Adult education programs are often grounded in problematic assumptions about learners' inadequacies. The purpose of this article is to critique such assumptions through presenting a history of the manner in which representatives of Canadian governments conceptualized the education of Inuit adults from the 1940s through the 1980s. Using genealogical methods and archival data, I find three stages in the evolution of official discourses about Inuit adult education: exclusion, cultural deprivation, and individualization. This article contributes to the history of Inuit education, and to the critique of deficiency discourses as more broadly deployed in the education of adults from marginalized backgrounds.