People of the Arctic

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Almost four million people live in the Arctic today, with the precise number depending on where the boundary is drawn. They include indigenous people and recent arrivals, hunters and herders living on the land, and city dwellers. Many distinct indigenous groups are found only in the Arctic, where they continue traditional activities and adapt to the modern world at the same time. Humans have long been part of the arctic system, shaping and being shaped by the local and regional environment. In the past few centuries, the influx of new arrivals has increased pressure on the arctic environment through rising fish and wildlife harvests and industrial development.

The Arctic includes part or all of the territories of eight nations: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Canada, Russia, and the United States, as well as the homelands of dozens of indigenous groups that encompass distinct sub-groups and communities. Indigenous people currently make up roughly 10% of the total arctic population, though in Canada, they represent about half the nation’s arctic population, and in Greenland they are the majority. Non-indigenous residents also include many different peoples with distinct identities and ways of life.

People have occupied parts of the Arctic since at least the peak of the last ice age, about  20,000 years ago, and recent studies suggest a human presence up to 30,000 years ago.  In North America, humans are believed to have spread across the Arctic in several waves,  reaching Greenland as many as 4,500 years ago before abandoning the island for a millennium  or more. Innovations such as the harpoon enabled people to hunt large marine  mammals, making it possible to inhabit remote coastal areas in which the land offered scant  resources. The development of reindeer husbandry in Eurasia allowed human populations  to increase dramatically owing to a reliable food source. In Eurasia and across the North  Atlantic, new groups of people moved northward over the past thousand years, colonizing  new lands such as the Faroe Islands and Iceland, and encountering indigenous populations  already present in West Greenland, and northern Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. 

In the 20th century, immigration to the Arctic increased dramatically, to the point where  the non-indigenous population currently outnumbers the indigenous population in most  regions. Many immigrants have been drawn by the prospect of new opportunities such as  developing natural resources. Conflicts over land and resource ownership and access have  been exacerbated by the rise in population and the incompatibility of some aspects of  traditional and modern ways of life. In North America, the indigenous struggle to re-establish  rights to land and resources has been addressed to some extent in land claims agreements,  the creation of largely self-governed regions within nation-states, and other political  and economic actions. In some areas, conflicts remain, particularly concerning the right to  use living and mineral resources. In Eurasia, by contrast, indigenous claims and rights have  only begun to be addressed as matters of national policy in recent years.

Populations are changing and northern regions are becoming more tightly related economically,  politically, and socially to national mainstreams. Life expectancy has increased  greatly across most of the Arctic in recent decades. The prevalence of indigenous language  use, however, has decreased in most areas, with several languages in danger of disappearing  in coming decades. In some respects, the disparities between northern and southern arctic  communities in terms of living standards, income, and education are decreasing, although  the gaps remain large in most cases.