Inuit in the context of Arctic

Greenland is an autonomous territory in the Kingdom of Denmark. It is by far the largest geographically of three constituent parts of the kingdom; the other two are metropolitan Denmark and the Faroe Islands. It shares a small 1.2 km border with Canada on Hans Island. Citizens of Greenland are full citizens of Denmark and of the European Union. Greenland is one of the Overseas Countries and Territories of the European Union and is part of the Council of Europe. It is the world's largest island, and lies between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Greenland's Kaffeklubben Island, off the northern coast, is the world's northernmost undisputed point of land—Cape Morris Jesup on the mainland was thought to be so until the 1960s. The capital and largest city is Nuuk. Economically, Greenland is heavily reliant on aid from Denmark, amounting to nearly half of the territory's total public revenue.

Though a part of the continent of North America, Greenland has been politically and culturally associated with the European kingdoms of Norway and Denmark for more than a millennium, beginning in 986. Greenland has been inhabited at intervals over at least the last 4,500 years by circumpolar peoples whose forebears migrated there from what is now Canada. Norsemen from Norway settled the uninhabited southern part of Greenland beginning in the 10th century (having previously settled Iceland), and their descendants lived in Greenland for 400 years until disappearing in the late 15th century. The 13th century saw the arrival of Inuit.

Nuuk (Greenlandic pronunciation: [nuːk] ; Danish: Nuuk, formerly Godthåb [ˈkʌtˌhɔˀp]) is the capital and most populous city of Greenland, an autonomous territory in the Kingdom of Denmark. Nuuk is the seat of government and the territory's largest cultural and economic center. It is also the seat of government for the Sermersooq municipality. In January 2025, it had a population of 20,113—more than a third of the territory's population—making it one of the smallest capital cities in the world by population.

The city was founded in 1728 by the Danish-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede when he relocated from the earlier Hope Colony (Haabets Koloni), where he had arrived in 1721; the governor Claus Paarss was part of the relocation. The new colony was placed at the Inuit settlement of Nûk and named Godthaab ("Good Hope"). "Nuuk" is the Greenlandic word for "cape" and is commonly found in Greenlandic place names. It is so named because of its position at the end of the Nuup Kangerlua fjord on the Labrador Sea's eastern shore. Its latitude, at 64°11' N, makes it the world's northernmost capital, a few kilometres farther north than Reykjavík. When home rule was established in 1979, the authorization of place names was transferred to Greenlandic authorities, who preferred Greenlandic names to Danish ones. The name Godthåb mostly went out of use over the next two decades.

Denmark–Norway was a 16th-to-19th-century multi-national and multi-lingual real union consisting of the Kingdom of Denmark, the Kingdom of Norway (including the then Norwegian overseas possessions: the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland, and other possessions), the Duchy of Schleswig, and the Duchy of Holstein. The state also claimed sovereignty over three historical peoples: Frisians, Gutes and Wends. Denmark–Norway had several colonies, namely the Danish Gold Coast, Danish India (the Nicobar Islands, Serampore, Tharangambadi), and the Danish West Indies.

The state's inhabitants were mainly Danes, Norwegians and Germans, and also included Faroese, Icelanders and Inuit in the Norwegian overseas possessions, a Sami minority in northern Norway, as well as other indigenous peoples. The main cities of Denmark–Norway were Copenhagen, Christiania (Oslo), Altona, Bergen and Trondheim, and the primary official languages were Danish and German, but Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, Sami and Greenlandic were also spoken locally.

Indigenous peoples in Canada (also known as Aboriginals) are the Indigenous peoples within the boundaries of Canada. They comprise the First Nations, Inuit, and Métis, representing roughly 5.0% of the total Canadian population. There are over 600 recognized First Nations governments or bands with distinctive cultures, languages, art, and music.

Old Crow Flats and Bluefish Caves are some of the earliest known sites of human habitation in Canada. The characteristics of Indigenous cultures in Canada prior to European colonization included permanent settlements, agriculture, civic and ceremonial architecture, complex societal hierarchies, and trading networks. Métis nations of mixed ancestry originated in the mid-17th century when First Nations and Inuit married Europeans, primarily French settlers. First Nations and Métis peoples played a critical part in the development of European colonies in Canada, particularly for their role in assisting Europeans during the North American fur trade.

