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The First Whale Hunters: The Arrival of the Thule Inuit in the Eastern Arctic

Inuit were bowhead whale hunters

Way before the whalers came up north; the Inuit were bowhead whale hunters. They had a very interesting technique for going after these humongous bowhead whales. They were the size of a bus! There would be from six up to a dozen qajait (kayaks) chasing a bowhead at the same time. Each qajaq (kayak) would have a small sealskin float and a harpoon, and right in front of the float would be a round thing that served the same purpose as a sea anchor. It's a perfectly round piece of seal skin that's very hard to pull through the water because it's flat, and it would slow down the animal that they harpooned. So the float would be at one end, the sea-anchor type of thing would be in the middle, and the end of the harpoon tip would be put into the whale.

The way they used to harvest these huge animals was to harpoon them right near the fluke. Very close to the fluke there is a major artery that the Inuit always aimed at. According to all the old people that talked about it, the whale cannot feel anything in that area. You can stab it and harpoon it all you want in that area, and it won't even flinch or react. I was amazed when I first heard that.

They would try to hit it in that spot with their harpoons, and once all the floats were attached to it, they would also use a lance, like a spear with no barb at the end. They would just use their qajait (kayaks) and get really close to it and keep stabbing it in that same area, where that artery is near the fluke. Eventually the whale would bleed out.

They would just drag the carcass to the closest piece of land. That's because the whale was so huge and they were pulling it with qajait (kayaks). So, wherever the closest piece of land was, they would land the whale there, and that would be where they established their fall camp. They would spend the whole winter there around the whale; sometimes it would even be years that they would stay in that place. All around Cumberland Sound there are old qammaq sites where people obviously lived for a short period of time, some of them in really horribly rough places. You can just imagine them trying to make a home on these really rough, rocky spots.

Before the whalers came here, there were three or four main settlements of Inuit in the Cumberland Sound. One would be over at Anarngittuq, and another one was at Kinngait Fiord, in a place called Niutaq. There are a couple more places on the far side of Cumberland Sound, but I am not quite sure where the old settlements were. Niutaq is really interesting, because according to a study that was done, they found that these people did not really mix with other Inuit groups. They studied the graves and the bones and found that they were very different; the DNA from these people indicated they did not mix very much with others.

For hunting purposes, people always went back to their main camp, a base camp. For example, Anarngnittuq was the permanent home, and away from that spot there would be a fall and a spring camp, in different places. Every fall the whole camp would move to a place where the ice would form sooner than anywhere else, or else near a polynya. They would live there until the ice at their main settlement froze over, then they would move back. In the spring, and this is still followed today, they would go to their spring camp by dogteam and sled and wait for the ice to go. When the ice was gone at the main settlement, they would go back home. In August and September they would go to their favourite caribou hunting areas; each camp had its own favourite spots. For the people at Niutaq, Pangnirtung was their favourite caribou hunting area. At Anarngnittuq, they would go all the way up to Nettiling Lake and up to the Penny Icecap to hunt caribou.

Andrew Dialla

My name is Doug Stenton and I'm the Director of Culture and Heritage for the Government of Nunavut. I'm an archaeologist by training and have lived and worked in Nunavut for about 28 years. I've done archaeological research in many parts of Nunavut over the last twenty-some years.

The Thule Migration and Whale-based Subsistence

The group that preceded contemporary Inuit are known to archaeologists as the Thule. Based on many years of archaeological research, the Thule culture is seen as originating in the north Alaska area and there are a number of hypotheses about why the populations began to move eastward into Canada and Greenland. It's generally said that this occurred around a thousand years ago, although there is some current opinion that it may have been around 1200 AD when groups initially migrated eastward. Research suggests that the hunting of bowhead whales figured prominently in that move, but it probably wasn't the only reason. Populations around the world have moved into new areas throughout history, so in this case there could have been other sorts of population pressures and changes that would have encouraged such a migration.

The Thule, who were probably organized in family-based groups, moved eastward and relatively quickly, over several generations, came to occupy most of what is now Nunavut and Arctic Canada and even further south into Labrador and Quebec. We see in many aspects of material culture and other types of activities that the Thule were the biological and cultural ancestors of contemporary Inuit. We can also see those early connections with Alaska stylistically in the archaeological remains, from designs and engravings on artefacts and that sort of thing.

