Pre-Historic Period

Around three million years ago, glaciers covered much of North America, reducing the level of the world's oceans and exposing a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. A variety of animals made their way from Asia to North America across the land bridge. Asiatic hunters, the ancestors of today's Amerindian peoples, may also have crossed the land bridge. The first of them are believed to have arrived in North America between about 40,000 and 25,000 years ago.

Slowly, over thousands of years, more people moved onto the new continent. As the Ice Age drew to a close, about 12,000 years ago, the glaciers began to retreat towards Hudson Bay and people occupied more and more territory. Over the next several thousand years, the glaciers continued to retreat, freeing all of the Mackenzie River, Great Slave and Great Bear Lake, and the western Arctic Coast, and the northern forests flourished as the climate warmed. By 6,000 years ago, the tree line was further north than it is today.

About 4,500 years ago, the final major wave of migration from Siberia brought the ancestors of the Inuit, the pre-Dorset people, to North America. Because of the warmer conditions in the Arctic, they moved quickly and, within a century or two, occupied the Arctic coast from Alaska to Greenland, Almost 3,500 years ago, the climate once again grew colder, the tree line shifted to the south, and with it the pre-Dorset people.

The Dorset culture, named after Cape Dorset where its remains were first discovered, began about 2,700 years ago. Over the course of the next 1,500 years, as the climate warmed again, the Dorset people settled most of the former Pre-Dorset territory as far south as the Labrador coast and Newfoundland.

By about 1,000 years ago, a new Inuit culture, the Thule, had arisen on the shores of the Bering Sea. These people where whale hunters, and when the whales moved east, during yet another warming of the Arctic climate, the people followed them. Within 200 years, the Thule had spread through the Arctic from the Mackenzie Delta to Greenland and soon absorbed or eliminated the Dorset people.

The Thule are the direct ancestors of the modern Inuit which means simply "the people" in Inuktitut. The modern Inuit include the Inuvialuit and Copper Inuit of the western Arctic, the Netsilik and Caribou Inuit of the central Arctic, Iglulik and Baffinland Inuit of the eastern Arctic, the Ungava Inuit of northern Quebec, and the Labrador Inuit.