Inuit legends remember the people they replaced across the Arctic as giants
Around 1000 CE, the Thule ancestors of today's Inuit pushed east from Alaska with dog teams and heavier weapons, reaching Greenland within about a century. The earlier Dorset people they displaced survive in Inuit stories as the Tuniit, usually cast as giants taller and stronger than Inuit, occasionally as dwarfs.
The Thule emerged around the Bering Strait and western Alaska, having separated from Aleut ancestors some 4,000 years earlier. Researchers credit their spread to dogs used for transport and to better weapons and tools than the Dorset had. By 1100 they had settled west Greenland, and east Greenland during the 12th century. The Dorset, last of the major Paleo-Eskimo cultures, faded by around 1400 or 1500. In the mid-1950s Henry B. Collins argued that the Sadlermiut of Southampton Island, who died out from introduced disease in the winter of 1902 to 1903, were their last survivors, though a 2012 genetic study found no link.
Terminology matters. Many people once called Eskimo find that word offensive or colonial. Inuit, singular Inuk, is an ancient self-name covering the Inupiat of northern Alaska and Chukotka, four broad Canadian groups and Greenlanders, but related Yupik and Aleut peoples generally do not use it for themselves. Inuit mostly lived north of the tree line, hemmed in by Cree, Innu, Gwich'in and other southern neighbours.
Climate reshaped life after about 1350, when the Little Ice Age drove bowhead whales from Canadian and Greenland waters and high-Arctic communities lost both a food source and whalebone for building. Norse Greenlanders had met them, lumping all locals together as skraelingar. By the mid-1500s Basque whalers worked Labrador, and Inuit took iron from their stations in winter. Martin Frobisher's 1576 voyage brought the first well-documented contact; five of his sailors went ashore and, according to Inuit oral tradition, lived among them for years before vanishing in a homemade boat.
Later encounters were more sustained. William Edward Parry wintered at Igloolik in the 1820s and published a sympathetic, illustrated account in 1824. Moravian missionaries in Labrador supplied iron cheaply, calming raids. Disease brought heavy losses, and by the late 1920s no uncontacted Inuit remained. In 1939 Canada's Supreme Court ruled in Re Eskimos that Inuit fell under federal jurisdiction.
Source: Inuit
