The Inuit World

Pamela Stern, Pamela Stern

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000456134
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Anthropology

The Inuit World is a robust and holistic reference source to contemporary Inuit life from the intimate world of the household to the global stage. Organized around the themes of physical worlds, moral, spiritual and intellectual worlds, intimate and everyday worlds, and social and political worlds, this book includes ethnographically rich contributions from a range of scholars, including Inuit and other Indigenous authors. The book considers regional, social, and cultural differences as well as the shared histories and common cultural practices that allow us to recognize Inuit as a single, distinct Indigenous people. The chapters demonstrate both the historical continuity of Inuit culture and the dynamic ways that Inuit people have responded to changing social, environmental, political, and economic conditions. Chapter topics include ancestral landscapes, tourism and archaeology, resource extraction and climate change, environmental activism, and women's leadership.

This book is an invaluable resource for students and researchers in anthropology, Indigenous studies, and Arctic studies and those in related fields including geography, history, sociology, political science, and education.

PART I

PLACING INUIT WORLDS

CHAPTER 1
ANCESTRAL LANDSCAPES
Archaeology and long-term Inuit history

DOI: 10.4324/9780429275470-1

Max Friesen

Walking on the Arctic tundra, even an outsider new to the North will be struck by the omnipresent human history written on the landscape. Coasts and riverbanks are frequently covered with stone-built features such as storage caches and tent rings. These often display varying amounts of lichen, implying complex and long-term histories – bare rock is a sign of recent activity, while heavy lichen indicates older structures. Meanwhile, animal bones spilling out of the eroding edges of ancient sites tell the story of hunting and fishing in the past. In many areas there are no real boundaries to what archaeologists elsewhere might call “sites”; instead, the landscape holds a continuous array of the remnants of past human activities (Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 A cultural landscape on southern Victoria Island, Nunavut. A Thule Inuit site in the foreground is part of a continuous distribution of cultural features that includes the modern hamlet of Cambridge Bay in the background. Photo: Max Friesen.

To contemporary Inuit ¹ the landscape is immeasurably richer than for outsiders. These visible traces of the past mesh with place names, travel routes, multi-sensory memories of personal experiences, and historical knowledge passed through generations, to form an entangled present directly connected to the past. The connection from modern life back to ancient settlement is not abrupt – it is gradual; people living in modern towns have direct connections to places on the landscape where their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents camped. These same places usually hold somewhat earlier structures that are similar to the recent ones and, in addition, there are often layers of older remains – obviously different, and perhaps even foreign-looking, but connected through similarities such as the bones of game animals indicating that some aspects of those ancient peoples’ lives were similar to their own.

In this chapter, I outline what we know about Inuit society over the past 2,000 years. This is an important part of global history, representing one of the most widely distributed cultural and linguistic groups on Earth. The chapter is based mainly on the cultural landscape, as approached through archaeology, and is intended to provide context for the more recent periods that comprise the remainder of the book.

Prologue: the Inuit world in the 19th century

As an entry point to long-term history, it is useful to understand what the Inuit world looked like in the recent past, before settlement in modern more permanent towns. While all Inuit societies were dynamic and developed at different paces depending on a host of variables, a good place to start is the situation of the 19th century (Figure 1.2). This is a period to which contemporary Elders are closely connected, when the impacts of external forces were not yet overwhelming, and for which ethnohistoric information collected by Europeans had become more frequent than in the previous century. While Inuit societies of this era should never be considered as isolated and unchanging, they were living a lifeway that was in most cases very similar to that of earlier centuries, before intensive European contact.

Figure 1.2 Map of Chukotka and the North American Arctic, showing the maximum extent of Inuit settlement in the 19th century and earlier. The two major language groups are indicated by solid lines (Inuit˗Iñupiaq) and dashed lines (Yupik). Map drafted by Taylor Thornton.

Inuit societies during this period had much in common with each other, but also demonstrated a great range of variability. In terms of language, the greatest split was between Yupik languages of Chukotka and southwestern Alaska, and Inuit˗Iñupiaq languages of northern Alaska, Inuit Nunangat (Arctic Canada), and Greenland (Woodbury 1984). Within each of these areas, adjacent dialects were generally very similar, though they became less mutually intelligible as physical distance increased. All other aspects of society were also variable, including population density, level of mobility (how often and how far people traveled over the course of a year), economic organization (level of reliance on different resources), and social organization (leadership roles, gender roles, kinship). All Inuit groups had highly specialized technologies; particularly noteworthy were their elaborate skin clothing, transportation consisting of sleds and two types of skin boat, sophisticated and variable dwellings, and complex hunting and fishing equipment. However, the exact nature of this technology varied across the Inuit world due to constant innovation and refinement on the part of each regional group. This variability in all aspects of culture was the result of many influences, ranging from local environmental factors such as the density of subsistence resources, to levels of interaction with neighboring Inuit societies, interior First Nations, and Europeans.

