Christianity, Continuity, and What Communities Choose Today

Christian missionary activity, particularly from the nineteenth century onward, achieved widespread conversion among Inuit communities across the Arctic, and Christianity, predominantly various Protestant denominations and Catholicism depending on region, remains the majority religious identification among Inuit people today, a significant historical shift that occurred alongside broader and often traumatic processes of colonial contact, including forced relocation and residential schooling policies in Canada whose harms have been the subject of extensive subsequent official acknowledgment and ongoing reconciliation efforts.

Traditional Inuit spiritual knowledge and practice did not disappear entirely, however, and continues in various forms within some families and communities, alongside renewed interest in cultural and linguistic revitalization more broadly across Inuit Nunangat and other Inuit regions in recent decades. Because the relationship between traditional Inuit spirituality, Christianity and ongoing cultural revitalization is actively and variably negotiated within different Inuit communities today rather than settled in any single way, this entry treats describing that general landscape, rather than presenting specific reconstructed prayer content, as the more accurate and appropriate approach for a reference source that cannot speak on behalf of the specific communities concerned.