Today I'm presenting another excerpt from our introduction. Here, we describe how chapters by Liza Piper, Tina Loo, Matthew Farish and Whitney Lackenbauer enhance our understanding of the history of northern Canada during the mid-twentieth century.
Transformations and the Modern North
The Second World War and the postwar era transformed relations between humans and northern nature. Wartime imperatives remade the north into a military zone defined by access and mobility, evident in airfields, the CANOL pipeline, and the Alaska Highway. During the Cold War, the north remained a strategic environment, now as a bulwark between the superpowers. By 1957 three radar systems, including the Distant Early Warning Line, had brought the region within the North American defence system. Canada also asserted its own view of the north as national territory through aerial photography, mapping, weather observations, and military exercises, and the northern environment defined the Canadian military�s vocation as the winter warfare specialist within the Western alliance. Science became a strategic necessity: Cold War requirements accelerated collection of climate and terrain data, and encouraged the study of human responses to the northern environment. The Arctic Institute of North America promoted and coordinated research on both strategic and scientific priorities.
Modernization and development soon joined strategic defence as northern imperatives. The Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, created in 1953, focused federal efforts, as new highways and other links, as well as an expanding mining economy, tightened the region�s links to global markets while degrading local environments. The Geological Survey, the Fisheries Research Board, and other agencies redefined the northern landscape in terms of the resources demanded by these markets. Strategic and economic initiatives typically bypassed Indigenous communities, perpetuating a view of the north as an unoccupied space to be transformed in response to priorities formed elsewhere. Nevertheless, these communities experienced profound environmental and social change. Low prices disrupted the fur trade economy, and reports of hardship, starvation, and disease captured national attention. For the federal government, intervention became an imperative: replacing hunting and trapping with integration within the Canadian state and economy. Social, educational, and health services were expanded, communities relocated or consolidated into larger settlements, wildlife became subject to management, and Indigenous peoples were encouraged to take up wage employment. These initiatives marginalized Indigenous interests, knowledge, and values, and provoked reaction: anger and frustration over hunting regulations, and assertions of resource rights. By the 1960s, this program of social and environmental engineering had begun to unravel. Three of our chapters provide insights into this period in northern history.
Amidst these transformations, the hunting and sharing of country foods remained central to Indigenous ways of life. So did uncertainty: wildlife migrations, and variations in climate and other aspects of the environment, led to hunger, particularly when accompanied by disease. As Liza Piper explains, food has also been essential to relations between Indigenous communities and newcomers. Depletion of musk ox, caribou, and walrus by explorers, whalers, trappers, and traders justified conservation initiatives that complicated and often criminalized food gathering. Motivated by belief in the inherent deficiency of a non-agricultural diet, the mid-century state engaged in �food colonialism.� Health initiatives guided by nutritional science, social programs (such as family allowances), and education encouraged northerners to adopt southern food ways: gardening rather than trapping, canned food in place of fresh meat, residential school cafeterias instead of family hunting trips. Piper�s account demonstrates how food links bodies to environments, and people to the politics of colonialism.
Tina Loo begins her chapter with a witness to starvation. In the early 1950s, reports of desperation, including Richard Harington�s photos of dying Inuit and Farley Mowat�s People of the Deer, provoked the Canadian government to take responsibility for northern social conditions. Its mandate expanded to include transformation of the north into a modern society, populated by citizens amenable to administration. Concepts of sustainable community development that had gained currency elsewhere linked northern economic priorities to issues of power and poverty, with expert knowledge applied to improving peoples� lives. Loo presents this history of northern development as a history of hope. Yet these efforts also fell short of their promise: defining development as a technical matter, they failed to challenge the political and economic forces and structures that defined northern existence.
The DEW Line was the most ambitious element of the postwar militarization of the north. It was an unprecedented exercise: both materially, with construction equipment and workers transported to sites across the region; and technically, as devices and practices perfected in southern laboratories were installed in the north. As Matt Farish and Whitney Lackenbauer explain, this fusion of science and security demanded a new form of expertise, embodied in the Western Electric engineers and technicians who conceived, assembled, and tested this complex system in an unfamiliar and challenging environment. Like dams and other projects, the DEW Line epitomized the ideology of high modernism, in which military and corporate forms of power are embodied in technology. But while this system reconfigured the north as part of continental defence, the region imposed its own requirements: getting southern technology to work in northern environments demanded improvisation and local knowledge.