The Greenlandic Inuit or sometimes simply the Greenlandic are an ethnic group and nation Indigenous to Greenland, where they constitute the largest ethnic population. They share a common ancestry, culture, and history; and natively speak the Greenlandic language. As Greenland is a territory within the Danish Realm, citizens of Greenland are both citizens of Denmark and of the European Union.

Approximately 89 percent of Greenland's population of 57,695 is Greenlandic Inuit, or 51,349 people as of 2012. Ethnographically, they consist of three major groups:

The history of Greenland is a history of life under extreme Arctic conditions: currently, an ice sheet covers about eighty percent of the island, restricting human activity largely to the coasts. The first humans are thought to have arrived in Greenland around 2500 BCE. Their descendants most likely died out and were replaced and succeeded by several other human groups migrating from continental North America since then. There has been no evidence discovered that Greenland was known to Norsemen until the 9th century CE, when Norse Icelandic explorers settled on its southwestern coast. The ancestors of the Greenlandic Inuit who live there today appear to have migrated there later, around the year 1200, across the Nares Strait from northern Canada.

While Inuit survived in the icy world of the Little Ice Age, the early Norse settlements, known as the Eastern Settlement, along the southwestern coast disappeared, leaving Inuit as the only inhabitants of the island for several centuries. During this time, Denmark–Norway, apparently believing the Norse settlements had survived, continued to claim sovereignty over the island despite the lack of any contact between the Norsemen (specifically Icelanders) installed in Greenland and their Scandinavian brethren. In 1721, aspiring to become a colonial power, Denmark-Norway sent a missionary expedition to Greenland with the stated aim of reinstating Christianity among descendants of the Norse Greenlanders who may have converted back to paganism. When the missionaries found no descendants of the Norse Greenlanders, they baptised the Inuit they found living there instead. Denmark-Norway then developed trading colonies along the coast and imposed a trade monopoly and other colonial privileges on the area.

Nunavut is the largest and northernmost territory of Canada. It was separated officially from the Northwest Territories on April 1, 1999, via the Nunavut Act and the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement Act, which provided this territory to the Inuit for self-government. The boundaries had been drawn in 1993. The creation of Nunavut resulted in the first major change to Canada's political map in half a century since the province of Newfoundland (now Newfoundland and Labrador) was admitted in 1949.

Nunavut comprises a major portion of Northern Canada and most of the Arctic Archipelago. Its vast territory makes it the fifth-largest country subdivision in the world, as well as North America's second-largest (after Greenland). The capital Iqaluit (formerly "Frobisher Bay"), on Baffin Island in the east, was chosen by a capital plebiscite in 1995. Other major communities include the regional centres of Rankin Inlet and Cambridge Bay.

Circumpolar peoples and Arctic peoples are umbrella terms for the various indigenous peoples of the Arctic region.

Approximately four million people are resident in the Arctic among which 10 percent are indigenous peoples belonging to a vast number of distinct communities. They represent a minority with the exception of Greenland of which 90 percent of its population is composed of Inuit.

Indigenous law in Canada refers to the legal traditions, customs, and practices of Indigenous peoples and groups. Canadian aboriginal law is different from Indigenous Law. Canadian Aboriginal law provides certain constitutionally recognized rights to land and traditional practices.

Canada contains over 900 different Indigenous groups, each using different Indigenous legal traditions. Cree, Blackfoot, Mi'kmaq and numerous other First Nations; Inuit; and Métis will apply their own legal traditions in daily life, creating contracts, working with governmental and corporate entities, ecological management and criminal proceedings and family law. Most maintain their laws through traditional governance alongside the elected officials and federal laws. The legal precedents set millennia ago are known through stories and derived from the actions and past responses as well as through continuous interpretation by elders and law-keepers—the same process by which nearly all legal traditions, from common laws and civil codes, are formed.

