The Eskimo and Aleut peoples occupy the northern North American coastline and nearby islands from Prince William Sound in south central Alaska westward and northward in Alaska, across the Bering Sea to St. Lawrence Island and eastern Siberia, and around the continental Arctic coast eastward across Canada to Quebec, Labrador, and on to Greenland. With the exceptions of the southernmost areas in Alaska, this region is icebound for nine to ten months of the year, and in most areas, treeless tundra predominates in the interior. The Eskimo cultural tradition evolved during the first millennium A.D. in the Bering Strait region, developing into the Thule culture, which spread rapidly to the north and east across the continent and to Greenland. This highly productive maritime culture focused on the harvest of large sea mammals, particularly the bowhead whale, utilizing toggle harpoons and open skin boats as well as kayaks, sleds, and dog teams; it is associated with semisubterranean houses and larger village settlements.
———The eastward expansion of Thule culture is associated with a warming trend that occurred after A.D. 900, reducing the Arctic ice pack and establishing open sea conditions suitable as a summer habitat for the bowhead whale. A cooling period began after 1200, culminating in the little ice age of 1650-1800, during which increased sea-ice accumulation brought a decline in whaling activities and gave rise to regional variations and diversification in subsistence patterns. Disruptions were most severe in the central Arctic, where people became more dependent on the ringed seals that lived and red along the ice edge. Although the ice house or igloo is the most common image of Eskimo society, the use of this residential structure was limited (except for emergencies) to the central Canadian Arctic region and represents an adaptation to these cooling environmental conditions.
———The Eskimo-Aleut language family consists of two long-separated but related branches, Eskimo and Aleut. The Eskimo language is further divided into two principal groups, the northern Inupiaq/Inuit and the more southerly Yupik. The Inupiaq and Inuit people speak localized dialects that stretch in a continuum from Norton Sound in Alaska northward and all the way across the continent to Greenland. The Yupik language includes five distinct sublanguages or dialects, of which these are represented in Alaska: Siberian Yupik, on St. Lawrence Island and the Siberian coast; Central Yupik, in southwestern Alaska; and Alutiiq, in the northern Pacific area (Kodiak Island and Prince William Sound). Together with their Aleut neighbors to the west, the Alutiiq people inhabit a warmer, wetter, and largely ice-free maritime zone significantly different from that of the northern Eskimos. The Aleut and Alutiiq peoples shared certain cultural features not found among northern Eskimo groups, most notably open-sea hunting techniques involving the use of barbed harpoon dart; extremes of social differentiation, including the use of slaves; and, particularly among the Aleuts, matrilineal social organization. The Alutiiq Eskimo culture also reflects influences from the maritime Pacific Northwest coast Indian cultures to the south. The major Eskimo cultural divisions are shown in the table below.
———Alaskan Eskimo groups were established into territorial groups or "societies," which at the local level comprised a number of smaller associations of extended family groups, or bands. The location and composition of modern villages and communities often reflect these traditional territorial associations, although the history of interaction with commercial whalers, traders, missionaries, and government schoolteachers is also a factor. Throughout Eskimo country, before the adoption of Western-style housing, members of the extended family usually lived together under one roof. Household size varied considerably depending upon population density and the availability of resources; the largest such groupings were found in Northwest Alaska. Today the residential group is the conjugal family, but the extended family continues to be the principal social unit, cooperating in the production, distribution, and consumption of foods, and materials, even though the constituent households may be geographically dispersed in the community.
———Kinship is the basic organizing principal of Eskimo society. Like the American system, Eskimo kinship is bilateral, placing equal emphasis on relationships on both the mother's and father's side of the family. Relationships within extended families (grandparents, parents, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews) are particularly important, as is an individual's kindred — the larger set of consanguineal relationships that can be traced on both sides up and down through three generations. The Siberian Yupik communities on St. Lawrence Island, where larger patrilineal descent groups function as political and economic units, is an exception to this Eskimo pattern. The scope of Eskimo kinship is maximal; that is, it recognizes more distant or affinal (related by marriage) relationships. This was important in the precontact period, when the ability to establish a kinship connection in a distant community meant the difference between life and death for the "stranger." In contemporary communities, where social life is often highly interactive, much daily association and interchange is structured according to these relationships, particularly among the households within extended families.
