Eskimo


Eskimo or Eskimos are the Indigenous circumpolar peoples who have traditionally inhabited the northern circumpolar region from eastern Siberia to Alaska, Northern Canada, Nunavik and Greenland.
The two main peoples known as "Eskimo" are the Inuit and the Yupik. A third northern group, the Aleut, is closely related to both. They share a relatively recent common ancestor and a language group.
The non-Inuit sub-branch of the Eskimo branch of the Eskimo-Aleut language family consists of four distinct Yupik languages, two used in the Russian Far East and St. Lawrence Island, and two used in western Alaska, southwestern Alaska, and the western part of Southcentral Alaska. The extinct language of the Sirenik people is sometimes argued to be related to these.
According to recent genomic research, the Chukchi people, from eastern Siberia, are the closest living relatives of the Siberian Yupik and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas generally.
There are more than 183,000 people of Eskimo descent alive today, of which 135,000 or more live in or near the traditional circumpolar regions. The NGO known as the Inuit Circumpolar Council claims to represent 180,000 people.
The governments in Canada, Greenland and the United States have made moves to cease using the term "Eskimo" in official documents, but it has not been entirely eliminated, as the word is in some places written into tribal, and therefore national, legal terminology. Canada officially uses the term "Inuit" to describe the native people living in the country's northernmost sector. The United States government legally uses "Alaska Native" for the Yupik, Inuit, and Aleut, but also for non-Eskimo indigenous Alaskans including the Tlingit, the Haida, the Eyak, the Tsimshian, in addition to at least nine separate northern Athabaskan/Dene peoples. The designation "Alaska Native" applies to official tribal members only, in contrast to individual Eskimo/Aleut persons claiming descent from the world's "most widespread aboriginal group".

Description

Etymologically speaking, there exists a scientific consensus that the word Eskimo comes from the Innu-aimun word ayas̆kimew meaning "a person who laces a snowshoe" and is related to "husky", and it does not have a pejorative meaning in origin.
In Canada and Greenland, the term "Eskimo" is predominantly seen as offensive or "non-preferred", and has been widely replaced by the term "Inuit" or terms specific to a particular group or community. This has resulted in a trend whereby some Canadians and Americans believe that they should not use the word "Eskimo", and use the classifier and typical Canadian word "Inuit" instead, even for Yupik people.
Some people still believe that Eskimo translates to "eater of raw meat", which may be seen, or used, in a pejorative way. The word has been cited by some authors as being used by colonizers in the process of committing cultural genocide.
Section 25 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and section 35 of the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982, recognized the Inuit as a distinctive group of Aboriginal peoples in Canada.
The Inuit Circumpolar Council voted to replace the word "Eskimo" with "Inuit" in 1977, but even at that time such a designation was not accepted by all, for both fairly obvious reasons, and less obvious reasons.
Under U.S. and Alaskan law, "Alaska Native" refers to all indigenous peoples of Alaska. This includes not only the Iñupiat and the Yupik, but also groups such as the Aleut, who share a recent ancestor, as well as the largely unrelated indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast and the Alaskan Athabaskans. As a result, the term Eskimo is still in use in Alaska. Alternative terms, such as Inuit-Yupik, have been proposed, but none has gained widespread acceptance. Recent 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.

History

Several earlier indigenous peoples existed in the northern circumpolar regions of eastern Siberia, Alaska, and Canada. The earliest positively identified Paleo-Eskimo cultures date to 5,000 years ago. They appear to have developed in Alaska from people related to the Arctic small tool tradition in eastern Asia, whose ancestors had probably migrated to Alaska at least 3,000 to 5,000 years earlier. Similar artifacts have been found in Siberia that date to perhaps 18,000 years ago.
The Yupik languages and cultures in Alaska evolved in place, beginning with the original pre-Dorset indigenous culture developed in Alaska. Approximately 4000 years ago, the Unangan culture of the Aleut became distinct. It is not generally considered an Eskimo culture.
Approximately 1,500–2,000 years ago, apparently in northwestern Alaska, two other distinct variations appeared. Inuit language became distinct and, over a period of several centuries, its speakers migrated across northern Alaska, through Canada and into Greenland. The distinct culture of the Thule people developed in northwestern Alaska and very quickly spread over the entire area occupied by Eskimo people, though it was not necessarily adopted by all of them.

