Inuit are the peoples of the Arctic from Greenland across northern Canada to Alaska, speaking closely related languages within one continuum, and their history since contact is largely a history of institutions arriving faster than consent. Whaling stations, then Anglican and Catholic missions from the later nineteenth century, then federal administration, residential schools and forced relocations reshaped settlement patterns within two generations.
Conversion was extensive, and it did not simply delete what preceded it. Church membership sits alongside continued observance concerning animals, naming and the dead in ways that vary by community, and prophetic and revival movements have appeared repeatedly on the boundary between the two.
The term Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit, what Inuit have always known to be true, was formulated in the late twentieth century as Nunavut was being negotiated, and the volume edited by Joe Karetak, Frank Tester and Shirley Tagalik presents it as a working body of law and ethics rather than as folklore: principles of relationship, of decision by consensus and of obligation to others, intended for use in schools, courts and government. Nunavut was created in 1999, and the Greenland home rule and self government arrangements of 1979 and 2009 rest on the same claim, that a people's own knowledge is a basis for administration and not only a heritage.