The people

The Arctic, or circumpolar, peoples are the indigenous inhabitants of the northernmost regions of the world. For the most part, they live beyond the climatic limits of agriculture, drawing a subsistence from hunting, trapping, and fishing or from pastoralism. Thus climatic gradients, rather than simple latitude, determine the effective boundaries of the circumpolar region, and these gradients have their counterparts in the major environmental transitions. Of these transitions, the most important is the tree line, which marks the northern margin of the coniferous forest, or taiga. Between this limit and the coasts of the Arctic Ocean, the land consists of open tundra, though, in regions of high altitude, pockets of tundra lie enclosed within the forest zone.

Arctic environments are commonly imagined to be barren and inhospitable, habitable only by virtue of the extreme physical endurance and technical virtuosity of the peoples who dwell in them. Though their possession of these qualities is not in doubt, this view of the far north rests on a misconception. The image of the remote wilderness, to be conquered through a struggle for survival, belongs to the language of the alien explorer, not to that of the native. For indigenous people, the circumpolar environment is neither hostile nor forbidding but familiar and generous, offering the gift of livelihood to those who would treat it with consideration and respect.

Though there are indeed seasons of scarcity, these alternate with periods of extraordinary abundance. The continuous daylight of the warm Arctic summer, coupled with ample surface water from melting snow, allows for a phenomenal rate of growth of surface vegetation, and this in turn attracts a multitude of animals, many of them of migratory species. Warm ocean currents around some of the Arctic coasts are likewise conducive to an abundance of marine fauna. It is not, then, scarcity that characterizes the Arctic environment but rather its seasonality. The resources available for human subsistence—which are primarily faunal rather than vegetable—tend to occur in great concentrations at particular times of year, rather than being widely dispersed and continuously available. These fluctuations naturally affect the settlement patterns and movements of human populations, as do the marked seasonal variations in the length of day and night and in the opportunities afforded by the landscape for transport and travel.

Adaptations to local environments

The three major environmental zones of forest, tundra, and coast, and the transitions between them, establish the range of conditions to which the ways of life of the circumpolar peoples are adapted. These conditions are strikingly uniform across both northern North America and Eurasia, and this uniformity is matched by remarkable similarities in cultural adaptation throughout the circumpolar region. Broadly speaking, it is possible to class these adaptations into four kinds. The first is entirely confined within the forest and is based on the exploitation of its fairly diverse resources of land animals, birds, and fish. Local groups tend to be small and widely scattered, each exploiting a range of territory around a fixed, central location. The second kind of adaptation spans the transition between forest and tundra. It is characterized by a heavy, year-round dependence on herds of reindeer or caribou, whose annual migrations from the forest to the tundra in spring and from the tundra back to the forest in autumn are matched by the lengthy nomadic movements of the associated human groups—whether these be of hunters (as in North America), who aim to intercept the herds on their migrations, or of pastoralists (as in Eurasia), who are in continuous association with them. The third kind of adaptation, most common among Inuit (Eskimo) groups, involves a seasonal movement in the reverse direction, between the hunting of sea mammals on the coast in winter and spring and the hunting of caribou and fishing on the inland tundra in summer and autumn. Fourth, typical of cultures of the northern Pacific coast is an exclusively maritime adaptation. People live year-round in relatively large, coastal settlements, hunting the rich resources of marine mammals from boats in summer and from the ice in winter.

Identification of Eastern and Western Arctic cultures

In northern North America the forest and forest-tundra modes of subsistence are practiced only by Indian peoples, while coastal and coastal-tundra adaptations are the exclusive preserve of the Inuit and of the Aleut of the northern Pacific islands. Indian cultures are thus essentially tied to the forest, whereas Inuit and Aleut cultures are entirely independent of the forest and tied rather to the coast. Conventionally, this contrast has been taken to mark the distinction between peoples of the subarctic and those of the Arctic. Thus in this article, of the indigenous peoples of northern North America, only the Inuit and Aleut are considered to be Arctic, whereas the Indian groups are dealt with separately in the article American subarctic people. A division of this kind, however, cannot be applied to the indigenous peoples of northern Eurasia. Apart from the Siberian Yupik (Eskimo), and perhaps some coastal Chukchi and Koryak inhabiting the northeastern tip of Siberia, there are no exclusively Arctic peoples in Eurasia. As among the Indians of the American subarctic, forest and forest-tundra adaptations predominate. For this reason, it has been necessary to treat the Eurasian Arctic and subarctic together as a single culture area. It should be noted, moreover, that the southern limits of this area are defined more by considerations of environmental adaptation than by culture per se. A number of Eurasian peoples are distributed over regions that span the transition between the taiga forest and the grassland steppe to the south. In such instances, only the forest-dwelling groups of these peoples will be considered here.

Apart from the absence of a cultural division corresponding to the environmental division between Arctic and subarctic, the north of the Old World is distinguished from that of the New in two major respects. The first lies in the domestication of the reindeer, the second in the history of settlement and European contact. The domestic reindeer is ubiquitous throughout Arctic and subarctic Eurasia (except the Pacific coast), whereas the North American caribou—which is virtually identical to the Eurasian wild reindeer—has never been domesticated. As a domestic animal, the reindeer is unusual both in that it has not been removed from its natural area of distribution and in its lack of deviation from the wild form. Originally employed within the hunting cultures of the forest, the eventual consequence of its adoption was the emergence among the peoples of the forest-tundra transition, from Lapland to the Bering Strait, of a unique form of pastoralism. It also led to the disappearance of the wild reindeer from most of this territory, since the wild animals lost out in the competition for pasture. In the absence of the domestic deer, an equivalent form of pastoralism never developed spontaneously on the American continent. Attempts were made, at the end of the 19th century, to introduce reindeer herding into Alaska, using imported deer and herdsmen, but they were notoriously unsuccessful.

As regards the history of settlement and contact, the most obvious difference is that the Russian exploration of Siberia was virtually complete at a time when the European exploration of northern North America had hardly begun. Although both movements of exploration were dominated by the fur trade and although it had very similar consequences for native communities on both continents, the former belongs to the earlier history of the trade, the latter to its later phases. In the European subarctic the contrast is even more striking, for there is a history of contact between its native people, the Sami (Lapps), and Finnish and Scandinavian settlers that dates back almost 2,000 years and that is part of indigenous cultural tradition. In the case of the Finns and the Sami, even the respective languages are closely related. This situation of continuous contact is a far cry from the encounter, in the North American Arctic, between Euro-Americans and Inuit, which brought together representatives of cultural worlds that, until that time, had had separate histories and had remained completely unaware of each other’s existence.

Relations with the encompassing nation-states

The eventual outcome of the history of contact on both continents, however, has been that indigenous groups have come into the knowledge not only of the world of their colonizers but also of one another. For the first time, for example, Sami people came to know of the existence of Inuit, and vice versa, and to realize that as the indigenous populations of their respective lands they share common problems, interests, and aspirations. This mutual awareness has been given political expression on an international level in the notion of the “Fourth World,” uniting all such indigenous minorities encompassed within the boundaries of modern nation-states. Though the notion is intended to be of global application, its force has been felt above all in relation to the peoples of the north, in northwestern Europe and North America, all of whom presently find themselves citizens of Western liberal democracies and both beneficiaries and victims of the institutions of welfare capitalism that have been developed in these countries since World War II.

This points to one of the major criteria of the modern world for dividing the indigenous peoples of the circumpolar region—namely, the artificially imposed geopolitical division between East and West. The Sami, as citizens of the Nordic countries, have been much more closely identified with their counterparts in North America than with the indigenous minorities of Siberia, for the recent history of the latter group was for decades shaped by its incorporation within the overall political and administrative framework of the U.S.S.R. Yet in both East and West the lands traditionally occupied by native groups have turned out to contain reserves of raw materials and energy vital to the industrial growth and prosperity of the encompassing states as well as to be of crucial significance for their strategic defense. This has brought money and jobs to the north, as well as the trappings of large-scale and advanced technology. But the jobs are largely filled, and the technology operated, not by native people but by a skilled immigrant workforce. Native people have become socially and economically marginalized in their own homelands.

It would be wrong, however, to conclude that the ways of life and livelihood of the indigenous peoples of the circumpolar north are bound to become things of the past, as natives abandon their “traditional” occupations of hunting, trapping, fishing, and herding and take to “modern” ways. Though it is true that northern native people have been quick to adopt certain elements of modern technology and consumer hardware, from snowmobiles to radios and televisions, this is because their use, alongside more traditional items, makes good practical sense in the context of everyday life. And, although the purchase of these and other items necessarily involves them to an increasing extent in the workings of a money economy, this involvement represents an attempt to sustain, rather than to abandon, a valued form of livelihood. People are not forced to make an all-or-nothing choice between the paths of tradition and modernity. Far from attesting to a state of transitional disorientation, as though suspended between two worlds and two times, such creative blends of the old and the new show that, for the peoples of the north, life is an ongoing concern. It is only because of the Western tendency to equate indigenous cultures with an exclusive adherence to tradition that they seem always to be on the point of disappearing.

Tim Ingold

Yet at the turn of the 21st century, more than the adoption of modern methods and machinery threatened the traditional cultures of Arctic peoples. As northern regions were increasingly explored for the presence of fossil fuels, the nomadic way of life itself began literally, as well as figuratively, to lose ground.

