Endangered Peoples of the Arctic

In the Arctic regions, virtually all inhabitants are cultural minorities within their own countries, and although their native culture is constantly evolving naturally, outside pressures are endangering their most important traditions. Endangered Peoples of the Arctic focuses on 14 endangered cultures, from the Inuit tribes in Canada, Alaska, and Greenland to the Saami in Sweden. Students and interested readers will become informed about the contemporary impacts on their traditional way of life, such as loss of language, military intrusions, oil drilling, and wildlife protection, and how these groups are responding. The chapters are written by anthropologists based on their recent fieldwork, which guarantees unparalleled accuracy and exciting immediacy. The Arctic regions are the heartland the groups profiled in Endangered Peoples of the Arctic, and the varied Arctic peoples share common threats from governments and neighbors to the south. Each chapter is devoted to a specific people, including a cultural overview of their history, subsistence strategies, social and political organization, and religion and world view; threats to their survival, and their response to these threats. A section entitled Food for Thought poses questions that encourage a personal engagement with the experience of these peoples, and a resource guide suggests further reading and lists films and videos, pertinent organizations and web sites. As the curriculum expands to include more multicultural and indigenous peoples, this unique volume will be valuable to both students and teachers.

MILTON M. R. FREEMAN is Henry Marshall Tory Professor of Anthropology at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He has long been involved with cultural survival issues and has written prolifically on the Arctic. His most recent book (with E. E. Wein and D. E. Keith) was Recovering Rights: Bowhead Whales and Inuvialuit Subsistence in the Western Canadian Arctic (1992).