The Greenlandic Inuit (Greenlandic: kalaallit, Danish: Grønlandsk Inuit) are the indigenous and most populous ethnic group in Greenland. Most speak Greenlandic (Western Greenlandic, Kalaallisut) and consider themselves ethnically Greenlandic. People of Greenland are both citizens of Denmark and citizens of the European Union.
| Total population | |
|---|---|
| c. 70,000 | |
| Regions with significant populations | |
| Greenland | 51,349 |
| Denmark | 16,470 |
| United States | 352 |
| Norway | 293 |
| Faroe Islands | 163 |
| Iceland | 65 |
| Canada | 55 |
| Netherlands | 14 |
| Languages | |
Greenlandic
| |
| Religion | |
| Predominantly Lutheran (Church of Denmark) Minority Inuit religion See Religion in Greenland | |
| Related ethnic groups | |
| other Inuit people | |
Approximately 89 percent of Greenland's population of 57,695 is Greenlandic Inuit, or 51,349 people as of 2012[update].Ethnographically, they consist of three major groups:
- the Kalaallit of west Greenland, who speak Kalaallisut
- the Tunumiit of Tunu (east Greenland), who speak Tunumiit oraasiat ("East Greenlandic")
- the Inughuit of north Greenland, who speak Inuktun ("Polar Inuit")
Historically, Kalaallit referred specifically to the people of Western Greenland. Northern Greenlanders call themselves Avanersuarmiut or Inughuit, and Eastern Greenlanders call themselves Tunumiit, respectively.
Today, most Greenlanders are bilingual speakers of Kalaallisut and Danish and most trace their lineage to the first Inuit that came to Greenland. The vast majority of ethnic Greenlanders reside in Greenland or elsewhere in the Danish Realm, primarily Denmark proper (approximately 20,000 Greenlanders reside in Denmark proper). A small minority reside in other countries, mostly elsewhere in Scandinavia and North America. There are though a number of Greenlanders and Greenlandic families who today are multiracial, mostly due to marriages between Greenlanders and Danes as well as other Europeans.
Regions
The Inuit are descended from the Thule people, who settled Greenland in between AD 1200 and 1400. As 84 percent of Greenland's land mass is covered by the Greenland ice sheet, Inuit people live in three regions: Polar, Eastern, and Western. In the 1850s, additional Canadian Inuit joined the Polar Inuit communities.
The Eastern Inuit, or Tunumiit, live in the area with the mildest climate, a territory called Tunu or Tasiilaq. Hunters can hunt marine mammals from kayaks throughout the year.
Language
Kalaallisut is the official language of Greenland. It is the western variety of the Greenlandic language, which is one of the Inuit languages within the Eskimo-Aleut family. Kalaallisut is taught in schools and used widely in Greenlandic media.
History
The first people arrived in Greenland from the Canadian island of Ellesmere, around 2500 to 2000 BCE, from where they colonized north Greenland as the Independence I culture and south Greenland as the Saqqaq culture. The Early Dorset replaced these early Greenlanders around 700 BCE, and themselves lived on the island until c. 1 CE. These people were unrelated to the Inuit. Save for a Late Dorset recolonisation of northeast Greenland c. 700 CE, the island was then uninhabited until the Norse arrived in the 980s. Between 1000 and 1400, the Thule, ancestors of the Inuit, replaced the Dorset in Arctic Canada, and then moved into Greenland from the north. The Norse disappeared from southern Greenland in the 15th century, and although Scandinavians revisited the island in the 16th and 17th centuries, they did not resettle until 1721. In 1814, the Treaty of Kiel confirmed Greenland as a territory of Denmark.
The primary method of survival for the Thule was hunting seal, narwhal, and walrus as well as gathering local plant material. Archaeological evidence of animal remains suggests that the Thule were well adjusted to Greenland and in such a way that they could afford to leave potential sources of fat behind.
European visitors to Northeast Greenland before the early 19th century reported evidence of extensive Inuit settlement in the region although they encountered no humans. In 1823, Douglas Charles Clavering met a group of twelve Inuit in Clavering Island. Later expeditions, starting with the Second German North Polar Expedition in 1869, found the remains of many former settlements, but the population had apparently died out during the intervening years.
In 1979, the Greenlanders voted to become autonomous. There is an active independence movement.