The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Peoples and cultures of the Eurasian Arctic and subarctic

Ethnic composition

In northern Eurasia there is no division corresponding to that in northern North America between the exclusively tundra- and coastal-dwelling Yupik, Aleut, and Inuit and the Indian groups that dwell partially or wholly within the taiga, or boreal forest. With the exception of the inhabitants of the coastal regions around the Bering Strait (Siberian Yupik and coastal Chukchi and Koryak), the indigenous peoples of northern Eurasia either inhabit the taiga year-round or migrate annually between the taiga margins and the tundra. In that respect they are more comparable to the peoples of the North American subarctic region than to those of the Arctic. Strictly speaking, the Eurasian Arctic region includes only those peoples whose lives and livelihood are principally confined to the tundra; however, for the purposes of this article, a number of other, forest-dwelling groups, which have conventionally fallen within the general rubric of “circumpolar peoples,” will be included. Inevitably, the criteria for inclusion within this category are somewhat arbitrary, but they include a traditional dependence on hunting, trapping, and fishing and/or the herding of reindeer (rather than other domestic livestock) and the absence or relative insignificance of agriculture.

In common with circumpolar peoples generally, those of northern Eurasia do not constitute clearly demarcated “tribes.” Ethnic and territorial boundaries, insofar as they are recognized at all, are ill-defined and fluid. Moreover, the enumeration of ethnic groups is further complicated by the many different names by which these groups may be known. Some names are broadly inclusive, designating populations of tens or even hundreds of thousands, whereas others apply to particular local groups of no more than a few hundred individuals. Some names are indigenous (self-designations); others are of foreign origin and have been applied by neighbouring peoples, conquering peoples, or anthropologists. In many cases, the indigenous designation is simply the term in the local language or dialect meaning “person” or “human being.” Bearing in mind these reservations, the following ethnic groups may be distinguished (with one or two exceptions, indigenous names are used throughout; where names of foreign origin have been in common ethnological use, these are placed in parentheses).

Peoples of Fennoscandia and northwestern Siberia

The Sami (Lapps) are the indigenous inhabitants of northern Fennoscandia. They were originally scattered throughout the forests of Finland, Karelia, and the Kola Peninsula and along the margins of the Scandinavian mountain chain, pursuing a livelihood based on hunting, trapping, and fishing. Reindeer were kept principally for transport. Among the Kola Sami and the so-called Skolt Sami of northeastern Finland, this way of life persisted until the end of the 19th century. In other areas, however, the expansion of Finnish and Scandinavian agricultural settlement led to the gradual contraction of the Sami homeland to the northernmost districts. Many Sami took up the life of their colonist neighbours, as small farmers and fishermen, but in the mountainous areas there developed in the 17th century a form of nomadic reindeer pastoralism, which is often taken to be the hallmark of Sami distinctiveness and ethnic identity.

The Komi-Zyryan inhabit the region between the Pechora and Vychegda rivers, to the west of the Ural Mountains; this area, roughly corresponding to Komi republic, enjoys a degree of autonomy within Russia. The Komi have long had contact with Russian settlers, and the majority are farmers and cattle keepers. In the northern part of their region, however, the Komi continue to practice reindeer herding and have traditionally enjoyed a reputation as traders.

The Nenets (Samoyed) form the largest of the indigenous groups of northwestern Siberia and are distributed over an area of taiga and tundra that extends from the White Sea in the west to the Yenisey River in the east. They were traditionally divided into the tundra Nenets, reindeer pastoralists who migrated with their herds between the tundra and taiga margins, and the much less numerous taiga, or forest, Nenets, with an economy based on hunting and fishing combined with small-scale and intensive reindeer husbandry. Closely related to the Nenets are the Nganasan (Tavgi Samoyed), inhabitants of the Taymyr Peninsula to the east of the Yenisey; and the Enets (Yenisey Samoyed), who occupy the basins of the Taz and Turukhan rivers and the lower reaches of the Yenisey. The Nganasan are notable for having preserved well into the 20th century a mode of livelihood focused on the hunting of wild reindeer, while they also kept herds of domestic deer for transport and for use in the chase. The Enets also traditionally combined wild reindeer hunting, domestic reindeer husbandry, and fishing.

The Khanty (Ostyak) and Mansi (Vogul) are closely related groups that inhabit the low-lying swamp and forest country around the Ob River and its tributaries. Their economy was traditionally based on hunting and fishing, but they adopted reindeer husbandry from the Nenets about the 15th century. The Selkup (Ostyak Samoyed), though related to the Nenets in language, were in their traditional economy very similar to their Khanty neighbours. They were hunters and fishermen living within the forested regions of the Ob basin. In the 17th century some Selkup migrated northward to the Taz and Turukhan rivers. Only this latter group, the so-called “northern Selkup,” kept domestic reindeer, which were used solely for transport. The Ket (Yenisey Ostyak) were once distributed throughout the Yenisey basin, but contact with Russians and other groups during the 18th and 19th centuries led to widespread assimilation, leaving only the most northerly group intact. Their traditional livelihood was based on hunting, fishing, and trapping for fur; only a minority kept small reindeer herds.

North-central and northeastern Siberian groups

East of the Yenisey, the dominant and most numerous ethnic group is that of the Sakha. They are distributed over a large area centred on the Lena River, roughly corresponding to Sakha republic (Yakutia), founded in 1922. Though the precise origins of the Sakha are obscure, their ancestors are believed to have been forced northward under pressure from Mongolic Buryats in the 13th and 14th centuries, either mixing with or displacing the indigenous populations along the Lena. The more southerly Sakha have retained an economy based on the husbandry of cattle and horses supplemented, only after contact with Russian settlers, with agriculture. Farther north, however, the Sakha adopted the hunting, fishing, and reindeer-herding economy of their neighbours. Like the Komi, they also had a reputation as traders.

The principal indigenous population of the mountainous taiga country stretching eastward from the Yenisey River as far as the Sea of Okhotsk are the Evenk (formerly called Tungus). Their territory is vast, including about a quarter of the whole area of Siberia. The southern Evenk, inhabiting the regions of Transbaikal and the upper Amur basin, are principally horse- and cattle-keeping pastoralists. A small number live a semisedentary life as fishermen and hunters of sea mammals on the Okhotsk coast. Otherwise, the forest-dwelling Evenk were traditionally reindeer-keeping hunters and trappers. Domestic reindeer were used primarily for transport and were both milked and ridden; however, unlike the Nenets and other western Siberian groups, the Evenk did not employ herding dogs. Closely related to the Evenk are the Dolgan and the Even (Lamut). The Dolgan inhabit the taiga and tundra south of the Taymyr Peninsula. Though of Evenk origin, they have adopted many of the reindeer hunting and herding practices of their northern neighbours, the Nganasan, and their language is a dialect of Sakha. The Even live interspersed with the Evenk over a wide area from the Lena River to the Sea of Okhotsk. They differ only in minor cultural detail from the Evenk and have often been included within the latter category. Most Even groups have, however, been heavily influenced by the Sakha or, farther east, by the Koryak.

The far northeastern region of Siberia is the home of the so-called Paleo-Siberian (Paleo-Asiatic, or Hyperborean) peoples, including the Chukchi, Koryak, Itelmen, and Yukaghir. The Chukchi inhabit the tundras and coasts of the Chukchi Peninsula and Anadyr Plateau, and the Koryak inhabit the Koryak plateau southward into the Kamchatka Peninsula. The Chukchi are ethnically homogeneous, the Koryak much less so—indeed, the Koryak lacked any term by which to designate their ethnic group as a whole (the term Koryak was applied by Russian settlers). In other respects, the Chukchi and Koryak are similar. Both are divided between inland groups practicing reindeer pastoralism (an economic form that developed among them in the 18th and 19th centuries) and coastal, sedentary groups with an economy of maritime hunting and fishing. The latter kept no reindeer and used only dogs for transport. Traditionally, inland and coastal groups were closely linked by regular trading partnerships.

The Itelmen are the indigenous inhabitants of Kamchatka. They were traditionally sedentary fishermen who made relatively little use of maritime and coastal resources. They also depended to an unusual extent, for a subarctic people, on the gathering of wild plant foods. Russian settlers began to arrive in Kamchatka in the 18th century and absorbed much of the indigenous population to form an ethnically mixed group known as the Kamchadal. By the end of the 19th century, most people of Itelmen ancestry were practicing a way of life indistinguishable from that of the settlers, which included horticulture and the husbandry of horses and cattle.

The Yukaghir have no general term for themselves—the designation, probably of Tungusic origin, was applied by Russian settlers who had borrowed the term from the Sakha. In earlier times, the Yukaghir inhabited a wide expanse of northeastern Siberia, living primarily as hunters and fishermen (they appear to have adopted reindeer husbandry not long ago from the Evenk). Their numbers have been severely depleted, however, especially during the 19th century, and only two groups (designated Kolyma Yukaghir and Tundra Yukaghir) have survived to recent times. The former group inhabits the forest margins between the Kolyma and Alazeya rivers, the latter the upper reaches of the Kolyma. A third group, known as the Chuvan, which occupied the Anadyr River basin, has been absorbed into the surrounding Chukchi.

