Many Inuit are Christian, but a number of them continue to practice shamanism. World View. More From Reference. What Is an Example of Parasitism in the Rainforest? What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages of a Graph? The reality, though, is that the Inuit do not rub noses in order to kiss, but they do use a slightly different form of this gesture to greet their significant others, children and parents.
This act is known as kunik. When you hear the word armor, you probably envision knights protected by steel. The ancient Inuit had no way to get their hands on steel, but they still needed protection from the elements and dangerous animals. Due to this, they crafted their own version of armor out of raw leather straps and bone plates, which was usually made from walrus teeth.
This design was definitely ingenious, and it enabled the earliest Inuit people to survive many encounters that would have almost certainly been deadly otherwise.
Tourists who visit Greenland are often excited to purchase an original piece of Inuit art. The most commonly available example of this art is a little statue that is known as a tupilak. In modern times, some Inuit carvers have been able to make a living out of making grotesque tupilaks from wood, narwhal tusks or reindeer horns.
Tupilaks are no longer associated with witchcraft and are sold at gift shops. Every culture throughout human history has developed some type of folklore, and most of these stories were meant to explain away fears about the unknown.
For example, some modern Americans believe in Bigfoot, but most people are convinced that this creature does not exist. For the ancient Inuit people, their mythological creature to fear and stand in awe of was called the Qallupilluk. This word translates into monster, and tales about its horrific actions were used to keep children from wandering far away. The image of what you believe to be an igloo is probably very easy to conjure up, but this does not fully encompass the actual meaning of this word.
Although there are some Inuit who live or have lived in the dome-shaped buildings that are constructed almost exclusively from snow and ice, the word igloo means any type of structure where people live. Therefore, whether you live in a European mansion or a studio apartment, you reside inside an igloo. Another misunderstanding of Inuit culture was caused by anthropologist Franz Boas back in the 19 th century.
Boas was given the ability to live with the Inuit for a while so that he could learn more about them, and he made note of the fact that they refer to snow often. However, the misconception that the Inuit have hundreds of words from snow derives from a misunderstanding of their sentence structure.
In Greenland, 11 percent of the residents are not Inuit. This means that the each Inuk who lives in Greenland has the potential to be exposed to new dining options, but even this has not considerably altered their traditional diet.
Anthropologists and other researchers have determined that the Inuit diet has stayed mostly the same throughout the centuries, and it consists primarily of meat and fish because it is hard to gain access to vegetables and fruit in cold, remote areas. DNA evidence suggests that the present-day Inuit descended from the Thule, a group thought to have migrated to the Arctic around the year Archaeologists found that the Thule culture developed along the Alaskan coast and moved east towards Canada and Greenland.
However, the Yupik people of Alaska and Siberia do not consider themselves Inuit and are ethnically different from Inuit people. They favor the term Yupik, Yupiit, or Eskimo.
In Canada, Inuit is the preferred term, while in Greenland, they use Greenlanders or Kalaallit as well. The continued arrival of explorers and traders caused numerous cultural changes for the Inuit. Colonization caused some of the most drastic alterations to their ways of life and has impacted Inuit culture substantially.
In Canada, many Inuit children attended residential schools, which were federally-run and aimed at assimilating Indigenous children into the Eurocentric Canadian culture. Although Inuit life has changed over the past centuries, the Inuit have maintained their cultural identity and traditions. There are approximately , Inuit globally, with approximately 65, in Canada, 35, in Alaska, 50, Greenland, and smaller populations in Siberia. Much of the Inuit population of the world lives in remote areas.
The majority of them live in the southwestern corner of the island. Many Inuit traditions and customs have developed over thousands of years and include extensive oral history and storytelling traditions. The Inuit pass stories from one generation to another as a way to preserve their culture.
Many Inuit ceremonies consisted of singing and dancing. Some dances were religious, and others were celebratory. Inuit spirituality is animistic, which is the belief that everything on earth, from objects to animals, is inhabited by a spirit. The Inuit believe that everything has its own Inua or spirit , and the Inua of the moon, sea, and air was of particular importance.
The Inuit also treated the animals they hunted with respect, as they believed the creatures possessed souls just like those of humans. One way they show respect for the animal they hunted is to use every part of it so nothing went to waste.
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