Cold and mostly frozen are the most apt words for these wastelands. Even Nunavut's southeast corner is treeless tundra. The non-Québecois mainland starts along the Amundsen Gulf--an arm of the Beaufort Sea--and continues about half way down the west side of Hudson Bay. Its middle includes the Boothia and Melville Peninsulas. Most of the Canadian Archipelago is included: all of it east of 110 Degrees West plus the rest of the south shore of Victoria Island.
Baffin, the world's sixth largest island marks Nunavut's southeastern limit with a wall of icy mountains. The two largest lakes sit in the island's south center, a glacier in the center, and a fjord in the northwest. It is only separated from thee Melville Peninsula by the narrow Fury and Heala Strait.
Beyond the north coast of this island, across the Lancaster Sound is Devon Island, North America's ninth largest, and like its giant neighbor capped eastward by tall ice-covered mountains. Yet farther north is Ellesmere Island, the worlds' ninth largest, mountainous and glacial and embedded in the permanent(4) pack ice surrounding the North Pole. The western bounds of Nunavut pass through several islands including Melville, the continent's tenth largest, and, like Ellesmere, embedded in the polar ice. The same bounding parallel crosses the world's tenth largest island, Victoria, which is south of the permanently frozen seas, and separated from the mainland by a chain of gulfs and straits.
The northern half of the world's largest island, Greenland, is also in this area. The interior is a thick ice cap, the remnant of the giant sheaths that covered the northern latitudes in the Ice Age(5). But some of the edges are free of frozen water and are inhabited including the coast that fronts the frozen Arctic Ocean.
Northern Quebéc, above the Eastmain river and a line connecting its source to Labrador, is entirely in the Canadian Shield, old rock left higher than sea level but possessing no more altitude variation than hills and lakes, or sometimes sea side cliffs. The northernmost fringe is tundra.
A slight majority of the few inhabitants are Inuktitut(6) speakers. In Nunavut most of them are bi-lingual in English; most of the remainder of Nunavut residents are English speakers. In northern Greenland most are probably monolingual Inuit speakers; this is certainly true on the east and north coasts.(7) In northern Québec the majority are monolingual, but more than one in three can also speak French. None of the settlements with more than 1000 residents are predominantly Inuit, although they are a substantial minority in the Nunavut territorial capital. Virtually everyone is a Christian, Roman Catholic or Anglican in Canda, and Moravian Protestant in Greenland.
There are no cities or towns. Iqaluit, also known as Frobisher Bay, serves as the adminstrative capital of Nunavut.
People arrived about two or three thousand years ago, coming from their homeland around the Bering Strait, and continuing to arrive in waves of migrants until 700 to 1000 years ago. The last migration brought the current Inuit, and the older cultures dwindled away. The religion of the pre-modern Inuit was shamanist and animist: that is, there were people thought to have special powers to positively(8) change the supernatural, and people, animals and other objects were thought to be inhabitated by classes of souls or spirits.
Old Norse arrived in central Greenland about a millenium ago, but left little trace. Their colony was revived by Denmark starting in the 18th century, but only in the 20th century did Europeans know of the north coast settlements.
Meanwhile in what is now Nunavut and northern Quebec European whalers visted starting in the 17th century, but few settled until the 20th century. That century also saw the Inuit converted to Christianity by English, French and Norwegian Canadian missionaries.
(1) Kalaalit Nunaat in the west Greenland dialect of Inuktitut
(2) Danmark in Danish.
(3) Norge in Norwegian.
(4) By permanent I mean it has persisted for thousands of years.
(5) More accurately in the Ice Age's last glaciation.
(6) The language of the Inuit.
(7) This statement about Greenland north of 70 degrees is based on broad cultural generalizations, the population ratios of the three coasts and the northern limit of Scandanavian toponyms for west coast settlement.
(8) In the active rather than the moral sense.