Inuit

The Inuit are Arctic hunters whose Thule ancestors spread eastward from the Bering Strait and western Alaska from about 1000, displacing the older Dorset culture, remembered in tradition as the Tuniit, which had vanished as a distinct people by about 1500. Speaking Eskaleut languages, they settled the treeless tundra from Alaska through Arctic Canada to Greenland.

Traveling by dog sled and kayak, they lived from sea mammals, fish and caribou in skin tents and snow houses, and traded or raided with the Subarctic peoples to their south, whose presence checked their expansion below the tree line.

West of Hudson Bay the Kivallirmiut, or Caribou Inuit, lived by the barren-ground caribou herds; in the eighteenth century, as Dene rivals withdrew when the herds declined, they turned to year-round inland life. Contact with Europeans became regular after the Churchill post opened in 1717, bringing guns, trapping and whaling.