One of the main types of sites that archaeologists investigate in relation to the Thule culture is the winter house site, which is the sod and whale bone house. The number of features, or ruins, in these sites might be as few as one, meaning one house remaining, or there are some sites that have as many as forty, fifty or sixty house ruins remaining. These locations must have been very good for harvesting all kinds of resources, which would be necessary in order to sustain a population of larger size.

We can learn a great deal by studying these sites, it's a very interesting aspect of archaeology. We get some sense of their other activities from excavating houses. We find certain tools that we can associate with men and women's work; a common example of this would be the ulu, the women's knife. We can identify activity areas within sites and within houses where food preparation may have taken place, or food storage. In my experience, especially with a Thule winter house where I've done a lot of excavations, these houses contained a lot of material and what some books call gadgets. These were very intricate composite weapons for everything from clam digging to bolas for taking birds, harpoons and lances for fishing; there was really nothing beyond the technology and skills of the Thule.

We don't really think that most of these large Thule sites with large numbers of houses were necessarily all occupied at the same time. I've excavated at sites here around Iqaluit over the last twenty years and some of these sites might have fifteen or twenty houses in them, but we don't think there were twenty houses occupied all at the same time. There may have been smaller groups of three, four, five or maybe a few more houses, maybe a group of hunting partners or related families, for example, who would decide to remain together for the winter or for whatever period of time they wanted to stay closely associated.

The hunting of the large whales was a very prominent aspect of Thule subsistence and social organization for the early generations, perhaps for the first couple of centuries that they were in the area. There would have to be a great deal of collaboration; if you've seen a bowhead whale, you can see that they're very impressive creatures and that it would require a great number of people, organization and structured leadership for the hunt to be successful in order for the group to survive.

Changes in Hunting Patterns

We also learn by looking at ethnographies and at some of the materials and information collected in the late 19th century and early 20th century about the pre-modern Inuit. There is the Fifth Thule Expedition, for example, with Mathiasson, and Birket-Smith and others who recorded a lot of the oral traditions. There is a continuance from those early days; many of the traditions or key elements of those traditions or values, we think, were carried forward into the early part of the 20th century. Now things are quite different in many ways, as you know.

By the 18th century, when the European and North American whalers came in force, they encountered Inuit populations who were expert hunters of every northern species that you can imagine. It is questionable whether by that time whale hunting played as prominent a role as it did in the early days of the Thule arrival in Nunavut. That's not to say that the pre-modern Inuit no longer had the skills or knowledge to hunt those animals. Many things may have reduced the availability of the whales in some way by this time, such as restrictions in the range of the bowhead or change in climate conditions with more ice in certain areas. But when we get into the early ethnographic period, other animals had become the mainstay of hunting activities and diet: ring seal, caribou, walrus, other seals, for example. The very large baleen whales were probably still taken, but there had been a shift.

We know from the early ethnographic period, from the work of David Damas and others from the 1800s, that we had these large iglu communities built out on the sea ice for most of the winter, where they were hunting ring seals right at the breathing holes. Again, this required a very complex organization and social structure, but what you see is a shift away from the sendentary sod and whale bone houses to a much more mobile situation with a different species being hunted for subsistence purposes for most of the year.

In the change that I am talking about, we see archaeologically and ethnographically that there was an abandonment of the Thule winter sites or villages. By the time the early ethnographies were being written the Inuit population had a different settlement/mobility system. While whales could still be taken, there were now large snow camp villages which were themselves mobile. You had a group, and you spread out for a period of time, and when the seals had been hunted out the whole camp could pick up and move to another location on the fast ice. We see quite a change in settlement and subsistence and in the number of people involved from the classic Thule migration to many generations later and several centuries later.

The general theory is that the arrival of the Thule came with the medieval warm period. There may have been reduced ice in many areas of Alaska at that time, expanding the range of the bowhead whales and creating some changes in how they could be hunted. In Alaska the bowhead were hunted from leads in the flow edge whereas here it was open water hunting. A few centuries later, we get the little ice age and more extensive ice, probably thicker ice in some areas. This would have the effect of reducing the availability and access to the large whales that people may have relied on generations before that, so we see the shift to the hunting of caribou and many different species of seals, although the ring seal was the staple in most areas of Nunavut.

