Who are the Tunit?

Question

i do not mean Inuit, i mean a different people in reference to book Farfairers by Farley Mowat

Answer 1

Do you mean the "inuit" - Canadian aboriginal peoples who live in the Arctic north of Canada.

Answer 2

There had been several waves of migration from central Asia and Siberia over the Bering Strait between Russia and Alaska. The Dorset people, that the Inuit refer to as Tunit, settled along the Arctic coast, the coasts of Labrador and Greenland as well as in the islands of the Canadian Arctic archipelago. They had dogs. The lack of remains of sleds and harness parts tend to indicate the dogs were not used as sled dogs. Hunting, guarding and pack carrying were probably their main functions.

http://www.inuitsleddoginternational.com...

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Greenland had already been partially settled before the Vikings arrived by a group of people archaeologists refer to as the Dorset Palaeo-Eskimos because their remains first appeared in a collection at Kinngait (Cape Dorset) on Qikiqtaaluk (Baffin Island). The Dorset people are likeliest the Tunit of Inuit legend. The Tunit were an “ancient race of strong, gentle, and rather simple people” who lived in the Arctic territories (presently claimed by Canada and Denmark) before the ancestors of the present Inuit arrived.

The relatively warm climate of a millennium ago generated the grazing and hunting conditions that attracted the Norsemen and Inuit contemporaneously to western Greenland. The westward migrants were the Thule Inuit, so named because their remains were first identified near a settlement now called Thule in northern Greenland. The whale-hunting prowess of the Inuit favored them over the Dorset people who eventually disappeared in the Arctic. Much as competition favored the Inuit over the Dorset people, it also seems that the Inuit were better predisposed to life in Greenland than were the Viking people.

http://www.dissidentvoice.org/2007/05/th...

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The Dorset people pretty much stayed Dorset, but Inuit called them "Tunit." The actual "Dorset" term was coined by the anthropologist Diamond Jenness (who, in my opinion, is to be most commended for his extraordinary collections of traditional string figures, some of which have been lost to modern Inuit).

In 1925, Jenness received some odd artifacts from Kingait — odd because they seemed to derive from an especially ancient lifestyle, unlike that of Inuit. Because Kingait was called "Cape Dorset" at the time, Jenness called the mysterious people that produced the artifacts the "Dorset" culture, and the hunt to find more evidence of this people has been on ever since.

The Thule may have become Inuit, but the Dorset people — the Tunit — never became much of anything, because they went extinct. The reasons for the Tunit extinction is unclear. It has been suggested that the Tunit (I’m going to stick with the Inuktitut term) simply starved to death due to their own inefficiency, but this idea is absurd.

The Tunit way of life was undoubtedly very harsh, since they seemed to have lacked dogs, toggles, boats and other technologies that make life easier, but their culture nevertheless persisted for many, many centuries. They thrived.

It seems most likely that the Tunit, once they had lived among Inuit for a time, simply began to recognize a good thing. Inuit were able to demonstrate a great deal of success with their sea-mammal hunting lifestyle. Hunger is hunger and meat is meat, and the Tunit probably began to recognize that they could subsist better by adopting some of the Inuit hunting strategies and technologies.

I find it likely that Tunit did indeed adopt some aspects of Inuit culture, causing them to change with time, to become more and more like Inuit. As they began to enjoy the benefits of "Thule" cultural innovations, they essentially became assimilated into Inuit culture.

A change in culture is rarely a rapid one. The Tunit would have had their own dialects and ways, those that they clung to even after the "Inuit revolution." This would have kept them culturally distinct from Inuit for some time, but the Dorset cultural distinctness was probably beginning to fade from the time that it met the Thule. Probably, neither Tunit nor Inuit ever noticed this happening, not even when the process became impossible to reverse.

http://www.nunatsiaq.com/archives/nunavu...

One of the mysteries of the Thule occupation of arctic Canada involves their relationships with the Dorset people, the previous occupants of the area. As we have mentioned, a few elements of Thule technology may derive from Dorset prototypes, suggesting that some contact occurred. Canadian Inuit legends recount that when their ancestors first arrived in the country, they encountered a people known as Tunit, described as a large and gentle race of seal hunters who lacked several elements of Inuit technology. The stories tell of fights between the two groups, and of the Tunit being driven away. These Tunit may well be the people we know archaeologically as the Dorset, and the archaeological evidence for the disappearance of Dorset culture at roughly the same time as the Thule migration is consistent with the Inuit legends. The Dorset people appear to have survived in arctic Quebec as late as A.D. 1400, and this is the area last occupied by the Thule culture; no Thule sites from Quebec or Labrador can be dated to earlier than A.D. 1500. By that time, the Thule Inuit had completed their occupation of arctic Canada.

http://www.studentsonice.com/arctic2004/...

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These earlier people, called Dorset by archaeologists and Tunit by Inuit, were the descendants of an earlier migration, around 2500 BC, that also originated in Alaska or Siberia.

The Tunit were said to be a gentle race, great hunters of seals, with whom Inuit lived for a time before quarrels erupted and they were driven away. The Tunit are thought to have occupied most of the present Inuit lands, from the coasts of Hudson Bay, through the central and high Arctic, to northern Greenland and Labrador and beyond that to Newfoundland.

The Dorset culture flourished between 500 BC and 1000 AD, when the climate was colder than today. Technology uncovered at Dorset sites includes harpoons adapted to hunting walrus and seals in open water, fishing gear, snow knives and ivory plates to protect the runners of sleds (suggestive of hunting on winter ice), and carved soapstone pots and lamps. Decorations on harpoons and other implements, carved wooden masks, and wood, ivory and bone miniatures of animals, birds and human figures suggest a well developed intellectual and ceremonial life, the nature of which is still a mystery.

http://www.ainc-inac.gc.ca/ch/rcap/sg/sg...

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There was only one culture in the Canadian Arctic and Greenland before Inuit. These, Inuit refer to as the "Tunit." These are Dorset. Inuit remember them well in their oral traditions. The Tunit were small, very strong, incredibly shy. It is said that Tunit taught Inuit about their lands, that they built the first inuksuit ("images of men," man-like stone structures) to herd caribou along predictable paths for hunting. Paradoxically, they were thought of as poor craftsmen.

http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm...

Answer 3

They are Palaeo-Eskimo People

There is an interesting website about them