The population of Greenlandic Inuit has fluctuated over the years. A smallpox outbreak reduced the population from 8,000 to 6,000 in the 18th century. The population doubled in 1900 to 12,000 then steadily rose by around 100 people each year from 1883–1919. Tuberculosis caused a drop in the population, but after several decades of steady birth rates and commercial fishing over traditional hunting, the population reached 41,000 in 1980.
Society
Gender roles among Greenlandic Inuit are flexible; however, historically men hunted and women prepared the meat and skins. Most marriages are by choice, as opposed to arranged, and monogamy is commonplace. Extended families are important to Inuit society.
Greenland Inuit diet consists of a combination of local or traditional dishes and imported foods, with the majority of Inuit, aged 18 to 25 and 60 and older, preferring customary, local foods like whale skin and dried cod over imported foods like sausage or chicken. That study also reveals that those who grew up in villages only consumed local, Inuit cuisine foods 31 times a month and those who lived in Danish areas would consume local, Inuit cuisine 17 times per month. The reasons for the lack of traditional food consumption varies, but 48 percent of respondents claim that they wanted to have variety in their diet, 45 percent of respondents said it was difficult to obtain traditional foods, and 39 percent said that traditional foods were too expensive.
The kinds of whale that have been historically hunted and consumed are the Minke and Fin whales, both are under watch by the International Whaling Commission (IWC). Greenland Home Rule implemented IWC quotas on aboriginal whale hunting, reducing hunting of Minke whales to a maximum of 115 per year and Fin whales to 21 per year.
Art and spirituality
The Greenlandic Inuit have a strong artistic practice based on sewing animal skins () and making masks. They are also known for an art form of figures called tupilait or "evil spirit objects". Sperm whale ivory (teeth) remains a valued medium for carving.
Customary art-making practices thrive in Ammassalik Island.Ammassalik wooden maps are carved maps of the Greenlandic coastline, used in the late 19th century.
Greenlandic Inuit believed that spirits inhabited every human joint, even knucklebones.
See also
- List of features in Greenland named after Greenlandic Inuit
- Inuit Circumpolar Council
- Kayak angst
Notes
- "Grønlands Statistik". Stat.gl. Retrieved 25 October 2015.
- "Statistikbanken". Statistics Denmark. 2018. Retrieved 22 July 2018.
- "Table 1. First, Second, and Total Responses to the Ancestry Question by Detailed Ancestry Code: 2000". U.S. Census Bureau. Retrieved 28 May 2024.
- "Foreign born, by sex and country background". Statistisk centralbyrå - Statistics Norway. Retrieved 3 July 2016.[permanent dead link]
- "IB01040 Population by birth country, sex and age, 1st January (1985-2016)". Hagstova Føroya - Statistics Faroe Islands. Retrieved 3 July 2016.
- "Population by country of birth, sex and age 1 January 1998-2015". Hagstofa Íslands - Statistics Iceland. Retrieved 3 July 2016.
- "Immigrant population by place of birth, period of immigration, 2016 counts, both sexes, age (total), Canada, 2016 Census". Statistics Canada. 25 October 2017. Retrieved 22 July 2018.
- "Population; sex, age, migration background and generation, 1 January". Statistics Netherlands (CBS). Retrieved 22 July 2018.
- "Greenland." Archived 2020-05-09 at the Wayback Machine CIA World Factbook. Retrieved 6 Aug 2012.
- "Inuktitut, Greenlandic." Ethnologue. Retrieved 6 Aug 2012.
- Lawrence C. Hamilton and Rasmus Ole Rasmussen, "Population, Sex Ratios and Development in Greenland", Arctic 63, no. 1 (2010): 43–52.
- "The Indigenous World 2023: Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland)". 24 March 2023. Retrieved 28 March 2024. at the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs
- Baldacchino, Godfrey. "Extreme tourism: lessons from the world's cold water islands", Elsevier Science, 2006: 101. (retrieved through Google Books) ISBN 978-0-08-044656-1.
- Hessel 11
- d'Andrea, William J.; Huang, Yongsong; Fritz, Sherilyn C.; Anderson, N. John (2011). "Abrupt Holocene climate change as an important factor for human migration in West Greenland". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 108 (24): 9765–9769. Bibcode:2011PNAS..108.9765D. doi:10.1073/pnas.1101708108. JSTOR 25831309. PMC 3116382. PMID 21628586.
