| This volume covers the cultures of Canada, Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaat), and the United States of America. Greenland, although administratively linked to Denmark, is included here because its native inhabitants, the Inuit, are related culturally to the Inuit of Canada. For the same reason, the cultures of Hawaii are covered in the Oceania volume, as native Hawaiians are related culturally to the Polynesian peoples of Oceania.
North America covers 8,254,654 square miles and had an estimated population of 276 million in 1989. The fortyeight contiguous U.S. states plus Alaska cover 3,562,864 square miles and in 1989 had an estimated population of 246,498,000. Canada covers 3,851,790 square miles with an estimated population of 25,334,000 in 1989. And Greenland covers 840,000 square miles, making it the largest island in the world, with an estimated population of 55,000 in 1989.
Reaching nearly from the North Pole almost to the Tropic of Cancer, North America is a diverse physiographic and climatic region. It is also a complex cultural region. At the time of sustained European contact (ca. 1600) the native inhabitants of the New World spoke at least one thousand languages and were organized into as many distinct cultural groups. Since that time, people representing hundreds of different cultural traditions have immigrated to and settled in the United States and Canada, creating a mix of cultures perhaps without precedent in human history.
The cultures of North America now fail into three general categories: (1) Native Americans, the modern-day descendants of the original inhabitants of North America-the American Indian (Amerindian), Aleut, and Eskimo and Inuit cultures; Eskimo, as used here, refers to the native cultures of north and western Alaska, and Inuit to the native cultures of northern Canada and Greenland; (2) folk cultures, such as the Amish, who have maintained their unique cultural identity within the context of modern North American society; and (3) ethnic groups composed of people who share a common sense of identity on the basis of national origin. race, or religion. This volume covers cultures in all three of these categories.
When dealing with cultures, one central issue is the name that is used for the culture. Most have more than one name: usually they have a name for themselves, and outsiders use one or more different names. The name of each summary in this book, and thus the name used for each culture, is either the name preferred by the author of the summary or the name by which the culture is most commonly known. Ethnonyms or alternative names are provided in the summaries and in the ethnonym index. For immigrant-based groups such as Korean-Americans, we have hyphenated the names except in summaries where authors preferred the nonhyphenated form. |
