The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement provides a good example of a modern-day treaty, and illustrates both the lofty principles that underlie the notion of a nation-to-nation treaty between Canada and its first peoples, and the disappointing aftermath.

It’s instructive in another way. Many uninformed Canadians insist that claims and treaties are “old obligations”, historical relics. Not so. The largest land claim in Canadian history was signed (by a Conservative Prime Minister) just fifteen years ago.

For nearly a century Inuit were never subject to any of the Acts that made the Federal government ““responsible” for the welfare of other native peoples. The Canadian Government ignored Inuit, Inuit ignored the government, and everyone got along very well. This happy state of affairs lasted until 1939, when a court ruling declared that Inuit were indeed a federal responsibility, and Inuit were to be “wards of the State”. The government began to encourage Inuit to move off the land into settlements, usually organized around an existing mission or Hudson’s Bay Company store. But most Inuit remained in their camps until the sixties, when the government began building heated houses and providing schooling and health care in communities.

That move into settlements forty years ago may have had a deeper impact on Inuit than any other event in their eight-thousand year history. Within one generation society was turned upside down. The authority of traditional leaders was undermined by government administrators, with the power to reward and punish, oversee trade, health care, law enforcement and education. Children were sent to school. With the boom in development, resource extraction, new military interest, and the expansion of communications systems north, Inuit began to find themselves sharing their land with newcomers with considerable incomes, education, technology and power.

Inuit suddenly become subjects of Her Majesty, wards of a government whose policies, for a time, explicitly included their assimilation, surrounded by foreign languages and immersed in foreign media. They were urged to abandon their traditional economy - the basis of their culture - and expected to participate in the wage economy.

There were some benefits. Starvation and infant mortality had been an accepted part of Inuit life for most of their history, and that was largely eliminated. Access to health care is better. And despite its serious flaws and the human and cultural damage it caused, the education of Inuit children in the southern system had one important and positive result. It produced a generation of Inuit fluent in English, who understood southern culture, and who quickly became quite adept at the practice of southern-style politics.

That generation of educated young Inuit saw the increasing transfer of political power from Ottawa to Yellowknife during the sixties. Decisions on education, on language programs, on cultural policy, on employment plans - in other words, all the decisions that would affect the Inuit majority in their homeland - were being made by non-Inuit bureaucrats in Yellowknife. They saw that Southern Canada was becoming very interested in the oil, gas and mineral resources of the Arctic.

And they understood the notion of Aboriginal title.

It was this generation of bilingual, politicized and educated young Inuit that launched the movement to negotiate a Land Claims Agreement.

Next installment: what Inuit won, what they surrendered, and the Great Federal Bait And Switch.

Tech Tags:
Recommend this Post at Progressive Bloggers

Check the forum for related posts