- D'Andrea, William J.; Huang, Yongsong; Fritz, Sherilyn C.; Anderson, N. John (2011). "Abrupt Holocene climate change as an important factor for human migration in West Greenland". Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 108 (24): 9765–9769. Bibcode:2011PNAS..108.9765D. doi:10.1073/pnas.1101708108. JSTOR 25831309. PMC 3116382. PMID 21628586.
- Lynnerup, Niels (2015). "The Thule Inuit Mummies From Greenland". The Anatomical Record. 298 (6): 1001–1006. doi:10.1002/ar.23131. PMID 25998634. S2CID 7773726.
- Sørensen, Mikkel; Gulløv, Hans Christian (2012). "The Prehistory of Inuit in Northeast Greenland". Arctic Anthropology. 49 (1): 88–104. doi:10.1353/arc.2012.0016. JSTOR 24475839. S2CID 162882708.
- Outram, Alan K. (1999). "A Comparison of Paleo-Eskimo and Medieval Norse Bone Fat Exploitation in Western Greenland" (PDF). Arctic Anthropology. 36 (1/2): 103–117. JSTOR 40316508.
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- Hamilton, Lawrence C.; Rasmussen, Rasmus Ole (2010). "Population, Sex Ratios and Development in Greenland". Arctic. 63 (1): 43–52. doi:10.14430/arctic645. JSTOR 40513368.
- Pars, Tine; Osler, Merete; Bjerregaard, Peter (2001). "Contemporary Use of Traditional and Imported Food among Greenlandic Inuit". Arctic. 54 (1): 22–31. doi:10.14430/arctic760. JSTOR 40512274.
- Caulfield, Richard A. (1993). "Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling in Greenland: The Case of Qeqertarsuaq Municipality in West Greenland". Arctic. 46 (2): 144–155. doi:10.14430/arctic1336. JSTOR 40511506. S2CID 53512929.
- "Population Estimates". iwc.int. Retrieved 17 March 2018.
- Hessel 21
- Ingo 20
- Subin, Anna Della. "The enchanted worlds of Marshall Sahlins".
References
- Hessel, Ingo (2006). Arctic Spirit. Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre. ISBN 978-1-55365-189-5.
External links
- Inuit Circumpolar Council: Greenland
- Culture and History of Greenland, Greenland Guide
- Colonialism in Greenland: An Inuit Perspective Archived 2017-10-31 at the Wayback Machine
The Greenlandic Inuit Greenlandic kalaallit Danish Gronlandsk Inuit are the indigenous and most populous ethnic group in Greenland Most speak Greenlandic Western Greenlandic Kalaallisut and consider themselves ethnically Greenlandic People of Greenland are both citizens of Denmark and citizens of the European Union Greenlandic InuitTotal populationc 70 000Regions with significant populationsGreenland51 349Denmark16 470United States352Norway293Faroe Islands163Iceland65Canada55Netherlands14LanguagesGreenlandic KalaallisutTunumiitInuktun Danish West Greenlandic Pidgin extinct ReligionPredominantly Lutheran Church of Denmark Minority Inuit religion See Religion in GreenlandRelated ethnic groupsother Inuit peopleGreenlandic Inuit population 1750 2000 Approximately 89 percent of Greenland s population of 57 695 is Greenlandic Inuit or 51 349 people as of 2012 update Ethnographically they consist of three major groups the Kalaallit of west Greenland who speak Kalaallisut the Tunumiit of Tunu east Greenland who speak Tunumiit oraasiat East Greenlandic the Inughuit of north Greenland who speak Inuktun Polar Inuit Historically Kalaallit referred specifically to the people of Western Greenland Northern Greenlanders call themselves Avanersuarmiut or Inughuit and Eastern Greenlanders call themselves Tunumiit respectively Today most Greenlanders are bilingual speakers of Kalaallisut and Danish and most trace their lineage to the first Inuit that came to Greenland The vast majority of ethnic Greenlanders reside in Greenland or elsewhere in the Danish Realm primarily Denmark proper approximately 20 000 Greenlanders reside in Denmark proper A small minority reside in other countries mostly elsewhere in Scandinavia and North America There are though a number of Greenlanders and Greenlandic families who today are multiracial mostly due to marriages between Greenlanders and Danes as well as other Europeans RegionsThe Inuit are descended from the Thule people who settled Greenland in between AD 1200 and 1400 As 84 percent of Greenland s land mass is covered by the Greenland ice sheet Inuit people live in three regions Polar Eastern and Western In the 