The Center for Polar Archives, a part of the General Services Administration's National Archives and Records Service in Washington, DC, was formally opened on 8 September 1967. The Center serves as a depository for selected records of the Federal Government and for papers that are related to United States activity in the polar regions; it also serves as a research facility for persons interested in United States polar activities.

Eskimo-speaking peoples inhabit Arctic lands that extend some 6 400 km longitudinallyfrom Chukotka to Greenland. This enormous territory comes under the administration of four nations: Canada, Denmark, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and United States of America. As citizens of these nations, Eskimos are becoming more and more enmeshed in the cultures and economies of their respective industrial societies, with the result that, as in other underdeveloped regions of the world, their numbers have increased markedly in therecent past

During this short period began what may be termed the re-exploration of northern Canada, a scientific examination of lands that had been roughly charted by expeditions of the previous hundred years, but that were otherwise little known except to fur traders, a few missionaries, and the occasional traveller. Only now did the newly confederated Dominion of Canada begin to take a practical interest in its vast northern expansions. The government sent three scientific expeditions to Hudson Strait and Hudson Bay, and the Geological Survey of Canada began to direct its attention towards the north. One of its officers, A. P. Low, explored the length and breadth of the Quebec-Labrador peninsula virtually single-handed and, as if anticipating the Klondike gold rush, towards which the work of many prospectors in Yukon Territory was steadily leading, Dawson, McConnell and Ogilvie published detailed accounts of routes and conditions in the Northwest Territories and Yukon Territory, information that proved invaluable to both government and individuals when the rush was on.