Nunavik and the Multiple Dimensions of Inuit Governance

ABSTRACT

Over the last five decades, the emergence of a sophisticated and multidimensional set of governance institutions in the predominantly Inuit regions of Canada and the circumpolar north has had a profound impact on the lives of Inuit peoples and the states in which they live. The region of Nunavik in northern Québec has played an important role in the political development of the Canadian and circumpolar Inuit, serving as both an institutional innovator and a key source of leadership at the regional, national, and international levels. Using a multilevel governance framework, this article explores the vertical and horizontal dimensions of Inuit governance in Canada and the circumpolar north. In particular, the article will focus on Nunavik’s contribution to and place in this multidimensional governance structure.     

Landscapes, Houses, Bodies, Things: “Place” and the Archaeology of Inuit Imaginaries

Although the dichotomization of space and place has spawned a lively archaeological discussion, it threatens to devolve into a troublesome binary like sex/gender. Local place-making and universalizing spatial science are not so neatly segregated. Rather than dividing and bounding the notion of an investment of locations with meaning, it can be extended to describe the intricate topologies of bodies and things, as well as landscapes. Places emerge as sites of the hybrid articulation of representations, practices, and things, as spatialized imaginaries. The notion of imaginaries and the rethinking of place are illustrated with Inuit archaeological and ethnographic examples.     

Climate change vulnerability and adaptation research focusing on the Inuit subsistence sector in Canada: Directions for future research

The last decade has witnessed a proliferation of research into the human dimensions of climate change in the Arctic. Much of this work has examined impacts on subsistence hunting, fishing, and trapping among Canadian Inuit communities. This scholarship has developed a baseline understanding of vulnerability and adaptation, drawing upon interviews with community members and stakeholders to identify and characterize climatic risks and adaptive strategies. To further advance this baseline understanding, new methodologies are needed to complement existing research if we are to capture the dynamic nature of how climate change is experienced and responded to, and fully engage communities as equal partners. Longitudinal studies, community‐based monitoring, and targeted adaptation research offer significant promise to advance understanding. These methodologies provide a strong basis for developing meaningful partnerships with communities, the co‐production of knowledge, and empowerment for adaptation: essential components of community‐based participatory research.     

Editorial

Abstract

A recent online article in The Daily Beast listed archaeology as one of the thirteen most useless undergraduate degrees. The article failed to identify transferable job skills gained while engaged in archaeological work. Further, archaeological field programmes and labs offer an alternative learning environment that benefits some students. This article reviews two archaeological projects that used archaeology as a form of social activism to provide employment and education to an under-served community as a fundamental aspect of its goals. The Hopedale Archaeology Project is an archaeology field project based in a north-east Canadian community that provides education and work opportunities for Inuit students. The Veterans Curation Program based in the United States provides temporary employment to recently discharged military veterans in an archaeological and archival curation lab. These programmes assist individuals to re-establish themselves within the workforce and add to their academic and professional growth, as well as incorporate a public outreach component that makes archaeology and history more accessible to the public.     

“The Men of the North” Redux: Nanook and Canadian National Unity

This article explores the operation of nordicity as a discursive resource in Canadian national identity. Drawing on the late nineteenth-century idea of Canadians as “the men of the north” and therefore having a particular national character, this article examines the way that the Inuit have been drawn into this discursive frame since the 1950s. The key argument advanced in this article is that idealized images of the Inuit as exemplars of “northern people” operate in various ways to affirm a “northern” identity for all Canadians. This claim is explored with reference to the images of Nanook of the North and of the Inuit as “a quintessential Canadian Folk.” Continuities between the nineteenth- and twentieth-century versions of the “northmen” thesis are examined in this article.     

Wrapped in Two Flags: The Complex Political History of Nunavik

ABSTRACT

During the first half of the twentieth century, northern Quebec was under federal jurisdiction. Tired of English Canadian supremacy and increasingly aware of northern Quebec’s considerable natural resources, which could provide a solid basis for future moves toward independence, the Quebec government began to take over responsibility for its northern territories in the 1960s. It established a regional administration to take charge of its northern affairs and sent officers to northern Quebec’s remote communities. For two decades, both governments administered the region and imposed two political systems on the local Inuit. This article is based on lengthy fieldwork and archival research. The historical background is described to show how Nunavik has developed as a political and social entity through its relationships with the Quebec and Canadian governments. This conflictual situation has created tensions in the Inuit community, resulting in political dissensions over the goal of self-government. Finally, this article details how the Inuit have exploited federal–provincial tensions to further their own interests.     

