From the Thule, across the top of the world
Around a thousand years ago the Thule people spread east from the Bering Strait, following the bowhead whale with dog-sled, umiaq and toggling harpoon. They are the direct ancestors of today's Inuit, and over a few centuries they crossed the entire North American Arctic to Greenland — absorbing or displacing the earlier Dorset (Tuniit) who had lived there for millennia.
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Reading the ice
Inuit life is keyed to sea ice and season — the iglu in deep winter, the skin tent in summer, the qajaq and the larger umiaq on open water. Survival rested on an ethic of sharing: a hunter's catch belonged to the camp, and knowledge of weather, current and animal was the most valuable inheritance of all.
A living culture, now
In 1999 Canada created Nunavut, an Inuit-governed territory the size of Western Europe. Inuktut is being taught and revitalised; printmakers like Kenojuak Ashevak, the throat-singer Tanya Tagaq and filmmaker Zacharias Kunuk carry the culture onto world stages. Meanwhile the sea ice that underpins it all is thinning faster than anywhere on Earth.
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What is kept alive
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A long thread
Hear it for yourself
Threads across the graph
Sámi
Arctic neighbours whose joik, like katajjaq, sings a being into the room rather than about it.
Tuvan
Throat-singing kin across the circumpolar and steppe worlds.
Ainu
Northern people whose rekuhkara was a throat-game much like katajjaq.
Every recording here is held with community consent. The Inuit are named as origin and primary beneficiary; royalties flow to the community fund. Photographs: Wikimedia Commons (public domain / CC0).