Understanding The Inuit People

The Inuits and the Ojibwa

The Inuit people, with their diets mostly consisting of protein and fat, suffered little from major dietary health problems that we are so used to seeing today. This might come as a bit of a shock to most of us growing up constantly seeing the food pyramid and being taught that that the only way to stay healthy is to consume a balanced diet of grains, vegetables, meat, eggs and dairy.

The Inuit, Haida, and Sioux were some of the very first people in Canada. These three groups were the same and different in many ways. Their way of life is very interesting in many ways. They are all alike in some ways, and the Inuit, Haida, and Sioux are very different.

Many people, when they think of Native Americans, will think of dancing and strange rituals, which is not the case with the Inuit Tribe. The Inuit Tribe are located in the far Arctic North. Also known as the Eskimo, the Inuit people have adapted to live in the freezing temperatures. They live by some of the most common ways Native Americans do. They practice not to waste anything they kill and also practice making arts. The Inuit Tribe have many ways to survive in the wild even with the hardships and scarce resources around them (Sontella 5).

The book The Netsilik Eskimo was written by author Asen Balikci. Waveland Press Incorporated published the book in 1970 and later revised it in 1989. The publication date of this ethnography is important to note because of the history of the Netsilik tribe. When the Europeans reached North America and Canada in the late fifteenth century and early sixteenth century, the Netsilik group remained unaffected by settlers because of their harsh climate and isolate region in the northern part of Canada near Hudson Bay. Numerous expeditions during the nineteenth century did reach the Netsilik land, however, because considerable amounts of people were hoping to find a northwest passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans in order to shorten the

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.

The Aboriginal peoples of Canada had gone through many situations to get to where they are today with their education system. Pain, sorrow, doubt, and hope are all feelings brought to mind when thinking about the history and the future of Aboriginal education. By taking a look at the past, anyone can see that the right to education for Aboriginal peoples has been fought about as early as the 1870s. This is still is a pressing issue today. Elder teachings, residential, reserve and post-secondary schools have all been concerning events of the past as well as the present. Though education has improved for the Aboriginal peoples of Canada, there are still many concerns and needs of reconciliation for the past to improve the future.

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

The Inuit developed a way of life well-suited to their Arctic environment, based on fishing; hunting seals, whales, and walruses in the ocean; and hunting caribou, polar bears, and other game on land. They lived in tents or travelled in skin-covered boats called kayaks and umiaks in summer, and stayed in

The Inuit are very spiritual people and they do not believe in a lot of the same things we do. They believe in something called Animism, all living and nonliving things have a spirit. When someone or something dies they believe that things spirit goes to the spiritual world. They only people powerful enough to talk or communicate with these spirits are religious leaders, Shamans or “Angakoks”. The way these religious leader speak with them is through dances or charms. They wear masks and clothes of an animal because they believe it helps them to communicate with them better. Not all spirits are good ones, when the weather was bad or there was an illness going around they believed it to be a displeased spirit, but the Inuit used guidelines to try to make the spirit happy. There was five rules that need to be followed in order to please the spirits, 1) women are not allowed to sew caribou skins on the inside of there igloo on sea ice in the winter. 2) Inuit can not eat sea mammal and land mammal at the same meal. 3) A knife used to kill whales had to wrapped in sealskin, not caribou skin. 4) After killing a seal melted snow had to dripped into its mouth to quench the spirit's thirst. 5) The Inuit saved the bladder of the hunted because they believed that’s where the spirit was found inside. One of the most important spirits was Sedna, The Goddess of the Sea. She provided them with food from the sea, which made the Inuit most happy.

The Inuit people had high metabolism rates. This is also related to body heat and how they adapted to their cold environment. By having a high metabolic rate they were able to produce body heat as well, thus keeping them warm. The last way in which the Inuit people adapted biologically to their environment is via adaptation to foods. The Inuit people’s diet consists of high protein and fat. They ate foods such as seal, whales, and freshwater fish.

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

The Inuits live in really harsh conditions in the Arctic. They have lived there for a really long time. They live in a place called Nunavut. They are brave to live there. They are not able to make wooden homes, because of their climate region, so they make snow houses called “Igloos”. In the summer, when the snow melts, they cannot make igloos. They live in tent like huts made of animal skins. Inuit communities are found in the: Northwest Territories, Labrador, and Quebec.

The Inuit people (also known as Eskimos) are a group of about 150,000 people who live in the Arctic tundra regions, mostly in Northern Canada, Siberia, Northern Alaska and Greenland. They are the indigenous people to the area. Their main language is Inuktitut and the word “Eskimo” technically means ‘eaters of raw meat’. They are also taught English, Danish, French or Russian at school. The Inuits descended from whale hunters who migrated to the Arctic regions but later turned to trapping animals when the European whale hunters arrived. They follow the Christian religion after being introduced it by missionaries. The Inuit people have changed their technology due to new ways being introduced to them.