Interspersed with Chukchi settlements along the Bering Sea coast and on Wrangel Island are communities of Siberian Yupik (Eskimo). Like the coastal Chukchi, to whom they are closely linked by history and tradition, they were primarily hunters of sea mammals: walrus, seals, and whales (though whale hunting declined sharply toward the end of the 19th century). A few hundred Aleut, who locally call themselves Unangan, live on Bering Island, one of the Komandor Islands off the coast of Kamchatka. Their ancestors had lived as maritime hunters on the islands of the Aleutian chain but were transported to the Komandor Islands in 1825–26 by the Russian-American Company in order to exploit the islands’ fur-bearing resources. The Aleut population of the islands has since become thoroughly mixed with other settlers of Russian, Komi, and Yupik descent.

Tim Ingold

Linguistic affiliations

The fluidity of settlement throughout Eurasia during prehistoric and historical times has left an extremely complex distribution of languages. Broadly speaking, however, the languages of the indigenous peoples of the Eurasian Arctic and subarctic can be grouped into four classes: Uralic, Manchu-Tungus, Turkic, and Paleo-Siberian.

The Uralic family of languages is split into two main branches, Finno-Ugric and Samoyedic. Finno-Ugric languages are spoken by the Sami, Komi, Khanty, and Mansi. The Sami languages, which are mutually unintelligible, are sometimes considered dialects of one language. Although they share many features with Finnish, Estonian, Karelian, and the other languages of the Baltic-Finnic subgroup, they are not closely related to any of these. Komi-Zyryan and Permyak (Komi-Permyak) are assigned to the Permic division, to which also belongs the language of the Udmurt (Votyak). The languages of the Khanty and Mansi, of which there are several distinct dialectal variants, are assigned to the Ugric division. This division also includes the Hungarian language, although its relationship to Khanty and Mansi is fairly distant.

The Samoyedic languages are divided into North Samoyedic and South Samoyedic. The North Samoyedic languages are spoken by the Nenets, Enets, and Nganasan, although the Nenets’ language has been much influenced by contact with the Komi. The South Samoyedic division is represented by the Selkup language and by the practically extinct Kamas language. The Kamas inhabit the Sayan uplands of south-central Siberia, which many scholars believe may have been the ancestral homeland of the Samoyedic-speaking peoples of today.

East of the Yenisey River, languages of the Tungusic type predominate. These languages, each with several dialect divisions, are spoken by the Evenk and the Even. They represent the northern branch of the so-called Manchu-Tungus language group. Languages of this group share a common agglutinative structure with the Mongolian languages (which include Mongol, Oirat, Buryat, Kalmyk, and several outlying languages) and the Turkic languages, which are widely spoken by the peoples of southwestern Siberia. The Turkic, Mongolian, and Manchu-Tungus language families together compose the Altaic family. In the Siberian north, languages of the Turkic type are represented only by the Sakha and by surrounding peoples such as the Dolgan who—though of Tungusic origin—have adopted the Sakha (Yakut) language. Apart from slight regional differences, there are no distinct Sakha dialects, and this linguistic homogeneity, together with the affinity of Sakha with other eastern Turkic languages such as those of the Shors and the Tuvans, supports the theory of a relatively recent incursion of the Sakha into northern Siberia.

The languages currently classified as Paleo-Siberian are thought to be the remnants of languages once spoken much more widely among the indigenous populations of the Siberian north, prior to the spread of the Samoyedic languages from the Sayan Mountains in the west and the Tungusic languages from Transbaikal in the east. In northeastern Siberia, Paleo-Siberian languages are spoken by the Chukchi, Koryak, and Itelmen, as well as by the Nivkh (Gilyak) of the lower Amur basin and Sakhalin Island. The Yukaghir language, which has a probable relationship to Early Uralic, is often grouped with the Paleo-Siberian languages. The languages of the Chukchi and Koryak are so closely related as to be mutually intelligible, both belonging to the Luorawetlan language family, as do the Itelmen languages. Extensive contact and borrowing between the Koryak and Itelmen has reduced the divergence between them. The Yukaghir language has survived into recent times as two distinct and mutually unintelligible dialects, and only a few hundred speakers remain. However, prior to the spread of Tungusic—and subsequently Sakha—influence, it may have been spoken over a wide area of northeastern Siberia. The Ket languages of western Siberia remain an enigma, since they appear to bear no relation to those of any surrounding peoples. They may be the only Paleo-Siberian languages to have survived in this region.

The languages of the Yupik, Inuit, and Aleut belong to the Eskimo-Aleut language family. Two mutually intelligible dialects of Aleut survive in Alaska and on several islands of Russia. The Eskimo languages fall into two divisions: Inuit, consisting of an interconnected series of dialects spoken across the New World Arctic from North Alaska to Greenland, and Yupik, which includes several Yupik languages spoken on both sides of the Bering Strait.


The indigenous peoples of northern Eurasia are everywhere outnumbered by immigrant populations—Norwegians, Swedes, and Finns in Lapland and Russians and other exogenous ethnic groups in Siberia. It is estimated that, in Siberia, the ratio of immigrants to native people was reversed from a minority of one to four to a majority of four to one within the period 1926–59. In Lapland the transition of the Sami from being a majority to a minority in their own homeland has taken place over a longer period but is no less marked. On account of the admixture of indigenous and immigrant peoples and the steady pressure of linguistic assimilation, there can be no accurate and objective measures of indigenous population numbers. Estimates of the total Sami numbers, for example, range from 35,000 to 60,000, depending on the criteria of inclusion. The figures published by the Swedish Saami Association in 1987, however, gave the number of Sami in Norway as 17,000, in Sweden as 8,500, and in Finland as 4,000. Adding a further 2,000 in Russia gives an estimated Sami population at that time in all four nations of 31,500.

Listed in the table are population numbers for indigenous peoples of northern Russia and much of Siberia, derived from the censuses of 1926, 1959, 1970, 1979, and 1989. These figures too, especially the earlier ones, must be treated with some caution; nevertheless, they give some idea of the relative sizes of these populations and the changes they underwent in the 20th century.

Indigenous peoples of Russia
*The 1926 census mistakenly included about 5,000 Even within the category of Evenk. Adjusted figures are shown in parentheses.
Data for 1926, 1959, 1970, and 1979 from Ronald Wixman, The Peoples of the U.S.S.R.: An Ethnographic Handbook, copyright © 1984; M.E. Sharpe, Inc., all rights reserved, used by permission of the publisher; and Terrence Armstrong, George Rogers, and Graham Rowley, The Circumpolar North, copyright © 1978, used by permission of Methuen and Company. Data for 1989 taken from Rossiysky Statistichesky Yezhegodnik (1995; "Russian Statistical Yearbook").
population (in thousands)
ethnic group 1926 1959 1970 1979 1989
Sami 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.9 1.8
Komi 226 287 322 327 336
Nenets 15 23 29 30 34
Nganasan 0.9 0.7 1 0.9 1.3
Enets 0.4 n/a n/a n/a 0.2
Khanty 18 19 21 21 22
Mansi 5.8 6.5 7.7 7.6 8.3
Selkup 1.6 3.8 4.3 3.6 3.6
Ket 1.4 1.0 1.2 1.1 1.1
Yakut 241 233 296 328 380
Evenk 39 (34)* 24 25 28 30
Dolgan 1.4 3.9 4.9 5.1 6.6
Even 2 (7)* 9.1 12 12 17
Chukchi 12 12 14 14 15
Koryak 7.4 6.3 7.5 7.9 8.9
Itelmen 4.2 1.1 1.3 1.3 2.4
Yukaghir 0.4 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.1
Yupik 1.3 1.1 1.3 1.5 1.7
Aleut 0.4 0.4 0.4 0.5 0.6
Total 579.9 634.1 751.1 792.2 871.6

The Komi and the Sakha stand out by a large margin as the two most numerous indigenous groups in the Eurasian Arctic and subarctic. At the other end of the spectrum, small populations such as those of the Enets, Ket, and Yukaghir are highly vulnerable to absorption by surrounding peoples, as well as to the effects of epidemics, although their resistance to disease was greater than among the indigenous peoples of the New World when exposed to European contact. Thus the Enets, who have all but disappeared, were some 3,000 strong at the beginning of the 17th century, but most were subsequently absorbed by the Nenets, Selkup, and Dolgan. Likewise, the Yukaghir numbered about 5,000 in the 1750s but were gradually reduced in number to a mere 443 in 1926. Smallpox, measles, and syphilis were largely responsible for the decline, as were wars with the Chukchi and economic destitution brought on by involvement in the fur trade, the introduction of firearms, and the resulting depletion of wild animal resources.

Indigenous numbers in the Eurasian north are continuing to increase but at a rate much slower than in northern North America. Between 1959 and 1970 the average increase was about 15 percent, compared with the 40 percent increase over the same period in the Inuit population of Canada. The reasons for this contrast are not clear, but it may be due to higher rates of assimilation among indigenous peoples in Russia.

Tim Ingold The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

History of settlement

The human occupation of Arctic and subarctic Eurasia dates to the last phase of the Upper Paleolithic Period. At that time much of northern Siberia consisted of arid steppe-tundra, an environment favourable to herds of large grazing animals, such as the now-extinct mammoth and woolly rhinoceros as well as the reindeer. The earliest settlers were specialized hunters of these rich game resources, and their descendants, having spread as far as the northeastern tip of Siberia, became the first humans to cross into North America, perhaps about 13,000 years ago. (Some investigators, however, hold that modern humans had migrated as far as present-day Alaska by 30,000 years ago.) Several further waves of migration followed, in both directions. A general climatic warming about 11,700 years ago, marking the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene Epoch, led to the expansion of the taiga, or boreal forest, which was flanked to the north by a narrow strip of swampy tundra. Within the taiga zone, hunting cultures developed with an emphasis on small game procurement and fishing, whereas, around the northeastern coasts, warm sea currents favoured the exploitation of marine mammals.

