Written by Richard Effland:
The Arctic area of native North America is the homeland of the Inuit people.
Commonly called "Eskimo", these people are known for their unique
way of life in a cold desert. Their vast territory extends more than five
thousand miles along the Arctic Circle from Russia, Alaska, northern Canada
to Greenland. There are fewer than 110,000 Inuit today thinly distributed
across this inhospitable region. Most of them are concentrated in ecologically
favorable areas along coastlines. This module examines the way of life of
the Inuit people. Their social organization as well as their kinship system.
Two keys to remember as we look at the
Inuit people are the harshness of the environment and the dependence on
the sea and land. Most of the arctic is rocky land with an underlying permafrost,
which limits the growth of trees and drainage of water in the summer months.
Long and severe winters dominate. It is often so cold that there is actually
very little snow in the arctic. Consider the implications of having no wood
in your environment. What would you miss? Considering the limits of the
land, it is understandable that the Inuit people have exploited the abundant
resources of the arctic seas.
To generalize, it can be said that the Inuit were an "edge" people
who looked to the land and sea, the winter and summer, the appropriate hunting
and domestic technologies for living.
Inuits made use of a wide variety of raw materials. Even snow and
ice could be used. Skins, bone, antler, ivory,
wood (distributed unevenly and sparsely) and stone all were raw materials
exploited by the Inuit for making tools and constructing houses. It is unfair
to characterize Inuit as "stone age" in the sense that they used
stone tools. Stone was only a part of a wide range of raw materials that
could be fashioned into a usable item.
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