its more hospitable lands largely settled, began to take a greater interest in its more peripheral territories, especially the fur and mineral rich hinterlands. By the late 1920s, there were no longer any Inuit who had not been contacted by traders, missionaries or government agents.

Native customs were worn down by the actions of police - who enforced Canadian criminal law on Inuit who often could not understand what they had done wrong - and by missionaries who preached a moral code very different from the one they were used to.

WWII and the Cold War made Arctic Canada strategically important for the first time, and, thanks to the development of modern aircraft, accessible year-round. The construction of airbases and radar stations in the 1940s and 50s brought more intensive contacts with European society, particularly in the form of public education, which instilled and enforced foreign values disdainful of the traditional structure of Inuit society. By 1953 Canada's Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent publicly admitted: "Apparently we have administered the vast territories of the north in an almost continuing absence of mind. (Parker 1996:32)" The government began to establish about forty permanent administrative centres to provide education, health and economic development services for Inuit (Parker 1996:32). Inuit from hundreds of smaller camps scattered across the north, began to congregate in these hamlets (Mitchell 1996:118).

Furthermore, regular visits from doctors and access to modern medical care raised the birth rate enormously. Before long, the Inuit population was beyond what traditional hunting and fishing could support. By the mid-1960s, encouraged first by missionaries, then by the prospect of paid jobs and government services, and finally forced by hunger and required by police, all Canadian Inuit lived year-round in permanent settlements. The nomadic migrations that were the central feature of Arctic life had for the most part disappeared. The Inuit, a once self-sufficient people in an extremely harsh environment, were in the span of perhaps two generations transformed into a small, impoverished minority lacking skills or resources to sell to the larger economy, but increasingly dependent on it for day to day survival.

Although anthropologists like Diamond Jenness (1964) were quick to predict that Inuit culture was facing extinction, Inuit political activism was already emerging as he wrote those words.

In the 1960s, the Canadian government funded the establishment of secular, government-operated high schools in the Northwest Territories and Inuit areas in Quebec and Labrador. The Inuit population was not large enough to support a full high school in every community, so this meant only a few schools were built, and students from across the territories were boarded there. These schools, in Iqaluit, Yellowknife and Kuujjuaq, brought together young Inuit from across the Arctic in one place for the first time, and exposed them to the rhetoric of civil and human rights that prevailed in Canada in the 1960s. This was a real wake-up call for Inuit, and it stimulated the emergence of a new generation of young Inuit activists in the late 1960s who came forward and pushed for respect for the Inuit and their territories.

The Inuit began to emerge as a political force in the late 1960s and early 1970s, shortly after the first graduates returned home. They formed new politically active associations in the early 1970s, starting with the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami in 1971, and more region specific organisations shortly afterwards, including the Northern Quebec Inuit Association and the Labrador Inuit Association. These activist movements began to change the direction of Inuit society in 1975 with the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement. This comprehensive land claims settlement for Quebec Inuit, along with a large cash settlement and substantial administrative autonomy in the new region of Nunavik, set the precedent for the settlements to follow. The Labrador Inuit submitted their land claim in 1977, although they had to wait until 2005 to have a signed land settlement establishing Nunatsiavut.

In 1982, the Tunngavik Federation of Nunavut (TFN) was incorporated, in order to take over negotiations for land claims on behalf of the Northwest Territories Inuit from the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, which became a joint association of the Inuit of Quebec, Labrador and the Northwest Territories.

The TFN worked for ten years and, in September 1992, came to a final agreement with the government of Canada. This agreement called for the separation of the Northwest Territories into an eastern territory whose only aboriginal population would be Inuit - the future Nunavut - and a rump Northwest Territories in the west. It was the largest land-claims agreement in Canadian history. In November 1992, the Nunavut Final Agreement was approved by nearly 85 percent of the Inuit of what would become Nunavut. As the final step in this long process, the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement was signed on May 25, 1993 in Iqaluit by Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and by Paul Quassa, the president of Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated, which replaced the TFN with the ratification of the Nunavut Final Agreement. The Canadian Parliament passed the supporting legislation in June of the same year, enabling the 1999 establishment of Nunavut as a territorial entity.

The Inuvialuit are western Canadian Inuit who remained in the Northwest Territories when Nunavut split off. They are officially represented by the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation and received a comprehensive land claims settlement in 1984, with the signature of the Inuvialuit Final Agreement.

With the establishment of Nunatsiavut in 2005, all the traditional Inuit lands in Canada are now covered by some sort of land claims agreement providing for regional autonomy.

Inuit communities in Canada continue to suffer under crushing unemployment, substance abuse, crime, violence and suicide. The problems Inuit face in the 21st century should not be underestimated. However, many Inuit are upbeat about the future. Arguably, their situation is better than it has been since the 14th century. Inuit arts - carving, print making, textiles and throat singing - are very popular, not only in Canada but globally, and Inuit artists are widely known. Indeed, Canada has, metaphorically, adopted the Inuit as a sort of national mascot, using Inuit symbols like the inukshuk in unlikely places, such as its use as a symbol of Vancouver's Olympic bid for 2010. The Inuit language - Inuktitut - is secure in Quebec and Nunavut. There are a surprising number of Inuit, even those who now live in urban centres such as Ottawa, Montreal and Winnipeg, who have experienced living on the land in the traditional life style. Sarah Ekoomiak, who was born in the 1930s saw her first building in Kuujuurapik when she was ten years old. Inuit culture is alive and vibrant today in spite of the negative impact of the Arctic exiles, residential schools, the TB epidemic and exiles, the paternalistic meddling in all their affairs including the current serious concerns regarding the removal of Inuit children from their homes by the CAS.

Inuit - Greenland

See History of Greenland.

Inuit - Alaska

This section is in progress but see Alaska and List of Native Alaskan Tribal Entities.

Inuit - Future prospects

In recent years, circumpolar cultural and political groups like the Inuit Circumpolar Conference have come together to promote the Inuit and other northern people and to fight against ecological problems, such as global warming, which disproportionately affects the Inuit population. Global warming will likely also cause Arctic mammal populations to decline.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Inuit since the arrival of Europeans", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki