THE ARCTIC AS A REGION

Geographically, the lands that comprise the Arctic represent but a small subset of the total land surface of the world. Similarly, the people who have inhabited this region represent only a small subset of the world's human population. Those people, however, have lived in some quite distinctive ways, a pattern that is not surprising given the distinctive environmental challenges they regularly faced. The passage at the beginning of the chapter, the last verse of a traditional eighteenth-century British whalers' song known as “Greenland Fishery,” captures something of the perception commonly held by many European- Americans about arctic environments. Especially intriguing, given the purposes of this volume, is a real contrast in the roles played by dogs in those environments at different times. Specifically, they sometimes played a conspicuous and even vital role among people in some contexts, but only a minor role, if any, under other circumstances that entailed similar or even more challenging environmental conditions. The purpose in this chapter is to describe these situations and explore the different roles that dogs played.