Nomenclature

Origin

The most commonly accepted etymological origin of the word "Eskimo" is derived by Ives Goddard at the Smithsonian Institution, from the Montagnais word meaning "snowshoe-netter" or "to net snowshoes". The word assime·w means "she laces a snowshoe" in Montagnais. Montagnais speakers refer to the neighbouring Mi'kmaq people using words that sound like eskimo
In 1978, Jose Mailhot, a Quebec anthropologist who speaks Montagnais, published a paper suggesting that Eskimo meant "people who speak a different language". French traders who encountered the Montagnais in the eastern areas, adopted their word for the more western peoples and spelled it as Esquimau in a transliteration.
Some people consider Eskimo offensive because it is popularly perceived to mean "eaters of raw meat" in Algonquian languages common to people along the Atlantic coast. One Cree speaker suggested the original word that became corrupted to Eskimo might have been askamiciw ; the Inuit are referred to in some Cree texts as askipiw.
In some contexts, as applied to Inuit people, the continued use of "Eskimo" may reinforce a perception that the Inuit are unimportant and remote. The use of Eskimo in such contexts is often viewed as offensive.
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.

General

In Canada and Greenland, the term Eskimo has largely been supplanted by the term Inuit. While Inuit can be accurately applied to all of the Eskimo peoples in Canada and Greenland, that is not true in Alaska and Siberia. In Alaska the term Eskimo is commonly used, because it includes both Yupik and Iñupiat. Inuit is not accepted as a collective term and it is not used specifically for Iñupiat. One of the oldest known Eskimo archaeological sites, dating back to 3,800 years ago, is located in Saglek Bay, Labrador. On Umnak Island in the Aleutians, another site was found and is estimated to be an age of approximately 3,000 years old.
In 1977, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference meeting in Utqiagvik, Alaska, officially adopted Inuit as a designation for all circumpolar native peoples, regardless of their local view on an appropriate term. As a result, the Canadian government usage has replaced the defunct term Eskimo with Inuit. The preferred term in Canada's Central Arctic is Inuinnaq, and in the eastern Canadian Arctic Inuit. The language is often called Inuktitut, though other local designations are also used. Despite the ICC's 1977 decision to adopt the term Inuit, this was never accepted by the Yupik peoples, who likened it to calling all Native American Indians Navajo simply because the Navajo felt that that's what all tribes should be called.
The Inuit of Greenland refer to themselves as "Greenlanders" and speak the Greenlandic language.
Because of the linguistic, ethnic, and cultural differences between Yupik and Inuit peoples, it seems unlikely that any umbrella term will be acceptable. There has been some movement to use Inuit, and the Inuit Circumpolar Council, representing a circumpolar population of 150,000 Inuit and Yupik people of Greenland, Northern Canada, Alaska, and Siberia, in its charter defines Inuit for use within that ICC document as including "the Inupiat, Yupik, Inuit, Inuvialuit, Kalaallit and Yupik ".
In 2010, the ICC passed a resolution in which they implored scientists to use "Inuit" and "Paleo-Inuit" instead of "Eskimo" or "Paleo-Eskimo". American linguist Lenore Grenoble has explicitly deferred to this resolution and used "Inuit–Yupik" instead of "Eskimo" with regards to the language branch. In a 2015 commentary in the journal Arctic, Canadian archaeologist Max Friesen argued fellow Arctic archaeologists should follow the ICC and use "Paleo-Inuit" instead of "Paleo-Eskimo". 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"; they suggested using more specific terms when possible 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 discuss "Paleo-Inuit", "Arctic Small Tool Tradition", and "pre-Inuit", as well as Inuktitut loanwords like "Tuniit" and "Sivullirmiut" as possibilities. One 2020 paper in Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, written by Katelyn Braymer-Hayes and colleagues, notes that there is a "clear need" to replace the terms "Neo-Eskimo" and "Paleo-Eskimo", citing the ICC resolution, but finding a consensus within the Alaskan context particularly is difficult, since Alaska Natives do not use the word Inuit to describe themselves, nor is the term legally applicable only to Inupiat and Yupik peoples in Alaska, and as such, terms used in Canada like "Paleo Inuit" and "Ancestral Inuit" would not be acceptable.
But, in Alaska, the Inuit people refer to themselves as Iñupiat, plural, and Iñupiaq, singular. They do not commonly use the term Inuit. In Alaska, Eskimo has been commonly used but is decreasing in prevalence.
Alaskans also use the term Alaska Native, which is inclusive of all Eskimo, Aleut and other Native Americans of Alaska. It does not apply to Inuit or Yupik people originating outside the state. The term Alaska Native has important legal usage in Alaska and the rest of the United States as a result of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.
The term "Eskimo" is also used in linguistic or ethnographic works to denote the larger branch of Eskimo–Aleut languages, the smaller branch being Aleut.

