Amerindian tribes of
the Canadian Dominion at the time of its gradual discovery by
Europeans, especially during the great explorations of the eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries.

It is evident that the ESKIMO--who are quite distinct from the
Amerindians in physical type, language, customs, and industries--have
been for thousands of years the only inhabitants of Arctic America.
When the Norsemen came to the New World they seem to have met with
Eskimo as far south as New England, but in more recent times the
Eskimo have only been found inhabiting the extreme north and
north-east: in Greenland, on the Labrador coast, on Baffin's Land, and
along the Arctic coast of the North-American continent, between the
Coppermine River and the westernmost extremity of Alaska, as well as
on the opposite islands and promontories of Asia.

Their name for themselves as a people is usually "Innuit" (in
Greenland, "Karalit"). Eskimo is a corruption of _Eskimantsik_, a
northern Algonkin word meaning "eaters of raw flesh". Although their
geographical range extends over a distance of about three thousand
five hundred miles--from north-easternmost Asia to the east coast of
Greenland--the difference in their dialects is little more than that
between French and Italian; whereas the difference between the speech
of one Amerindian tribe and another--even where they belong to the
same language group--is very great--not less than that between German
and Latin, or English and French, or even between Russian and
Hindustani. This fact--of the widespread Eskimo language--makes some
authorities suppose that the presence of the Eskimo in Arctic America
cannot be such a very ancient event as, from other evidence, one might
believe. Perhaps the bold travelling habits of the Eskimo--which makes
them range over vast distances of ice and snow when hunting seals,
walruses, whales, musk ox, or reindeer--enables them to keep in touch
with their far-away relations.

The canoes or _kayaks_ in which they travel (first described by the
Norsemen in the tenth century) are made out of the hide of the seal or
walrus. The leather is stretched over a framework constructed from
driftwood or whales' bones. There is a hole in the middle for the man
or woman to insert their legs. This hole they fill up with their
bodies. If the canoe capsizes, the Eskimo cannot fall out, but bobs up
immediately. He and the canoe are really "one-and-indivisible" when he
is navigating t