Everything about Inupiaq totally explained
The
Inupiat or
Iñupiaq (from inuit- people - and piaq/t real, for example 'real people') are the
Inuit people of
Alaska's
Northwest Arctic and
North Slope boroughs and the
Bering Straits region.
Barrow, the northernmost city in the United States, is in the Inupiat region. Their language is known as
Inupiat. There is one Inupiat culture-oriented institute of higher education,
Ilisagvik College.
Inupiat people continue to rely heavily on subsistence
hunting and
fishing, including
whaling. The capture of a
whale benefits each member of a community, as the animal is butchered and its
meat and
blubber allocated according to a traditional formula. Even city-dwelling relatives thousands of miles away are entitled to a share of each whale killed by the hunters of their ancestral village.
Muktuk, the skin of bowhead and other whales, is rich in vitamins
A and
C and contributes to good health in a population with limited access to fruits and vegetables.
In recent years the exploitation of oil and other resources has been an important revenue source for the Inupiat. The
Alaska Pipeline connects the
Prudhoe Bay wells with the port of
Valdez in south central Alaska.
Inupiat people have grown more concerned in recent years that
climate change is threatening their traditional lifestyle. The warming trend in the
Arctic affects the Inupiaq lifestyle in numerous ways, for example: thinning sea ice makes it more difficult to harvest
bowhead whale, seals,
walrus, and other traditional foods; warmer winters make travel more dangerous and less predictable; later-forming
sea ice contributes to increased flooding and
erosion along the coast, directly imperiling many coastal villages. The
Inuit Circumpolar Conference, a group representing indigenous peoples of the Arctic, has made the case that climate change represents a threat to their human rights.
Inupiaq groups, in common with other
Inuit groups, often have a name ending in "miut." One example is the
Nunamiut, a generic term for inland Inupiaq
caribou hunters. During a period of
starvation and
influenza (brought by American and European whaling crews, see John Bockstoce's 1995
Whales, Ice, & Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic) most of these moved to the coast or other parts of Alaska between 1890 and 1910. A number of Nunamiut returned to the mountains in the 1930s. By 1950, most Nunamiut groups, like the Killikmiut, had coalesced in
Anaktuvuk Pass, a village in north-central Alaska. Some of the Nunamiut remained nomadic until the 1950s. More Nunamiut information can be found in
Nicholas Gubser's 1965
The Nunamiut Eskimos, Hunters of Caribou and
Nunamiut; among Alaska's inland Eskimos by
Helge Ingstad, published in 1954.
Further Information
Get more info on 'Inupiaq'.
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