Blond Eskimos - Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Vilhjalmur Stefansson

In 1910 Vilhjalmur Stefansson visited the Copper Inuit inhabiting southwestern Victoria Island (Prince Albert Sound). He described meeting many men whose beards and hair were blonde and "who looked like typical Scandinavians". In his book My Life with the Eskimos, Stefánsson proposed several explanations for these physical features:

• Early mixture with Norse colonists from Greenland;
• Mixture with European whalers;
• Ancient migration of European-like people from across the Bering Strait;

He rejected the second explanation because "if the mixing of races is so recent, it would appear that it should be most conspicuous farther east where the whalers had their headquarters, fading away as one goes westward. The opposite is the case".