page_title: Eskimo
section_title: General
hierarchical_section_title: Eskimo / Nomenclature / General
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Санкт-Петербург. Музей антропологии и этнографии имени Петра Великого Российской академии наук (Кунсткамера). Кожаный панцирь Deutsch: Sankt-Petersburg. Museum für Anthropologie und Ethnographie nach Peter dem Großen Russischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Kunstkammer). Leder-Rüstung
context_page_description: Eskimo or Eskimos are the Indigenous circumpolar peoples who have traditionally inhabited the northern circumpolar region from eastern Siberia to Alaska, Northern Canada, Nunavik and Greenland.
  The two main peoples known as "Eskimo" are the Inuit and the Yupik. A third northern group, the Aleut, is closely related to both. They share a relatively recent common ancestor and a language group.
  The non-Inuit sub-branch of the Eskimo branch of the Eskimo-Aleut language family consists of four distinct Yupik languages, two used in the Russian Far East and St. Lawrence Island, and two used in western Alaska, southwestern Alaska, and the western part of Southcentral Alaska. The extinct language of the Sirenik people is sometimes argued to be related to these.
  According to recent genomic research, the Chukchi people, from eastern Siberia, are the closest living relatives of the Siberian Yupik and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas generally.
  There are more than 183,000 people of Eskimo descent alive today, of which 135,000 or more live in or near the traditional circumpolar regions. The NGO known as the Inuit Circumpolar Council claims to represent 180,000 people.
context_section_description: In Canada and Greenland, the term Eskimo has largely been supplanted by the term Inuit. While Inuit can be accurately applied to all of the Eskimo peoples in Canada and Greenland, that is not true in Alaska and Siberia. In Alaska the term Eskimo is commonly used, because it includes both Yupik and Iñupiat. Inuit is not accepted as a collective term and it is not used specifically for Iñupiat (although they are related to the Canadian Inuit peoples). One of the oldest known Eskimo archaeological sites, dating back to 3,800 years ago, is located in Saglek Bay, Labrador. On Umnak Island in the Aleutians, another site was found and is estimated to be an age of approximately 3,000 years old .
  In 1977, the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC) meeting in Utqiagvik, Alaska, officially adopted Inuit as a designation for all circumpolar native peoples, regardless of their local view on an appropriate term. As a result, the Canadian government usage has replaced the (locally) defunct term Eskimo with Inuit (Inuk in singular). The preferred term in Canada's Central Arctic is Inuinnaq, and in the eastern Canadian Arctic Inuit. The language is often called Inuktitut, though other local designations are also used. Despite the ICC's 1977 decision to adopt the term Inuit, this was never accepted by the Yupik peoples, who likened it to calling all Native American Indians Navajo simply because the Navajo felt that that's what all tribes should be called.
  The Inuit of Greenland refer to themselves as "Greenlanders" and speak the Greenlandic language.
  Because of the linguistic, ethnic, and cultural differences between Yupik and Inuit peoples, it seems unlikely that any umbrella term will be acceptable. There has been some movement to use Inuit, and the Inuit Circumpolar Council, representing a circumpolar population of 150,000 Inuit and Yupik people of Greenland, Northern Canada, Alaska, and Siberia, in its charter defines Inuit for use within that ICC document as including "the Inupiat, Yupik (Alaska), Inuit, Inuvialuit (Canada), Kalaallit (Greenland) and Yupik (Russia)".
  In 2010, the ICC passed a resolution in which they implored scientists to use "Inuit" and "Paleo-Inuit" instead of "Eskimo" or "Paleo-Eskimo". American linguist Lenore Grenoble has explicitly deferred to this resolution and used "Inuit–Yupik" instead of "Eskimo" with regards to the language branch. In a 2015 commentary in the journal Arctic, Canadian archaeologist Max Friesen argued fellow Arctic archaeologists should follow the ICC and use "Paleo-Inuit" instead of "Paleo-Eskimo". In 2016, Lisa Hodgetts and Arctic editor Patricia Wells wrote: "In the Canadian context, continued use of any term that incorporates 'Eskimo' is potentially harmful to the relationships between archaeologists and the Inuit and Inuvialuit communities who are our hosts and increasingly our research partners"; they suggested using more specific terms when possible (e.g., Dorset and Groswater) and agreed with Frieson in using "the Inuit tradition" to replace "Neo-Eskimo", although they noted replacement for "Palaeoeskimo" was still an open question and discuss "Paleo-Inuit", "Arctic Small Tool Tradition", and "pre-Inuit", as well as Inuktitut loanwords like "Tuniit" and "Sivullirmiut" as possibilities. One 2020 paper in Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, written by Katelyn Braymer-Hayes and colleagues, notes that there is a "clear need" to replace the terms "Neo-Eskimo" and "Paleo-Eskimo", citing the ICC resolution, but finding a consensus within the Alaskan context particularly is difficult, since Alaska Natives do not use the word Inuit to describe themselves, nor is the term legally applicable only to Inupiat and Yupik peoples in Alaska, and as such, terms used in Canada like "Paleo Inuit" and "Ancestral Inuit" would not be acceptable.
  But, in Alaska, the Inuit people refer to themselves as Iñupiat, plural, and Iñupiaq, singular (their North Alaskan Inupiatun language is also called Iñupiaq). They do not commonly use the term Inuit. In Alaska, Eskimo has been commonly used but is decreasing in 
caption: Laminar armour from hardened leather reinforced by wood and bones worn by native Siberians and Eskimos
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