Inuit

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The peoples of the Arctic coasts of Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Chukotka, whose ancestors of the Thule tradition spread east across the North American Arctic from Alaska roughly a thousand years ago, displacing or absorbing the earlier Dorset. Their presence is the single fact that most sharply distinguishes the two poles: the Arctic is inhabited, has been for millennia, and its ice is somebody's ground, road and larder rather than a research object. That has institutional consequences - Greenland exercises self-government within the Kingdom of Denmark, Nunavut was created within Canada in 1999 out of a land claim agreement, and Inuit organisations hold Permanent Participant status at the Arctic Council. It also produces a body of environmental observation that long predates the satellite record, and which sea-ice research has increasingly had to treat as evidence rather than as colour.