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Despite her exotic features, described by one fan site as "more reminiscent of the peoples of Central Asia, or even neighbouring Greenland, than they are of the average Icelandic native," we could find no evidence that Bjork is related to the indigenous people of northern Canada and parts of Alaska and Greenland. Björk Guðmundsdóttir was born November 21, 1965, in Reykjavik, the capitol of Iceland. Unfortunately, none of her numerous fan sites elaborated any further upon her heritage. We did stumble
across an interview that reported she was often teased for her looks -- her classmates thought she looked Chinese or Inuit -- but we found no mention of any actual Inuit blood in her family tree. Giving up on the fan sites, we decided to focus our efforts on the history of Iceland and its natives instead. We found a recent article on Iceland in New Scientist that informed us, "Virtually all the country's 270,000 inhabitants are descended from settlers who colonized the island in the ninth century AD." At Go
Iceland!, we learned that these settlers were Vikings trying to escape their ancestral lands in southern Norway, then ruled by the tyrannical king Harald Haarfagri. It appears that Bjork's Viking ancestors had little contact with their Inuit neighbors even after a group of Inuit Indians moved from Alaska to Greenland in 1100 AD. While the Norse colonies in Greenland coexisted peacefully with the Inuit villages, there is no record of the Inuit venturing South to Iceland. Still, you never know. Those Vikings got around.
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