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Circumpolar peoples

Term for Indigenous peoples of the Arctic

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Through Indigenous peoples and Common Era

Lab · Class 6–12Archaeology & Discovery

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 everywhere except Greenland, where 90 percent of the population is Inuit.

It is difficult to find an exact number of the Indigenous peoples in the Arctic as states have a tendency to downplay the numbers. Moreover, each state has its own different methods to count its Indigenous population. For instance, Russia excludes from the official status of "small peoples of the North" (Russian: "малые народы Севера" or "Коренные малочисленные народы Севера") every community that exceeds 50,000 people. They are therefore excluding from the definition certain numerically large Indigenous communities like the Komi peoples, Karelians or Yakuts.

Definition and extent

The term circumpolar peoples denotes the indigenous populations of the land and sea around the North Pole. The region has no single agreed boundary, since climate, vegetation, fauna, permafrost and the sparseness of settlement each yield a different limit. In the broadest delimitation it takes in Alaska, the northern Canadian territories and provinces with the Labrador Peninsula and Newfoundland, Greenland, northern Fennoscandia, northern Russia and northern Siberia as far as Kamchatka.

The area is conventionally divided into the Arctic and the Subarctic. The Arctic carries only tundra vegetation, while the Subarctic corresponds to the boreal forest belt, and the tree line separating them works as both an ecological and a cultural boundary. On estimates drawn from the 1970s the region covered some 41 million square kilometres, about eight per cent of the globe, and held an aboriginal population of roughly 600,000 to 800,000 in seventy to eighty ethnic groups. Peoples sharing a language did not thereby form a political or national body but identified with their local community, so that linguistic kinship and cultural likeness do not run together.

Sustained contact with Europeans came at different dates in different regions. Russian settlement reached Siberia in the 17th century, the indigenous peoples of north-western Canada dealt with European traders from about the turn of the 18th century, and the Inuit entered continuous contact during the 18th century, in some territories not until the 19th.

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