Dorset culture
The
Dorset culture preceded the
Inuit culture in
Arctic North America. Inuit legends mention the
Tuniit (singular
Tuniq) or
Sivullirmiut (
"First Inhabitants"), who were driven away by the Inuit. According to legend, they were "giants", people who were taller and stronger than the Inuit, but who were easily scared off and retreated from the advancing Inuit. They were credited with a faultless understanding of their local environment (which they may have shared with the newly-arrived Inuit) but with inferior technologies. The Dorset did lack dogsleds, sophisticated boats and toggled harpoons and therefore may have adapted poorly to the newly harsh weather of the late first- and early second
millennium.
Surprisingly, there appears to have been no genetic connection between the Dorset and the
Thule, which indicates the complete replacement and extinction of the former. Nonetheless, the Dorset were kin to the modern Inuit, an earlier incursion into the Arctic region from a common population, and as such were closely related to their successors.
Anthropologist Diamond Jenness in
1925 received some odd artifacts from
Cape Dorset, Nunavut, which seemed to derive from an ancient lifestyle unlike that of the Inuit. Jenness named the culture after the location of the find. His finds showed a consistent and distinct cultural pattern that included sophisticated and un-Inuit art that depicted, for example, uniquely large hairstyles for women and hoodless parkas with giant, tall collars on both sexes. A leading modern figure in the field of Tuniit/Dorset studies is
Robert McGhee, who has written numerous books on this culture and the transition to the Thule (Inuit) tradition.
Canadian poet
Al Purdy wrote a poem entitled "Lament for the Dorsets" which starts "Animal bones and some mossy tent rings... all that remains of Dorset giants, who drove the Vikings back to their longships..." This poem laments the loss of their culture and describes them and their end.
In
1824,
HMS Griper, under Captain
George Francis Lyon, anchored off
Cape Pembroke on
Coats Island in
Hudson Bay. The
whalers discovered a band of
Eskimos who spoke a "strange dialect" and were called
Sadlermiut. (
Sallirmiut in modern
Inuktitut spelling, from
Salliq, the Inuktitut name for the settlement of
Coral Harbour, Nunavut.)
The Sadlermiut, living in near isolation on and around
Southampton Island, preserved a culture distinct from the
Inuit. They continued to have contact with Westerners and contracted Western diseases. By
1896, there were only 70 of them remaining. In the fall of
1902, some of them visited the
Active, a whaling vessel that had stopped at Southampton Island. They caught a disease from a sick sailor, possibly
typhoid or
typhus. The entire community died within weeks.
In
1954 and
1955,
Henry B. Collins of the
Smithsonian Institution studied Eskimo house ruins in the Canadian Arctic. He determined that these ruins were characteristic of Sadlermiut culture which had once been quite extensive. He also found evidence that the Sadlermiut were the last remnants of the Dorset culture. Recent genetic research has, moreover, confirmed the genetic connection between the Sadlermiut and the Dorset culture.
*
In the bones of the world at the
Nuntsiaq News website.
*
Article on the Sadlermiut from the Canadian encyclopedia*Michael Fortescue, Steven Jacobson & Lawrence Kaplan 1994:
Comparative Eskimo Dictionary; with Aleut Cognates (Alaska Native Language Center Research Paper 9); ISBN 1555000517
*Robert McGhee 2005:
The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World; ISBN 0195183681