Languages

The Eskimo–Aleut family of languages includes two cognate branches: the Aleut branch and the Eskimo branch.
The number of cases varies, with Aleut languages having a greatly reduced case system compared to those of the Eskimo subfamily. Eskimo–Aleut languages possess voiceless plosives at the bilabial, coronal, velar and uvular positions in all languages except Aleut, which has lost the bilabial stops but retained the nasal. In the Eskimo subfamily a voiceless alveolar lateral fricative is also present.
The Eskimo sub-family consists of the Inuit language and Yupik language sub-groups. The Sirenikski language, which is virtually extinct, is sometimes regarded as a third branch of the Eskimo language family. Other sources regard it as a group belonging to the Yupik branch.
Inuit languages comprise a dialect continuum, or dialect chain, that stretches from Unalakleet and Norton Sound in Alaska, across northern Alaska and Canada, and east to Greenland. Changes from western to eastern dialects are marked by the dropping of vestigial Yupik-related features, increasing consonant assimilation, and increased consonant lengthening, and lexical change. Thus, speakers of two adjacent Inuit dialects would usually be able to understand one another, but speakers from dialects distant from each other on the dialect continuum would have difficulty understanding one another. 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 the Inuit range, has had significant word replacement due to a unique form of ritual name avoidance.
The four Yupik languages, by contrast, including Alutiiq, Central Alaskan Yup'ik, Naukan, and Siberian Yupik, are distinct languages with phonological, morphological, and lexical differences. They demonstrate limited mutual intelligibility. Additionally, both Alutiiq and Central Yup'ik have considerable dialect diversity. The northernmost Yupik languages – Siberian Yupik and Naukan Yupik – are linguistically only slightly closer to Inuit than is Alutiiq, which is the southernmost of the Yupik languages. Although the grammatical structures of Yupik and Inuit languages are similar, they have pronounced differences phonologically. Differences of vocabulary between Inuit and any one of the Yupik languages are greater than between any two Yupik languages. Even the dialectal differences within Alutiiq and Central Alaskan Yup'ik sometimes are relatively great for locations that are relatively close geographically.
Despite the relatively small population of Naukan speakers, documentation of the language dates back to 1732. While Naukan is only spoken in Siberia, the language acts as an intermediate between two Alaskan languages: Siberian Yupik Eskimo and Central Yup'ik Eskimo.
The Sirenikski language is sometimes regarded as a third branch of the Eskimo language family, but other sources regard it as a group belonging to the Yupik branch.
woman, Alaska, circa 1907
An overview of the Eskimo–Aleut languages family is given below:

Inuit

The Inuit inhabit the Arctic and northern Bering Sea coasts of Alaska in the United States, and Arctic coasts of the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Quebec, and Labrador in Canada, and Greenland. 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. Their food sources primarily relied on seals, whales, whale blubber, walrus, and fish, all of which they hunted using harpoons on the ice. Clothing consisted of robes made of wolfskin and reindeer skin to acclimate to the low temperatures. They maintain a unique Inuit culture.

Greenland's Inuit

make up 90% of Greenland's population. They belong to three major groups:
Canadian Inuit live primarily in Nunavut, Nunavik and in Nunatsiavut.

Inuvialuit of Canada's Western Arctic

The Inuvialuit live in the western Canadian Arctic region. Their homeland – the Inuvialuit Settlement Region – covers the Arctic Ocean coastline area from the Alaskan border east to Amundsen Gulf and includes the western Canadian Arctic Islands. The land was demarked in 1984 by the Inuvialuit Final Agreement.

Alaska's Iñupiat

The Iñupiat are the Inuit of Alaska's Northwest Arctic and North Slope boroughs and the Bering Straits region, including the Seward Peninsula. Utqiagvik, the northernmost city in the United States, is above the Arctic Circle and in the Iñupiat region. Their language is known as Iñupiaq.

Yupik

The Yupik are indigenous or aboriginal peoples who live along the coast of western Alaska, especially on the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta and along the Kuskokwim River ; in southern Alaska ; and along the eastern coast of Chukotka in the Russian Far East and St. Lawrence Island in western Alaska. The Yupik economy has traditionally been strongly dominated by the harvest of marine mammals, especially seals, walrus, and whales.

