Nunavut Abroad
by Peter Jull
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Nunavut has prophetic meaning when viewed in an international context.
It heralds a new world order, a real one this time, created from the ground up.
For This vast expanse. Canadians it is a sign that we remain capable of
creative politics—by any world standard.
Nunavut may be little noticed in Canada. It can get lost in the clamour of
other indigenous issues. However, it gets major and respectful attention
overseas. It has been one of two or three bits of Canadian news to leak
through the fogs of international indifference to reach Australia. In
northern Europe there have been university seminars and lectures on Nunavut
for a decade. In other parts of the "first world", and increasingly in the
"third world", Nunavut has been seen as an astonishing piece of good race
relations and social progress.
The reason for Nunavut's appeal is obvious. A large area of a settled,
affluent, and (although we would never wish to admit it!) successful
industrial nation-state has renegotiated the effects of European settlement
with an aboriginal people earlier dispossessed.
It can be expressed in other ways. A hunter-gatherer people with a stubborn
sustainable development philosophy and no visible modern industrial economy
are taking over one-fifth of the world's second largest nation-state. Or, a
vast area without trees, covered with snow and ice for most of the year, is
being transformed into a full modern society with computers and parking
tickets under the control of a people known to the world largely through
cartoons of fur parkas, domed snowhouses, and polar bears.
Such a breakthrough provides practical inspiration for other indigenous
peoples. This does not mean it should be precisely copied elsewhere, but it
can be usefully studied as a precedent.
Why do Canadians not take more pride in Nunavut and the north? After all,
the northern territories and parts of the provincial north have been the
scene of the most successful innovation in socio-political, economic, and
environmental matters in Canada in recent years. There is something
breathtaking in a situation where a people and a region like Nunavut, with
no lack of legitimate grievances, opt to join with enthusiasm a jaded
nation-state having a life crisis, a country unsure of its will to continue
to exist!
Nunavut was achieved by a partnership of determined Inuit and responsive
southern Canadians. Canadians do have the capacity to dream dreams and see
visions, at least if they are going to happen somewhere far away.
Land claims negotiations, despite their avowedly limited and specific
purposes, are the most profound constitutionmaking and nation-building
exercises in the European period of our history. Typical of great events,
they are conducted in obscure meeting rooms by largely unknown persons
while the press and society whirl around the glittery and largely symbolic
activities of formal bodies and first ministers.
There are numberless other meetings—in badly heated indigenous village
halls and in some dazzling fine new ones whose decor sits oddly with the
dark clothes and unpretentious manners of the local people—too remote and
humble for media presence, but where indigenous Canadians are re-inventing
the economic and resource policies of most of our national expanse. The
consistency of views expressed and persistence of northern spokespersons
has, over the years, made up for limitations of inexperience, funding,
legal standing, and political status.
Although national policy-makers think in terms of incorporating the north
into national policies and assumptions, they would do better to incorporate
the Canadian south into the pattems of northern political culture. There,
after all, the world' s big problems—racial and cross-cultural relations,
environmental management, ecologically sustainable development, fundamental
reform of political institutions, local participation in resource
management—are being resolved steadily if not always cooperatively.
Northern politics are usually more robust and opinions more strongly
held—and the whole community is more likely to be involved—than in the
"sophisticated" south. But real results are achieved in the north, while
the south, despite all the tireso ne niceness of Canadians in public, shows
a meanness of spirit and failure of vision when and where it counts.
While Canadians tune in dutifully to the national political soap-opera—more
improbable on some days than others— they are seeing only a stale,
ritualised, discredited, and largely failed process of, dare we say it, a
largely stale and discredited elite. In theatre as in life, people look for
freshness and authenticity. Nunavut, like the rest of the north in Canada,
has these qualities in abundance.
Canadians as a whole should learn from Nunavut. They should forget their
inherited prejudices about race, culture, political or economic ideology,
public vs. private agency, etc., and make pragmatic accommodations in the
interests of survival. They might also discover some of the enthusiasm for
Canada and the future evident in the Nunavut villages. (Flags of Canada vie
with even posters of the Montreal Canadians on teenaged bedroom walls in
Nunavut these days!)
Nunavut and the other land claims settlement areas of northern and rural
Canada, including the tribal territories of British Columbia, are new
societies, emerging in culture even more than in law. This fact links them
with other similar regions abroad such as those represented in the Inuit
Circumpolar Conference, Nordic Sami Council, and association of 26
indigenous peoples across Russia.
No sizeable area of Canada has been so planned and fussed over by
government bodies as the Nunavut area since the Second World War. If Inuit
famines and American criticism attracted political attention to the
region's needs, it was maintained by an army of dedicated of ficials
who—whatever their mistakes and failures of understanding—were committed to
the Inuit north and to the well-being of its residents. There was almost
nothing they were not willing to try, using the full power of an
administration remote from the scrutiny of elected representatives. That
lack of accountability was often positive: it permitted spending levels and
progressive social policies which would probably not have been countenanced
if the Canadian public were paying more attention.
