Inupiaq

The Iñupiaq are the Alaskan branch of the Inuit, whose traditional lands run along the northern Alaskan coast from Norton Sound on the Bering Sea to the Canadian border. Their name means 'real people', from iñuk, person, and -piaq, real, and their local bands, among them coastal whalers and the inland caribou-hunting Nunamiut, often carry the suffix -miut, meaning 'people of'.

They descend from the Thule whale-hunting culture that had developed in coastal Alaska by 1000 and later spread east across the Arctic as far as Greenland. Their language, Iñupiatun, belongs to the Inuit dialect continuum and is divided into the North Slope, Malimiut, Bering Straits and Qawiaraq dialects.

From the mid-seventeenth century the cooling of the Little Ice Age contracted many coastal settlements, and from 1741 Russian voyages and fur traders opened the first sustained contact with Europeans.