Meanwhile, agricultural economies involving the use of domestic animals were expanding from their centres of origin into Southwest and Central Asia. It was this expansion that eventually led to the domestication of the horse and, in the 1st millennium bc, to the rise of mobile, equestrian pastoralism in the Central Asian steppes. Moving north into the Siberian taiga, these pastoralists were probably the first to domesticate the reindeer. They were the ancestors of the present Samoyedic- and Tungusic-speaking peoples. With their gradual dispersion northward, local hunting and fishing cultures were progressively absorbed. This process of absorption was still apparent in recent times in the spread of Evenk and Even pastoralism into Yukaghir country, though it was somewhat overtaken by the subsequent northward expansion of the Sakha. Where the domestic reindeer appeared on the northern margin of the taiga, as among the tundra Nenets and Chukchi, it eventually led to the emergence of full-blown pastoralism. The same occurred in Lapland, though the initial domestication of the reindeer by the Sami also owed something to the influence of Finnish and Scandinavian peasants.

West of the Ural Mountains, contacts between European settlers and indigenous hunters and fishermen date back more than 1,000 years. Throughout the Middle Ages, trading and raiding forays were made into Sami country—later in the name of the Danish, Swedish, and Russian crowns—to tap the rich reserves of furs and foodstuffs. From roughly the 16th century, this commercial penetration was followed by a concerted movement of agricultural colonization, as rival kingdoms competed for control over the territory of Lapland. Some Sami found themselves obliged to pay taxes to representatives of three different states. Farther east, Russian merchant seafarers had colonized the White Sea coasts by the 9th century, and by the 11th century they had reached the mouth of the Ob River. A parallel movement overland, initially out of Novgorod, was given added impetus by the demand for fur. Cossacks and fur traders had penetrated the region east of the Urals by the 16th century and proceeded to advance across the entire breadth of Siberia, from the Urals to the Pacific coast, in the space of 60 years, 1580–1640. Kamchatka was annexed in 1697. In what is now the Chukchi region of the Russian Far East, however, the Russians encountered fierce resistance: in 1789 the Chukchi were the last indigenous group to be subjugated. Having established its presence across Siberia, Russia could maintain control without much difficulty, despite the vast expanse of territory and sparse immigrant population, for it did not have to contend with any competing external threat.

During the 20th century the human settlement of Arctic and subarctic Eurasia has been completely transformed. The development of industrial fishing, forestry, mining, oil and natural gas exploration, and military installations, along with the necessary transport, communication, and administrative infrastructure, has required the introduction of a large immigrant population. In Siberia many of these immigrants were originally brought in under constraint from other parts of the former Soviet Union, but they or their descendants have since remained. These nonnative groups form a predominantly urban population, inhabiting the new towns around industrial centres. The indigenous populations, by contrast, continue to live primarily in the rural areas.

Traditional culture

With the exception of the Pacific coast, the Eurasian Arctic and subarctic correspond fairly precisely with the distribution of the reindeer. More than any other factor, the reindeer and its domestication lend some cultural unity to the region as a whole, as well as distinguish the region from the North American Arctic and subarctic, where the reindeer (or caribou) remains wild.

The two types of reindeer husbandry are defined by the two predominant ecosystems, the taiga and the tundra. The open terrain of the tundra permits the supervision of large herds, and these generally migrate with their herdsmen between winter pastures within the margins of the taiga and summer pastures out on the tundra. Such pastoralism therefore entails fairly extended nomadic movements, sometimes across hundreds of miles. Peoples that practice this form of husbandry include the mountain Sami and tundra Nenets in the west and the inland Chukchi and Koryak in the east. The Sami and Nenets, however, use herding dogs, whereas the eastern groups do not. Techniques of herding that involve the use of drift nets and surrounds are clearly derived from the pre-pastoral hunting of wild reindeer (still practiced in the 20th century by the Nganasan). A few trained animals are kept for transport purposes, the reindeer being harnessed to the sledge in place of the dog. But the majority of animals are kept for their meat, fat, and hides and are scarcely tame.

The taiga form of reindeer husbandry occurs on a much smaller scale, since it is impossible to supervise large herds in a forest environment. The reindeer themselves are of a larger stature and can be ridden and used as pack animals. Indeed, their primary use is for transport in an economy that is otherwise based on hunting, trapping, and fishing. The animals are therefore much more tame and are slaughtered only in case of emergency. With such a form of husbandry, the pattern of movement tends to be seminomadic. Peoples practicing this form include the forest and Skolt Sami, forest Nenets, Selkup, Ket, Evenk, and Even.

The cultures of the North Pacific coast, on both the Asian and the American sides, have a quite different economic basis. Among the coastal Asian peoples the reindeer plays no part, although reindeer products may be obtained in trade from inland peoples. Maritime hunting and fishing support relatively large, sedentary settlements, and the only domestic animals are dogs, which are harnessed in teams to pull sledges. Siberian peoples with this kind of coastal economy include the coastal Chukchi and Koryak, the Yupik, and some Evenk and Even communities on the Okhotsk coast.

Other features of traditional cultural adaptation, such as housing and clothing, can be linked to this tripartite division between taiga, tundra, and coast. Winter dwellings in the taiga were often semi-subterranean. They were lined with timber, with walls and roof also of timber, and were often insulated with earthen sods. At temporary hunting and fishing sites, occupied in the summer months, taiga dwellers would build pyramidal or conical tents covered with birch bark (in western regions) or larch bark (in the east). The nomadic herders of the tundra lived year-round in conical tents covered with reindeer hide. Because tent poles and covers had to be carried during migrations, the size of the tent was constrained by the number of draft reindeer at a household’s disposal. Thus the tents of wealthy reindeer owners could be large and numerous, whereas poorer peoples had to be content with more meagre dwellings. In northeastern Siberia, among the reindeer-keeping Chukchi, Koryak, Yukaghir, and Even, a different type of tent was in use. This had a low, circular (but vertical) wall capped by a gently sloping, conical roof section. The covering of reindeer skin or larch bark was stretched over a frame of wooden poles. In former times, the coastal Chukchi and Yupik lived in semi-subterranean dwellings roofed with a structure made of the jaw and rib bones of the whale and covered with earthen sods. More recently, they have lived in tents similar to those of the inland peoples, except that they may be covered with walrus hide rather than reindeer skin. The permanent dwellings of the coastal Koryak and the Itelmen are remarkable semi-subterranean structures octagonal in plan, lined with timber, and with a side entrance along a corridor for summer use and an entrance through the centre of the roof for use in winter.

Throughout the Eurasian Arctic and subarctic, the main items of clothing were made from hides and furs. The forest-dwelling peoples drew on a wide range of fur-bearing species, whereas the clothes of the tundra dwellers were made almost exclusively from reindeer hide. On the northern Pacific coast, clothes were made both from sealskin and from reindeer hide obtained in trade from the inland herding people.

Information on kinship patterns and social organization among the peoples of the Eurasian Arctic and subarctic is rather patchy. Sami kinship has been well studied and has been shown to have a bilateral structure in which equal significance is attached to relationships on both maternal and paternal sides. Local communities or camps tend to take the form of a bilateral kindred centred on a group of siblings and their spouses. This kind of community organization appears to be widespread across the Eurasian north from Lapland to the Bering Strait, and the flexibility it affords for residential affiliation holds clear adaptive advantages in an uncertain environment. Nevertheless, ethnographers have claimed to detect vestiges of patrilineal clan organization among such peoples as the Nenets, Khanty, Mansi, Nganasan, Evenk, Even, and Sakha. The origins of the clan system may lie with the pastoral peoples of the southern Siberian steppes, but with the transition to taiga and tundra environments the significance of clans appears to fade out. With the significant exception of the Sakha, all northern Eurasian peoples are politically egalitarian, and, despite individual differences in wealth and influence, there are no formal chiefly offices or institutionalized hierarchies. As for Arctic and subarctic peoples generally, a strong emphasis is placed on the value of personal autonomy.

Traditional religious belief and practice throughout the Eurasian north was shamanistic in form (indeed, the term “shaman” is of Evenk derivation). According to the shamanistic worldview, the cosmos is divided into many layers, and the shaman, who is helped or hindered by various spirits, is thought to be able to travel in trance between them and, in so doing, to achieve an integration that is essential both to the health of individuals and to the well-being of the community. The animal counterpart of the human shaman was the bear, which throughout northern Eurasia has been the object of a special cult. The various species of wild animals were believed to be controlled by spirit masters or guardians, which would “give” animals to hunters who treated them with proper respect. Domestic reindeer (and dogs, on the Pacific coast) were vehicles of propitiatory sacrifice.

The Skolt Sami were among the first of the indigenous peoples of the north to be converted to Christianity, which was brought by the legendary Orthodox saint Trifon in 1532. Subsequently, from the 17th century, the Sami living farther to the west were subjected to Lutheran missionary influence, and their shamanistic beliefs and practices were violently eradicated. In Siberia the Eastern Orthodox church spread eastward along with Russian settlement, but Eastern Orthodoxy often secured only nominal adherence among native populations, who continued to practice their traditional religion. In the 20th century, shamanistic practices had been more rigorously suppressed but were showing signs of revival.

