Episode Details

North of North drops you into Ice Cove and never stops to explain anything — which is exactly the point. So when a listener wrote in admitting that "Eskimo" was basically the whole extent of her Arctic vocabulary, we decided to do the work properly. This episode covers who the Inuit actually are: roughly 155,000 people across four countries speaking dialects of one language family, descended from the Thule who spread across the top of the world a thousand years ago. We get into the word "Eskimo" itself — why it's not the raw-meat slur most people think, why Canada and Greenland dropped it in 1977, and why Alaska never did. Then the traditional half: a diet that got 75% of its energy from fat, vitamin C from raw seal liver and muktuk, the amauti as both baby carrier and social document, and gender roles that bent whenever survival required it. Finally, the modern half — a fully contemporary people who are also fully Inuk, and a show made by Inuit hands in Iqaluit that refuses to translate itself for outsiders. Key sources: • UAF Alaska Native Language Center, Inuit or Eskimo: Which name to use? (Lawrence Kaplan) — https://www.uaf.edu/anlc/research-and-resources/resources/archives/inuit_or_eskimo.php • UAF Alaska Native Language Archive, Comparative Eskimo-Aleut — https://www.uaf.edu/anla/collections/cea/ • CBC Media Centre, North of North program page — https://mediacentre.cbc.ca/program/north-of-north Episode 5976 — myweirdprompts.com/n/5976 (permanent short link: myweirdprompts.com/779723)