Arctic Peoples: Who Are They, Anyway?

Contrary to the widely accepted idea that Arctic peoples have strikingly similar physical characteristics and cultures, the about 400,000 indigenous people that live in the circumpolar north are of very diverse indigenous groups: The Gwich’in and Dene in North America, the Sámi in northern Fennoscandia and into the Kola Peninsula in Russia along with a dozen or so other ethnic groups in northern Russia, including the Nenets, Chukchi and Yupik. An Inuit people, the Yup’ik, are on both sides of the Bering Strait that separates Asia from North America. All once known as Eskimo, a term no longer used in most regions, Inuit is a broad label to describe the Arctic peoples that speak related languages or dialects in the Eskimo-Aleut language. Spanning from the Inupiat in northern Alaska to the Kalaallit in Greenland, Inuit total about 155,000 in Arctic Alaska, Canada, Russia and Greenland.

What the cultures of all these Arctic peoples share is that they are keenly adapted to the demanding Arctic environment.

The Caribou People

Alaska’s North Slope, encompassing the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), is one of the most extreme environments in which humans live and work. The average temperatures are too low to grow timber or food. To the Native people of the communities, the Gwich’in and the Inupiat, the means for survival have been, and to a large extent still are, hunting and gathering. Cultural knowledge and practices have been refined over many generations in an environment where one poor decision can lead to the death or starvation of an entire village.

Living on the coast, the Inupiat traditionally rely on sea mammals, whereas the Gwich’in, living in the forested areas, rely primarily on the caribou. Records indicate caribou have been hunted in the ANWR some 30,000 years!

In their own language, Gwich’in means “people of the caribou.” More than a life-sustaining resource, the animals are also an important spiritual component of Gwich’in lives. The traditional belief is that “every caribou has a bit of the human heart in him, and every human has a bit of caribou heart.” Arctic peoples view themselves as part of the environment and not separate from it, and reverence for the environment and its inhabitants underlies their cultures.

Listen to hunter Charlie Swaney talk about the caribou hunt and how important it is for all. Story and images (c) by Mille Porsild, PolarHusky.com

Caribou is the primary food staple for the remote Arctic Gwich’in communities. Store-bought food is high-priced. The cooperative (the Co-op) in Arctic Village sells a chicken for $11.50 per pound and beef at $14.50 per pound (2006 prices). Low incomes make purchasing these protein sources difficult and high-quality caribou meat, containing little fat and more protein per pound than beef, pork, or chicken, is highly valued. It is possible to keep a balanced diet simply by eating caribou; the meat is rich in vitamin C (caribou eat lots of lichen!) and the organs provide a range of vitamins and minerals. After a hunt, sharing the meat with other community members strengthens social ties and promotes respect and caring for Elders.

Gwich’in rely on the land and the caribou, with more than 75 percent of their resources obtained from hunting and gathering. Baseball caps and jeans are everywhere, but so are winter boots, slippers, socks, purses, bags, and shirts made from caribou skins. Based on traditional designs, clothing, footwear, bags, and wall hangings are elaborately decorated with caribou hair tufting, and embroidery with plastic beads or porcupine quills colorfully dyed and woven into flower, animal, and geometric patterns. Much of this, as well as bone and antler carved into ornaments and jewelry, is shipped out to be sold to Alaskan tourists.

Sense of Place (It’s all in the eye of the beholder)

Like the Gwich’in, to all Arctic peoples their homeland, the land and the sea and its animals, is much more than a place of resources – it defines “sense of self.”

Environmental scientists have classified the various regions of the Arctic into zones, based on the climate and geology of each region. Arctic peoples have their own classifications. For example, the Sámi notion of the reindeer forest includes what scientists would call woodlands, tundra and mountains – the term simply refers to anywhere that the work of reindeer herding takes place. Other designations for the land change seasonally. The same patch of earth might be called mustikassa during the blueberry season and lintumetsa, or bird forest, at another time of the year. Another traditional Sámi classification of the land is based upon sieidi (or seitas), sacred natural places with a ritual or even supernatural significance.