In modern times, the Sami of Norway, Sweden, and Finland have fared very differently from the indigenous peoples of Russia. Although the aspirations of the Sami toward nationhood have been frustrated by their citizenship of three different states (or four, including Russia), vigorous ethnopolitical organizations have been established which have fought effectively to reverse the stigma that once was attached to Sami identity, to secure respect for their language and cultural traditions, and to assert their rights—on the basis of prior occupancy—to land and water. Materially, the Sami can enjoy the benefits, in terms of raised living standards, of their citizenship of relatively affluent welfare states; however, the Chernobyl nuclear accident of 1986, which spread radioactive material over much of northwestern Lapland, dealt a blow from which the reindeer economy may be slow to recover.

Prior to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, many of the minority peoples of the northern U.S.S.R. were given formal recognition in its administrative structure. Post-Soviet Russia retains to a large degree the recognition and rights to limited autonomy of certain minorities, including the Komi, Sakha, Nenets, Khanty, Mansi, Evenk, Chukchi, and Koryak. During the Soviet era, however, all political and economic direction came from the centre. Reindeer husbandry, hunting, fishing, and trapping were all reorganized on the principles of collectivization.

The growth of mining and of oil and gas exploration in Russia has caused grave problems of environmental pollution, posing a major threat to the livelihood of indigenous peoples. Since the late 1980s, however, with the advent of the policy of perestroika (“restructuring”) and the breakup of the Soviet Union itself, these peoples are finding a new voice with which to express their concerns and ethnic aspirations, in solidarity with other peoples of the so-called Fourth World.

Tim Ingold

Peoples and cultures of the American Arctic

the Eskimo (Inuit and Yupik/Yupiit) and Aleuts of the treeless shores and tundra-covered coastal hinterlands of northernmost North America and Greenland. Because of their close social, genetic, and linguistic relations to Yupik speakers in Alaska, the Yupik-speaking peoples living near the Bering Sea in Siberia are sometimes discussed with these groups. Scholarly custom separates the American Arctic peoples from other American Indians, from whom they are distinguished by various linguistic, physiological, and cultural differences.

Linguistic composition

Various outside relationships for the Eskimo-Aleut language stock have been suggested, but in the absence of conclusive evidence the stock must be considered to be isolated. Internally, it falls into two related divisions, Eskimo and Aleut.

The Eskimo division is further subdivided into Inuit and Yupik. Inuit, or Eastern Eskimo (in Greenland called Greenlandic or Kalaaleq; in Canada, Inuktitut; in Alaska, Inupiaq), is a single language formed of a series of intergrading dialects that extend thousands of miles, from eastern Greenland to northern Alaska and around the Seward Peninsula to Norton Sound; there it adjoins Yupik, or Western Eskimo. The Yupik section, on the other hand, consists of five separate languages that were not mutually intelligible. Three of these are Siberian: Sirenikski is now virtually extinct, Naukanski is restricted to the easternmost Chukchi Peninsula, and Chaplinski is spoken on Alaska’s St. Lawrence Island, on the southern end of the Chukchi Peninsula, and near the mouth of the Anadyr River in the south and on Wrangel Island in the north. In Alaska, Central Alaskan Yupik includes dialects that covered the Bering Sea coast from Norton Sound to the Alaska Peninsula, where it met Pacific Yupik (known also as Sugpiaq or Alutiiq). Pacific Yupik comprises three dialects: that of the Kodiak Island group, that of the south shore of the Kenai Peninsula, and that of Prince William Sound.

Aleut now includes only a single language of two dialects, but, before the disruption that followed the 18th-century arrival of Russian fur hunters, it included several dialects, if not separate languages, spoken from about longitude 158° W on the Alaska Peninsula, throughout the Aleutian Islands, and westward to Attu, the westernmost island of the Aleutian chain. The Russians transplanted some Aleuts to formerly unoccupied islands of the Commander group, west of the Aleutians, and to those of the Pribilofs, in the Bering Sea. (See also North American Indian languages.)

Ethnic groups

In general, American Eskimo peoples did not organize their societies into units such as clans or tribes. Identification of group membership was traditionally made by place of residence, with the suffix -miut (“people of”) applied in a nesting set of labels to persons of any specifiable place—from the home of a family or two to a broad region with many residents. Among the largest of the customary -miut designators are those coinciding at least roughly with the limits of a dialect or subdialect, the speakers of which tended to seek spouses from within that group; such groups might range in size from 200 to as many as 1,000 people.

Historically, each individual’s identity was defined on the basis of connections such as kinship and marriage in addition to place and language. All of these continued to be important to Arctic self-identity in the 20th and 21st centuries, although native peoples in the region have also formed large—and in some cases pan-Arctic—organizations in order to facilitate their representation in legal and political affairs.

Ethnographies, historical accounts, and documents from before the late 20th century typically used geographic nomenclature to refer to groups that shared similar dialects, customs, and material cultures. For instance, in reference to groups residing on the North Atlantic and Arctic coasts, these texts might discuss the East Greenland Eskimo, West Greenland Eskimo, and Polar Eskimo, although only the last territorial division corresponded to a single self-contained, in-marrying (endogamous) group. The peoples of Canada’s North Atlantic and eastern Hudson Bay were referred to as the Labrador Eskimo and the Eskimo of Quebec; these were often described as whole units, although each comprises a number of separate societies. The Baffinland Eskimo were often included in the Central Eskimo, a grouping that otherwise included the Caribou Eskimo of the barrens west of Hudson Bay and the Iglulik, Netsilik, Copper, and Mackenzie Eskimo, all of whom live on or near the Arctic Ocean in northern Canada. The Mackenzie Eskimo, however, are also set apart from other Canadians as speakers of the western, or Inupiaq, dialect of the Inuit (Eastern Eskimo) language. Descriptions of these Alaskan Arctic peoples have tended to be along linguistic rather than geographic lines and include the Inupiaq-speaking Inupiat, who live on or near the Arctic Ocean and as far south as the Bering Strait. All of the groups noted thus far reside near open water that freezes solid in winter, speak dialects of the Inuit language, and are commonly referred to in aggregate as Inuit (meaning “the people”).

The other American Arctic groups live farther south, where open water is less likely to freeze solid for greatly extended periods (see sea ice). The Bering Sea Eskimo and St. Lawrence Island Eskimo live around the Bering Sea, where resources include migrating sea mammals and, in the mainland rivers, seasonal runs of salmon and other fish. The Pacific Eskimo, on the other hand, live on the shores of the North Pacific itself, around Kodiak Island and Prince William Sound, where the Alaska Current prevents open water from freezing at all. Each of these three groups speaks a distinct form of Yupik; together they are commonly referred to as Yupik Eskimo or as Yupiit (“the people”).

In the Gulf of Alaska, ethnic distinctions were blurred by Russian colonizers who used the term Aleut to refer not only to people of the Aleutian Islands but also to the culturally distinct groups residing on Kodiak Island and the neighbouring areas of the mainland. As a result, many modern native people from Kodiak, the Alaska Peninsula, and Prince William Sound identify themselves as Aleuts, although only those from the tip of the peninsula and the Aleutian Islands are descended from people who spoke what linguists refer to as the Aleut language; these latter refer to themselves as Unangan (“people”). The groups from Kodiak Island and the neighbouring areas traditionally spoke the form of Yupik called Pacific Yupik, Sugpiaq, or Alutiiq and refer to themselves as Alutiiq (singular) or Alutiit (plural).

History of settlement

In northernmost North America, only mainland Alaska and a small northwestern corner of Canada remained largely unglaciated during the latest ice age of the Pleistocene (about 2,600,000 to 11,700 years ago); these areas were joined to northeastern Asia—also largely without ice—across land exposed by low sea levels at what is now the Bering Strait. To the east and south, the way into the North American continent was blocked with ice and unnegotiable terrain from about 25,000 to 11,000 bc.

The earliest residents of the American Arctic are known from this area of ice-free Alaska and northwest Canada; they arrived as early as perhaps 12,000 bc and can be referred to as members of the Paleo-Arctic cultural tradition. They made cutting implements in a style common to northeast Asia that was characterized by slender flakes struck from specially prepared stone cores—flakes referred to by archaeologists as “blades,” many of them small (less than 5 cm [2 in] in length) and classed as “microblades.” Some of these blades were apparently set into the edges of bone or antler batons, thus forming knives or projectile heads. With the latter, the Paleo-Arctic people hunted terrestrial animals; caribou appear to have been their preferred food, although they also hunted elk, forms of bison now extinct (e.g., Bison antiquus), and perhaps mammoths. Blade and microblade tools had appeared earlier on the Asian side of the North Pacific, notably in Siberia and in portions of the Japanese islands; evidence from those regions also suggests a reliance on terrestrial, rather than coastal, resources.

In approximately 11,000 bc, as the thawing of the ice caps began to open access to the rest of North America and to flood the land bridge to Asia, a change occurred in sites in north Alaska: the production of microblades decreased, while small projectile points or knife blades of stone, more fully shaped by chipping than were the microblades, appeared. Some archaeologists have attempted without appreciable success to find the beginning of this change in northeast Siberia. Others have suggested that it represents a development within the early Paleo-Arctic tradition itself or that it is in fact a reflection of people already in the American heartland to the southeast, although the time and manner of their arrival there remains unknown at this time. In any event, by 10,000 bc there was a resurgence of the microblade-producing sites of the Paleo-Arctic tradition; in northern Alaska at the same time there also appeared stone spear points that bear a striking resemblance to the artifacts known from the same period in other parts of North America.

