Indigenous Arctic Peoples and Their Territories

The circumpolar Arctic is home to an estimated 400,000 to 500,000 indigenous people, according to figures compiled in the Arctic Human Development Report, spread across roughly forty distinct peoples in eight countries; the major groupings include the Inuit of Canada, Greenland, and Alaska, the Yupik and Aleut of Alaska and Chukotka, the Sámi of Fennoscandia and northwest Russia, and the Nenets, Khanty, Evenki, Chukchi, and Sakha (Yakut) peoples of Russia's Far North and Siberia. These populations have inhabited the region for millennia, developing distinct languages, subsistence economies built around hunting, fishing, and reindeer herding, and forms of social and political organization that predate the modern states now exercising sovereignty over their homelands.