Blond Eskimos facts for kids

Blonde Eskimos or Blond Eskimos is a term that was used in the early 1900s. It described Inuit people in Northern Canada who had light-colored hair. These sightings mostly happened around the Coronation Gulf and Victoria Island. People had reported seeing light-haired native people in the Arctic as far back as the 1600s.

How the Term "Blonde Eskimo" Started

The term "Blonde Eskimo" was first used by Christian Klengenberg. He told Vilhjalmur Stefansson about it in 1910. Stefansson was about to visit the Inuit living on southwestern Victoria Island. Stefansson himself preferred the name "Copper Inuit" for these people.

In 1912, Adolphus Greely gathered all the earlier reports of fair-haired Arctic natives. He published them in the National Geographic Magazine. His article was called "The Origin of Stefansson's Blonde Eskimo." Newspapers then made the term "Blonde Eskimo" very popular. It caught more readers' attention than "Copper Inuit." Stefansson later mentioned Greely's work in his own writings. This made the term "Blonde Eskimo" apply to sightings of light-haired Inuit from as early as the 1600s.

Early Sightings of Fair-Haired Arctic People

Greely found the first report of light-haired Arctic natives from 1656. A Dutch trading ship sailed west from Greenland towards Baffin Island. The captain, Nicholas Tunes, said he saw two different groups of people. One group was the brownish-skinned Inuit. The second group was tall and had fair skin.

Hans Egede, a missionary, also wrote about a blonde tribe in Greenland in 1721. He described them as "quite handsome and white."

Later, William Edward Parry wrote about native people in the Qikiqtaaluk Region, Canada. He said they had European features like blonde hair and light skin. In 1821, Captain Wilhelm August Graah of the Royal Danish Navy met Inuit whose skin was "scarcely less fair than that of Danish peasantry."

In 1824, British navy officer John Franklin claimed he spoke with a "Blonde Eskimo." This person had strong European facial features. In 1903, Greenlandic explorer Knud Rasmussen also said he found blonde-haired Eskimos in Greenland and parts of Canada. He thought they were "of a different race."

Vilhjalmur Stefansson's Ideas

In 1910, Stefansson visited the Copper Inuit on southwestern Victoria Island and Prince Albert Sound. He described meeting many men with blonde beards and hair. He said they "looked like typical Scandinavians."

In his book My Life with the Eskimo, Stefansson suggested a few reasons for these features:

• They might have mixed with Norse settlers from Greenland a long time ago.
• They might have mixed with European whalers.
• Perhaps European-like people migrated from across the Bering Strait a long time ago.

Stefansson did not think the whaler idea was likely. He noted that whalers and Inuit had met in Alaska for over 100 years, but there were no blondes there. He also said that Inuit in the eastern Arctic had more contact with whalers. If whalers were the cause, there should have been more blondes there, but there were none.

What Scientists Found Out

By 1922, scientists called anthropologists began to study Stefansson's claims. They could not find a clear answer for why so many Copper Inuit on southwestern Victoria Island had blonde hair.

In 2003, two scientists from Iceland looked into this. Agnar Helgason (a geneticist) and Gísli Pálsson (an anthropologist) compared DNA from 100 Cambridge Bay Inuit with DNA from Icelanders. They found no match between the two groups.

In 2008, Pálsson wrote an article in Current Anthropology. He concluded that new research "refutes Stefansson's speculations on the Copper Inuit." This means the scientific evidence did not support Stefansson's ideas about why some Inuit had blonde hair.