Like its southern counterparts, this material culture and its makers are referred to as Paleo-Indian. Most archaeologists presume the Arctic Paleo-Indians were a new influx of people who moved north from regions to the southeast, probably following (and hunting) herds of bison and other animals as they expanded into the areas where the ice had retreated (see Native American: Prehistory). That they were in some way descended from people present in Alaska in that earlier interval when microblades were uncommon seems possible but is yet to be demonstrated. The sites used by the Paleo-Arctic (microblade) and Paleo-Indian (spear-point) cultures are in somewhat different areas, and so these groups are thought to have been distinct peoples.

By at least 8000 bc the presence of Paleo-Arctic people can be recognized on the Alaska Peninsula in southern mainland Alaska. At almost exactly the same moment, their characteristic microblade tools appear in a few sites on the coast in southeastern Alaska and British Columbia, suggesting a movement of Paleo-Arctic descendants south. When microblades appear on the central coast of British Columbia, they are found at sites that include distinctively different artifacts; this seems to indicate that the Paleo-Arctic people met with others who were already living in the area. Although food remains from this period are seldom preserved, evidence indicates that the transition from a terrestrial subsistence economy to one based on oceanside resources was complete within a millennium.

Beginning about 7000 bc, sites with blades and microblades appear in the eastern Aleutian Islands. Although food remains are lacking in these sites, it is clear that the occupants lived on ocean resources, as there are no other resources present in any significant quantity. Notably, all of these Paleo-Arctic-related appearances on the coast (of both islands and mainland) occur south of the regions in which coastlines freeze fast during the winter.

The end of the Paleo-Arctic tradition occurred about 5500 bc. Certainly by 5000 bc the signs of remnant Paleo-Arctic-related people had been eclipsed both in the interior and on the southern coast. In the interior, new styles of artifacts constitute the Northern Archaic tradition (see also Archaic culture). In general, Northern Archaic sites are located within what were the expanding northern forests; although some Northern Archaic people left traces outside the forest limits, they generally avoided the coasts. Their artifacts include fairly large chipped-stone points with stems or notches near the points’ base (stemming and notching both facilitate hafting a point to its shaft). Northern Archaic food resources were terrestrial. If the sequence of major tool types in the American Arctic is analogous to that represented to the south, this tradition may have developed from the earlier Paleo-Indian culture of the north, although direct evidence for this has thus far not been presented.

By 5000 bc, changes are also seen at sites along parts of the northernmost Pacific coast, including the eastern Aleutians, where the sea remains open in winter. These sites are characterized by new kinds of artifacts, notably large stone projectile points, stone basins for burning sea-mammal oil, and harpoon heads of bone. When combined with evidence from food remains, these materials clearly indicate that local residents relied heavily upon marine mammals, including those that required the use of boats well offshore. Scholars have not reached consensus on a name for the people represented by this new material culture, but some have referred to them as members of the Ocean Bay tradition.

Up to about 4000 bc this tradition was common to the residents of the Kodiak region and the Aleutian Islands; shortly thereafter, however, these two groups began to develop in different directions. People in the Aleutians carried aspects of Ocean Bay technology with them as they moved farther and farther west through the chain of islands, arriving at the most distant islands, Agattu and Attu, not later than about 600 bc. On the Pacific coast around Kodiak, on the other hand, the people began to fashion stone artifacts by grinding, a technology that persisted throughout later millennia and was markedly different from that used in the Aleutians.

The first residents of the winter-freezing coasts of the north appeared only after 3000 bc, when people of the Arctic Small Tool tradition began to replace any Northern Archaic people who were exploiting the largely treeless lands immediately inland from the coasts. Predominantly terrestrial in subsistence orientation—hunting especially caribou and musk ox and taking river and lake fish—the people of the Arctic Small Tool tradition also exploited coastal resources on a seasonal basis. These people are thought to have been new immigrants from Neolithic northeast Asia, as their material culture is characterized by diminutive stone artifacts similar to those found in that region, albeit without the pottery that is usually found on Asian sites.

Although leaving evidence of neither sleds nor boats, by 2500 bc the descendants of the Small Tool people had exploded across the Arctic Archipelago of Canada to northernmost Greenland, in some areas turning more and more to coastal resources. At about the same time, they also expanded within Alaska south to the Alaska Peninsula, where their southern limit coincided with that of heavy winter coastal drift ice and intruded in some limited areas to the North Pacific itself near Cook Inlet. Within a few centuries they moved also into the tundra-covered Barren Grounds west of Hudson Bay, displacing earlier peoples who had exploited Barren Grounds caribou. Along the northeastern coast of the continent, they penetrated southward as far as the Gulf of St. Lawrence, again to the southern edge of heavy winter sea ice.

In northern Canada and Greenland the Small Tool folk gradually developed into those of the Dorset culture, who by 800 bc had created techniques for hunting seals through their breathing holes in winter sea ice and developed substantial dwellings of sod and rocks that they heated with lamps of sea-mammal oil. In some areas the Dorset culture is thought to have persisted until about ad 1300.

In Alaska the material culture of the Small Tool people was replaced by that of the Norton culture in approximately 500 bc. These people made pottery similar to that found in contemporary Siberia, and their substantial villages of semisubterranean houses appeared along the coast from the Bering Sea to the Beaufort Sea, near the present northern border of Alaska with Canada. Norton people hunted sea mammals in open water—some of their harpoons were large enough for whaling—as well as interior animals, including caribou; they also took lake and river fish. On much of the Alaska mainland, people of the Norton tradition endured until the end of the 1st millennium ad, a period when other major developments were taking place in the islands and on the Asian coast near the Bering Strait.

In the area around the strait, an increasing ability to hunt in the open sea led to the development of the Northern Maritime, or Thule, cultural tradition. In this area the tradition is recognizable by ad 200 and in some cases perhaps a century or two earlier; it is characterized by ground slate tools, ivory harpoon heads (often decoratively engraved), lamps made of clay or mud, and a heavy reliance on sea mammals. By c. ad 700 the ancestral Thule people (or their culture) had expanded into Alaska north of the Bering Strait, where by ad 900–1000 the mature Thule culture, or Thule proper, appeared.

Thule culture proved to be the most adaptable of the Arctic, expanding rapidly to the coasts of Alaska, the eastern Chukchi Peninsula of Asia, and up the rivers of the Alaska mainland; this culture’s use of the large open skin boat, or umiak, for walrus and whale hunting, the kayak for sealing, and the dogsled for winter land transportation enabled the people to increase their subsistence options and geographic range. After ad 1000, perhaps moving in pursuit of whales (whose locations were shifting due to changing ice conditions), they moved rapidly across northernmost Canada to Greenland. In these areas, they established new settlements of stone and sod houses at key locations while also displacing or absorbing the thinly scattered Dorset descendants of the Small Tool people. The Canadian Thule culture carried the Inuit language to Greenland, while Thule-related groups in Alaska spread forms of the closely related Yupik language around the Bering Sea coast and to the North Pacific.

For the next few centuries a warming climate reduced the formation of winter pack ice. Most Arctic communities relied on excursions inland for caribou, river and lake fish, and other resources during the short summer months; some people also pursued whales during those animals’ migrations; and all of them made use of resources such as nonmigratory seals in both summer and winter. After about ad 1400, a period of increasing cold caused the peoples of northern Canada to give up permanent winter settlements, shifting instead to a nomadic seasonal round. This typically included warm-weather caribou hunting and river fishing, activities during which people lived in tents, and cold-weather seal hunting through the sea ice (at the animals’ breathing holes), undertaken while people resided in snow houses—essentially the way of life that many people now think of as characteristic of all traditional Eskimo peoples. Because the climate shift was less extreme in areas closer to the coasts of the Pacific (including the Bering Sea) and Atlantic oceans, communities in those areas perpetuated the stable oceanside life established in the Thule period, building permanent dwellings of sod, logs, and stones; they rarely used snow houses except during winter travel, and they hunted through the sea ice chiefly in times of winter famine when stores of other foods had been exhausted.

Traditional culture

The traditional cultures of this region are generally discussed in terms of two broad divisions: seasonally migratory peoples living on or near winter-frozen coastlines (the northern Yupiit and the Inuit) and more-sedentary groups living on or near the open-water regions of the Pacific coast (the southern Yupiit and Aleuts).

Seasonally migratory peoples: the northern Yupiit and the Inuit

The seasonally organized economy of these peoples derived from that of their Thule ancestors and focused on the exploitation of both sea and land resources. Traditional peoples generally followed the Thule subsistence pattern, in which summers were spent in pursuit of caribou and fish and other seasons were devoted to the pursuit of sea mammals, especially seals; food was also stored for consumption during the deepest part of winter. There were exceptions to this pattern, however. People of the Bering Strait islands, for instance, depended almost entirely on sea mammals, walrus being very important. In the specialized Alaskan whaling villages between the Seward Peninsula and Point Barrow, caribou and seals were outweighed as food resources by bowhead whales (Baleana mysticetus; see right whale). In the Brooks Range of northern Alaska, some people were year-round caribou hunters who also depended on traded sea-mammal oil as a condiment and for heat. In the Barren Grounds, west of Hudson Bay, some groups used no sea products at all, illuminating their snow houses with burning caribou fat and heating these homes with twig fires.

