Copper Inuit
, "People." The people received this name from non-native explorers who found them using native copper in tools and weapons.
Location In the eighteenth century the Copper Inuit were living between Cape Parry and Queen Maude Gulf, especially on southern Victoria Island and along Coronation Gulf. The region is almost entirely tundra, except for some forest to the south and along the Coppermine River. Many Copper Inuit still live in this area of the central Arctic, known as Kitikmeot.
Population The native population was probably between 800 and 1,300 in the late eighteenth century. In 1990 there were around 2,000 Inuit in the local communities, most of whom were Copper Inuit. The mid-1990s population of the Kitikmeot Region (Copper and Netsilik Inuit) was roughly 4,000.
Language Copper Inuits speak a dialect of Inuit-Inupiaq (Inuktitut), a member of the Eskaleut language family.
Historical Information
History Historical Copper Inuit people are descended from ancient pre-Dorset, Dorset, and Thule cultures. They first encountered non-natives in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Although they obtained some non-native trade goods, such as iron, and caught new diseases, traditional life remained relatively unchanged for some time thereafter.
Local trading posts were established in the 1920s, bringing items such as rifles, fish nets, and steel traps as well as cloth, tea and flour. These material changes had the result of extending the caribou season and generally reorienting the people away from the sea. This development, plus the regular presence of trade ships, began to undermine traditional self-sufficiency and social structures. The region’s first missionaries arrived at about the same time, as did a permanent presence of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP).
In the 1920s, the establishment of local trading posts brought items such as rifles, fish nets, steel traps, cloth, tea, and flour into circulation. With the prevalence of rifles, the Inuit, for the most part, gave up their harpoons for hunting seals.
It was not until the 1950s, however, that the root aspects of traditional culture began to disappear. Some mixing with western Inuit newcomers occurred during that time. The far north took on strategic importance during the Cold War, about the same time that vast mineral reserves became known and technologically possible to exploit. These two industries offered some wage labor and contributed to the decline of nomadic life. Other factors contributed as well, such as the decline of the caribou herds.
The federal Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources (1954) began constructing wood-frame housing developments, clinics, and schools and encouraged resettlement in these permanent communities. Local political decisions were made by a community council subject to non-native approval and review. Population centralization was largely completed by the 1970s. Most job opportunities for Inuit were unskilled and menial, although hunting and trapping remained important. With radical diet changes, the adoption of a sedentary life, and the appearance of drugs and alcohol, health declined markedly.
Religion Religious belief and practice were based on the need to appease spirit entities found in nature. Hunting, and specifically the land-sea dichotomy, was the focus of most rituals and taboos, such as that prohibiting sewing caribou-skin clothing in certain seasons. The people also recognized generative spirits, conceived of as female and identified with natural forces and cycles.
Male and female shamans (angakok) provided religious leadership by virtue of their connection with guardian spirits. They could also control the weather, improve conditions for hunting, cure disease, and divine the future. Illness was due to soul loss and/or violation of taboos and/or the anger of the dead. Curing methods included interrogation about taboo adherence, trancelike communication with spirit helpers, and performance.
Government Nuclear families were the basic economic and political unit. Families were led by the oldest man. They were loosely organized into small local groups associated with geographical areas (-miuts). Local groups occasionally came together as perhaps six or seven small, fluid bands. The bands were also geographically identified, their names carrying the -miut suffix as well.
Customs Sharing was paramount in Inuit society. All aspects of a person’s life were controlled by kinship relationships. The people recognized many types of formal and informal partnerships and relationships. Some of these included wife exchanges. People came together in larger group gatherings in late autumn; this was a time to sew and mend clothing and renew kinship ties. Men hunted, made and repaired weapons and tools, and build kayaks, sleds, and shelter. Women prepared skins and made clothing, sewed hides for coverings, caught and prepared fish, raised children, and gathered moss, berries, and other items.
Descent was bilateral. People married simply by announcing their intentions, although infants were regularly betrothed. Prospective husbands often served their future in-laws for a period of time. Men might have more than one wife, but most had only one. Divorce was easy to obtain. Names were taken from deceased people and given by elders. A person might have several names, each denoting a kinship relationship and particular behaviors. Names were not sex specific.
People often adopted orphans. Children were highly valued and loved, especially males. When a boy killed his first seal, the seal’s body was ritually dragged over his. The sick or aged were sometimes abandoned, especially in times of scarcity. Corpses were wrapped in skins and buried in stone or snow vaults or, later, left outside within a ring of stones. The tools of the deceased were left with him or her. People brought weapons and food to the grave after four days. No work, including hunting, was performed during the days of mourning.
Tensions were relieved through games, such as feats of strength, and duels of drums and songs, in which one person tried to outdo another in parody and song. Joking relationships also helped keep people’s emotions in check. Games included ring-and-pin and cat’s cradle. Children liked to play games, including tag and hide-and-seek. Ostracism and even death were reserved for the most serious cases of socially inappropriate behavior.
