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Overview

A. “Our Land”: The Inuit and the Establishment of the Canadian Arctic

No brief summary can do justice to the history of Nunavut, which means "Our Land" in Inuktitut, the Inuit language.[25] Nevertheless, something must be said about the 400-year relationship between the Inuit and the Crown, so that the context of the present negotiations can be understood and the dimensions of the present crisis appreciated.

Canada’s Arctic region consists of the continental territories ‘North of 60’ and the huge cluster of islands that run from about 70 degrees North toward the Pole. For much of the year, polar ice covers most of the waterways in the far North, forming a solid white landscape from the edge of the continent to the North Pole. In the summer, much of the ice breaks up and the Arctic ice retreats, leaving most of the islands accessible by sea for at least one month of the year. In the last decade, however, we have observed, occurring quite suddenly, climate change that has substantially reduced the Arctic ice cover.

Inuit means "the people" in Inuktitut. In its modern form, the term refers to the Inuvialuit and Copper Inuit of the western Arctic, the Netsilik and Caribou Inuit of the central Arctic, the Iglulik and Baffinland Inuit of the eastern Arctic, the Ungava Inuit of northern Quebec, and the Labrador Inuit. The Canadian Inuit also share cultural and linguistic roots with the Inuit in Greenland, Alaska, and northeastern Siberia.

Prior to European contact, and indeed for most of the 400 years since, the Inuit lived in small nomadic multi-family hunting groups, migrating according to the seasons and the movements of the animals upon which they relied. In summer, the Inuit hunted the herds of caribou and fished in inland rivers and lakes, and put to sea in open boats to harvest whales. In winter, most Inuit lived at water’s edge, hunting seals through holes in the ice and often traversing vast areas of the arctic floes in kayaks and open boats. Arctic hare, fox, muskoxen and walrus were also hunted for food and skins, and the Inuit diet was supplemented by eggs, shellfish, seaweed and berries.

The Inuit developed a sophisticated language, Inuktitut, in which they stored their collective knowledge and history. A defining characteristic of their society, which has served them well, is a deeply ingrained ethic of Ningiqtuq, or sharing.

The appearance of white people in the North was spearheaded by explorers, then fur traders and whalers. The clergy followed, offering salvation and schooling; then came representatives of government. In this the North resembles the pattern of historical development throughout Canada.

Volumes have been written about the history of the Arctic, especially the period of exploration beginning with Martin Frobisher’s 1580 expedition. When you place the history of Western contact with the Inuit in its unique perspective, it is very much a story of a partnership – not always an equal partnership, to be sure – between, on the one hand, explorers, fur traders, and the Crown, and on the other, the Inuit.

The particular skills of the Inuit as hunters, trappers and guides made the Inuit a crucial part of successful exploration expeditions, of the Northern fur trade and, while it lasted, of the whaling industry. The Inuit guided Southern visitors safely on their travels; they hunted, fished and trapped to feed them; they built their snow-houses, they sewed the clothing that permitted their survival. They taught, when their guests were willing to learn. It is not fanciful to suggest that, but for the historical contribution of the Inuit, there would be no Canadian Arctic, and without the Canadian government, there would be no Nunavut. The Canadian adventure in the Arctic was always a joint venture.

The 1920s saw the establishment of a number of Royal Canadian Mounted Police posts in the High Arctic. The RCMP and their Inuit companions undertook extraordinary feats of navigation and endurance, as when the guide Nookapingwa led Inspector A.H. Joy, Constable Taggart and two dog teams 1700 miles from Dundas Harbour to Winter Harbour on Melville Island, then eastward to the Bache Peninsula by way of Lougheed, King Christian, Ellef Ringnes, Cornwall, and Axel Heiberg Islands in 1929. Other Inuit names from the period are equally illustrious: Eetookashoo, Kahdi (Peary's son), Quavigarsuaq, Kahkacho, Inuetuk and Seekeeunguaq were some of the Inuit who traversed thousands of miles with RCMP officers by dogsled and boat in search of the ill-fated Kruger expedition in the 1930s.[26]

In 1944, on the St. Roch’s second voyage, Captain Henry Larsen transited the Northwest Passage in one season. Joe Panipakoocho acted as guide, interpreter and hunter for the expedition. In fact the whole Panipakoocho family, eight in all, accompanied the RCMP, living in a tent on the cargo hatch.

