ETHNOLOGICAL PROBLEMS OF ARCTIC 

 AMERICA* 



Diamond Jenness 



Although, from the days of Frobisher and Davis down to the 

 present generation, every explorer of the American Arctic has filled 

 the pages of his journal with descriptions of the Eskimos, yet until 

 the last six years we knew very little of the early history of this strange 

 people that has elected to dwell amid almost perpetual ice and snow. 

 Older ethnologists regarded them as a single tribe who, migrating 

 from some hypothetical home in northern Asia, in Alaska, or in 

 central Canada, to the Arctic shores of America, gradually spread 

 over the whole coast line and attained to their present condition by 

 slow and rather uneventful modifications that permeated from one 

 tribe to another. This conception still holds good in the main, but 

 in detail it requires considerable revision to meet the demands of 

 recent discoveries. We still believe that the Eskimos are funda- 

 mentally a single people, that they had their origin in a homeland not 

 yet determined; but we have learned that they reached their present 

 condition through a series of complex changes and migrations, the 

 outlines of which we have hardly begun to decipher. 



Early Eskimo Cultures: The Thule Culture 



It was archeological research that here, as in other parts of the 

 world, produced the revolution in our ideas. From Bering Strait 

 to the south of Baffin Island, through the Parry Archipelago to 

 northwest Greenland, stretch the ruined dwellings of ancient tribes 

 that have only recently become the object of careful investigation. 

 Mathiassen, the Danish archeologist, discovered in 1922 that they 

 held the remains of a culture very different from that which now 

 prevails east of the Mackenzie River delta, although it was not 

 unlike the culture of the Eskimos in northern Alaska just prior to 

 European exploration and resembled still more closely that of an 

 earlier period in the same region. To this ancient culture in the 

 eastern Arctic he gave the name of Thule culture, from the site of 

 its first discovery in northwest Greenland. There were no written 

 records, of course, to indicate its antiquity or to show how long it 

 had prevailed along these shores; but from the location of the ruins 

 he concluded that some of them dated from a time when the land was 



*Published by permission of the Director, Victoria Memorial Museum, Ottawa. 



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