Dwellings Men built domed snow houses in winter. Entrance through a straight-sided, flat-topped tunnel kept the warm air inside. Some houses had more than one room. Snow platforms covered with caribou, musk ox, or bearskins served as beds. The people used larger snow or sod and bone houses for ceremonial purposes. They also used caribou-skin and sealskin tents built over raised sod rings in summer and over pits in autumn.
Diet Copper Inuits were nomadic hunters. The most important game animals were seals and whales. Dogs helped roughly eight large bands of 50 to 200 people hunt seals at their breathing holes in winter. Some polar bears were caught in winter as well.
The people also hunted caribou, musk ox, small game, and fowl, mainly in small groups in summer and autumn. Women and children chased caribou through stone runways to where the men were waiting with bows and lances. Caribou were also hunted from kayaks. The meat was sun dried or frozen and cached for the winter. Fishing was a year-round activity. Some berries were available in summer.
Key Technology Men used bone knives to cut blocks for snow houses. Other tools and equipment included harpoons, spears, snares, lances, bow and arrow, and bolas. Bows were made of spruce with sealskin and sinew backing. Some were also made of musk-ox horn or antler. Many tools were made from caribou antlers as well as stone, bone, and driftwood. Blades were made of bone or copper.
Fishing equipment included hooks, wooden or stone weirs and traps, and a variety of spears and harpoons. The people carved soapstone cooking pots and seal-oil lamps as well as wooden utensils, trays, dishes, spoons, and other objects. Women sewed with bone needles and sinew thread.
Trade Summer was trade season. The people exchanged goods, particularly copper and driftwood, with the Inuvialuit, the Caribou Inuit, and the Netsilik. There were occasional contacts with Athapaskan Indians to their south.
Notable Arts The most important artistic traditions were carved wooden and ivory figurines. Clothing decoration consisted mainly of bands of white fur or skin. There was some skin fringing.
Transportation One- or two-person kayaks, propelled with a double-bladed paddle, were generally used for hunting. Several men could hunt whales in umiaks, which were larger, skin-covered open boats. Dogs carried burdens in summer and pulled wooden sleds in winter. The sleds had wooden runners covered with whalebone, mud, or peat and then ice. Toboggans were occasionally made of skin.
Dress Women sewed most clothing from caribou skins, although sealskins were commonly used on boots. Apparel included men’s long, gut sealing coats and light swallowtail ceremonial coats. The people wore a double skin suit in winter and only the inner layer in summer. Women’s clothing featured large shoulders and hoods as well as one-piece, attached leggings and boots. Their coattails were long and narrow. Men wore small loon-beak dancing caps with weasel-skin tassels. They sometimes shaved their foreheads. Both sexes wore tattoos and ivory or bone snow goggles.
War and Weapons Spears and arrowheads were copper tipped. Most fighting was local and small-scale in nature.
Contemporary Information
Government/Reservations Contemporary Copper Inuit communities include Iqaluktuuttiaq (Cambridge Bay), Qingauq (Bathurst Inlet), Qurluqtuuq (Coppermine), Umingmaktuuq, and Taloyoak. Government is by locally elected council.
Economy Subsistence hunting, trapping, and fishing are still important, as are various types of wage work and government assistance. Possible future developments include oil and gas exploration as well as tanker traffic. Cape Dorset artists are well known and relatively successful.
Native-owned and -operated cooperatives have been an important part of the Inuit economy for some time. Activities range from arts and crafts to retail to commercial fishing to construction.
Legal Status Inuit are considered "nonstatus" native people. Most Inuit communities are incorporated as hamlets and are officially recognized. Kitikmeot is slated to become a part of the new territory of Nunavut.
Daily Life The people never abandoned their land, which is still central to their identity. Traditional and modern coexist, sometimes uneasily, for many Inuit. Although people use television (there is even radio and television programming in Inuktitut), snowmobiles, and manufactured items, women also carry babies in the traditional hooded parkas, chew caribou skin to make it soft, and use the semilunar knives to cut seal meat. Full-time doctors are rare in the communities. Housing is often of poor quality. Most people are Christians. Culturally, although many stabilizing patterns of traditional culture have been destroyed, many remain. Many people live as part of extended families. Adoption is widely practiced. Decisions are often taken by consensus.
Politically, community councils have gained considerably more autonomy over the past decade or two. There is also a significant Inuit presence in the Northwest Territories Legislative Assembly and some presence at the federal level as well. In 1993, the Tungavik Federation of Nunavut (TFN), an outgrowth of the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (ITC), signed an agreement with Canada providing for the establishment, in 1999, of a new, mostly Inuit, territory on roughly 36,000 square kilometers of land, including Kitikmeot.
The disastrous effects of government-run schools have been mitigated to some degree by local control of education, including more culturally relevant curricula in schools. Many people still speak Inuktitut, which is also taught in most schools, especially in the earlier grades. Children attend school in their community through grade nine; there is a high school in Frobisher Bay. Adult education is also available.