Some idea of the range of variability can be indicated by describing two quite different groups: Inuinnait of the Coronation Gulf region (known in earlier anthropological literature as Copper Inuit) and Inuvialuit of the Mackenzie Delta region (sometimes known as Mackenzie Inuit). Despite occupying adjacent regions, these two societies were far apart in many aspects of their lifeways.

The Inuinnait lifeway is well known from modern Elders’ knowledge (e.g., Kitikmeot Heritage Society 2019) and comprehensive early ethnographic work (e.g., Jenness 1922; 1946; Rasmussen 1932; Stefansson 1919) – it was, in many ways, similar to that of their eastern neighbors, the Netsilik Inuit, made famous in the films of Asen Balikci (1970). Their years were divided into two roughly equal halves. The warm season was spent on land with movements closely attuned to the locations of caribou, fish (especially Arctic char), and migratory waterfowl. Small groups, at times consisting only of individual families, lived in skin tents with driftwood frames, moving frequently. In the fall, larger groups congregated at coastal locations, where preparations were made for winter, including the sewing of winter skin clothing. The other half of the year was very different; it was spent living in snow houses on the sea ice and hunting almost exclusively for seals at their breathing holes. In many cases, the largest aggregations of the year occurred in these winter sea-ice villages, which would often include at least one very large communal structure for drum dances and other social activities in which all participated. Snow house villages were abandoned, with their inhabitants moving to new ones, several times over the winter whenever local seal populations were hunted out. Inuinnait social organization was relatively fluid, characterized by frequent fluctuations in group size, bilateral kinship ties, a variety of partnerships linking kin and non-kin, and a lack of elaborate leadership roles.

The ancestors of today’s Inuvialuit of the Mackenzie Delta lived very different lives, according to modern Elders’ knowledge (e.g., Hart 2011; Nuligak 1966) as well as an incomplete ethnographic record (e.g., Petitot 1876; 1887; Stefansson 1919). The region between the Alaska˗Yukon border and Amundsen Gulf was home to about eight named regional groups, each of which had well-defined borders and was centered on a particularly large and permanent winter village. Subsistence varied across the region, with each regional group depending on a different mix of resources including seals, caribou, moose, waterfowl, many species of fish, bowhead whales, and beluga whales. However, the two largest and most populous groups, centered on the East Channel of the Mackenzie River near modern-day Tuktoyaktuk, were focused on the summer hunt of the thousands of beluga whales that congregated there each year. Winters were spent in large, driftwood-framed, semi-subterranean houses with sunken entrance tunnels, with some groups occupying very large three-alcove houses that could accommodate up to 30 people. During fall and spring, people often dispersed in smaller groups to travel and pursue seasonal resources; summer was highly variable, though on the East Channel this season saw particularly large aggregations of hundreds of people pursuing beluga whales. Their social organization was relatively complex, as seen in formalized leadership positions, large summer kajigis (communal structures), widespread trade in exotic materials, and a wide variety of ornamental objects such as earrings and labrets (lip plugs).

These two groups, while very different from each other, illustrate just part of the range of variability. Some Alaskan and Siberian groups – both Yupik and Iñupiat – lived in even larger and more permanent villages than Inuvialuit, where local conditions led to particularly dense and reliable resource concentrations. In some cases, organized warfare occurred, and trade systems were extremely elaborate (Burch 2005), though it can be difficult to reconstruct the degree to which these 19th-century patterns were impacted by the advent of Russian trade. To the east, some Inuit groups were even smaller in scale and more mobile than the Inuinnait. For example, inland Inuit west of Hudson Bay (often known as Caribou Inuit) were highly mobile as they pursued the very large caribou herds of the region (Birket-Smith 1929), and Inughuit of northwest Greenland consisted at times of only about 200 people, separated from their nearest neighbors by hundreds of kilometers of unoccupied territory (LeMoine and Darwent 2016).

This situation represents the end-point of a long and complex history that began in the Bering Strait region around 2,000 years ago. The remainder of this chapter is about the long-term processes that led to the Inuit worlds of the 19th century.

