Inuit History after 1500 AD

In 1500 AD, the Inuit had recently finished conquering the Arctic from the Tuniit or Dorset Culture people who had lived there before them. Because of a cooling trend known as the Little Ice Age, the Inuit were finding it difficult to get enough food in the Arctic, and they had been gradually expanding their territory to the south, reaching as far south as Labrador in modern Canada (which is still pretty far north). They had succeeded in taking over Greenland from the Vikings around 1400 AD.

Now in 1530 AD more Europeans arrived. Basque men came first from Spain and built little forts along the coast of Labrador to fish and hunt whales. Inuit people didn't try to stop the Basque men, but they did raid their forts to get tools, especially iron tools, for themselves. Then Martin Frobisher and John Davis came from Britain in the 1570's and 1580's to sail around the Arctic looking for what they called the "Northwest passage" - a way through from Greenland to Alaska by boat, so that Europeans could ship things from Europe to China without having to travel all the way around Africa and India. Inuit people met with these men and told them they didn't know any Northwest Passage. Frobisher took one Inuit man back to England with him to visit.

By 1600, the Basque sailors had stopped coming to Labrador, probably because the whales had also stopped coming there. But the Inuit began to meet occasional French and English explorers and traders. They caught many serious diseases from these French and English visitors, and many people died of smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, and other sicknesses.

Gradually more European people came to visit Inuit villages or stayed to show that the Canadians or the United States government ruled the Arctic. In the late 1700's, Protestant missionaries came and converted many Inuit people to Christianity. These missionaries also gave people lots of iron tools like sewing needles and knives that were very useful to them. Some Inuit people began to trade furs to European traders in exchange for steel knives and other tools, and for food.

Here's a very old movie about the Inuit called Nanook of the North. Because it was made in the 1920's, it has some racist ideas, and the movie got some things wrong, but you can more or less see how the Inuit did things at that time. The movie's almost two hours long, though.

About 1940, Canadian people had developed good enough airplanes and helicopters to be able to visit Inuit territory even in the wintertime. The Canadians began to interfere more with the lives of Inuit people, forcing their kids to go away to boarding school to learn Canadian ways of doing things, and forcing grown-up Inuits to settle down in towns instead of being nomads. At the same time, Canadian doctors and nurses saved many babies and children who would have died, and so there got to be many more people living in Inuit territory than there had been before. There were too many to feed by traditional hunting and gathering and fishing. Many Inuit became poor and angry.

But in the 1960's kids in the boarding schools made friends and decided to fight for better treatment for their people. When they grew up, they went back to their families and insisted that Inuit people should be treated by Inuit doctors and nurses, and have Inuit policemen and governors in their towns.