Predictably, exploration gave way in many cases to exploitation, and many Inuit (even those who had only very infrequent contact with Southerners) became increasingly dependent on international markets for their economic wellbeing. And yet for the majority of Inuit, well into the twentieth century, life was still traditional, based on the same multi-family, usually nomadic groups which had engaged in harvesting for centuries.

Prior to the Second World War, the intrusion of Canadian authority into the Arctic was a minimalist affair, with a handful of RCMP officers, bureaucrats and Hudson’s Bay Company employees manning small outposts in the region. While treaty-making proceeded with the Indians in the Mackenzie Valley and the Western Arctic, no corresponding attempt was made to treat with the Inuit with respect to their own immense lands in the Eastern Arctic. Canada did not set aside reserves for the Inuit, who were nevertheless regarded, if unofficially, to be wards of the federal government but were not brought under the Indian Act.[27] In 1936, the Inuit were designated as a responsibility of the new Department of Mines and Resources. In 1939, in Re Eskimos,[28] the Supreme Court of Canada held that the Inuit were “Indians” within the meaning of Section 91(24) of the Constitution Act, 1867, placing it beyond doubt that under the Constitution they were under the jurisdiction of the federal government

After World War II, a sea-change occurred in Inuit life which threatened to forever alter the nature of their relationship with Canada, replacing what had been a period of partnership with a period of intensified colonization which threatened the heart of Inuit culture. The reasons for the postwar crisis are many and I need only touch on a few well-known historical events.

The end of World War II, and the resulting abundance of skilled and adventurous pilots, flying new and sturdy aircraft equipped as necessary with wheels, skis or floats, made travel to (and supply of) all but the most remote areas a year-round reality. Frobisher Bay airport, originally developed for the supply of Europe by the United States Air Force in World War II, became the main gateway to the Baffin region.

At the same time, the coming of the Cold War meant that the Arctic was suddenly central to strategic planning: the threat to North America of a Soviet attack over the North Pole led to the creation of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line of radar installations stretching along the 70^th Parallel from Alaska to Greenland. Military aircraft patrolled the Arctic airspace, and nuclear submarines were known to cross the North Pole under the ice. The Canadian Armed Forces formed the Canadian Rangers, an Aboriginal-based reservist organization, and instituted a regular program of light infantry patrols to reinforce claims of Canadian sovereignty over the Arctic. These manoeuvres supplemented the joint RCMP-Inuit dogsled patrols that had been crisscrossing some of the most dangerous terrain for decades. In Nunavut today, sovereignty patrols are mainly conducted by Inuit members of the Canadian Rangers.[29]

Communications, previously limited even in the wireless age, became instantaneous with the advent of the satellite. As the North became accessible, so did its resources: fur traders, fishers and soldiers were followed by prospectors and geologists, although by the close of the 20^th century their efforts had not in the Eastern Arctic led to the same enthusiasm for oil, gas and mineral exploration and development that has characterized much of the Western Arctic.[30]

For the Inuit, the postwar period was marked by a series of events which brought economic and social distress. In 1949, the Arctic fox fur market collapsed, depriving many of the Inuit, who had used their hunting and survival skills to good effect as trappers, of their main source of income. In the 1980s, the European Community’s ban on the import of Canadian seal pelts delivered a devastating financial blow to Inuit who had relied on sealing.

