Man, the Fifties were a strange decade. I've come to think of it in popular music terms as the era of unregulated white colonization of the non-white planet (and beyond!), from the mondo exotica of Les Baxter, to the mambo, tango, cha-cha, meringue, and every pre-rock & roll dance craze known to the Western world, to the pseudo-space-age music generated by the first (and hopefully last) era of the theremin as lead instrument.
The eskimos were perhaps the hardest hit victims of Fifties cliches. Granted statehood in 1959, Alaska was as exotic as the moon to most Americans. So, what's more American than making popular songs based on cartoonish caricatures? And we of course had such a vast store based on centuries of colonizing and forcibly assimilating natives that it was easy to transpose on this new, heretofore unexploited indigenous culture.
This is all to say I'm ashamed of how much I still enjoy both Alma Cogan's "Never Do a Tango with an Eskimo" (1955) and Hank Thompson's "Squaws Along the Yukon" (1958), both of which I discovered when my stepfather and I purchased an Eighties-vintage jukebox in 2000. The humor of both is based entirely on predictable thermo-regional generalizations: The premise of the Cogan's tune is almost cruelly unfair (Who would ever think an eskimo could tango? It's like faulting an Argentinian for not knowing how to snow-sled.), and Thompson simply takes the well-trodden Cherokee Maiden trope and moves it to the Yukon River.