What North of North Assumes You Know About Inuit

A sloth, a donkey, and a curious human Send a prompt and see what they're doing. One hits a record with a question on his mind Two brothers pick it up, see what they find. Corn takes his time, Herman's got the facts Back and forth, they never hold back. My Weird Prompts, come on in, that's where we begin. My Weird Prompts, glad you're here

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So the thing about the show is that it never stops to explain anything.

Right, and that's the whole design. You're dropped into Ice Cove and expected to keep up.

Which is why Anna sent us this. She's been watching North of North and realized halfway through that she was nodding along to things she couldn't actually define.

She said it well too, that she grew up with the word Eskimo, knows it's not what people say now, and then hit the wall of realizing that was basically the whole extent of it.

The prompt is really a confession of ignorance and a request to fix it. Who are the Inuit? What do the groups across Canada and Greenland and Alaska actually share? Are they part of the broader indigenous world or something separate? What did traditional life look like and how much of it's still standing? And then the modern half, which is the part the show puts in front of you. People who are completely contemporary and also completely Inuk, and the show assumes you understand what that means.

And the specific stuff, walrus dick baseball, bum hopping, the no yelling parenting thing which she read in Hunt Gather Parent and wants checked.

So let's do it properly. Start with a map.

The map is the thing most people get wrong. Inuit isn't one community. It's roughly 155,000 people spread across four countries. Canada, about 70,000. Greenland, about 50,000. Denmark, 17,000. The United States, about 16 and a half thousand. That's a span of 5,000 kilometers from the Bering Strait all the way to eastern Greenland.

And they're all speaking versions of the same language.

A continuum, yes. Inupiaq up in Alaska, Inuvialuktun in the western Canadian Arctic, Inuinnaqtun, Inuktitut across Nunavut and Nunavik, Kalaallisut in Greenland. Those sit in the Eskaleut family, sometimes called Inuit. Yupik Unangan. And the surprise for most people is that Inuktitut and West Greenlandic are close enough that they're often described as prestige dialects of the same thing. A person from Iqaluit and a person from Nuuk can, with some effort, understand each other.

Which is a remarkable thing to hold together for a thousand years across that distance.

Except they didn't hold it together by trying. They held it together by moving. The ancestors are the Thule people who emerged near the Bering Strait around the year 1000 and spread east across the whole Arctic in a couple of centuries. When they got to the eastern Arctic, they ran into the Dorset culture who were already there.

And the Dorset are the Tunit.

In Inuktitut, yes. The people the Thule displaced. And the Inuit memory of them is that they were giants, bigger, stronger, and they disappeared. There's a whole oral tradition about encounters with them.

So the Inuit didn't arrive to an empty Arctic. They replaced somebody.

In most