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The focus of this part of our guide is on the Inuit people.

The Inuit are often associated with the Aleut in the minds of people who are unfamiliar with either, but they are separate cultures.

Both the Aleut and Inuit are native to the far north of North America, Greenland, and Eurasia. Given their proximity tone another, they speak related languages, inhabit comparable environments, and are similar in other ways, but there are significant differences between them, as well.

While both the Aleut and Inuit peoples inhabit northern coastal environments, the Aleutian Islands are subarctic, while most of the Inuit people inhabit areas within the Arctic circle.

Inuit communities are widely distributed, from northern Alaska and Siberia, as far west as western Greenland, while the Aleuts are concentrated in the Aleutian Islands, a chain of more than one hundred and fifty volcanic islands off the coast of Alaska, and some islands off of Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula.

Today, there are only about 2,000 Aleuts, while the Inuit are believed to number more than 100,000.

While it can be argued that the Inuits are not American Indians, their populations are largely in North America, and the prevailing theory is that their civilizations evolved from the same origins, that being Beringia, a large area of land that was flooded during a period of warming that melted the glaciers that once covered most of the North American continent, thus forming what is now the Bering Strait. Native Alaskan is a term that is often applied to them.

The Inuit traditionally inhabit the Arctic and subarctic regions of North America, including Greenland, Labrador, Quebec, Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, the Yukon, Alaska, and the Chukotsky District of Chukotka in Russia.

The Inuit are descendants of the Thule people, who emerged from the Bering Strait and western Alaska around 1000 CE. They split from the related Aleut group about 4,000 years ago, spreading across the Arctic, while the Aleut remained along the coastal islands.

While the term Eskimo is still used by some Inuit groups and other organizations to describe the Inuit, the term is considered a pejorative by some Canadian and English-speaking Inuit in Greenland. Although the term is commonly used in Alaska, its use is not without criticism.

The Inuit language is a group of five languages: Inuvialuktun, Inuinnaqtun, and three dialects of Inuktitut.

Traditional Inuit lifestyles were an adaptation to the extreme climatic conditions in which they lived. Essential skills included hunting, trapping, and developing fur clothing for survival, as agriculture was impossible. Today, the everyday life of the Inuit still reflects their long history as a hunting culture.

Inuit culture and heritage stem from ancient myths and legends passed down by word of mouth. Even today, while the Inuit have produced a few noted novel writers, writing is not emphasized, and Inuit writers mainly produce reports, summaries, and essays about their own experiences.

Until recent years, Inuit crafts tended to be utilitarian rather than artistic, lacking a distinct music tradition.

The first contact the Inuit had with Europeans was with the Vikings, who had settled in Greenland centuries before. After around 1350, the climate grew colder during the period known as the Little Ice Age. During this time, Russian and Alaskan natives could continue their whaling activities, but, in the high Arctic, the Inuit were forced to abandon their hunting and whaling sites as bowhead whales disappeared from Canada and Greenland. They had to resort to a much poorer diet and lost access to the raw materials necessary for building tools and architecture, which had been derived from whaling.

With the exception of mutual trade, the early Inuit were not much affected by the arrival of visiting Norsemen. In the mid-16th century, Basque whalers and fishermen established whaling stations on land. Except for raiding the stations during the winter and taking tools and other items made from iron, the Iuit did not interfere with their operations.

Greater contact began in the 18th century when Moravian missionaries began activities in Labrador, supported by the British. Although relationships were generally peaceful, mass deaths resulted from infectious diseases.

European interference in Inuit customs and traditions intensified in the early 20th century after the Canadian government determined that the Inuit were under the government's jurisdiction, and Canadian entrepreneurs began to take a greater interest in mining minerals found in Inuit lands.

World War II and the Cold War made Inuit lands strategically important to the larger powers of the United States and Canada, and their lands were made more accessible through modern long-distance aircraft.

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