The Second World War and the postwar era transformed relations between humans and northern nature. Wartime imperatives remade the north into a military zone defined by access and mobility, evident in airfields, the CANOL pipeline, and the Alaska Highway. During the Cold War, the north remained a strategic environment, now as a bulwark between the superpowers. By 1957 three radar systems, including the Distant Early Warning Line, had brought the region within the North American defence system. Canada also asserted its own view of the north as national territory through aerial photography, mapping, weather observations, and military exercises, and the northern environment defined the Canadian military�s vocation as the winter warfare specialist within the Western alliance. Science became a strategic necessity: Cold War requirements accelerated collection of climate and terrain data, and encouraged the study of human responses to the northern environment. The Arctic Institute of North America promoted and coordinated research on both strategic and scientific priorities.
Modernization and development soon joined strategic defence as northern imperatives. The Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, created in 1953, focused federal efforts, as new highways and other links, as well as an expanding mining economy, tightened the region�s links to global markets while degrading local environments. The Geological Survey, the Fisheries Research Board, and other agencies redefined the northern landscape in terms of the resources demanded by these markets. Strategic and economic initiatives typically bypassed Indigenous communities, perpetuating a view of the north as an unoccupied space to be transformed in response to priorities formed elsewhere. Nevertheless, these communities experienced profound environmental and social change. Low prices disrupted the fur trade economy, and reports of hardship, starvation, and disease captured national attention. For the federal government, intervention became an imperative: replacing hunting and trapping with integration within the Canadian state and economy. Social, educational, and health services were expanded, communities relocated or consolidated into larger settlements, wildlife became subject to management, and Indigenous peoples were encouraged to take up wage employment. These initiatives marginalized Indigenous interests, knowledge, and values, and provoked reaction: anger and frustration over hunting regulations, and assertions of resource rights. By the 1960s, this program of social and environmental engineering had begun to unravel. Three of our chapters provide insights into this period in northern history.
Amidst these transformations, the hunting and sharing of country foods remained central to Indigenous ways of life. So did uncertainty: wildlife migrations, and variations in climate and other aspects of the environment, led to hunger, particularly when accompanied by disease. As Liza Piper explains, food has also been essential to relations between Indigenous communities and newcomers. Depletion of musk ox, caribou, and walrus by explorers, whalers, trappers, and traders justified conservation initiatives that complicated and often criminalized food gathering. Motivated by belief in the inherent deficiency of a non-agricultural diet, the mid-century state engaged in �food colonialism.� Health initiatives guided by nutritional science, social programs (such as family allowances), and education encouraged northerners to adopt southern food ways: gardening rather than trapping, canned food in place of fresh meat, residential school cafeterias instead of family hunting trips. Piper�s account demonstrates how food links bodies to environments, and people to the politics of colonialism.
Tina Loo begins her chapter with a witness to starvation. In the early 1950s, reports of desperation, including Richard Harington�s photos of dying Inuit and Farley Mowat�s People of the Deer, provoked the Canadian government to take responsibility for northern social conditions. Its mandate expanded to include transformation of the north into a modern society, populated by citizens amenable to administration. Concepts of sustainable community development that had gained currency elsewhere linked northern economic priorities to issues of power and poverty, with expert knowledge applied to improving peoples� lives. Loo presents this history of northern development as a history of hope. Yet these efforts also fell short of their promise: defining development as a technical matter, they failed to challenge the political and economic forces and structures that defined northern existence.
The DEW Line was the most ambitious element of the postwar militarization of the north. It was an unprecedented exercise: both materially, with construction equipment and workers transported to sites across the region; and technically, as devices and practices perfected in southern laboratories were installed in the north. As Matt Farish and Whitney Lackenbauer explain, this fusion of science and security demanded a new form of expertise, embodied in the Western Electric engineers and technicians who conceived, assembled, and tested this complex system in an unfamiliar and challenging environment. Like dams and other projects, the DEW Line epitomized the ideology of high modernism, in which military and corporate forms of power are embodied in technology. But while this system reconfigured the north as part of continental defence, the region imposed its own requirements: getting southern technology to work in northern environments demanded improvisation and local knowledge.
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