In the traditional worldview of Arctic peoples, all aspects of the natural world – animals, lakes, rivers, the sun, the moon, the winds – have souls just like humans. An Inuit hunter asks a seal’s forgiveness for killing it, and by giving it water, returns its soul safely to the spirit world and Sedna, the Sea Woman, who together with Moon Man balances the world – the cycles of the moon determine the seasons, and the seasons determine the availability of game.

Hunting seal and caribou, Inuit in Canada traditionally base their lifestyle around following the seasons and the migrations of animals, in the past moving between summer and winter camps. To the Canadian Inuit it was as late as the 1950s and 1960s that they moved – some willingly, some under compulsion – into settled communities created by the Canadian government, most often around a missionary station by the Hudson Bay trading post, first established in 1670. In much of the Arctic, prolonged contact with Europeans began when whalers entered the region in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Once the whaling industry started to decline in the late 1800s it was replaced by the European and North American quest for furs. This created a shift in the seasonal use of the land; in the Russian, Canadian, and Alaskan Arctic, it put Arctic peoples in direct and continuing economic relationship with fur-trading companies. By the 1950s the Canadian government was on a mission to establish a presence throughout the Canadian Arctic and to assimilate the Inuit into the mainstream economic, social, and cultural life of Canada. The Inuit were believed to be living on the edge of starvation in a barren inhospitable wilderness. The indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic were to be become modern Canadians, able to improve their lifestyle options and take their place in the new period of economic development on the Canadian Arctic frontier!

Traditional Knowledge – It’s a Matter of Survival!

Indeed, in spite of their rich cultural heritage, Arctic peoples and their culture have long been treated as inferior. Early Euro-American visitors to the Arctic were lured by the promise of riches from whale oil, ivory and baleen and by prestige in the heyday of Arctic exploration. They brought with them exotic trade items, new materials, technologies and ideas – as well as diseases, exploitation and colonial domination. Colonizing governments claimed native territories as their own, often enforcing their tenancy with brutality and imposing new customs and religions. Children were forcibly removed from their families, forbidden to speak Native languages, and often sent to faraway boarding schools to be “reeducated” in non-Native ways.

During the 1920s Lenin and other Bolsheviks argued that the Native peoples and minorities of the Soviet empire should be assimilated into the political, cultural and economic mainstream of the country; even remote peoples, such as the Chukchi and Yup’ik living far from Moscow in Chukotka, a vast Russian territory in the far northeastern corner of Asia, did not escape the dramatic upheavals under Stalin.

During the Soviet era, Chukchi and Yup’ik were organized together in territorial administrative groups known as oblasts and were settled into permanent coastal villages or collective farms. New economic activities were introduced, including factories to make pork sausages and growing cucumbers in hot spring-powered greenhouses! Traditional nomadic subsistence living – Chukchi reindeer herding, and Yu’pik maritime hunting – underwent structural collectivization. Families would no longer travel together following the seasons of the land and the migration of animals. Men and women were separated to handle different niches, while children were sent away to boarding school. The traditional social structure and family unit were lost along with the transferring of traditional knowledge and skills. Moreover, the strong Native ties across the Bering Strait were severed. The region is separated from the United States in places by only a sliver of water less than 80 miles wide. As a result, Chukotka was a military zone packed with troops and entirely closed to outsiders (even Russians) for close to 75 years – except for Gulag prisoners who toiled in gold and lead mines.