Alutiiq

The Alutiiq, also called Pacific Yupik or Sugpiaq, are a southern, coastal branch of Yupik. They are not to be confused with the Aleut, who live further to the southwest, including along the Aleutian Islands. They traditionally lived a coastal lifestyle, subsisting primarily on ocean resources such as salmon, halibut, and whales, as well as rich land resources such as berries and land mammals. Alutiiq people today live in coastal fishing communities, where they work in all aspects of the modern economy. They also maintain the cultural value of a subsistence lifestyle.
The Alutiiq language is relatively close to that spoken by the Yupik in the Bethel, Alaska area. But, it is considered a distinct language with two major dialects: the Koniag dialect, spoken on the Alaska Peninsula and on Kodiak Island, and the Chugach dialect, spoken on the southern Kenai Peninsula and in Prince William Sound. Residents of Nanwalek, located on southern part of the Kenai Peninsula near Seldovia, speak what they call Sugpiaq. They are able to understand those who speak Yupik in Bethel. With a population of approximately 3,000, and the number of speakers in the hundreds, Alutiiq communities are working to revitalize their language.

Central Alaskan Yup'ik

Yup'ik, with an apostrophe, denotes the speakers of the Central Alaskan Yup'ik language, who live in western Alaska and southwestern Alaska from southern Norton Sound to the north side of Bristol Bay, on the Yukon–Kuskokwim Delta, and on Nelson Island. 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. Of all the Alaska Native languages, Central Alaskan Yup'ik has the most speakers, with about 10,000 of a total Yup'ik population of 21,000 still speaking the language. The five dialects of Central Alaskan Yup'ik include General Central Yup'ik, and the Egegik, Norton Sound, Hooper Bay-Chevak, and Nunivak dialects. In the latter two dialects, both the language and the people are called Cup'ik.

Siberian Yupik

Siberian Yupik reside along the Bering Sea coast of the Chukchi Peninsula in Siberia in the Russian Far East and in the villages of Gambell and Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island in Alaska. The Central Siberian Yupik spoken on the Chukchi Peninsula and on St. Lawrence Island is nearly identical. About 1,050 of a total Alaska population of 1,100 Siberian Yupik people in Alaska speak the language. It is the first language of the home for most St. Lawrence Island children. In Siberia, about 300 of a total of 900 Siberian Yupik people still learn and study the language, though it is no longer learned as a first language by children.

Naukan

About 70 of 400 Naukan people still speak Naukanski. The Naukan originate on the Chukot Peninsula in Chukotka Autonomous Okrug in Siberia. Despite the relatively small population of Naukan speakers, documentation of the language dates back to 1732. While Naukan is only spoken in Siberia, the language acts as an intermediate between two Alaskan languages: Siberian Yupik Eskimo and Central Yup'ik Eskimo.

Sirenik Eskimos

Some speakers of Siberian Yupik languages used to speak an Eskimo variant in the past, before they underwent a language shift. These former speakers of Sirenik Eskimo language inhabited the settlements of Sireniki, Imtuk, and some small villages stretching to the west from Sireniki along south-eastern coasts of Chukchi Peninsula. They lived in neighborhoods with Siberian Yupik and Chukchi peoples.
As early as in 1895, Imtuk was a settlement with a mixed population of Sirenik Eskimos and Ungazigmit. Sirenik Eskimo culture has been influenced by that of Chukchi, and the language shows Chukchi language influences. Folktale motifs also show the influence of Chuckchi culture.
The above peculiarities of this Eskimo language amounted to mutual unintelligibility even with its nearest language relatives: in the past, Sirenik Eskimos had to use the unrelated Chukchi language as a lingua franca for communicating with Siberian Yupik.
Many words are formed from entirely different roots from in Siberian Yupik, but even the grammar has several peculiarities distinct not only among Eskimo languages, but even compared to Aleut. For example, dual number is not known in Sirenik Eskimo, while most Eskimo–Aleut languages have dual, including its neighboring Siberian Yupikax relatives.
Little is known about the origin of this diversity. The peculiarities of this language may be the result of a supposed long isolation from other Eskimo groups, and being in contact only with speakers of unrelated languages for many centuries. The influence of the Chukchi language is clear.
Because of all these factors, the classification of Sireniki Eskimo language is not settled yet: Sireniki language is sometimes regarded as a third branch of Eskimo. Sometimes it is regarded rather as a group belonging to the Yupik branch.

Cyrillic

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