The Dorset culture preceded the Inuit culture in Arctic North America. Inuit legends mention a people called the Tunit, which were driven away by the Inuits.

Anthropologist Diamond Jenness in 1925 received some odd artifacts from Cape Dorset, now called Kingait, which seemed to derive from an ancient lifestyle unlike that of the Inuit. Jenness named the culture after the location of the find.

Researchers believe that Dorset culture lacked dogs, boats and other technologies and adapted poorly to the development of harsher weather in the Arctic. As a result, they were displaced by the Inuit.

The Sadlermiut

In 1824, HMS Griper, under Captain G.F. Lyon, anchored off Cape Pembroke on Coats Island in Hudson Bay. The whalers discovered a tribe of Eskimos who called themselves Sallirmiut or Sadlermiut and talked in a strange dialect. The Sadlermiut, living on an isolated island, preserved a culture distinct from the Inuit. They continued to have contact with Westerners and contracted Western diseases. By 1896, there were only 70 of them remaining. In the fall of 1902, some of them visited the Active, a whaling vessel that had stopped at Southampton Island. They caught a disease from a sick sailor, possibly typhoid or typhus. The entire tribe died within weeks.

In 1954 and 1955, Henry B. Collins of the Smithsonian Institution studied Eskimo house ruins in the Canadian Arctic. He determined that these ruins were characteristic of Sadlermiut culture which had once been quite extensive. He also found evidence that the Sadlermiut were the last remnants of the Dorset culture.

Genetic research has, moreover, confirmed the genetic connection between the Sadlermiut and the Dorset culture. Surprisingly, there was no genetic connection between the Dorset culture and the Inuit culture.

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