Human Presence in Polar Environments

The Arctic has been continuously inhabited by indigenous peoples for millennia, in sharp contrast to Antarctica. The Inuit, numbering roughly 180,000 people spread across Alaska, Arctic Canada, Greenland, and Chukotka in the Russian Far East, developed subsistence economies built around seal and whale hunting, fishing, and travel over sea ice, and are represented internationally by the Inuit Circumpolar Council, founded in 1977. Other circumpolar indigenous peoples include the Sámi of Fennoscandia, numbering roughly 80,000 to 100,000 and traditionally associated with reindeer herding, along with the Nenets, Yakut (Sakha), and Chukchi peoples of Siberia, together representing a circumpolar indigenous population of several hundred thousand people with deep, continuous roots in the region.