Fifty unpublished texts and extensive notes on Inuktun, the language of the Inuit people in northwestern Greenland, were recently uncovered by UC Berkeley Linguistics Professor Andrew Garrett. They predate all previously known documentation of the language by more than two generations and are changing the way linguists understand Inuktun.
While looking through UC Berkeley archives, Garrett discovered the little-known notebooks and recognized their significance for linguists and Inuit communities. He analyzed the texts in a study titled “Alfred Kroeber’s Documentation of Inuktun (Polar Inuit),” which was published in Anthropological Linguistics.
The notes were originally compiled from 1897-1898 by Alfred Kroeber, one of the founders of the Berkeley Anthropology Department and a long-time prominent figure in anthropology. At the time, Kroeber was an anthropology graduate student at Columbia University. He was studying under Franz Boas, who is widely considered to be the founder of cultural anthropology.
Boas tasked Kroeber with documenting the language of six Inuit people, including two children, whom American polar explorer Robert Peary infamously brought to New York. Boas himself requested that Peary bring the group to the U.S for his research, hoping to use them to disprove cultural evolution theories, or the idea that cultures develop in predictable stages.
However, the group was grossly mistreated, explained Garrett. The museum housed them in a public exhibit, and four of the six died within a year due to neglect and disease. Rather than being given a proper funeral, their skeletons were displayed in the American Museum of Natural History.
“All the Greenlandic participants in this work were cruelly used by Euro-American explorers and scientists; they deserve to have their voices heard,” said Garrett. “My hope in writing this paper was that what they wanted to say about themselves will still be heard.”
The notebooks reveal that Inuktun grammar and pronunciation have changed substantially in the decades after Kroeber’s research, according to Garrett. Certain features that were once characteristic of Inuktun, such as pronunciations and sentence patterns, have been replaced or even lost altogether, his study shows.
“Because the work predates all other substantial work with the Inuktun language by two generations, it shows what the language was like prior to 20th-century contact with other languages,” Garrett said.
The findings suggest that Inuktun was once more similar to northern Canadian Inuit languages. Garrett explained that this provides evidence of longstanding communication across Arctic communities before colonial borders reshaped those relationships.
“Inuktun is spoken in Greenland, and its speakers today have close connections with both Greenland and Denmark, but its earlier connections further east were also strong,” he said.
To interpret the materials, Garrett relied on modern knowledge of Inuit languages to correct gaps and inaccuracies in Kroeber’s early transcriptions. What once might have been dismissed as incomplete notes can now be read as a valid linguistic record.
By uncovering and interpreting these texts, the study not only contributes to a more complete linguistic understanding of Inuktun, but also makes the texts more accessible to researchers and restores a valuable cultural resource to the Inuit communities they belong to.