Inuit origins in the Bering Strait region

Inuit cultures have flourished in the Arctic for millennia, however, their full modern distribution was only established within the last 800 years. While not covered in this chapter, it is important to note that in all Arctic regions, other, more ancient people lived before Inuit arrived (Mason and Friesen 2017).

The earliest societies that are clearly and directly ancestral to Inuit emerged around 2,000 years ago (dating is very uncertain) in the Bering Strait region, especially on St. Lawrence Island and on the coasts of the easternmost extension of Siberia’s Chukotka Peninsula. Here, the Old Bering Sea (OBS) culture appears in a remarkable fluorescence of new technology and living patterns (Bronshtein et al. 2016; Mason 2016a). OBS people were accomplished hunters of sea mammals, particularly walrus and several seal species; they also likely obtained gray and bowhead whales in some regions, especially in Chukotka (Mason 2017). In the winter, they lived in settlements consisting of semi-subterranean pit houses of varying sizes. However, they are best known for their spectacular artistic achievements in the form of engraved designs on a wide variety of objects, mainly on walrus ivory (Figure 1.3).

Figure 1.3 Decorated Old Bering Sea artifacts from Chukotka (scale varies). (1) Harpoon counterweight, ivory, 19.0 cm; (2) snow goggles, ivory, 12.5 cm; (3) harpoon socket piece, ivory, 25.9 cm; (4) harpoon head, ivory with stone side blades, 15.1 cm; (5) animal figure, ivory, 13.2 cm; (6) ulu, ivory with a stone blade, 11.5 cm. Drawings by Nina Survillo, originally published by Mikhail M. Bronshtein, Kirill A. Dneprovsky, and Arkady B. Savinetsky (2016). Courtesy of the authors and the State Museum of Oriental Art (Moscow).

Where did OBS come from? Its sudden appearance in the archaeological record may result in part from the difficulty in finding early sites, or their destruction through erosion. However, many of the earliest OBS sites were the first in their locations, sitting directly on sterile soil, indicating a lack of earlier settlement (Mason 2017). Thus, OBS must ultimately represent a migration from elsewhere. Some attributes of stone tools can be tentatively traced either to the west (northeast Asia) or east (Alaska) of the main OBS homeland (Mason 2017); however, there is no agreement on a single “ideal” antecedent culture. A recent development in this regard is the study of ancient and modern DNA, which is beginning to narrow down where OBS may have originated (Flegontov et al. 2019). The leading possibility is that its ultimate origin is mainly in southwest Alaska, around 2000 BC, though the path from there to OBS 2,000 years later remains mysterious; it might include some interaction with Norton Tradition cultures in coastal Alaska.

Over time, many aspects of OBS culture changed, leading to several later named cultures including Punuk, represented mainly on St. Lawrence Island and the Bering Strait coasts; and Birnirk on the coasts of northern Chukotka and northern Alaska (Mason 2017). These societies developed in the later centuries of the first millennium AD, and despite their common origin, several differences are apparent. Punuk was quite closely connected to Asian trade and military networks, as seen in an apparent increase in iron use, as well as the adoption of slat armor and evidence for intergroup conflict (Bandi 1995). Punuk people maintained many aspects of the earlier OBS economic system, but may have been particularly adept at whaling. Birnirk people, on the northern coasts, lived in elaborate multi-roomed dwellings; they were able to exploit the full range of resources available in the region, including bowhead whales (Mason 2016b).

Around AD 1000, subtle shifts led to the emergence of a new culture known to us as Thule, the name based on the Danish scientific “Fifth Thule Expedition,” which was in turn named after an ancient Greek term for a mythical northern land. Thule culture developed from Birnirk in northern Alaska, in the context of an interaction network that included Birnirk, Punuk, and other regional societies across northern coastal regions of Alaska and Chukotka. Most classes of Thule technology are very similar to those in Punuk and especially Birnirk sites; differences are mainly subtle and stylistic. The elaborate and specialized material culture of Thule sites is clearly recognizable as Inuit; it is in most cases virtually identical to the clothing, tools, hunting weapons, and dwellings used by Inuit across the Arctic in the 19th century.

Because the Thule period represents the common cultural background of all Inuit across the Arctic, it is worth describing this lifeway in some detail. Thule (and later Inuit) were probably the most technologically complex hunter-gatherer society ever to hav...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Inuit worlds: An introduction
• PART I: Placing Inuit Worlds
• PART II: Moral, spiritual, and intellectual worlds
• PART III: Intimate and everyday worlds
• PART IV: Social and political worlds
• Afterword: Inuit worlds in a global Arctic
• Index