Before his trip to Siberia, Li Du knew that the indigenous people of the Arctic were the Eskimos. That was what he had learned back in geography classes.
When he was preparing for the Arctic trip, he had read more about the locals. He realized that there were quite a few indigenous tribes across the Arctic. That area had been a habitat for humans for thousands of years.
Narrowly speaking, the Arctic region referred to the North Pole alone, where there were only a few people. However, the Arctic was commonly known as all the land within the Arctic Circle, including territories of Canada, the United States, Russia, Finland, Sweden, Norway, Iceland, and Greenland. All those countries had territorial claims in the North Pole area.
Looking at it this way, the population of the Arctic Circle was actually quite considerable. There were about four million people belonging to more than forty different tribes who all spoke different languages.