1850s additional Canadian Inuit joined the Polar Inuit communities The Eastern Inuit or Tunumiit live in the area with the mildest climate a territory called Tunu or Tasiilaq Hunters can hunt marine mammals from kayaks throughout the year LanguageKuupik Kleist former Prime Minister of Greenland 2009 2013 Nive Nielsen Inuk singer and songwriter from Greenland 2016 Kalaallisut is the official language of Greenland It is the western variety of the Greenlandic language which is one of the Inuit languages within the Eskimo Aleut family Kalaallisut is taught in schools and used widely in Greenlandic media HistoryGreenlandic Inuit in 1903 The first people arrived in Greenland from the Canadian island of Ellesmere around 2500 to 2000 BCE from where they colonized north Greenland as the Independence I culture and south Greenland as the Saqqaq culture The Early Dorset replaced these early Greenlanders around 700 BCE and themselves lived on the island until c 1 CE These people were unrelated to the Inuit Save for a Late Dorset recolonisation of northeast Greenland c 700 CE the island was then uninhabited until the Norse arrived in the 980s Between 1000 and 1400 the Thule ancestors of the Inuit replaced the Dorset in Arctic Canada and then moved into Greenland from the north The Norse disappeared from southern Greenland in the 15th century and although Scandinavians revisited the island in the 16th and 17th centuries they did not resettle until 1721 In 1814 the Treaty of Kiel confirmed Greenland as a territory of Denmark The primary method of survival for the Thule was hunting seal narwhal and walrus as well as gathering local plant material Archaeological evidence of animal remains suggests that the Thule were well adjusted to Greenland and in such a way that they could afford to leave potential sources of fat behind European visitors to Northeast Greenland before the early 19th century reported evidence of extensive Inuit settlement in the region although they encountered no humans In 1823 Douglas Charles Clavering met a group of twelve Inuit in Clavering Island Later expeditions starting with the Second German North Polar Expedition in 1869 found the remains of many former settlements but the population had apparently died out during the intervening years In 1979 the Greenlanders voted to become autonomous There is an active independence movement The population of Greenlandic Inuit has fluctuated over the years A smallpox outbreak reduced the population from 8 000 to 6 000 in the 18th century The population doubled in 1900 to 12 000 then steadily rose by around 100 people each year from 1883 1919 Tuberculosis caused a drop in the population but after several decades of steady birth rates and commercial fishing over traditional hunting the population reached 41 000 in 1980 SocietyGender roles among Greenlandic Inuit are flexible however historically men hunted and women prepared the meat and skins Most marriages are by choice as opposed to arranged and monogamy is commonplace Extended families are important to Inuit society Greenland Inuit diet consists of a combination of local or traditional dishes and imported foods with the majority of Inuit aged 18 to 25 and 60 and older preferring customary local foods like whale skin and dried cod over imported foods like sausage or chicken That study also reveals that those who grew up in villages only consumed local Inuit cuisine foods 31 times a month and those who lived in Danish areas would consume local Inuit cuisine 17 times per month The reasons for the lack of traditional food consumption varies but 48 percent of respondents claim that they wanted to have variety in their diet 45 percent of respondents said it was difficult to obtain traditional foods and 39 percent said that traditional foods were too expensive The kinds of whale that have been historically hunted and consumed are the Minke and Fin whales both are under watch by the International Whaling Commission IWC Greenland Home Rule implemented IWC quotas on aboriginal whale hunting reducing hunting of Minke whales to a maximum of 115 per year and Fin whales to 21 per year Art and spiritualityThe Greenlandic Inuit have a strong artistic