Native American ǀ American Indian
Photo: Ronald Senungetuk, Inupiat sculptor and silversmith, born in Wales, Alaska
Alaska Natives are the indigenous peoples of Alaska. They include: Aleut, Inuit, Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, Eyak, and a number of Northern Athabasca cultures. Alaskan natives in Alaska number about 119,241 (as of the 2000 census). There are 229 federally recognized Alaskan villages and five unrecognized Tlingit Alaskan Indian tribes. The Iñupiat (or Inupiaq) are a native Alaskan people whose traditional territory spans Norton Sound on the Bering Sea to the Canada–United States border. Their current communities include seven Alaskan villages in the North Slope Borough, affiliated with the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation; eleven villages in Northwest Arctic Borough; and sixteen villages affiliated with the Bering Straits Regional Corporation. Barrow, the northernmost city in the United States, is in the Inupiat region. Inupiat people continue to rely heavily on subsistence hunting and fishing, including whaling, which has more recently come into conflict with oil drilling as another important revenue source for the Inupiat. Dwellings were characterized by underground tunnel entrances that trapped cold air. Whale bones were used to form the roof and were covered with sod.
The Native American – Alaskan Inupiat population data represent DNA samples from 109 Native American (Native Americans in the United States) individuals who, as an Eskimo tribe called the Inupiat (Explore cultures inupiat), settled regions near Alaska’s northernmost city of Barrow, along the Bering Strait, on the North Slope and along the northwestern Arctic coast. These samples of Alaska’s Native American groups –which make up 19 percent of the state’s population– were obtained by the FBI’s Laboratory Division; by the Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory for the Alaska Dept. of Public Safety; and by the Dept. of Environmental Health at the Center for Genome Information, in the University of Cincinnati.
Source publication: Population studies on three Native Alaska population groups using STR loci, FSI, 2002, p51-57.
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