Page 118 - J. C. Turner - History and Science of Knots

CHAPTER 7

INUIT KNOTS

Pieter van de Griend

A Little About the Arctic and the Inuits

The Inuits* occupy nearly all of the coastline from Greenland and Labrador
in the east to the Bering Sea in the west, together with a short stretch of
Siberian shore of the Chfikchi Peninsula. However, the area, with which this
chapter primarily will be concerned, is roughly situated around Davis Strait
and Baffin Bay (see Fig. 1). This is a region the Inuits have inhabited relatively
undisturbed by foreign influences for an estimated four millennia. Generally
accepted theory places the first of several migration waves of Inuit tribes in the
Thule district around 4500 B.P. One may wonder what drove these people to
settle in this harsh environment where vegetable foods are unprocurable, iron
extremely scarce and trees exist in only one or two marginal districts. Large
areas lack wood of any ltind, including driftwood. Yet these people came from
the west over Ellesmere Island, crossed Nares Strait and wandered right into
the rich food supplies of western Greenland. Obviously only a people of great
ingenuity and endurance could have survived in a region that lies rigid under
snow and ice for 6-9 months of the year. Certain groups along the Arctic
coast of Canada remained practically untouched by the outside world until
the 20th century and even by the beginning of the 1960s a few Inuit were still
maintaining the life of their forefathers almost unaltered, though none remain
as such any longer.
Knowledge about Inuit history is in many ways sparse. What we know
about their prehistory is due to their own orally transmitted legends and the
picture emerging from a huge archaeological puzzle. From a Western view-
*An Inuit is an Eskimo of Greenland or North America.