Igloolik
hamlet in Nunavut, Canada
Igloolik (Inuktitut syllabics: ᐃᒡᓗᓕᒃ, Iglulik, Inuktitut pronunciation: [iɣ.lu.ˈlik]) is an Inuit hamlet in Foxe Basin, Qikiqtaaluk Region in Nunavut, northern Canada. Because its location on Igloolik Island is close to Melville Peninsula, it is often mistakenly thought to be on the peninsula. The name "Igloolik" means "there is a house here". It derives from iglu meaning house or building, and refers to the sod houses that were originally in the area, not to snow igloos. In Inuktitut the residents are called Iglulingmiut (the suffix miut means "people of").
History
Information about the area's earliest inhabitants comes mainly from numerous archaeological sites on the island; some dating back more than 4,000 years. First contact with Europeans came when the British Royal Navy ships HMS Fury and HMS Hecla, under the command of Captain William Edward Parry, wintered in Igloolik in 1822.
The island was visited in 1867 and 1868 by the American explorer Charles Francis Hall in his search for survivors of the lost Franklin Expedition. In 1913, Alfred Tremblay, a French-Canadian prospector with Captain Joseph-Elzéar Bernier's expedition to Pond Inlet, extended his mineral exploration overland to Igloolik, and in 1921 a member of Knud Rasmussen's Fifth Thule Expedition visited the island.
The first permanent presence by southerners in Igloolik came with the establishment of a Roman Catholic Mission in the 1930s.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q999339. VIAF identifies the subject as 145489985. The Library of Congress control number is n85270863. Authority coordinates are 69.376, -81.799. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1822, 1867, 1868 and 1913.
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This entry incorporates text from “Igloolik” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.