Today Is November 7

The Inuit are a people of the Arctic who live in Greenland and Canada.

By Ansgar Walk - photo taken by Ansgar Walk

The Inughuit of northwest Greenland are the world's northernmost people. When contact was made in 1818 they had been isolated for several hundred years and were completely unaware of the existence of other humans.

Although they live in a climate inhospitable to crop development, the Inuit do not suffer from vitamin C deficiency (scurvy) due to their diet of frozen and raw fish and mammal organs. By not cooking the food, the vitamin C is not broken down and can be absorbed by the human body.

International Inuit Day is a holiday that was created to celebrate Inuit and amplify their voices. It falls on November 7.

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected the 16th president of the United States, defeating three rival candidates. Lincoln, a Republican, won with just under 40 per cent of the popular vote, but secured a comfortable majority in the Electoral College. He was the first Republican to become president. His election was deeply unpopular in the Southern states, where his opposition to the expansion of slavery caused alarm. Within weeks, South Carolina voted to secede from the Union, and by the time Lincoln took office in March 1861, seven Southern states had broken away. The country was heading towards the American Civil War.


Today is National Bison Day. Bison or buffalo are large, even-toed mammals. "Bison" is a Greek word meaning ox-like animal, while "buffalo" originated with the French fur trappers who called these massive beasts bœufs, meaning ox or bullock—so both names, "bison" and "buffalo", have a similar meaning.

The buffalo formed the mainstay of the economy of the Native Americans, providing them with meat for food, hides and fur for clothing and shelter, and sinew and horn for tools

In the 1800s, the westward-moving pioneers and railroad workers wantonly killed the huge animals by the thousands for food. Only the choicest pieces of the slaughtered buffalo, the hump and tongues, were cut out of the carcasses.

The near-extinction bison hunting in the 1800s was not only to gain food. The pioneers also wanted to restrict the American Indians' dominant food supply; herds were shot from trains and left to rot where they died.

By 1870s, the buffalo had been decimated east of the Mississippi River thus removing a major source of meat. The extension of railroads across the Great Plains had led to the destruction of the huge herds that foraged on the vast grasslands there.

The Buffalo Protection Act of 1894 was one of the earliest official recognitions of an endangered species problem in the United States. By the late 1880s fewer than a thousand bison were left on the continent, two thirds of them in Canada.  The law to protect the few remaining in Yellowstone National Park was the first federal legislation that focused on conserving a once-vast wildlife resource.

The United States Senate has passed resolutions each year since 2013 making the first Saturday of November National Bison Day. The purpose of National Bison Day is to encourage celebration of the American Bison, also commonly known as the American buffalo. The species is acknowledged as the first American conservation success story, having been brought back from the brink of extinction by a concerted effort of ranchers, conservationists and politicians to save the species in the early 20th century.  Bison can also play an important role in improving the types of grasses found in landscapes to the benefit of grasslands and hold significant economic value for private producers and rural communities.

President Barack Obama signed into law on May 9, 2016 the National Bison Legacy Act, which designated the bison as the official mammal of the United States.