A harpoon is a long, spear-like projectile used in fishing, whaling, sealing, and other hunting to shoot, kill, and capture large fish or marine mammals such as seals, sea cows, and whales. It impales the target and secures it with barb or toggling claws, allowing the fishermen or hunters to use an attached rope or chain to pull and retrieve the animal. A harpoon can also be used as a ranged weapon against other watercraft in naval warfare.

Certain harpoons are made with different builds to perform better with the type of target. For example, the Inuit have short, fixed-foreshaft harpoons for hunting at breathing holes, while loose-shafted ones are made for throwing and remaining attached to the game.

Whaling is the hunting of whales for their products such as meat and blubber, which can be turned into a type of oil that was important in the Industrial Revolution. Whaling was practiced as an organized industry as early as 875 AD. By the 16th century, it had become the principal industry in the Basque coastal regions of Spain and France. The whaling industry spread throughout the world and became very profitable in terms of trade and resources. Some regions of the world's oceans, along the animals' migration routes, had a particularly dense whale population and became targets for large concentrations of whaling ships, and the industry continued to grow well into the 20th century. The depletion of some whale species to near extinction led to the banning of whaling in many countries by 1969 and to an international cessation of whaling as an industry in the late 1980s.Archaeological evidence suggests the earliest known forms of whaling date to at least 3000 BC, practiced by the Inuit and other peoples in the North Atlantic and North Pacific. Coastal communities around the world have long histories of subsistence use of cetaceans, by dolphin drive hunting and by harvesting drift whales. Widespread commercial whaling emerged with organized fleets of whaling ships in the 17th century; competitive national whaling industries in the 18th and 19th centuries; and the introduction of factory ships and explosive harpoons along with the concept of whale harvesting in the first half of the 20th century. By the late 1930s, more than 50,000 whales were killed annually. In 1982, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) decided that there should be a pause on commercial whaling on all whale species from 1986 onwards because of the extreme depletion of most of the whale stocks.

Contemporary whaling for whale meat is subject to intense debate. Iceland, Japan, Norway, North American indigenous peoples and the Danish dependencies of the Faroe Islands and Greenland continue to hunt in the 21st century. The IWC ban on commercial whaling has been very successful, with only Iceland, Japan and Norway still engaging in and supporting commercial hunting. They also support having the IWC moratorium lifted on certain whale stocks for hunting. Anti-whaling countries and environmental activists oppose lifting the ban. Under the terms of the IWC moratorium, aboriginal whaling is allowed to continue on a subsistence basis. Over the past few decades, whale watching has become a significant industry in many parts of the world; in some countries it has replaced whaling, but in a few others the two business models exist in an uneasy tension. The live capture of cetaceans for display in aquaria (e.g., captive killer whales) continues.

Hans Poulsen Egede (31 January 1686 – 5 November 1758) was a Norwegian Lutheran priest and missionary who launched mission efforts to Greenland, which led him to be styled the Apostle of Greenland. He established a successful mission among the Inuit and is credited with revitalizing Danish-Norwegian interest in the island after contact had been broken for about 300 years. He founded Greenland's capital Godthåb, now known as Nuuk.

Mary Jeannie May Simon (born August 21, 1947) is a Canadian civil servant, diplomat, and former broadcaster who has been serving as the 30th governor general of Canada since July 26, 2021. She is Inuk on her mother's side, making her the first Indigenous person to hold the office.

Simon was born in Fort Severight (now Kangiqsualujjuaq), Quebec. She briefly worked as a producer and announcer for the CBC Northern Service in the 1970s before entering public service, serving on the board of the Northern Quebec Inuit Association and playing a key role in the Charlottetown Accord negotiations. She was Canada's first ambassador for circumpolar affairs from 1994 to 2004, as well as a lead negotiator for the creation of the Arctic Council. She also served as the Canadian ambassador to Denmark from 1999 to 2002.

