Northern Environmental History Workshop 2009 Presentations

This paper explores attitudes and opinions on military activity in the Arctic among the indigenous inhabitants of Barter Island, Alaska. The recent history of the native village of Kaktovik has been largely directed by the island's military presence: the Air Force built an airstrip on the village site in 1947 and a main DEW Line radar site was constructed on the island in the 1950s. Despite the likelihood that modern Kaktovik would not exist had the military not arrived, residents do not feel culturally affected by the military and are increasingly skeptical about the broader issue of arctic militarization.

This paper interrogates changing environmental perception and the materiality of “unbuilt environments” in the wake of two failed massive infrastructure projects in Northwest British Columbia. The first section examines the failed attempts to build the Yukon-Canadian Railway through the Stikine plateau during the Klondike gold rush. The second section analyses B.C. Hydro’s abandoned attempts to build a series of five dams on the Stikine and Iskut Rivers in the 1970s and 1980s. The paper draws on both examples to interrogate the paraphernalia of these failed infrastructure projects – the reports and surveys, debates, embellishments and expertise – and to suggest ways in which even the failure of these ‘unbuilt environments’ had tangible, material effects on human/nature relationships in Northwest B.C.

I am currently working on my dissertation, about encounters between Inuit and Americans in each others' homelands in the nineteenth century. My work would fit into any of the following categories (among other things): Aboriginal histories, oral history and its ethical/methodological implications, fusing northern/environmental history, connections to place, and ideas about arctic environments.

In the early 1970s federal and territorial governments made plans to erect heritage plaques commemorating Samuel Hearne’s journey to the Coppermine River in 1771, a journey that marked the ‘discovery’ of the Coppermine River and the Inuit who inhabited the region by European explorers. The journey also allegedly included the massacre of a group of Inuit by Hearne’s Chipewyan guides at a place along the river known as ‘Bloody Falls’, approximately 10 km from present-day Kugluktuk, Nunavut. The plaques were to be erected in the town of Coppermine, NWT (now Kugluktuk), a primarily Inuit settlement located at the mouth of the Coppermine River, and also at Bloody Falls. This paper considers the responses of the residents of Coppermine/Kugluktuk to the proposed plaques and the ways in which these responses were shaped by an emerging political culture among Inuit in Canada. It considers how Inuit objections to the plaques were articulated with broader northern Indigenous political movements and how these cultures and movements were themselves shaped by the intensification of governmental power and economic ‘development’ in the post-war NWT. The paper problematizes the identification and study of Indigenous ‘resistance’ in postcolonial scholarship through close attention to the details of a year-long dispute between Inuit political leaders, federal and territorial government officials, and other organizations and individuals.

This presentation focuses on the shifting meaning of "isolation" over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries in Northern Labrador, and how an understanding of various states of isolation enframed Missionary, trader, and, later, government relations with the Northern environment and its people, Inuit. Before the arrival of Moravian Missionaries in the 1770s, bands of Thule Inuit distributed themselves along the length of the Atlantic-Arctic coast and clearly had their own thoughts about engagement with others, including migrant Europeans and their new trade goods and technologies. For the Christian brethren, isolation was a desirable physical and spiritual state to be promoted for evangelical reasons, both to deepen the conversation between the faithful and God, and to insulate native converts from sinful influences. Isolation from non-believing kin and, conversely, the proximity of God were important considerations for Inuit during the mass conversion to Christianity at the beginning of the 19th century. Inuit developed numerous strategies for resisting and reordering the Moravian theocracy that emerged out of the Brethren's meditations on isolation. However, it was the gradual encroachment of other, secular European influences that eventually began to fragment the insulated Inuit-Moravian world in the later half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The post-World War II years inaugurated a pivotal epoch in Northern history by introducing technologies of transportation and communication that produced a new version of "isolation"--whose ultimate end was to demand the concentration of scattered populations into centralized locations. Because all technologies continue to enframe and produce knowledge about the world in basically the same way today, understanding this era in Northern history remains of ongoing interest. Indeed, policy and public discourse in Canada continues to ponder the fate of "isolated" Northern communities.

I will present some ideas relating to understanding the political and environmental history of science in northern Canada since the 1940s. These ideas are tentative, representing one possible way of thinking about the history of northern science, and I will be eager for advice on how to work with them. Several themes that seem relevant to this history will be mentioned, including the intersection of scientific knowledge and cultural and political views of the north; and also the political history of northern science, particularly in terms of the way that shifting political priorities have been expressed through institutions for science. I will spend the most time surveying implications and questions that flow from viewing northern science in terms of concepts of situated science, with a focus on its material practice, using various examples from the history of the science over the last 60 years. Some of these questions include: how and why scientists (most based in the south) have defined the north as scientifically interesting; how features of the northern environment itself have influenced scientific work; how scientists have placed themselves: as "northern" scientists, or as representatives of disciplines that are mainly defined by scientific communities based in the south; how knowledge has moved in and out of the north; and how the authority of this knowledge has been asserted.