So confused were the results on the ground of some of these actions that
Inuit were and are unaware of their intentions. While the Carrothers report
of 1966 led to arctic greenhouse experiments in local government which were
supposed to bring political as well as social assimilation, Inuit youth in
school and elders in unhapy new villages were thinking about something
entirely different. The government was busy building local government
council halls and designing coats of arms featuring contorted arctic
wildlife to hang in them. It was charming, even touching, in its naivety.
Meanwhile, Inuit were using whatever was to hand—including funds and
programs provided for other ends—to shape a society in which they are
comfortable.
True, the pace and shape of change was beyond stopping, and Inuit knew it.
But they could domesticate it—harness its power and even its institutions.
The Nunavut Act for the new territory's government and Nunavut Land Claims
Agreement Act of the Canadian Parliament are two results.
All across Canada a variety of peoples—Inuit, Algonquian, Dene,
Nuu-chah-nulth, and mixed-blood or Metis—are building a new country, or
rather many new regional units which make up a country. It may be hard for
some of us older persons to understand the scope of change. Not only are
down-at-heels fringes of northern towns, and small communities known only
on the maps of Indian Affairs officials, emerging full of new life and
social energy, but a new history of Canada is being written. Historians,
social scientists, literary scholars, and writers have combined to
re-discover or re-interpret a past glossed over in our conventional
European-derived national narratives. A whole new Canada is emerging from
this restoration work.
Now indigenous politics, national scholarship, and official responses are
re-creating an integral Canada rooted in natural history, a true reading of
the historical past, and a post-industrial ethic, all this as a by-product
of their main efforts. This is not to suggest that indigenous people should
be entertaining us with new visions of ourselves. However, the federal
principle in politics makes possible both strong regional cultures with a
complete set of the instruments and institutions of place and identity and
a framework of wider cooperation. In northern Canada different peoples have
learned to live with each other' s sense of history, while in the south
warring conceptions of the past threaten to wreck the present.
The renewal which we find in Nunavut, in northern Quebec, in Labrador, in
the Western Arctic, Yukon, and Denendeh, is also going on in Lapland (that
is, the Sami areas of Norway, Sweden, and Finland, today known to the
indigenous residents as Sapmi), Greenland, and the many regions of Alaska.
It is happening in outback Australia, despite the efforts of Australian
governments to keep indigenous initiative firmly channelled by federal and
state government agencies. In New Zealand, national identity and
institutions are being contested from the top down by Maori, as will now
happen in British Columbia.
Ancient societies of indigenous peoples are recreating themselves in new
political institutions with the aid of many new ideas and technologies.
Nevertheless, they are very definitely creating something different from
the industrial societies whose appetite for hinterland resources first
drove them to mobilise politically. (In the case of Nunavut and some other
areas like Greenland, outsiders bringing the social and cultural values of
European society fuelled this resistance even before resource, land, and
sea issues generated public debate).
Mere numbers of population will not determine the nature of these northern
regions. Even where indigenous people are a minority, even a relatively
small minority, they may in fact control the political agenda. The most
obvious reasons for this are that better educated outsiders are apt to
support the indigenous agenda, tacitly or actively, or to be transient and
aloof from regional politics. Resident non-indigenes, on the other hand,
may be very much involved, but are often so reactionary that their views
cannot be taken seriously or acted upon by national capitals. The upshot is
that hinterland indigenous people negotiate the regional future, de facto
or de jure, with senior governments.
It will be interesting and, no doubt, sometimes startling to see how these
new indigenous-influenced regions of Canada and the "first world" evolve.
Rather than sit and wonder, however, national society needs to respond more
helpfully than it has often done in the past. Surely we all have a stake in
encouraging the bits of our country which have the gumption and
self-confidence to live for tomorrow rather than cling to the prejudices of
yesterday.
Governments have forced Inuit and other indigenous peoples to undergo a
sort of initiation in years of protracted negotiations before being allowed
land, sea, and governing powers. The toll on indigenous leaders in terms of
personal health and family life have often been horrendous, and for what
purpose?
Instead of making indigenous self-government as hard to achieve as
possible, and something done in embarrassed concession far from the
mainstream of public policy, Canadians and others should embrace it for
what it is: constitutional renewal, social justice, cultural flowering, and
regional development.
Peter Jull, a Canadian, long associated with Inuit organizations and
Nunavut, is a consultant based in Brisbane, Australia.
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"In This Issue..." | Publication Index
Selected contributions by Peter Jull
that have appeared in The Northern Review
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+ Voices of Summer: Australia Slouches Towards the Millennium
+ New Directions in North Australia
+ Review of Shooting the Banker: Essays on ATSIC and Self-Determination
+ Australian Indigenous Policy (and some Northern Canada Inspiration)
+ A Personal Response to Frank J. Tester and Peter Kulchyski, Tammarniit
(Mistakes)
+ Building Nunavut: A Story of Inuit Self-Government
+ Dreaming in Black and White: An Australian Northern Policy