Inuit

The Inuit group is the Arctic hunters descended from the Thule, who spoke Eskaleut languages. Thule people emerged in coastal Alaska by 1000 and spread east across northern Canada, reaching west Greenland by 1100. They replaced the earlier Dorset culture, whom Inuit tradition remembers as the Tuniit, strong but timid giants easily driven away. The Dorset were extinct by 1500 at the latest.

Norse settlers called these newcomers Skrælingjar. Intensified contact with Europeans came in the eighteenth century, and the Little Ice Age, which began around 1650, broke up the Thule communities into the peoples later known as Inuit and Yupik.