Regular contact between the Inuit and Southerners in the postwar period increased the incidence of epidemic disease. Influenza, tuberculosis, typhus and polio became at times widespread, and the ravaging of the population (and the federal government’s apparent inaction) became the subject of outrage in Canada. Soon, the efficient provision of medical services became a primary goal of the official Canadian presence in the North. This, together with the introduction of formal schooling, facilitated Canada’s policy of encouraging the Inuit to move away from traditional life on the land into the settlements.

A host of social and economic problems followed the shock of these changes. In The Road to Nunavut, R. Quinn Duffy wrote in 1988:

The chapters that follow chronicle the last 40 years of cultural near-extinction of the Inuit, from the years of the Second World War to the 1980s. During those 40 years the Inuit have sunk as low as any people could in dirt, degradation, disease and dependence.[31]

The postwar history of colonization of the Inuit, which followed a path that many contemporary commentators saw as one of inexorable cultural decline, highlights the remarkable character of the Inuit achievement in recent decades. Duffy's account goes on to describe the second characteristic change of the period he was chronicling: the emergence of the Inuit as a people. He continued:

But with that tenacity of spirit that sustained them through thousands of years in the harshest environment on earth, they are fighting to regain their cultural independence, their self-respect, their identity as a unique people in the Canadian mosaic. And they are winning.

In a single generation, the Inuit forged a political cohesiveness previously unimagined. Where once the Inuit were dispersed in small, isolated and nomadic groups, advances in travel and communications and the gathering of the people into the settlements led to the development of what has been referred to, not inaccurately, as a sense of “Inuit nationalism”.[32]

It was this political cohesiveness and increasing confidence that enabled the Inuit, between 1976 and 1993, to negotiate a new partnership with Canada, a comprehensive settlement of land claims that is unique in North America.

B. The Nunavut Land Claim

The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement signed in 1993 is by far the largest of the four land claims agreements reached between Canadian governments and the Inuit.[33] It covers one–fifth of the Canadian land mass, an area twice the size of Ontario. If the Nunavut Settlement Area were an independent country, it would be the twelfth largest in the world; by the terms of the Agreement, the Inuit of Nunavut own in fee simple more land and subsurface rights than any other Aboriginal people in Canada.

The Inuit claim was originally presented to the Government of Canada in 1976 by the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada. From 1982 the Tungavik Federation of Nunavut represented the Inuit in negotiations. In 1990, the Tungavik Federation of Nunavut, the Government of Canada and the Government of the Northwest Territories entered into an agreement-in-principle. After the Inuit ratified the agreement-in-principle, a final agreement was successfully negotiated and the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement was signed in Iqaluit on May 25, 1993. Parliament accordingly passed the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement Act S.C. 1993 c. 29, and the Tungavik Federation of Nunavut was succeeded by the Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated.[34]

The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement for the first time explicitly recognized “the contributions of Inuit to Canada's history, identity and sovereignty in the Arctic”. The Preamble to the Agreement states four objectives shared by the Parties to the Agreement:

to provide for certainty and clarity of rights to ownership and use of lands and resources, and of rights for Inuit to participate in decision-making concerning the use, management and conservation of land, water and resources, including the offshore;

to provide Inuit with wildlife harvesting rights and rights to participate in decision-making concerning wildlife harvesting;

to provide Inuit with financial compensation and means of participating in economic opportunities; [and]

to encourage self-reliance and the cultural and social well-being of Inuit[.]

Hicks & White summarize the Agreement as follows:

At the heart of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement is a fundamental exchange between the Inuit of Nunavut and the federal Crown. For their part, the Nunavut Inuit agreed to surrender "any claims, rights, title and interests based on their assertion of an aboriginal title" anywhere in Canada (including the Nunavut Settlement Area - the area to which the terms of the land claim apply). In return, the Agreement set out an array of constitutionally protected rights and benefits that the Inuit of Nunavut will exercise and enjoy in perpetuity.[35]

The terms of the Agreement are set out in 41 articles. The Agreement recognizes the title vested in the Inuit of Nunavut to 352,240 square kilometers of land in what was at the time the eastern part of the Northwest Territories, and Inuit subsurface rights to over 38,000 square kilometers in those same lands. The Inuit have priority rights to harvest wildlife for domestic, sport and commercial purposes throughout all the lands and waters covered by the Agreement. The Inuit (through NTI) also received financial compensation in the form of capital transfer payments of $1.148 billion payable over a 14-year period. There is no provision for distribution of this fund to individual Inuit. It is held in trust to be used for programs for the benefit of Inuit beneficiaries.

