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Pre-contact history

Inuit are the descendants of what anthropologists call the Thule people, who emerged from the Bering Strait and western Alaska around 1000 CE. They had split from the related Aleut group about 4000 years ago and from northeastern Siberian migrants. They spread eastward across the Arctic. They displaced the related Dorset culture, called the Tuniit in Inuktitut, which was the last major Paleo-Eskimo culture.

Inuit legends speak of the Tuniit as "giants", people who were taller and stronger than Inuit. Less frequently, the legends refer to the Dorset as "dwarfs". Researchers believe that Inuit society had advantages by having adapted to using dogs as transport animals, and developing larger weapons and other technologies superior to those of the Dorset culture. By 1100 CE, Inuit migrants had reached west Greenland, where they settled. During the 12th century, they also settled in East Greenland.

Faced with population pressures from the Thule and other surrounding groups, such as the Algonquian and Siouan -speaking peoples to the south, the Tuniit gradually receded. The Tuniit were thought to have become completely extinct as a people by about 1400 or 1500. But, in the mid-1950s, researcher Henry B. Collins determined that based on the ruins found at Native Point, on Southampton Island, the Sadlermiut were likely the last remnants of the Dorset culture, or Tuniit. The Sadlermiut population survived up until winter 1902–1903 when exposure to new infectious diseases brought by contact with Europeans led to their extinction as a people.

In the early 21st century, mitochondrial DNA research has supported the theory of continuity between the Tuniit and the Sadlermiut peoples. It also provided evidence that a population displacement did not occur within the Aleutian Islands between the Dorset and Thule transition. However a subsequent 2012 genetic analysis showed no genetic link between the Sadlermiut and the Dorset or Tuniit people. In contrast to other Tuniit populations, the Aleut and Sadlermiut benefited from both geographical isolation and their ability to adopt certain Thule technologies.

In Canada and Greenland, Inuit circulated almost exclusively north of the Arctic tree line, with the exception of Inuit in Labrador where there are large swaths of coastal barrens. In Labrador there are two Inuit groups, one accepted by Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, Nunatsiavut and one independent, NunatuKavut. The most southern Inuit community in Nunatsiavut is Rigolet while the most southern community within the traditional Inuit territory of NunatuKavut and in the world is L'anse au Clair, Labrador.

In other areas south of the tree line, non-Inuit Indigenous cultures were well established. As a result, being challenged by the groups below the tree line including Chukchi and Siberian Yupik for Russian Iñupiat, Arctic Athabascan and Gwichʼin for Alaskan Iñupiat and Inuvialuit, Cree for Nunavummiut (Nunavut Inuit) and Nunavimmiut (Northern Quebec Inuit), and Innu for Nunatsiavummiut (Labrador Inuit) and NunatuKavummiut (Southern Inuit or Inuit-metis), Inuit did not make significant progress South, or in the case of Labrador, East.

Inuit had trade relations with more southern cultures; boundary disputes were common and gave rise to aggressive actions. Warfare was not uncommon among those Inuit groups with sufficient population density. Inuit such as the Nunamiut (Uummarmiut), who inhabited the Mackenzie River delta area, often engaged in warfare. The more sparsely settled Inuit in the Central Arctic, however, did so less often.

Their first European contact was with the Vikings who had settled in Greenland centuries prior. The sagas recorded meeting skrælingar, probably an undifferentiated label for all the Indigenous peoples whom the Norse encountered, whether Tuniit, Inuit, or Beothuk.

After about 1350, the climate grew colder during the period known as the Little Ice Age. During this period, Russian and Alaskan natives were able to continue their whaling activities. But, in the high Arctic, Inuit were forced to abandon their hunting and whaling sites as bowhead whales disappeared from Canada and Greenland. These Inuit had to subsist on a much poorer diet, and lost access to the essential raw materials for their tools and architecture which they had previously derived from whaling.