[16][17][18] In the United States, the Alaskan Iñupiat are traditionally located in the Northwest Arctic Borough, on the Alaska North Slope, the Bering Strait and on Little Diomede Island.

Many individuals who would have historically been referred to as Eskimo find that term offensive or forced upon them in a colonial way, Inuit is now a common autonym for a large sub-group of these people.

[31] Researchers believe that Inuit society had advantages by having adapted to using dogs as transport animals, and developing larger weapons and other technologies superior to those of the Dorset culture.

But, in the mid-1950s, researcher Henry B. Collins determined that based on the ruins found at Native Point, on Southampton Island, the Sadlermiut were likely the last remnants of the Dorset culture, or Tuniit.

[47][48] Inuit do not appear to have interfered with their operations, but raided the stations in winter, taking tools and items made of worked iron, which they adapted to their own needs.

Inuit oral tradition tells that the men lived among them for a few years of their own free will until they died attempting to leave Baffin Island in a self-made boat and vanished.

[51] In the final years of the 18th century, the Moravian Church began missionary activities in Labrador, supported by the British[52] who were tired of the raids on their whaling stations.

Once its more hospitable lands were largely settled, the government of Canada and entrepreneurs began to take a greater interest in its more peripheral territories, especially the fur and mineral-rich hinterlands.

The construction of air bases and the Distant Early Warning Line in the 1940s and 1950s brought more intensive contact with European society, particularly in the form of public education for children.

These were to include protecting Canada's sovereignty in the Arctic, alleviating hunger (as the area currently occupied had been over-hunted), and attempting to solve the "Eskimo problem", by seeking assimilation of the people and the end of their traditional Inuit culture.

[58][59][60][61] By 1953, Canada's prime minister Louis St. Laurent publicly admitted, "Apparently we have administered the vast territories of the north in an almost continuing absence of mind.

[65] By the mid-1960s, encouraged first by missionaries, then by the prospect of paid jobs and government services, and finally forced by hunger and required by the police, most Canadian Inuit lived year-round in permanent settlements.

Inuit, a once self-sufficient people in an extremely harsh environment were, in the span of perhaps two generations, transformed into a small, impoverished minority, lacking skills or resources to sell to the larger economy, but increasingly dependent on it for survival.

These schools, in Aklavik, Iqaluit, Yellowknife, Inuvik and Kuujjuaq, brought together young Inuit from across the Arctic in one place for the first time and exposed them to the rhetoric of civil and human rights that prevailed in Canada in the 1960s.

In particular, he found that adequate vitamin C could be obtained from items in their traditional diet of raw meat such as ringed seal liver and whale skin (muktuk).

[99][100] Modern Inuit have lifespans 12 to 15 years shorter than the average Canadian's, which is thought to be influenced by factors such as their diet[101] and limited access to medical services.

[108][109][110] Inuit hunted sea animals from single-passenger, seal-skin covered boats called qajaq (Inuktitut syllabics: ᖃᔭᖅ)[111] which were extraordinarily buoyant, and could be righted by a seated person, even if completely overturned.

In the winter, Inuit would also hunt sea mammals by patiently watching an aglu (breathing hole) in the ice and waiting for the air-breathing seals to use them.

A team of dogs in either a tandem/side-by-side or fan formation would pull a sled made of wood, animal bones, or the baleen from a whale's mouth and even frozen fish,[112] over the snow and ice.

[126] One of the customs following the birth of an infant was for an Angakkuq (shaman) to place a tiny ivory carving of a whale into the baby's mouth, in hopes this would make the child good at hunting.

The belief that Inuit regularly resorted to infanticide may be due in part to studies done by Asen Balikci,[145] Milton Freeman[146] and David Riches[147] among the Netsilik, along with the trial of Kikkik.

[154] During the 19th century, the Western Arctic suffered a population decline of close to 90 per cent, resulting from exposure to new diseases, including tuberculosis, measles, influenza, and smallpox.

Autopsies near Greenland reveal that, more commonly pneumonia, kidney diseases, trichinosis, malnutrition, and degenerative disorders may have contributed to mass deaths among different Inuit tribes.

These "Indian hospitals" were focused on treating people for tuberculosis, though diagnosis was difficult and treatment involved forced removal of individuals from their communities for in-patient confinement in other parts of the country.

Long winter months of waiting for caribou herds or sitting near breathing holes hunting seals gave birth to stories of the mysterious and sudden appearance of ghosts and fantastic creatures.

The angakkuq of a community of Inuit was not the leader, but rather a sort of healer and psychotherapist, who tended wounds and offered advice, as well as invoking the spirits to assist people in their lives.

[163] By believing that all things, including animals, have souls like those of humans,[164] any hunt that failed to show appropriate respect and customary supplication would only give the liberated spirits cause to avenge themselves.

The harshness and unpredictability of life in the Arctic ensured that Inuit lived with concern for the uncontrollable, where a streak of bad luck could destroy an entire community.

Recently, there has been an identity struggle among the younger generations of Inuit, between their traditional heritage and the modern society which their cultures have been forced to assimilate into in order to maintain a livelihood.

Other notable Inuit include the freelance journalist Ossie Michelin, whose iconic photograph of the activist Amanda Polchies went viral after the 2013 anti-fracking protests at Elsipogtog First Nation.