Under the Agreement the Inuit share in royalties collected by Canada on non-renewable resources. The Agreement also contains an obligation on the part of developers to conclude impact and benefit agreements; a $13 million training trust fund; and a federal commitment to establish three national parks in Nunavut.

The Agreement provides for the establishment of Institutions of Public Government (Article 10.1.1(b)) and through these same institutions for co-management by the Inuit and the federal and territorial governments of lands and resources within the Nunavut Settlement Area. The Nunavut Planning Commission is responsible for land-use monitoring (Article 11), the Nunavut Impact Review Board for environmental impact assessment (Article 12), the Nunavut Water Board for regulation of water use and management (Article 13), and the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board for management of wildlife and wildlife habitat (Article 5) within the Nunavut Settlement Area. These bodies are joint-management boards whose members are nominated by NTI, the Government of Canada and the Government of Nunavut. The Nunavut Surface Rights Tribunal, although not a co-management board,[36] is created pursuant to the Agreement (Article 21), with jurisdiction mainly with respect to disputes over access to lands and related matters, including compensation payable for access and consequent environmental harm.

Under the Agreement an Arbitration Board was established to resolve disputes that might arise under the NLCA, especially disputes among the Parties over the interpretation, application or implementation of the Agreement.

From the time the original claim was presented in 1976, the Inuit insisted that any comprehensive settlement of their land claim must include the establishment of a territorial government for Nunavut. The Inuit did not wish their claim to be subsumed within the then-existing Northwest Territories, which was demographically dominated by the more densely populated (and mainly non-Inuit) Western Arctic. Nor, however, did they seek an Aboriginal government: Nunavut was to be a public government, with full enfranchisement of Inuit and non-Inuit residents.

The Agreement contained, in Article 4, an undertaking by Canada to recommend legislation to Parliament to establish the Territory of Nunavut. In 1992 a plebiscite was held to confirm the boundary between the Northwest Territories and the new territory, and a Political Accord was developed pursuant to Article 4 outlining the types of powers, financing and scheduling involved in establishing the new territory. On April 1, 1999, Nunavut came into being as Canada's third and newest territory.

C. Nunavut Today

The population of Nunavut is today approaching 30,000, of whom 85 percent are Inuit. Even this figure, however, does not do justice to the dominance of the Inuit presence in the Territory: outside the larger centres of Iqaluit, Rankin Inlet and Cambridge Bay, the percentage of Inuit approaches 95 per cent. Approximately half the population of Nunavut resides in the Baffin region, with roughly 30 per cent in the Kivalliq (Keewatin) region and 20 per cent in the Kitikmeot region.

The Inuit, owing in part to their historical isolation and regional dominance, have retained their language to a degree that is quite exceptional among indigenous populations in North America, with fully 80 percent of Inuit in Nunavut reporting in the 2001 Census that they spoke Inuktitut. Thirty-five hundred Nunavut Inuit – 15 percent – are recorded in the same Census as speaking only Inuktitut.

Inuit communities are isolated from one another by lack of easy transportation but increasingly connected by telephone, satellite technology and the Internet. Only a handful of the communities have a population over 1,000, and the largest, Iqaluit, the capital, has a population of less than 7,000 residents.

Canadians are aware of the impact of European society on smaller Aboriginal societies. This is no less true of Nunavut.

