The Arctic and Western North America

The unmistakable affinity and probable common ancestry of Eurasian and American shamanisms is especially striking in the case of the Eskimo (or Inuit) and the tribes of the Northwest Pacific coast, the peoples closest to Siberia. The Eskimo in particular belong to an Arctic culture circling the globe from Lapland through Siberia to Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, and their once-universal shamanism was until recently central to their culture. Given the immense extent of these sparsely populated barren lands, the uniformity of a culture unmistakably Eskimo in spite of every regional variation is astonishing. The isolation of the traditional Eskimo from