The shift away from the Thule culture might be difficult to reconstruct accurately, but if we look at the Thule, we see that they had the capability to be highly mobile. Archaeologists refer to nomadism as mobility and look at how mobile these groups were. The Thule had the kayak, umiak, qamutik and dog teams; they had all this technology that allowed them to be highly mobile. In any season of the year they could go pretty much anywhere they chose to go, for social purposes or for hunting purposes or for whatever reason. There were few, if any, barriers to their travel on land and water. But in very general terms, the changing environmental conditions appear to have played a prominent role in the changes on the types of wildlife that were harvested, and in the numbers and organization of people at different times of the year. When bowhead whale hunting played a very big role, the amount of food was enormous; a single bowhead would mean thousands of kilograms of meat, blubber and bone. All of these things could sustain any number of families through a winter quite easily, so they could remain more sedentary over the winter should they choose to do so. In the summer the groups are ordinarily more mobile, they go to the river to get the fish when they're coming in, to get eggs from the ducks and geese. They had to have a certain amount of mobility for this, as many species are migratory and you have to be where they're going to be.

The Thule, like the Inuit, would have had a very intimate knowledge of the animal cycles and seasons of their availability and where they would be concentrated, but we see in the archaeological record that the pre-modern Inuit had more of a reliance on such things as migrating caribou herds, for example, particularly in the fall. We see the hunting of seals, walrus, and perhaps some of the smaller whales, and perhaps a larger whale if one presented itself.

By the time we're getting into the ethnographic period there may actually have been larger groups. There may have been a certain requirement for that so that you could monitor as many breathing holes as possible. If you have six or seven families together, you would want as many of those breathing holes to be monitored as possible to increase your chances of success in the hunt. It's interesting to consider that a small Thule winter village could have a population of thirty or thirty-five individuals and that you could have that many or more in a snow house community. In the one case, because you were hunting bowhead whales which provide large quantities of food, you could have forty people and sustain them, and in the other case, in the ethnographic period, you may have needed a larger group but you could still get as much food to sustain them. That's an interesting parallel.

Doug Stenton, Ph.D.
Director of Culture and Heritage,
Government of Nunavut

• Before the Arrival of the Europeans
• Davis Strait
  • Introduction
  • Inuit Whalers
    • Kanaka
  • Whaling Stations and Harbours
  • Captains
    • Henry Toke Munn
  • Ships
    • The Albert
• Cumberland Sound
  • Introduction
  • Inuit Whalers
    • Angmarlik
    • Inulluapik
    • Ipiirvik and Taqulittuq
    • Johnnibo and Kimilu
    • Tessuin
    • Uugaq
    • Kanaka
  • Whaling Stations and Harbours
    • Naujaqtalik
    • Nuvujen
    • Singaijaq
    • Umanaqjuaq
    • Kekerten
  • Captains
    • Sidney O. Budington
    • William Penny
    • John C. Taylor
    • George E. Tyson
    • Henry Toke Munn
  • Ships
    • The Andrews
    • The Daniel Webster
    • The McLellan
    • The Active
    • The Albert
• Hudson Strait
  • Introduction
  • Inuit Whalers
    • Johnnybo and Kimilu
  • Whaling Stations and Harbours
    • AKULIAK
  • Captains
    • John O. Spicer
  • Ships
    • The Era
    • Le Nile
    • The Active
    • The Roswell King
• Hudson Bay
  • Introduction
  • Inuit Whalers
    • Ippaktuq Tasseok (Harry)
    • Melichi (Malachi or Malika)
    • Nivisinaaq (Shoofly)
    • Ullanaq (John Ell or John L.)
    • Angutimmarik (Scotch Tom)
    • Kayakjuaq (Joe Curley)
  • Whaling stations and Harbours
    • Marble Island
    • Depot Island
    • Cape Fullerton
    • Repulse Bay/Naujaat
    • Chesterfield Inlet/Igluligaarjuk
    • Southampton Island/Salliq
    • Wager Bay
  • Captains
    • Brothers Christopher B. and Edward Chapel
    • Capitain George Comer
    • Captain Alexander Murray Sr.
    • Captain John Murray
    • Captain Alexander Murray Jr.
    • Henry Toke Munn
  • Ships
    • The Era
    • The A.T. Gifford
    • The Syren Queen and the Northern Light
    • The Ernest William
    • The Albert
    • The Ocean Nymph and the Perseverance
    • The Active