When I think of the native people of the Arctic regions the Inuit come to mind. This book explores the Tuniit, a people who lived in the Arctic prior to the Inuit. The Tuniit were not nomads like the Inuit. The Tuniit used flint tools and had stone shelters. The Tuniit were a shy people who had their own ways of hunting, surviving, and understanding the world. They were not just an early Inuit culture. “Tuniit are very special beings, because they blend the realms of Inuit myth and fact. Scientists say that they existed. But if we go by what Inuit stories have to say about them, the Tuniit were anything but normal people.” (p. 2) The Tuniit were extremely strong. “The strength of the Tuniit was said to be so great, in fact, that they did not always need spears to kill their prey. It is said that if they caught their prey by running it down,…they could snap the neck of even a bull caribou by simply wrestling with it.” (.13)

In the 1920s, anthropologist Diamond Jenness gave the Tuniit the name Dorset when he realized they were culture separate from the Inuit.

No one knows why they disappeared, perhaps they were exterminated by the Inuit, or they intermarried, or plague.