For a great many Inuit the loss of a way of life, without securing a sure foothold in the new dispensation, can bring with it individual and collective desolation. Alcohol and other substance-abuse problems are prevalent in many communities; family cohesiveness has suffered; crime, violence and suicide affect every community. Although improved access to health care has greatly increased life expectancy in recent decades, Inuit life expectancy is still ten years below the national average.

Owing to the high cost of construction materials, housing is expensive (construction costs per square foot are roughly three times the Canadian average) and in short supply. Living quarters are cramped: while the average number of occupants in the average Canadian dwelling is 2.39, in Nunavut it is 3.27, and in some communities much higher still. According to Statistics Canada, 54 percent of Nunavut residents live in “crowded” conditions, compared to a Canadian average of 7 percent. Over half of Nunavut’s Inuit - 14,225 – live in public housing, with 1,000 families on the waiting list.

Even these figures do not do justice to the problem of overcrowding in Nunavut. As I have seen for myself , the cost of materials and the expense of heating dictates that houses in Nunavut are generally very small. Overcrowding of such small buildings, which for a substantial part of the year are closed virtually airtight to conserve heat, exacerbates the transmission of disease and contributes to persistent health problems such as Chronic Otitis Media (COM), a cause of hearing loss which afflicts one-third to one-half of Inuit children.

Universal education has been available to the Inuit for only the past 35 years. Opportunities for higher education have been sharply limited. Many young Inuit have nevertheless successfully completed high school, and some have gained a university degree or advanced professional qualification. But levels of educational achievement remain well below the national average; seventy-five percent of the Inuit labour force do not have a high school diploma. Even today, only one in four Inuit children entering the education system is expected to graduate from high school.

Economically, the Inuit face persistent challenges. Although the price of most goods is high owing to transportation costs to Northern communities, Nunavut’s per capita income is 27 percent lower than in the rest of the country. There is no agricultural or manufacturing base. There have been mines opened in the past but they are now closed.

Hunting, fishing and trapping, once the mainstay of the economy of the North and a principal source of employment, now provide full time support for a relative handful of Inuit. These traditional activities, however, remain central to Inuit culture and identity, and most Inuit families, even in the larger settlements, continue to hunt and fish, using both traditional and modern technologies. The production of Inuit art, sculpture and clothing is another cultural mainstay, with more than 2,000 families reportedly deriving some of their income from this source.[37]

Unemployment among the Inuit is very high, between 30 and 70 percent depending on the measure used and the community in question. As might be expected, unemployment is highest in the smaller and more isolated communities.

In 2005 Rodolfo Stavenhagen, the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people, reported to the United Nations Committee on Human Rights:

38. In Nunavut, the existing social housing units are among the oldest, smallest and most crowded in Canada. There is a severe housing shortage in Nunavut that adversely affects the health of Inuit, in particular of children, and it is estimated that 3,500 new units are needed over the next five years.

39. The overall health of Inuit continues to lag far behind that of other Canadians. Life expectancy is ten years lower than the rest of Canada. Many health indicators are getting worse. Arctic research shows that changes in traditional diets lead to increased health problems, particularly of mental health, characterized by increased rates of depression, seasonal affective disorder, anxiety and suicide. Inuit leaders are deeply concerned that the housing, education, health and suicide situation have reached crisis proportions and are not being addressed by the Federal Government.[38]

Footnotes:

