Светловолосые эскимосы: история термина и исследования

Light haired Inuit from the Coronation Gulf area of Canada

Blonde Eskimos or Blond Eskimos is a term first applied in accounts of sightings of, and encounters with, light haired Inuit

Christian Klengenberg is credited with having introduced the term "Blonde Eskimo" to Vilhjalmur Stefansson just before Stefansson's visit to the Inuit inhabiting southwestern Victoria Island, in 1910. Stefansson, however, preferred the term "Copper Inuit". Adolphus Greely first compiled the sightings recorded in earlier literature of blonde or fair haired Arctic natives, and in 1912 published them in the National Geographic Magazine, in an article entitled "The Origin of Stefansson's Blonde Eskimo". Newspapers subsequently popularised the term "Blonde Eskimo", which caught more readers' attention despite Stefansson's preference for "Copper Inuit". Stefansson later referenced Greely's work in his writings, and the term "Blonde Eskimo" came to be applied to sightings of light haired Inuit from as early as the 17th century.

Greely traced the first sighting of light haired Arctic natives to 1656 when a Dutch trading vessel travelled west from Greenland across the Davis Strait towards Baffin Island. Nicholas Tunes, the captain of the vessel, claimed to have sighted two distinct races, the first being the brownish skinned Inuit, but the second being a tall, fair skinned people. Greely also published the eyewitness account of the Lutheran missionary Hans Egede who wrote in 1721 of a blonde "quite handsome and white" indigenous tribe he had discovered in Greenland. Greenlandic polar explorer Knud Rasmussen in 1903 further claimed to have found blonde haired Eskimos "of a different race" in Greenland and parts of Canada.

In 1910, Stefansson visited the Copper Inuit inhabiting southwestern Victoria Island and Prince Albert Sound. He described meeting many men whose beards and hair were blonde "who looked like typical Scandinavians".

As early as 1922, anthropologists investigated Stefansson's claims but could not come up with an answer to explain the high amount of blondeness in Copper Inuit inhabiting southwestern Victoria Island. In 2008, in an article in Current Anthropology, Palsson concludes that recent work "refutes Stefansson's speculations on the Copper Inuit".