———Other social practices establish "quasi-kinship" relationships that also serve to link separate households and older and younger members of extended families. These traditional practices, while undergoing some changes, have been continued in modern communities. For example, adoption is widespread in Eskimo communities: single and multiple adoptions are common, as are adoptions of a grandchild by the grandparents. Social relationships are recognized between individuals with the same name, and between surviving relatives and the namesake when another namesake is deceased. Newborn babies are usually given the name of a recently deceased person and are seen as vessels of the rebirth of the spirit of the late individual, most often a member of the grandparental generation. Formal trading partnerships once provided a further means of establishing long-term relationships between members of different communities and between coastal and interior groups. While this custom is no longer practiced today, the institution of friendships between members of different extended families in the community is common.
———Alaskan Eskimo communities frequently included men of influence who headed extended family groups, organized trade, led hunting groups, and were ceremonial leaders. In the north, men who captained whaling crews held the greatest wealth and influence, having acquired or inherited significant wealth in the form of whale boats and equipment, which held them to provide economic support for their crews. Formerly the members of each whaling crew were associated with a man's house (karigi), headed by the captain (umaelik), who also led associated hunting rituals and sponsored trading expeditions. While members of the captain's extended family provided the core of this group, the crew also included non-kin, and sons often joined the karigi of their father. These karigi associations provided an additional degree of community interrogation in the larger whaling villages. Modern umaelit own the whaling boat and equipment, are responsible for supplying the crew while out on the ice, and often provide access to hunting equipment and other assistance to their crew during the remaining part of the year.
———Eskimos follow a scheduled annual round of subsistence activities often correlated with the presence of animals during their seasonal migrations. They harvest sea mammals including bearded, spotted, ringed, and harbor seals, bowhead and beluga whales, walrus, narwhals, sea lions, and sea otters. They also utilize other marine resources such as polar bears, crabs, smelt, and herring. During warmer months, inland resources including caribou, ducks, gees, fish (especially whitefish, char, and salmon), and plant foods are important. Families are often absent at various times in the warm season as they disperse to hunting and fishing camps on the land. Variations in ecology and the availability of animals have resulted in regional differences in subsistence practices, and both coastal and interior adaptations have arisen. For example, while most Eskimo communities focus on marine mammals supplemented with caribou, waterfowl, and fish, some inland groups in Alaska and Canada depend on caribou as their primary resource, while in Southwest Alaska salmon is the major resource for the interior, riverine Yupik Eskimos.
———Modern subsistence hunters use aluminum skuffs and outboard motors (or larger boats), snowmachines, sleds, rifles, CB radios, fish nets, and camping equipment, and they must provide for supplies and equipment repairs. Spring whaling entails additional efforts to establish camps on the ice at the edge of the shore-fast ice leads and supply a skin boat (umiaq), shoulder and darting guns, harpoons, and food and supplies to support a crew, while fall whaling involves open-sea hunting using motorboats. Whaling involves year-round preparatory efforts; besides getting equipment ready, the skins of bearded seals (or walrus on St. Lawrence Island) must be acquired for skin boats, and sufficient meat and fish must be accumulated to provide for the crew. Employment is necessary to support these subsistence activities, and in most communities wage-work opportunities are limited. Although female hunters are not unknown, a division of labor is maintained: men do the hunting and fishing, while women are responsible for processing and distributing the catch within the extended family (after primary distribution within the hunting party by the men). Bowhead whales are butchered, and their meat is distributed to the participating crews and the community, according to formal, prescribed rules.