Most shelter in winter was in substantial semisubterranean houses of stone or sod over wooden or whalebone frameworks. In Alaska, save for the far north, heat was provided by a central wood fire that was placed beneath a smoke hole; throughout the north and in Greenland, a large sea-mammal oil lamp served the same purpose. In 19th-century Siberia and on St. Lawrence Island, the older semisubterranean house was given up for a yurt-like structure with sod walls and a walrus-hide roof.

The people nearest the Arctic Ocean relied on the snow house in winter, with most groups moving onto fresh ice fields in search of seals during that season. Caribou hunters and lake and river fishermen used the snow house on land. The caribou specialists of northern Alaska often lived through the winter in double-layered dome-shaped tents, heated like the coastal snow houses with an oil lamp; these dwellings commonly housed an extended family. In East and West Greenland, communal dwellings were built of stone, housed as many as 50 people from different kin groups, and were arranged such that each nuclear family had its own interior space and oil lamp. Communities in the far north of Greenland chose to use smaller stone houses designed to shelter nuclear families.

Among the Yupiit a special large semisubterranean house, called a kashim by the Russians, was used for public and ceremonial occasions and as a men’s residence. The kashim was the place where men built their boats, repaired their equipment, took sweat baths, educated young boys, and hosted community dances. Women had their own homes in which they worked and cared for their children. In many cases the women’s homes were connected to one another and to the kashim by a system of tunnels, not all of them generally known; a number of folktales tell how canny women saved their families from raids by directing them to hidden tunnels that opened far away from the village.

The institution of the kashim was stronger to the south of the Bering Strait than to its north. Kashims did not exist on St. Lawrence Island or in Siberia, nor were they found east of Point Barrow until the late 19th or early 20th century, when they began to be used by Inuit living near the Mackenzie River.

Both the single-cockpit kayak and the larger open umiak were virtually universal, although they were not used the same way everywhere. The kayak was generally used as a seal-hunting craft, but, in the places where open-water sealing was limited, it was used to intercept migrating caribou as they crossed lakes and rivers. The umiak was usually a freight vessel, often rowed by women facing backward, but in whaling and walrus-hunting regions it was used as a hunting boat and paddled by a male crew facing forward. Winter transport was by sled, pulled by dogs or by both dogs and people. In most regions the number of sled dogs—which ate the same food as humans and thus were a burden in times of want—was limited, an exception being the few areas in which relative plenty was provided by whales or migrating salmon.

The bow and arrow were the standard tools of land hunters. Seals and walrus were taken from shore with a thrown harpoon tipped with a toggling head—an asymmetrical point with a line affixed, shaped to twist sidewise in the wound as the detachable shaft pulled loose. Kayak-based seal hunters used specialized harpoons with fixed barbs rather than toggling heads; these were often cast with the spear-thrower or throwing board, a flat trough of wood that cradled the butt of the dart and formed an extension of the thrower’s arm, increasing the velocity of the thrown projectile. The whaling umiak was manned by a professional crew; it was directed by the boat’s owner, or umialik, and a marksman who wielded a heavy harpoon with a detachable toggling head and line attached to sealskin floats. In Quebec, whales were harpooned from kayaks or run aground in shallow bays.

The flexibility of movement required by the seasonally varied subsistence quest was supported by the flexible organization of society. Individuals obtained psychological and material support from their kindred and tended to avoid people who were not kin, but there were devices for creating kinlike relationships that could extend the social and territorial sphere in which an individual could move in safety and comfort. These included a variety of institutionalized relationships; people bearing the same name as a relative might be treated as if they held the same relation, and trading partners, song partners, meat-sharing partners, and partners created by the temporary exchange of spouses might also be treated approximately as relatives.

Generally, American Eskimo recognized kin on both the paternal and maternal sides of the family to about the degree of second cousin. Marriage with cousins was frowned upon by most groups although permitted by some; certain groups also emphasized paternal kin over maternal. On St. Lawrence Island and in Siberia, however, there were patrilineal clans—named groups of all people related in the male line. In Siberia marriage could not be contracted by two members of the same clan, although on St. Lawrence such a rule was not enforced. There the walrus- and whale-hunting crews were composed of clansmen, the senior male became clan chief, and the chief of the strongest local clan acted as the village chief.

Among other groups there was no formal position of chief, the closest to an exception being the umialik of the Inupiat. In addition to owning the boat used for whaling, the umialik was the employer of a whaling crew, recruiting his men for their professional ability and acting as benefactor to them and their families. In many villages each umialik and his crew controlled a kashim. The title of umialik was also used in some villages not devoted to whaling, especially in the northern Alaskan interior, where the umialik was the organizer of a caribou-hunting team. The position of umialik was not inherited but was gained by skilled entrepreneurs, and it brought no control over anyone but the umialik’s own crew (and then only to the extent that an individual chose to remain a crew member). South of the Bering Strait the title was rarely used.

Religious beliefs were based on animism; all things—animate or otherwise—were believed to have a living essence. Thus, all humans, animals, plants, and objects had souls or spirits, which might be related to one another in a hereafter, details of the location of which varied from group to group. Courtesies given to freshly killed animals promoted their reincarnation as new animals of the same species. The souls of humans were subject to interference from other spirits, and soul loss meant illness or even death. There also were ideas of human reincarnation. The name of a deceased person was given to a child who “became” that person by being addressed with kinship terms appropriate to the deceased.

Traditionally, all people were in contact with the spirit world; they carried amulets of traditional or individual potency, experienced dreams, devised songs or other words of power, and achieved special relationships with particular spirit-beings. Men and women who were especially adept at such contact became shamans; they were called on to cure the sick by recovering lost soul-stuff, to foretell the future, to determine the location of game, and so forth—all with the help of powerful spirit familiars.

Shamans were also expected to contact a few more strongly personified spirit-beings, such as the female being (whose name and attributes varied from group to group) who governed important land or sea mammals; when game was scarce, the shaman might cajole her into providing more bounty. In Greenland the shaman was also an entertainer whose séances, escape tricks, and noisy spirit helpers could enliven a long winter’s night in the communal house (see shamanism).

Sedentary peoples: the southern Yupiit and the Aleuts

These groups made use of the sod-covered and semisubterranean house, the skin-covered kayak and the umiak, and fishing and hunting apparatus similar to those of the northern Yupiit and the Inuit. Yet, like many neighbouring Northwest Coast Indians, they focused almost exclusively on aquatic resources and had a hierarchical society comprising formal chiefs (apparently inherited in the male line), other elites, commoners, and a class of slaves that was generally composed of war captives. Although the Yupik-speaking people of the Kodiak region maintained kashims that seem to have functioned generally like those of the north and were said to be “owned” by local chiefs, the Aleut-speaking groups had no similar structure. Unfortunately, the region’s conquest by Russian fur hunters eradicated many details of indigenous life before they could be thoroughly recorded.

Historical developments

The European colonization of the American Arctic flowed inland from the coasts of Greenland, southern and southwestern Alaska, and the Arctic Ocean and Hudson Bay. The discussions below consider these major areas of colonization in turn.


Erik the Red founded a small Norse colony on Greenland in ad 986, although the Norse and the Thule people seem not to have interacted until the 13th century. The Norse colony was abandoned in the early 15th century, a time when a general climatic cooling trend probably made subsistence farming unsustainable there. European fishermen built seasonally used base camps on Greenland’s southern coasts during the 16th and 17th centuries. During the periods of European absence, Inuit peoples sometimes burned the seemingly abandoned buildings in order to simplify the collection of iron nails and metal fittings; these were easily transformed into implements that proved more durable than traditional stone tools. This destruction of fishing camps created tensions between the Europeans and the Inuit; the groups sometimes fought, but there were apparently no attempts at political domination.

In 1721 a permanent Danish-Norwegian colony was founded on Greenland; its goals were missionization and trade. Unusually, the region’s indigenous peoples were from the first treated as full citizens of the kingdom. Epidemics of European diseases struck almost immediately, killing as many as a third of the people on the island. In 1776 the Danish government granted a trade monopoly to the Royal Greenlandic Trading Company; with the restriction of contact with outsiders, losses to epidemic disease were greatly reduced. Denmark retained a trading monopoly with Greenland until 1951.

Indigenous languages remained in general use after colonization. Because missionaries often learned Inuit while residing in Nuuk (now the capital city) and then left for more-distant locales, the Nuuk dialect came into common use throughout Greenland. This helped create a sense of ethnic unity among indigenous Greenlanders, and that unity continued to grow with the 1861 publication of the first Inuit-language newspaper, Atuagagdliutit (an invented word originally meaning “distributed reading matter” or “free newspaper”). By the late 19th century, Greenland’s native peoples had created a significant and growing vernacular literature and a name for their shared identity, Kalaaleq (“Greenland Inuk”; Inuk is the local ethnonym for someone who is a member of an Inuit-speaking group).

In 1862 Greenland was granted limited local self-government. In the period from 1905 to 1929, its residents shifted from a traditional subsistence economy to sheep breeding and cod fishing (although hunting remained important in the early 21st century); schools also began to teach Danish. In 1953, after more than 200 years as a colony, Greenland became an integral part of Denmark and gained representation in the national legislative assembly; in 1979 it achieved complete home rule. See also Greenland: History.

