The Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut, Canada, has been inhabited for millennia by successive Indigenous cultures, beginning with Pre-Dorset peoples around 1800 BC, followed by Dorset (Tuniit) groups and, from roughly the 13th century AD, the Thule ancestors of today’s Inuit—particularly the Inuinnait (Copper Inuit) and Netsilingmiut—who developed highly adaptive seasonal cycles of seal hunting on sea ice in winter and caribou hunting and fishing on land in summer. European contact began with Samuel Hearne’s overland journey to the Coppermine River in 1771, intensified during 19th-century British naval searches for the Northwest Passage (including Franklin’s expeditions and Amundsen’s overwintering at Gjoa Haven), and expanded in the early 20th century with the fur trade, Hudson’s Bay Company posts, and the gradual establishment of Canadian colonial administration. Designated the Central Arctic region of the Northwest Territories in 1981 and renamed Kitikmeot (an Inuit term for the area) in 1982, with Cambridge Bay as its headquarters, the region became part of the new territory of Nunavut on 1 April 1999 following the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement.
