WI Arctic natives were brought over to Antarctica to settle could they survive or thrive?

If in the late 19th century or early 20th Natives from the Arctic regions of Canada or the US or Russia were transported down to Antarctica as a way to set up settlement claims there for these nations, on the beliefs that the natives would be more acclimatized for that land.

Could those natives have survived and prospered?
 
The problem is that the Inuit and Aleut were quite dependent on driftwood for much of their material culture, which will never reach there because of the circumpolar current. There are also no caribou, polar bears, arctic foxes, or snowshoe hares in Antarctica. Without these things, elephant seals are rather tough customers, and their only hair is their whiskers. They and Emperor Penguins are the only local wild game. Not even they could make any colony there self sufficient.
 
[EDIT: Cross-posted with Kalvan, who provides more detail.]

The climate probably wouldn't be too huge a shock for them, but what about the flora and fauna? That's gonna be important for things like food supply and clothing.
 
The Canadian government's High Arctic Relocation scheme.

The general consensus ranges between thinking that this was misguided at best, an atrocity at worst. One can only imagine a re-settlement to the opposite end of the hemisphere would be even worse.
 
You *MIGHT* be able to successfully settle Aleuts in some of the sub-Antarctic islands, like South Georgia or Kerguelen, but that would still be pretty dicey and anything beyond that would be a veritable death sentence for the settlers.
 
The Canadian government's High Arctic Relocation scheme.

The general consensus ranges between thinking that this was misguided at best, an atrocity at worst. One can only imagine a re-settlement to the opposite end of the hemisphere would be even worse.

The things you learn while reading Alternatehistory.com. It wouldn't have been so bad if the settlers had been given tonnes of supplies, but apparently they weren't:

"The exiles lived in tents that first year. They survived mainly on seal meat and scraps that they found in the RCMP garbage dump. Finding water was difficult, and catching anything was near impossible. Not only was it always dark, but there were just no animals around to hunt. And in the summer when the birds returned, and on the rare occasion they found a musk ox, the Inuit were unable to shoot them, because they were a protected species."

On the other hand the settlements still exist. I suspect if a similar ruse had been tried in the late 1800s, over a greater distance, from the relatively habitable north to empty Antarctica, half of the volunteers would have died in the passage and the rest would have followed soon afterwards.
 
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