Nuutauniq (Moves in Inuit Life): Arctic Transformations and the Politics of Urban Inuit Mobility

ABSTRACT

Today, one in four Inuit live outside of Inuit Nunangat, the Arctic territory incorporating the four northern Inuit land claims regions. With the majority of those Inuit living in cities, the issue of urban Inuit populations is becoming a more prominent focus for policy debate. In this article, I argue that urban Inuit mobility is a historically complex and multilayered phenomenon embedded in, not detached from, the major processes of social transformation affecting Inuit across the Canadian Arctic from the mid-twentieth century on. I use this analysis to explore the diverse formulation of Inuit-specific policy initiatives in Montreal, a task that, I show, is made easier by the Montreal Inuit radio show called Nipivut.     

Producing consent: How environmental assessment enabled oil and gas extraction in the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut

There is now an extensive body of academic literature examining how the environmental movement contributed to the colonization of Indigenous peoples and development of capitalism in northern Canada. This paper contributes to these discussions by considering how environmental assessment (EA) helped enable hydrocarbon extraction in the Qikiqtani (Baffin Island) region of Nunavut in the 1970s and 1980s. When exploration activities began to threaten the Inuit harvesting economy, communities protested with letters and petitions. The federal government responded to Inuit resistance by referring proposed exploratory drilling and extraction to its new EA process. While Inuit won significant victories during some assessments of proposed exploratory drilling and extraction, federal EA ultimately helped create the conditions for Inuit to consent to oil extraction. EA helped impose material compromises between Inuit and hydrocarbon industries, including preferential hiring of Inuit, a reduction in the scope of proposed extraction, and the rejection of especially controversial proposals for offshore drilling. These concessions, combined with a collapse in the market for sealskins due to international boycotts, persuaded several Qikiqtani communities to support oil extraction in the 1980s. The ensuing extraction and export of oil from the High Arctic accelerated processes of colonial dispossession and reinforced colonial political dynamics.     

Voices from the sea ice: the reception of climate impact narratives

This paper argues that indigenous peoples' responses to climate change are better understood in relation to emerging notions of citizenship than to climate change crisis narratives. The latter, like development narratives, are often used to license the intervention of experts in debates about resource management and conservation. Dominant climate change narratives about the Arctic emphasise the power of global climate systems to threaten northern communities by situating them as being intrinsically ‘at risk’. These narratives envisage Arctic citizenship within very narrow parameters which have largely masked the voices of northern citizens. Definitions of ecosystem resilience, while providing a framework for comparing disparate cultural and ecological contexts, are predicated on avoiding systemic collapse. It is argued that such definitions heighten the sense of risk implicit in climate change impacts. This may ultimately impede the development of different aspects of civic participation by northern citizens with climate change policy opportunities. Policy responses across a range of diverse geographical contexts require new narratives that put communities back into the calculus of risk and decision-making. One way to be more critical about the language of climate change narratives is to evaluate the extent to which they can account for, and mitigate, growing inequalities of power and wealth. Studies in the historical reception of science narratives are proposed as a better approach for making grounded comparisons of the discursive strategies with which climate change narratives are made to work. This also helps to bridge discussions of climate change across regions like the Arctic and Africa, which share much in common, but are too often studied in isolation.     

Spondylolysis in Inuit skeletons from Arctic Canada

Inuit skeletons from archaeological sites in Arctic Canada were examined for the presence of spondylolysis. The largest series represent the Thule culture and historic Inuit from northwest Hudson Bay and Labrador, and Sadlermiut from Southampton Island. The condition was found in 90 individuals, with a total of 120 affected vertebrae producing 198 hemi‐arch defect sites. As in other studies, L5 is affected most frequently, followed by L4 and L3, but examples of L1, L2, L6, and S1 involvement are represented. Incomplete separations account for 20% (40) of the 198 defects, and 5% (10) occur at sites other than interarticularis. Affected males outnumber females at a ratio of 2.4 to 1. The condition was found to increase in frequency from adolescence to young adulthood, and then decrease to middle adulthood and decrease again to old adulthood, but the drop in frequency with age in the adult categories is significant only at the .20 level. Where comparisons could be made, the data obtained from the Canadian Inuit closely resemble those obtained from Alaskan Eskimos and Aleuts, especially their closest linguistic relatives, Inupiat speakers in northern Alaska. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.