The Inuit Institute, Greenland’s first institution of higher education, was formed in 1983; in 1989 it was reorganized as a university, Ilisimatusarfik, and became one of the few institutions dedicated to the study of Kalaaleq traditional cultures and languages. Within Greenland, university training in other subjects is still limited; as younger Kalaaleq commonly speak Danish as a second language, many enroll in Danish universities.

Southern and southwestern Alaska

In 1728 the Russian tsar Peter I (the Great) supported an expedition to the northern Pacific. Led by Vitus Bering, the expedition set out to determine whether Siberia and North America were connected and, if not, whether there was a navigable sea route connecting the commercial centres of western Russia to China. Although poor visibility limited the results of this voyage, subsequent Russian journeys determined that the Pacific coast of North America was home to a seemingly inexhaustible population of sea otters. Russian entrepreneurs quickly seized on the opportunity to garner sea otter pelts, known for their lush feel and superior insulating qualities, as these were at the time almost the only items for which the Chinese were willing to engage in trade with Russia.

Russian rule was established in the region quickly and often brutally. Perhaps the worst atrocities occurred in 1745, when a large party of Russian and Siberian hunters overwintered in the Aleutian Islands; members of the party engaged in such wholesale murder and sexual assault that they were later charged in the Russian courts and punished. Similar incidents of violent conquest occurred throughout the region, and over the next several decades the indigenous population was forced into virtual slavery. Russian administrators recognized native expertise in capturing sea otters and so negotiated with the hunters during the first part of the colonial era (albeit on an unequal basis given the colonizers’ imposing firepower). However, these more or less voluntary levels of fur production proved inadequate for commercial trading. By 1761 the Russians had instituted a village-based quota system; they remained unsatisfied with the results and soon took entire villages hostage as a way to ensure the docility of Aleut and Yupik men, nearly all of whom were impressed into service as hunters.

This created intense hardship for the elders, women, and children left behind. Hunting had provided most of their subsistence, and, with the hunters away or exhausted, many communities suffered from malnourishment or starvation in addition to the epidemic diseases that characterized European conquest throughout the Americas. Within a century of initial contact, the Aleut-speaking population had declined to no more than 2,000; at least 80 percent of their original number were gone. Around Kodiak Island and the Pacific coast, the decrease in roughly the same period was to about 3,000, a loss of about two-thirds. On the Bering Sea, where the fur trade was less intense, the loss was limited to about one-third or one-half of the population, all of it coming in the 19th century.

In 1799 the Russian-American Company was granted what amounted to governance of the Russian colonies in the North Pacific. The company undertook a period of expansion and eventually ruled thousands of miles of coast, from the Bering Sea to northern California. Russian Orthodox missionaries arrived at about the same time. They observed the brutalities committed against indigenous peoples, reported these to the tsar, and worked to ameliorate the horrendous conditions in the hostage villages. Although protective language was placed in the company’s second charter, enforcement was haphazard. Nonetheless, and perhaps because the priests were clearly their advocates, many Aleuts and Yupiit converted to Orthodox Christianity.

The U.S. government purchased Russian America in 1867 and subsequently imposed its assimilationist policies on Native Alaskans (see Alaska Purchase). Various forms of pressure were applied to ensure that native communities shifted from subsistence to wage labour, from the use of their own languages to English, and from Russian Orthodox traditions to mainline Protestantism, among other things.

As elsewhere in the United States, these policies undermined indigenous traditions and generally caused local economies to shift from self-sufficiency and sustainability to a reliance on outside capital. As the sea otter neared extinction, some Yupik and Aleut communities shifted to the hunting of other fur-bearing mammals, such as seals and Arctic foxes. As among the neighbouring Northwest Coast Indians, other groups used their knowledge of local fisheries to ensure employment. These strategies met with various levels of success, but the native communities often faced circumstantial difficulties: demand for furs collapsed during the Great Depression of the 1930s, and fishermen had to cope with natural cycles in the population levels of various kinds of fish, the vagaries of consumer taste, and competition from better-equipped Euro-Americans.

By the mid-20th century, international politics were also affecting large numbers of indigenous Alaskans. World War II saw the removal of whole Native Alaskan communities under the aegis of protection and national defense. After the war, having in some cases endured years of difficult “temporary” conditions, those who returned to their homes found them in disrepair and in some cases ransacked. The Cold War ensured that the military presence in Alaska would continue to grow until the late 20th century; new facilities were often placed on property that indigenous groups used and regarded as their own, creating further hardships.

Canada and northern Alaska

The region from the Bering Strait northward and east to the Mackenzie River was untouched by Russians, but after the mid-19th century it was visited by great numbers of European and Euro-American whalers, who imported both disease and alcohol; the native population declined by two-thirds or more between 1850 and 1910. In far northern Canada the impact was lessened somewhat, for contact was limited and the thinly distributed populations more easily avoided the spread of disease. Nevertheless, European whalers active in Hudson Bay and elsewhere were a source of disease and disruption that resulted in a significant decline in native population in the 19th century.

Intensive whaling, and later the hunting of walruses, depleted some of the major food sources of far northern communities and in some cases created localized hardship. However, whalers often recognized the technical skills of the northern Yupiit and the Inuit and arranged for various kinds of partnership; a Euro-American might reside with a local family for a winter, gaining food, shelter, and company while the family would gain labour-saving technology, such as metal knives, steel needles, and rifles.

Widespread difficulties arose with the imposition of assimilationist policies by the United States and Canada and later, after the discovery of gold, oil, and mineral resources in the region. By the late 19th century, church-sponsored experiments in reindeer herding were promoting assimilation in northern Alaska. These ventures generally failed due to their incompatibility with the local culture; people were accustomed to moving widely across the landscape but also had the habit of returning frequently to their home communities, a practice that quickly caused overgrazing near settlements. In addition, Euro-American entrepreneurs generally had enough capital to crowd out native reindeer operations. Gold strikes on Canada’s Klondike River in 1896 and near Nome, Alaska, in 1898 shifted attention away from indigenous economic development, incidentally providing many northern Native Alaskans with a welcome opportunity to return to traditional modes of subsistence.

As in western and southwestern Alaska, the northern parts of Alaska and Canada saw an increase in military facilities during and after World War II. By the 1950s and ’60s, concerns about environmental degradation and land seizures caused Native Alaskans to file lawsuits to halt the development of oil and other resources. These suits eventually led to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, in which the United States agreed to provide to Alaskan natives some $962.5 million and 44 million acres of land, all to be administered through native-run corporations. For administrative purposes and to encourage local development, the state was divided among 12 regional native corporations (seven of them Inuit or Yupik, one Aleut, and the rest Indian), each including a series of village corporations in which individual natives were sole shareholders. A 13th corporation serves Native Alaskans who reside outside the state. The corporations have promoted housing, local schools, satellite communications facilities, medical facilities, and programs directed at alcohol abuse and have provided a training ground for native politicians active in state government, where they represent an increasingly sophisticated native citizenry.

Canada did not seek direct rule over the northern coastal region until the early 20th century, and the Canadian Inuit have had the same opportunities to vote and hold office as other Canadians only since about 1960—a time that coincides with the creation of increasingly stable settlements, the extension of social welfare, a decline in the importance of the traditional hunting economy, and the beginnings of native organizations that seek the recognition of the Inuit as a distinct people with rights of self-governance and to lands and traditional culture.

Canada’s Inuit proved quite adept at effecting political change. In the mid-1970s the province of Quebec took from the dominion government all political responsibility for relationships with Inuit residing there; Inuit communities soon organized into village corporations with defined rights to land and resources. At about the same time, the Northwest Territories elected people of aboriginal descent to a majority of the 15 seats then in the territorial legislative assembly; in 1979 the first Inuit was elected to one of the two Northwest Territories seats in the national House of Commons. A proposal to divide the Northwest Territories into two parts, the eastern to include the major Inuit territory, was submitted to a plebiscite in 1982. The proposal won heavily in the east but only narrowly overall. It eventually passed, and what had been the eastern part of the Northwest Territories became the territory of Nunavut in 1999.

Contemporary developments

During the 20th century, indigenous populations throughout the American Arctic were regenerating. After World War II, national health systems reduced both chronic and acute infections, and populations doubled between 1950 and 1980. Early 21st-century population estimates indicated that the total population of persons self-identified as Inuit, Yupik, or Aleut stood at about 130,000 individuals in Canada and the United States, with approximately 45,000 additional individuals in Greenland.

For native peoples throughout the Arctic, a key development from the late 20th century onward has been their sophisticated activism and increasing transnationalism. They were heavily involved in the broad global push for indigenous, or “Fourth World,” rights that had begun by the late 1960s and was encouraged by the civil rights movements of the so-called First World and the new independence of the formerly colonized Third World. In 1977 the Inuit Circumpolar Conference was formed by the Inuit peoples of Greenland, Canada, and Alaska; in 1983 it was recognized officially by the United Nations. By the early 21st century it represented some 150,000 individuals of Inuit and Yupik heritage, including those of Siberia. The Aleut International Association, a sister group, formed in 1998. These organizations are particularly active in promoting the preservation of indigenous cultures and languages and in protecting the northern environment from global warming and resource exploitation. They are two of the six indigenous associations and eight member states with permanent membership status in the Arctic Council, an international forum for intergovernmental research, cooperation, and advocacy that works frequently with the United Nations.

Don E. Dumond


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