A Research Project On Inuit Of Arctic Canada

In these 5 paragraphs I will talk about the Inuit and Haida tribes.The second paragraph will talk about challenges they both face.The third will talk about resources they both have.The fourth will talk about the Universals of Culture such as shelter,tools,and clothing.

Chelsea Vowel in her book Indigenous Writes speaks about how with the shift of more Aboriginal peoples moving from isolated environments where the notion of being allowably indigenous comes into play. The concept details how Canadians are used to seeing Indigenous peoples through a very pigeon-holed view of their culture and identity. More often than not, this view comprises of Indigenous peoples expressing their culture “within the context of cultural celebration” (68).

The people of Inuit, Yup’ik, Unangan, and other Native Americans Indians have lived in the harshest environment on Earth from Siberia, across Alaska and Canada, and to the East of Greenland along the coast of the Bering Sea and Arctic Ocean. From Labrador to the interior of Alaska the Athapaskan, Cree, Innu, and other Native’s people lived in the subarctic region of the land. These people had the ability to depend on their years of knowledge of the sky, ice, ocean, land, and animal behaviors in order to survive. Living in the area that was vast and dealing with seasonal dynamic extremes these Native people of the Artic and Subarctic had a honorable endurance for an millennia of exchanged goods, ceremonies, and shared feasts with neighboring goods that has help them throughout the years.

The Canadian Inuit were a domestic, tribal, egalitarian society in the 19th century. And some cultural changes occurred; making the Inuit adapt and become more aware of other resources they could get hold of, for gathering and hunting for food. In the 19th Century, the Europeans discovered the Inuit culture and this provided new resources for the Inuit to gain an easier way to gather and hunt for food. But because of the European influence, the Inuit’s culture changed to adapt with European Individuals living in their land, and European resources that had been made access to them. By this cultural change in the 19th century there was “an increased diversity in the social structure and material culture of the Labrador Inuit society” (Auger, 1993:27). The Labrador Inuit was a significant Inuit Society to have an ethnographical research made to understand a little bit more to; how the Inuit was affected and how the food process was changed. It will also be discussed the significant ideas and techniques that the Inuit used to gather and hunt for resources.

Giangrande (1990) often relies on an emotional appeal of individual members of tribes, which show the abuse of indigenous peoples in a white Canadian society. Certainly, Giangrande is a journalist that gets does direct interviews with indigenous peoples , which reveals a pattern of logos in data collecting methodology. However, these interviews are based on “individual accounts” of indigenous rights

In the film “Eskimo Fight for Life” the Inuit winter camp has a defined social structure. From generation to generation the roles of men and women remain the same. The most important role for men is to hunt to feed the camp. They hunt seal which is a symbol within the camp because it conveys the meaning of survival. The women are responsible for supplying the camp with the necessary clothing such as fur coats and boots. The women also teach their daughters these skills so that they can make their own clothes and boots. The Inuit camp also has their own language which enables them to communicate with one another. With the use of language, the elders, especially the grandmothers, can tell the children stories. These stories are one way they pass

experience and knowledge of indigenous peoples and their various ways of life. He explains the

Not only have the Cree people maintain a connection with hunting, fishing, and trapping lifestyle, but at the same time they have become more significant people when it comes to ‘politics of embarrassment’. They push for greater native regional autonomy while resisting the threats of major resource development and Quebec’s sovereignty movement. There is a bridge between forest lifestyle and the demands of administrative development and political struggle, between tradition and bureaucracy that the Cree created.

Although very similar, the Haida and the Inuit can also be vastly different. I want to point out the similarities and differences between the challenges faced, the resources available, and the universals of culture in each tribe.

The Inuit People The word Eskimo is not a proper Eskimo word. It means "eaters of raw meat" and was used by the Algonquin Indians of eastern Canada for their neighbours who wore animal-skin clothing and were ruthless hunters. The name became commonly employed by European explorers and now is generally used, even by them. Their own term for themselves is Inuit which means the "real people."

The Inuit people are also known as Eskimos. They have lived in the Artic area; the Tundra, where the climate is cold and too severe for trees to grow, for over a thousand years. Over the thousands of years living in the Artic environment, the Inuit people have adapted culturally and biologically. Among the biological adaptations, their bodies altered permitting them to adapt to the environment in five ways. In addition to biological adaptations, the Inuit people also adapted culturally, changing how they dressed, the type of home they lived in, and the number of individuals in their groups.

I believe that increasing the autonomy that individual Indigenous communities have over their health care system needs to happen to incorporate all the diverse Indigenous cultures. We have seen in this class that when it comes to Indigenous peoples health issues’ need to be addressed by whole cultural communities rather than dealing with one individual wounds (Chandler & Dunlop, 2015). This is largely due to the shared cultural wounds communities have from colonization, residential schooling, and dispossession of knowledge (Wexler, 2016). For example, diabetes prevalence rates amongst Indigenous peoples across Canada have increased by 70% over the past 15 years (Martin, 2016). However, prior to the 1980s there was no reported incidences of diabetes for Inuit peoples and none for First Nations prior to the 1950s (Martin, 2016). Similarly, in Northwest Alaska, where suicide is a big issue amongst the Indigenous communities, there were no recorded youth suicides until the 1960s (Wexler, 2016). Therefore, allowing communities to make their own decisions would also prevent a potential mistake of painting all Indigenous communities in Canada with the same brush to arrive at a one-size-fits-all approach (Chandler & Dunlop, 2015).

In this class, I was presented with an opportunity to reflect upon my personal knowledge of Indigenous

When the Europeans first came into contact with the Inuits, they spread diseases which killed many of their kind. As time went by, outsiders changed the Inuits way of life (Santella 35). Airbases and radio stations built in the Arctic changed the Inuit’s nomadic way of life by influencing the creation of permanent settlements near these areas. The creation of schools and health care facilities were also very influential in the change of the Inuit culture (“Inuit Culture, Traditions, and History”). People from other countries had a major impact on the Inuits

Each individual makes up the society as it is, and various characteristics and beliefs makes up an individual. Although, individual lives together with a variety of personal ideologies, emotions, cultures, and rituals, they all differentiate one person from the other making up one’s own identity. This identity makes up who one is inside and out, their behaviour, actions, and words comes from their own practices and values. However, the profound history of Indigenous people raises question in the present about their identities. Who are they really? Do we as the non-native people judge them from the outside or the inside? Regardless of whether the society or the government were involved in their lives, they faced discrimination in every