Let me begin with terminology. Reflecting current Inuit usage, the name used for the entire area of lands and waters that make up the four Inuit homelands across the circumpolar Arctic, stretching from Chukotka to Greenland, is Inuit Nunaat, and the name used to describe the Inuit homeland within Arctic Canada is Inuit Nunangat.

In order to consider the first half of the challenge posed by the rifle of this article--how Canadian Inuit have come to be where we are today-we must consider some geography and some history. The Arctic is roughly one-third of Canada's land and marine mass, with 50 percent of Canada's shoreline. It is the homeland of Canada's Inuit.

We are some 55,000 in number, approximately one-third of the total Inuit population living around the circumpolar world, in Chukotka, Siberia, Alaska, Greenland, and Canada. There are 53 Inuit communities in Arctic Canada, numbering from a Yew hundred to more than 5000 inhabitants.

Inuit are the solid majority of the permanent population in the Canadian Arctic as a whole. We are also a clear majority in all permanent communities, with the exception of Inuvik and Iqaluit. Inuit are also becoming more numerous in some southern cities, such as Ottawa, Montreal, Winnipeg, and Edmonton.

Inuit have lived in the Arctic since long before historical records. Our existence in the Arctic was built around the opportunities, risks, and realities of a hunting and gathering way of life. Until relatively recently, most Inuit lived a nomadic lifestyle with very little contact with the outside world. There are Inuit living today who were young adults before they ever encountered non-Inuit.

We lived on the land, hunted, gathered, and fished. We organized ourselves around immediate and extended family. We spoke a very complex and nuanced language.

The depth of contact between Inuit and European peoples was limited on a day-to-day basis before the first half of the 20th century. But our relationship to the world changed forever as a result of that contact. From the time of Martin Frobisher's ill-fated voyage and continuing through centuries of activities involving naval ships, whalers, traders, missionaries, police, and public servants, Inuit have been engaged in an ever-evolving intersocietal relationship with qablunaaq (our word for non-Inuit people).

More specifically, we have experienced a tight political and legal relationship with the crown--first the British imperial crown and then with the crown in right of Canada. In the period leading up the 1960s and 1970s, the relationship between the Europeans and Inuit was a grossly one-sided one. We Inuit suffered a steady loss of control over our ability to make decisions--decisions for ourselves and for the lands and waters that have sustained us for thousands of years. We became a colonized people. We were pushed to the margins of political and economic and social power in Inuit Nunangat.

The low points of this one-sided relationship were experienced in the period when entire family camps were wiped out by measles, when Inuit...