A quagmire of environmental problems such as pollution and large-scale resource development amassed for the Native people of Chukotka to inherit as the Soviet Union dissolved. Worst, the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union left them in a state of a humanitarian catastrophe: Still repressed by the former KGB, the Native people were now cut off from western Russia and essential supply lines. By winter of 2001, there were literally no food provisions and no oil in the communities for heating or powering of machinery. While stripped of traditional knowledge, the Natives found themselves having to rely on traditional subsistence activities for their survival. Local hunters who had not harvested whales for years had no choice but to resume whaling, despite inadequate equipment, knowledge and skills required for safe and successful hunting. However, the Cold War coming to an end, Yu’pik were again able embrace their friends and family ties across the Strait, and hunters from Alaska’s North Slope traveled to Chukotka in 2002 with motors for small boats and other supplies and, most important, shared traditional whaling skills. Today, marine mammal hunting has become vital to Yup’ik and Chukchi coastal communities again.

Breaking the Beat: A Broken Record

Today Chukotka’s Arctic people are also reclaiming important aspects of their culture, including language and religious practices. Authorities repressed their languages and outlawed shamanism. The cultures of all Arctic people are rooted in an oral tradition: Knowledge and history survived in songs, stories and legends passed on from one generation to the next in the dark winter evenings, accompanied by chants and the rhythm of the drum.

The drum holds a special role throughout the entire Arctic region. From about 3 feet in diameter in north-eastern Russia, western Canada and Alaska to the small drum of the Polar Inuit in Greenland, the round ring is covered with skin from the stomach of a bear, walrus or reindeer and fixed with a round handle often decorated with a little carved face. The availability of wood in the area determined the size of the drum. Traditionally Greenlandic Polar Inuit made the ring by joining pieces of bone or reindeer antler, while the Sámi, being in a region with plenty wood below the tree-line in Scandinavia, construct the most elaborate drums. Their Runebomme could be either an oval ring or even a wooden bowl with two or more oblong holes as handles and beaten with a Y-shaped stick made of reindeer antler. Unlike the drums of the Inuit people, theirs were richly painted with figures, believed to be maps of the spiritual world for the noaidi—the Sámi shaman. The chant, yoiking, accompanying the drums is also quite different in sound from that of other Arctic peoples such as the throat singing of Inupiat, Yup’ik, Chukchi and Kalaallit in Greenland.

Like the shamans, the drums and the chanting were “evils” to western missionaries. In Scandinavia, by the seventeenth century, Sámi shamans were put on trial for practicing witchcraft, and a ruling of the Danish king outlawed Sámi yoiking. The voice of the Sámi was silenced and drums were gathered up and burned, leaving only 70 traditional drums known to exist today.

The Right to Be (Indigenous)

The oldest inhabitants of the European continent, ancestors of Sámi, are believed to have been the first to push their way into the northern lands of Fennoscandia after the last Ice Age, 10,000 B.C., when the inland ice receded in northern Scandinavia; just as it is believed that the first immigrants came to North America from Siberia, by way of Chukotka, across the Bering land bridge, a narrow strip of land exposed by low sea levels at the same time. Some thousand years later, these ancestors of the Inuit made their way into Canada and finally onto Greenland.

From long before national boundaries, Sápmi, the natural territory of the Sámi, overlaps within four nations: Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia. The Sámi culture encompasses many lifestyles, from woodland hunter-gatherers to seafaring fishermen. Over the past 2,000 years or more, the Sámi identity became closely intertwined with the cultural practice of reindeer husbandry. The reindeer remains a potent part of the thriving Sámi identity though only a fraction of the Sámi people today (some 3,000 out of a population of 70,000 or more) depends on husbandry for their livelihood.

At the reindeer races in Inari! Story and images (c) by Mille Porsild, PolarHusky.com.

Explore Sámi and the land of Sápmi with GoNorth! Fennoscandia 2008.

At various points in history, Sámi have been burned at the stake because of their religious beliefs, prohibited from speaking their own language, and stripped of their traditional garments. By the yardstick of modern notions of human rights, it is no exaggeration to say that their experience has been one of complete and total annihilation of freedom of expression. By the last decades of the nineteenth century, policy against Sámi was influenced by racial biology: it was believed that the Sámi were born with certain characteristics that prohibited them from living as “civilized” people. In Sweden, under the Nomad School Act of 1913, Sámi children were denied admission to public schools. Instead, to limit the Sámi’s education and ensure that they not become “civilized,” during the summer teachers traveled to teach young students in their family’s tents for a few weeks. From this time and 40-50 years forward, most Sámi pretended not to be Sámi at all.