• 25 I generally use “Inuktitut”, which means “like the Inuit”, to encompass not only Inuktitut but also Inuinnaqtun, a variant spoken in the Kitikmeot Region of Nunavut. (return to source paragraph)
• 26 P. Schledermann, “The Muskox Patrol: High Arctic Sovereignty Revisited” (March 2003) 56 Arctic 101. (return to source paragraph)
• 27 R. Quinn Duffy, The Road to Nunavut: The Progress of the Eastern Arctic Inuit Since the Second World War, (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1988) at pp. 7-10. (return to source paragraph)
• 28 [1939] S.C.R. 104. (return to source paragraph)
• 29 For an account of one such patrol, see Chris Nuttall-Smith, "Ice Warriors: Why Canada's puny force of Inuit rangers just might prevent the world's superpowers from controlling the Arctic", Toro, Oct. 2005 at pp. 44 to 52. (return to source paragraph)
• 30 It should be noted that recently there has been greatly increased interest in mining properties in Nunavut and, in particular, a proposal for a port for shipment of ore at Grays Bay, 175 kilometres East of Kugluktuk. (return to source paragraph)
• 31 R. Quinn Duffy, The Road to Nunavut: The Progress of the Eastern Arctic Inuit Since the Second World War, (Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1988). (return to source paragraph)
• 32 Marybelle Mitchell, From Talking Chiefs to a Native Corporate Elite: The Birth of Class and Nationalism among Canadian Inuit (Montréal: McGill Queen’s University Press, 1996). (return to source paragraph)
• 33 The James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, settling outstanding Inuit claims in the province of Quebec, was signed in 1975 by the Inuit of Nunavik, Canada and Quebec. At the same time, the Grand Council of the Cree signed a companion land claims agreement with Canada and Quebec. In 1984, the Inuvialuit signed the first comprehensive land claim settlement in the Northwest Territories with the Government of Canada. Most recently, the Inuit of Nunatsiavut (Labrador), along with Canada and Newfoundland & Labrador, finalized the Labrador Inuit Land Claim Agreement, which was signed on January 22, 2005, and came into force on December 1, 2005. (return to source paragraph)
• 34 Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated is a federal not-for-profit company. As successor to the Tungavik Federation of Nunavut, it has the responsibility of representing the Inuit as a Party to the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. Its mandate is to ensure that the rights of the Inuit of Nunavut, as derived from the Agreement and other sources, are respected. NTI also pursues a variety of policy and program initiatives aimed at improving the economic, social and cultural conditions of Inuit. NTI is a member of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, the national Inuit organization.
  NTI has a principal office in Iqaluit and other offices in Rankin Inlet, Cambridge Bay and Ottawa. The executive officers of NTI are elected directly by Inuit voters. Other members of its Board of Directors are made up of elected leaders of the three regional Inuit organizations in Nunavut, the Kitikmeot Inuit Association, the Kivalliq Inuit Association and the Qikiqtani Inuit Association. The three regional Inuit organizations carry out important implementation responsibilities under the Agreement and are also democratically constituted with accountability to Inuit communities and voters.
  Some of NTI's programs and initiatives since 1993 have included: the operation of a support program for hunters; income support for elders; scholarships; financial contributions to economic development agencies; the setting up the $50 million Atuqtuarvik corporation to provide Inuit with business loans and equity investments; assistance in the financing of new regional health facilities; the co-management, with regional Inuit organizations, of Inuit owned lands; and the legal defence of Inuit hunting rights in the application of federal firearms legislation. (return to source paragraph)
• 35 Jack Hicks and Graham White, “Nunavut: Inuit Self-Determination Through a Land Claim and Public Government?” in Dahl, Hicks and Jull, Eds., Nunavut: Inuit Regain Control of Their Lands and Their Lives (Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs, 2000) at p. 33. (return to source paragraph)
• 36 There is no requirement under the Nunavut Waters and Nunavut Surface Rights Tribunal Act S.C. 2002, c. 10 or the NLCA that each of the Parties be represented on the Tribunal, whose members are appointed by the Minister with the proviso that two members, and half the members of any panel dealing with a case involving Inuit Owned Lands, be residents of the Nunavut Settlement Area. (return to source paragraph)
• 37 In the single community of Cape Dorset, which is well known for its printmaking and sculpture, fully 22% of residents report participating in the arts and crafts industries. (return to source paragraph)
• 38 Report of the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people, Rodolfo Stavenhagen, on his mission to Canada (21 May to 4 June 2004) (New York: United Nations, 2005) E/CN.4/2005/88/Add.3 at paras. 38-9. (return to source paragraph)