The Probert Encyclopaedia of People

INUIT

The Inuit (also Innuit) are a people inhabiting the Arctic coasts of North America, the east islands of the Canadian Arctic, and the ice-free coasts of Greenland. They are short of stature, averaging around 1.6 meters tall, with broad, fat faces, black eyes, brownish yellow skin and coarse black hair. They live by hunting and fishing. Hunting is done with dog drawn sledges, fishing from a canoe. During the summer they live in tents and in winter huts made from turf and snow heated by oil lamps. They tend to live in small groups of twenty to thirty families and practise a shamanistic religion. In 1912 an expedition discovered white Inuit with red hair and blue eyes and implements which led to the belief that they may be descendants of old Norse Vikings who visited North America from 1000 onwards. Inuktitut, their language, has about 60,000 speakers; it belongs to the Eskimo-Aleut group. The Inuit object to the name Eskimos (an insulting Abenaki word meaning 'raw flesh-eater') given them by the Algonquin Indians.
Research Inuit