DISEASE AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF INUIT CULTURE

Early ethnographic descriptions of the Inuit, the original inhabitants of Arctic Canada and Greenland, depict a culture and society assumed to have been relatively untouched by European influence. Archaeology has shown that this way of life had developed over the past five centuries from the Thule culture, which was technologically richer and more economically secure than that of the historic Inuit. The transformation from Thule to Inuit culture has generally been explained in terms of adaptation to a deteriorating environment. This paper argues that the development of Inuit culture can be more satisfactorily interpreted as a response to early and continued contacts with Europeans and the effects of repeated epidemic diseases resulting from such contacts.