Eskimo
A related third group, the Aleut, who inhabit the Aleutian Islands, are generally excluded from the definition of Eskimo.
These circumpolar peoples have traditionally inhabited the Arctic and subarctic regions from eastern Siberia (Russia) to Alaska (United States), Northern Canada, Nunavik, Nunatsiavut, and Greenland.
Some Inuit, Yupik, Aleut, and other individuals consider the term Eskimo, which is of a disputed etymology,[1] to be pejorative or even offensive.
The governments in Canada[4][5][6] and the United States[7][8] have made moves to cease using the term Eskimo in official documents, but it has not been eliminated, as the word is in some places written into tribal, and therefore national, legal terminology.
[9] Canada officially uses the term Inuit to describe the indigenous Canadian people who are living in the country's northern sectors and are not First Nations or Métis.
[4][5][10][11] The United States government legally uses Alaska Native[8] for enrolled tribal members of the Yupik, Inuit, and Aleut, and also for non-Eskimos including the Tlingit, the Haida, the Eyak, and the Tsimshian, in addition to at least nine northern Athabaskan/Dene peoples.
[33][34] French traders who encountered the Innu (Montagnais) in the eastern areas adopted their word for the more western peoples and spelled it as Esquimau or Esquimaux in a transliteration.
[28][38][43][44] One of the first printed uses of the French word Esquimaux comes from Samuel Hearne's A Journey from Prince of Wales's Fort in Hudson's Bay to the Northern Ocean in the Years 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772 first published in 1795.
Early 21st century population estimates registered more than 135,000 individuals of Eskimo descent, with approximately 85,000 living in North America, 50,000 in Greenland, and the rest residing in Siberia.
[28][35] As a result, the Canadian government usage has replaced the term Eskimo with Inuit (Inuk in singular).
[63] In 2016, Lisa Hodgetts and Arctic editor Patricia Wells wrote: "In the Canadian context, continued use of any term that incorporates Eskimo is potentially harmful to the relationships between archaeologists and the Inuit and Inuvialuit communities who are our hosts and increasingly our research partners."
Hodgetts and Wells suggested using more specific terms when possible (e.g., Dorset and Groswater) and agreed with Frieson in using the Inuit tradition to replace Neo-Eskimo, although they noted replacement for Palaeoeskimo was still an open question and discussed Paleo-Inuit, Arctic Small Tool Tradition, and pre-Inuit, as well as Inuktitut loanwords like Tuniit and Sivullirmiut, as possibilities.
[65] American linguist Lenore Grenoble has also explicitly deferred to the ICC resolution and used Inuit–Yupik instead of Eskimo with regards to the language branch.
[69] It is understood that some or all of these ancient people migrated across the Chukchi Sea to North America during the pre-neolithic era, somewhere around 5,000 to 10,000 years ago.
[69] Several earlier indigenous peoples existed in the northern circumpolar regions of eastern Siberia, Alaska, and Canada (although probably not in Greenland).
However, there is some possibility of an Aleutian origin of the Dorset people,[69] who in turn are a likely ancestor of today's Inuit and Yupik.
Inuit language became distinct and, over a period of several centuries, its speakers migrated across northern Alaska, through Canada, and into Greenland.
[77] Seward Peninsula dialects in western Alaska, where much of the Iñupiat culture has been in place for perhaps less than 500 years, are greatly affected by phonological influence from the Yupik languages.
Eastern Greenlandic, at the opposite end of Inuit range, has had significant word replacement due to a unique form of ritual name avoidance.
[66] There has been a long-running linguistic debate about whether or not the speakers of the Inuit–Yupik–Unangan language group have an unusually large number of words for snow.
Until fairly recent times, there has been a remarkable homogeneity in the culture throughout this area, which traditionally relied on fish, marine mammals, and land animals for food, heat, light, clothing, and tools.
[27] Clothing consisted of robes made of wolfskin and reindeer skin to acclimate to the low temperatures.
[16][86][87][88] The Iñupiat are Inuit of Alaska's Northwest Arctic and North Slope boroughs and the Bering Straits region, including the Seward Peninsula.
[92] The Yupik economy has traditionally been strongly dominated by the harvest of marine mammals, especially seals, walrus, and whales.
[93] The Alutiiq (pronounced /əˈluːtɪk/ ə-LOO-tik in English; from Promyshlenniki Russian Алеутъ, "Aleut";[94][95][96] plural often "Alutiit"), also called by their ancestral name Sugpiaq (/ˈsʊɡˌbjɑːk/ SUUG-byahk or /ˈsʊɡpiˌæk/ SUUG-pee-AK; plural often "Sugpiat"), as well as Pacific Eskimo or Pacific Yupik, are a Yupik peoples, one of eight groups of Alaska Natives that inhabit the southern-central coast of the region.
Residents of Nanwalek, located on southern part of the Kenai Peninsula near Seldovia, speak what they call Sugpiaq.
The use of the apostrophe in the name Yup'ik is a written convention to denote the long pronunciation of the p sound; but it is spoken the same in other Yupik languages.
[100] Siberian Yupik reside along the Bering Sea coast of the Chukchi Peninsula in Siberia in the Russian Far East[77] and in the villages of Gambell and Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island in Alaska.
As early as in 1895, Imtuk was a settlement with a mixed population of Sireniki and Ungazigmit[103] (the latter belonging to Siberian Yupik).
[104] Many words are formed from entirely different roots from in Siberian Yupik,[107] but even the grammar has several peculiarities distinct not only among Inuit–Yupik languages, but even compared to Aleut.