———The international Whaling Commission (IWC) imposed a quota on the 1978 harvest of bowhead whales that affected the eight whaling communities in Alaska. In response, the Alaska whalers formed the Alaskan Eskimo Whaling Commission to represent themselves before the IWC and to seek an increase in the harvest quota, with notable success. Similar associations have been formed with regard to other animal resources, such as the Eskimo Walrus Commission, the Sea Otter Commission, and the International Porcupine Caribou Commission. A contemporary concern is the presence of trace metals and industrial pollutants in the organs of marine mammals in the Arctic. In addition to monitoring the levels of such pollutants, Eskimos have been developing cooperative agreements across state and national boundaries for the management and protection of shared animal populations, including waterfowl, polar bears, and walrus.
———Whaling is associated with a significant round of rituals and community ceremonial activity. Preparatory efforts include specific activities that show respect for the whale, and a whales captain's wife follows behavioral prescriptions during the hunt that are believed to be pleasing and not cause alarm to the spirit of the whale's soul return to the spirit world. Ceremonial distributions of whale meat maktak (skin and blubber) are made to the community — initially by the captain's wife and later by the captain himself at the Nulakataq celebration, when the successful whaling captains host a community feast followed by a blanket toss, in which a person is propelled high into the air by coordinated action of people pulling on a large piece of ugruk skin. Captains also contribute portions of whales and other animals to the large annual community feast at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
———Alaskan Eskimos used to celebrate the Messenger Feast during midwinter. This was a large ceremonial gathering organized by the heads of extended families (or, in the north, by an umaelik), who sent messengers to invite designated persons (usually trading partners) from other communities. The feasting was accompanied by elaborate gift giving, competitive games, and feats of strength, as well as singing, dancing, and storytelling. According to report, the last of these gatherings in North Alaska, were called Kiviq, occurred in 1915 in Wainwright. Under the influence of missionaries, this ceremony gradually declined and was discontinued in the early twentieth century throughout Alaska. This tradition was revived several years ago involving all North Slope (the northern Alaska region) communities each year. According to one anthropologist, a comical dance involving men and women is the most important contemporary annual community ceremonial event among the Yupik on Nelson Island, and which some of the gift-giving elements of Messenger Feast survive.
———The Yupik Eskimo formerly celebrated the Bladder Feast, which was a propitiation and a demonstration of respect for the seals caught during the year. It was believed that the spirits of the seals moved into their bladders when they were killed, and the bladders of harvested seals were inflated and hung in the men's house throughout the year; the spirits of the seals were feasted and entertained during the annual ceremony, at the end of which the bladders were released into the sea to help the spirits return to their ocean home, where they could be reborn. Seal parties, during which the seal meat and numerous small household items are given away, are another common ceremonial event; these are given by the woman of the household in the spring when the men and boys bring home their first seals of the year.
———Beliefs in the spirituality of the natural world were very silent in Eskimo culture. Animals were thought to resemble humans in having souls or spirits that could think, feel, and talk. Eskimos believed that animals would give themselves voluntarily to the hunter who acted properly toward them, and the purpose of many ritual practices was in fact to show respect for and give thanks to the spirits of animals taken for food. Across the Arctic, Eskimos gave a drink of water to dead seals, whales, caribou, and waterfowl after they had killed them. If humans did not show their appreciation, or if they acted improperly, animals could prevent themselves from appearing in physical form, and humans might starve. Another Eskimo belief was that the spirits of whales, after spending time in the human community, returned to their home under the sea and reported on the human behaviors they had observed to the other whales, their reports, in turn, had an effect on the spring whale hunt. When respect was shown to the spirits of the whale and harmonious behavior was present in the community, whales would return and allow themselves to be harvested in the following spring. Eskimos believe in reincarnation and the recycling of both human and animal souls. They also believed that rocks, mountains, and other features of the landscape had spirits. Contemporary Eskimos believe in supernatural beings with whom ordinary people interact. These beings include caribou people, miniature people, invisible people, mermaids, and trolls, and may be present to assist people in hunting efforts and at times of distress; there are even reports of marriages between humans and caribou people.

CHARLES W SMYTHE
Smithsonian Institution