However, for the past 30 years Sámi have been at the forefront of reclaiming their identity and rights – and that of Native people across the globe. In the Scandinavian countries, Sámi have decision-making powers on matters such as Sámi culture, language and schools. The Sámi community and outstanding members such as Ole Henrik Magga have been instrumental in making the 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. More than 22 years in the making, it details the rights to self-determination for the Sámi and other indigenous populations. Ratified by 140-some countries, the declaration is instrumental to the progress in indigenous peoples’ right to ownership of land and water and to cultural and language preservation worldwide.

Our Land

While the Sámi laid the path for self-determination, the circumpolar Arctic peoples are looking to Greenland to lead. The 57,000 Greenlanders are the first Arctic peoples to achieve self-determination and self-government. Home rule was introduced in Greenland in 1979 when legislative power was transferred from the Danish parliament to the Greenlandic Home Rule parliament, and the country officially was named Kalaallit Nunaat, “the Greenlanders Land.” Anxious about hunting and fishing rights, one of the Greenlanders first actions was to promptly vote to pull themselves out of the European Union (then the European Community).

Three indigenous groups live in Greenland, the world’s largest island: the Kalaallit, the Inughuit (Polar Inuit, the world’s most northerly indigenous people), and the Iit. Greenland was regarded a part of Danish-Norwegian territory since the independent Norse medieval communities that arrived in Greenland around the tenth century had agreed to pay taxes to the king about A.D. 1260. Greenland became a Danish colony in 1775 and was made a province of Denmark in 1953. In 1979, it was made an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark, with a parliament and local control of health care, schools, and social services.

On June 21, 2009, the 30th anniversary of the establishment of home rule, a new referendum on Greenland’s autonomy took effect that paves the way for Greenland to eventually become independent from Denmark – maybe not in the very near future, but down the trail. Greenlanders are now recognized as a separate group of people under international law. The referendum makes Kalaallisut (Greenlandic) the sole official language of Greenland. Greenland will manage its own police force and the criminal justice system, as well as its own financing and natural resources. It is believed that much oil and oil revenues lie in the future of Greenland. The first 75 million kroner (US $13.1 million) will go to Greenland, and the remaining revenue will be split evenly with Denmark. In return Greenlanders will receive fewer Danish subsidies, which currently are about Dkr3.4 billion ($633 million), or about $11,000 per Greenlander, and account for about 30 percent of Greenland’s GDP. The primary industry in Greenland is fishing – export of shrimp in particular.

Greenlanders are now faced with the challenge of showing how to reconcile the development of the Arctic with its protection and to keep their traditional knowledge alive while merging its use with the tools and technologies of the modern world in ways that lead to financial prosperity. A challenge indeed! But one that comes with opportunities. The Inuit have survived in the Arctic environment only because of their exceptional ability to adapt to its brutal and hostile conditions and by developing a cultural framework that makes responsible use of very limited natural resources. Traditional knowledge, today as in the past, has much to offer in terms of its approach and perspective, especially when it comes to sustainable development and understanding climate change. To the Inuit and all Arctic peoples, the need for future sustainable development of natural resources and the realities of climate change do not have to be proven; it is a matter of how to respond and adapt accordingly. And the rest of the world is watching – to learn.

About GoNorth!

GoNorth! is a free adventure learning series for the K-12 classroom developed at the University of Minnesota. Each year February through May, GoNorth! goes live from a circumpolar Arctic locale on a journey anchored in a multidisciplinary K-12 curriculum aligned with national standards. Visit PolarHusky.com to learn more and join the team – it’s free!

Watch The Sub-zero Classroom and learn how adventure learning provides students opportunities to explore and learn with real- world issues!