The first contact the Inuits had with eastern civilizations was with the Norse culture of Greenland. Once they had disappeared it would be hundreds of years, until the mid 1500's when people started hunting whales up and down the Labrador coast. The Inuits didn't have much contact or trade with these people except that the natives would sometimes conduct raids of the whaling stations and steal the metal tools used by the whalers for their own uses. Once Eastern cultures started inhabiting Alaska, the government started having missionaries sent out to supply the Inuits with the tools they were once stealing, so that the relationships between the groups could be more "peaceful." The explorers and whalers coming to the country often transferred deadly diseases to the native groups, but the Inuits living in higher latitudes would remain relatively untouched by outside civilizations until around the 1920's. At this time, the royal mounted police of Canada began to oppress the Inuits and would arrest them for breaking laws which they had no idea they were breaking, and by converting them to Christianity. It wasn't until the 1960's that the Inuits began coming back by standing up to the government that basically stole their country, however they still hadn't been fully compensated until around 2005.
"Countries and Their Cultures." Inuit. N.p., n.d. Web. Apr. 2013.
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