The Inuit World is a robust and holistic reference source to contemporary Inuit life from the intimate world of the household to the global stage. Organized around the themes of physical worlds, moral, spiritual and intellectual worlds, intimate and everyday worlds, and social and political worlds, this book includes ethnographically rich contributions from a range of scholars, including Inuit and other Indigenous authors. The book considers regional, social, and cultural differences as well as the shared histories and common cultural practices that allow us to recognize Inuit as a single, distinct Indigenous people. The chapters demonstrate both the historical continuity of Inuit culture and the dynamic ways that Inuit people have responded to changing social, environmental, political, and economic conditions. Chapter topics include ancestral landscapes, tourism and archaeology, resource extraction and climate change, environmental activism, and women’s leadership. This book is an invaluable resource for students and researchers in anthropology, Indigenous studies, and Arctic studies and those in related fields including geography, history, sociology, political science, and education.

"Words of the Inuit" is an important compendium of Inuit culture illustrated through Inuit words. It brings the sum of the author’s decades of experience and engagement with Inuit and Inuktitut to bear on what he fashions as an amiable, leisurely stroll through words and meanings. Inuit words are often more complex than English words and frequently contain small units of meaning that add up to convey a larger sensibility. Dorais’ lexical and semantic analyses and reconstructions are not overly technical, yet they reliably evince connections and underlying significations that allow for an in-depth reflection on the richness of Inuit linguistic and cultural heritage and identity. An appendix on the polysynthetic character of Inuit languages includes more detailed grammatical description of interest to more specialist readers. Organized thematically, the book tours the histories and meanings of the words to illuminate numerous aspects of Inuit culture, including environment and the land; animals and subsistence activities; humans and spirits; family, kinship, and naming; the human body; and socializing with other people in the contemporary world. It concludes with a reflection on the usefulness for modern Inuit—especially youth and others looking to strengthen their cultural identity —to know about the underlying meanings embedded in their language and culture. With recent reports alerting us to the declining use of the Inuit language in the North, "Words of the Inuit" is a timely contribution to understanding one of the world’s most resilient Indigenous languages.

Alliance and Conflict combines a richly descriptive study of intersocietal relations in early nineteenth-century Northwest Alaska with a bold theoretical treatise on the structure of the world system as it might have been in ancient times. Ernest S. Burch Jr. illuminates one aspect of the traditional lives of the I_upiaq Eskimos in unparalleled detail and depth. Basing his account on observations made by early Western explorers, interviews with Native historians, and archeological research, Burch describes the social boundaries and geographic borders formerly existing in Northwest Alaska and the various kinds of transactions that took place across them. These ranged from violence of the most brutal sort, at one extreme, to relations of peace and friendship, at the other. Burch argues that the international system he describes approximated in many respects the type of system existing all over the world before the development of agriculture. Based on that assumption, he presents a series of hypotheses about what the world system may have been like when it consisted entirely of hunter-gatherer societies and about how it became more centralized with the evolution of chiefdoms. ø Accounts of specific people, places, and events add an immediate, experiential dimension to the work, complementing its theoretical apparatus and sweeping narrative scope. Provocative and comprehensive, Alliance and Conflict is a definitive look at the greater world of Native peoples of Northwest Alaska.

This book describes the history and culture of the Inuit, whose ancestors crossed the Bering Strait to Alaska around 3000 B.C.

In the early eighteenth century, West Greenland became a colonial territory of Denmark. Nevertheless, a large number of Inuit communities maintained significant aspects of their cultural and economic practices. When home rule was introduced in 1979, the benign paternalism of colonial days was superseded by the incorporation of ethnic and institutional relations under a unified political system in Greenland. A national Greenlandic Inuit community was created, forcing further cultural adaptation on the part of the Inuit. Jens Dahl analyses life in Saqqaq, a small Greenlandic hunting community, and explores the changes that have taken place there over the last couple of decades. As modern technology is introduced and the worldviews of the Greenlandic Inuit change, the hunting community continues to base its life on a traditional notions, including an economy involving sharing, exchanging, and free access to the hunting and fishing grounds. Dahl demonstrates that Saqqaq and other communities have adapted to colonial and post-colonial influences by combining their practices of hunting and fishing with other forms of employment. In the midst of these economic developments, however, hunters are losing control over their traditional lands. Dahl discusses this conflict within the political context, making "Saqqaq" a unique and valuable example of Inuit survival in the modern world.

Although not considered an "Indian Tribe," the Inuit are a group of culturally similar Indigenous peoples inhabiting the Arctic and subarctic regions of Greenland, Labrador, Quebec, Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and Alaska. Inuit of the Arctic is a narrative non-fiction. Learn about what life was like among the Inuit long ago, before the influx of European immigrants, how they hunted, what they ate, what they wore, how children were raised, and how they withstood the cold. It also features the history of the Inuit of the Arctic, explanations of the wars and treaties that affected them, how they survived through cooperation, tattoos, the Inuit language, the Arctic Winter Games, and their beliefs in medicine men, gods, luck, and superstitions. Also included are historical and contemporary photos and drawings of the tribe and parts of its culture, maps, fascinating facts, chapter notes, suggested reading, and a glossary. Find out what early life was like for the Inuit of the Arctic and how it framed the present.

A story of adventure and danger among the Polar Eskimos.