Last week in this space I introduced Ice Blink: Navigating Northern Environmental History, the new book on northern environmental history that I co-edited with Brad Martin, to be published later this year by University of Calgary Press.
Today I'm presenting an excerpt from our introduction that describes how chapters by Jonathan Peyton, Andrew Stuhl, Tina Adcock, and Marionne Cronin enhance our understanding of the history of northern Canada during the first decades of the twentieth century.
Forming Northern Colonial Environments
Even while drawing on universalizing discourses of imperialism and progress, colonization nevertheless took a distinctive form in the north, which became evident in human-environment relations. In the western Arctic, commercial harvesting depleted bowhead whale populations, as well as caribou, polar bears, and musk oxen. In the east, whalers, traders, and missionaries brought new technology, while the fur trade and the Hudson�s Bay Company reshaped Inuit environmental and economic relations. Novel biota from the south included disease, with often devastating impacts on communities. With agricultural expansion encountering the limits imposed by soil, climate, and distance, other ways of colonizing northern environments became more prominent. Visions of a domesticated north focused on caribou and musk oxen. A royal commission examined the potential, and in 1922 Wood Buffalo National Park was established, providing space for experiments in transferring and managing bison. Conservation became an instrument of sovereign authority, exercised in a dispute with Denmark involving musk ox hunting on Ellesmere Island. Game reserves, the Northwest Game Act of 1917 and 1929, and the Migratory Birds Convention Treaty infringed on Indigenous hunting activities. Ideas from elsewhere guided these initiatives: ecological theory, sport hunting narratives, and the notion of Indigenous people as irrationally wasteful. The government also initiated a series of scientific surveys.
Economic interests took much of the initiative in reshaping relations between people and the northern environment. In 1920, the discovery of oil at Fort Norman revived interest in northern minerals, two decades after the Klondike Gold Rush. Airplanes promised speed and access (displacing dog teams, canoes, and feet), and a new view of and control over the landscape. Industry sponsored surveys, the federal government provided maps and aerial photos, and discoveries followed: silver and pitchblende east of Great Bear Lake in 1932, and the following year, gold north of Great Slave Lake. Northern colonization gained a distinctive form: scattered sites of exploitation, lasting only as long as the market required. Industrialization (although constrained by geography and ecology) remade northern environments and communities, while drawing the region into global economic networks: exporting commodities, importing capital, machinery, and expertise.
Four of our authors examine this era in northern environmental history. Jonathan Peytonpresents a novel perspective on the Klondike, from the point of view of aspiring capitalists and miners in the Stikine region of northern British Columbia. Competing interests proposed railroads to the gold fields, and governments granted concessions, imagining an all-Canadian route. But these plans failed, as did those of most travellers. Yet these schemes�too readily dismissed as irrelevant�had historical significance. Surveys and practical experience eventually catalyzed new ways of linking the Stikine to the world. These failed railroads therefore had consequences, influencing perceptions of the region and its future.
As Andrew Stuhlexplains, domesticating northern wildlife implied not only a new view of northern landscapes but a novel interest in scientific advice. In 1926, Robert and Alf Erling Porsild arrived from Denmark to begin the Canadian Reindeer Project. They travelled to Alaska to learn about its reindeer industry, and then surveyed the north to identify a suitable range. Their project itself became an experiment in both applied botany and a new role for the state: managing the relations between northerners and their landscape. National policy was now expressed through an animal peculiarly suited to both the environment and the state�s priorities. Their work illustrates how science could become the basis not only for surveying but manipulating resources, a task rendered feasible by reducing the landscape to just a few variables. Yet this conjunction of biology and policy would quickly pass, as changing northern state and scientific priorities rendered the reindeer project a relic of an earlier era.
Tina Adcockexamines another aspect of the sense of change that overtook the north during the interwar era. Guy Blanchet and George Douglas�two seasoned northern travellers�worked as prospectors and geological surveyors, helping to build the new resource economy. Yet they regretted the passing of another north: remote from the modern world, where hard travel on land and water could preserve one�s vital spirit. Their thoughts and experiences illustrate the complexity of responses to technological and environmental change: while many welcomed faster and easier travel and new economic opportunities, this also provoked disquiet, doubt, and a sense of loss.
Even as airplanes became essential to northern travel and transformation, aviators and their machines had to adapt to environmental realities. Marionne Cronin examines how pilots and other employees of Canadian Airways translated experience in the northern environment into technological change. Her view of northern aviation focuses on the technology itself, as material articulations of values, ideas, and power. Northern geography, including rivers and lakes, determined flying routes and landing sites, and weather and other challenges required airplanes to be modified if they were to work properly. The north did not simply receive, but actively reshaped technology from elsewhere.
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