A dog sled or dog sleigh is a sled pulled by one or more sled dogs used to travel over ice and through snow, a practice known as mushing. Numerous types of sleds are used, depending on their function. They can be used for dog sled racing. Traditionally in Greenland and the eastern Canadian Arctic the Inuit had the dogs pull in a fan shape in front of the sled, while in other regions, such as Alaska and the western part of Northern Canada the dogs pull side by side in pairs.

The Hudson Strait (French: Détroit d'Hudson) in Nunavut links the Atlantic Ocean and the Labrador Sea to Hudson Bay in Canada. This strait lies between Baffin Island and Nunavik, with its eastern entrance marked by Cape Chidley in Newfoundland and Labrador and Nunavut and Resolution Island, off Baffin Island. The strait is about 750 km (470 mi) long with an average width of 125 km (78 mi), varying from 70 km (43 mi) at the eastern entrance to 240 km (150 mi) at Deception Bay.

English navigator Sir Martin Frobisher was the first European to report entering the strait, in 1578. He named a tidal rip at the entrance the Furious Overfall and called the strait Mistaken Strait, since he felt it held less promise as an entrance to the Northwest Passage than the body of water that was later named Frobisher Bay. Later in his 1587 voyage, explorer John Davis sailed by the entrance to the strait. The first European to explore the strait was George Weymouth who sailed 300 nautical miles (560 km; 350 mi) beyond the Furious Overfall in 1602.

The Cree are a North American Indigenous people, numbering more than 350,000 in Canada, where they form one of the country's largest First Nations macro-communities. There are numerous Cree peoples and several nations closely related to the Cree, these being the Plains Cree, Woodland Cree, Rocky Cree, Swampy Cree, Moose Cree, and East Cree with the Atikamekw, Innu, and Naskapi being closely related. Also closely related to the Cree are the Oji-Cree and Métis, both nations of mixed heritage, the former with Ojibweg (Chippewa) and the latter with European fur traders. Cree homelands account for a majority of eastern and central Canada, from Eeyou Istchee in the east in what is now Quebec to northern Ontario, much of the Canadian Prairies, and up into British Columbia and the Northwest Territories. Although a majority of Cree live in Canada, there are small communities in the United States, living mostly in Montana where they share Rocky Boy's Indian Reservation with the Ojibwe people.

The Cree are in a variety of treaty relations with the Canadian state. Most notable are the Numbered Treaties which cover a majority of Cree homelands. In Quebec, the East Cree (along with the Inuit of Nunavik) entered into one of the first modern treaties: the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement which formalized relations between the province and both Eeyou Istchee and the Nunavik region of Inuit Nunangat. A documented westward migration, over time, has been strongly associated with their roles as traders and hunters in the North American fur trade.

Inuit kinship (formerly Eskimo kinship) is a category of kinship used to define family organization in anthropology. Identified by Lewis H. Morgan in his 1871 work Systems of Consanguinity and Affinity of the Human Family, the Inuit system was one of six major kinship systems (Inuit, Hawaiian, Iroquois, Crow, Omaha, and Sudanese). The system of English-language kinship terms falls into the Inuit type.

Eskimo (/ˈɛskɪmoʊ/) is a controversial exonym that refers to two closely related Indigenous peoples: Inuit (including the Alaska Native Iñupiat, the Canadian Inuit, and the Greenlandic Inuit) and the Yupik (or Yuit) of eastern Siberia and Alaska. A related third group, Aleuts, who inhabit the Aleutian Islands, are generally excluded from the definition of Eskimo. The three groups share a relatively recent common ancestor, and speak related languages belonging to the family of Eskaleut languages. 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, to be pejorative or even offensive. Eskimo continues to be used within a historical, linguistic, archaeological, and cultural context. The governments in Canada and the United States 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. Canada officially uses the term Inuit to describe the indigenous Canadian people who are living in the country's northern sectors and who are not First Nations or Métis. The United States government legally uses Alaska Native for enrolled Yupik and Inuit tribal members, and also for non-Eskimos including Aleut, Tlingit, Haida, Eyak, and Tsimshian, in addition to at least nine northern Athabaskan/Dene peoples. Other non-enrolled individuals also claim Eskimo/Aleut descent, making it the world's "most widespread aboriginal group".