On the Way to Pond Inlet, Baffin Island, and the Canadian Arctic, July 20
We all learned to read a map when we were quite young. You hold the map with North of the top and South at the bottom. Most of us hold either Europe or North America right in the middle. You focus on the temperate zones, which are disproportionately large. The fringes and the top and bottom are distorted and minimized. When you look at those maps, you see that Northern Canada has an Inuit* population, as does Greenland and Alaska. The same is true of the Russian and European High Arctic. We tend to think of these as separate and distinct populations, and a part of each country. The standard flat map shows the Russian high Arctic at the far upper right, while the Alaskan Arctic is in the upper left corner.
However, changing the way you look at a map gives a very different picture. If we look down on the North Pole from above, we see an almost continuous mass of land, separated by channels of water, from Iceland to Greenland to Canada, to the U.S., across to Russia and so on. All these communities are ringing a central body of water, the Arctic Ocean. In the winter many of those channels freeze over, allowing for intermingling of those peoples, making the distinction even more meaningless. This is especially true in the area stretching from Greenland through Canada to Alaska; the area we are traveling through. Suddenly, rather than seeing people scattered across the fringes of various countries and continents you now see an almost contiguous community sitting around a very large lake. This is the world of the Inuit.
How did the Inuit come to this place? Looking at the map, it’s easy to follow the path of human migration into the Arctic. The Pre-Dorset people are believed to have originated in Siberia and started pushing eastward more than 4,000 years BCE. Some followed the shores of the Arctic Ocean across Alaska and the Yukon and fanned out across the Canadian Archipelago, eventually reaching Greenland. The Pre-Dorset civilization was the ancestors of the Dorset people, who populated the region between around 500 and 1000 CE. For unknown reasons, the Dorset people moved south around the same time that a second wave of migration started from Siberia, around 1,000 CE. These were the Thule people. It doesn’t appear that the Thule and the Dorset ever interacted, and by around 1500, the Dorset population disappeared. The Thule were whalers and many of their settlements can be found along the shores of the islands. The Thule are the ancestors of the modern Inuit.