practice based on sewing animal skins and making masks They are also known for an art form of figures called tupilait or evil spirit objects Sperm whale ivory teeth remains a valued medium for carving Customary art making practices thrive in Ammassalik Island Ammassalik wooden maps are carved maps of the Greenlandic coastline used in the late 19th century Greenlandic Inuit believed that spirits inhabited every human joint even knucklebones See alsoList of features in Greenland named after Greenlandic Inuit Inuit Circumpolar Council Kayak angstNotes Gronlands Statistik Stat gl Retrieved 25 October 2015 Statistikbanken Statistics Denmark 2018 Retrieved 22 July 2018 Table 1 First Second and Total Responses to the Ancestry Question by Detailed Ancestry Code 2000 U S Census Bureau Retrieved 28 May 2024 Foreign born by sex and country background Statistisk centralbyra Statistics Norway Retrieved 3 July 2016 permanent dead link IB01040 Population by birth country sex and age 1st January 1985 2016 Hagstova Foroya Statistics Faroe Islands Retrieved 3 July 2016 Population by country of birth sex and age 1 January 1998 2015 Hagstofa Islands Statistics Iceland Retrieved 3 July 2016 Immigrant population by place of birth period of immigration 2016 counts both sexes age total Canada 2016 Census Statistics Canada 25 October 2017 Retrieved 22 July 2018 Population sex age migration background and generation 1 January Statistics Netherlands CBS Retrieved 22 July 2018 Greenland Archived 2020 05 09 at the Wayback Machine CIA World Factbook Retrieved 6 Aug 2012 Inuktitut Greenlandic Ethnologue Retrieved 6 Aug 2012 Lawrence C Hamilton and Rasmus Ole Rasmussen Population Sex Ratios and Development in Greenland Arctic 63 no 1 2010 43 52 The Indigenous World 2023 Kalaallit Nunaat Greenland 24 March 2023 Retrieved 28 March 2024 at the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs Baldacchino Godfrey Extreme tourism lessons from the world s cold water islands Elsevier Science 2006 101 retrieved through Google Books ISBN 978 0 08 044656 1 Hessel 11 d Andrea William J Huang Yongsong Fritz Sherilyn C Anderson N John 2011 Abrupt Holocene climate change as an important factor for human migration in West Greenland Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108 24 9765 9769 Bibcode 2011PNAS 108 9765D doi 10 1073 pnas 1101708108 JSTOR 25831309 PMC 3116382 PMID 21628586 D Andrea William J Huang Yongsong Fritz Sherilyn C Anderson N John 2011 Abrupt Holocene climate change as an important factor for human migration in West Greenland Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 108 24 9765 9769 Bibcode 2011PNAS 108 9765D doi 10 1073 pnas 1101708108 JSTOR 25831309 PMC 3116382 PMID 21628586 Lynnerup Niels 2015 The Thule Inuit Mummies From Greenland The Anatomical Record 298 6 1001 1006 doi 10 1002 ar 23131 PMID 25998634 S2CID 7773726 Sorensen Mikkel Gullov Hans Christian 2012 The Prehistory of Inuit in Northeast Greenland Arctic Anthropology 49 1 88 104 doi 10 1353 arc 2012 0016 JSTOR 24475839 S2CID 162882708 Outram Alan K 1999 A Comparison of Paleo Eskimo and Medieval Norse Bone Fat Exploitation in Western Greenland PDF Arctic Anthropology 36 1 2 103 117 JSTOR 40316508 Hamilton Lawrence C Rasmussen Rasmus Ole 2010 Population Sex Ratios and Development in Greenland Arctic 63 1 43 52 doi 10 14430 arctic645 JSTOR 40513368 Pars Tine Osler Merete Bjerregaard Peter 2001 Contemporary Use of Traditional and Imported Food among Greenlandic Inuit Arctic 54 1 22 31 doi 10 14430 arctic760 JSTOR 40512274 Caulfield Richard A 1993 Aboriginal Subsistence Whaling in Greenland The Case of Qeqertarsuaq Municipality in West Greenland Arctic 46 2 144 155 doi 10 14430 arctic1336 JSTOR 40511506 S2CID 53512929 Population Estimates iwc int Retrieved 17 March 2018 Hessel 21 Ingo 20 Subin Anna Della The enchanted worlds of Marshall Sahlins ReferencesHessel Ingo 2006 Arctic Spirit Vancouver Douglas and McIntyre ISBN 978 1 55365 189 5 External linksWikimedia Commons has media related to Greenlandic Inuit people Inuit Circumpolar Council Greenland Culture and History of Greenland Greenland Guide Colonialism in Greenland An Inuit Perspective Archived 2017 10 31 at the Wayback Machine
