Ice Blink: Indigenous Peoples and Northern Environmental History

Here we are on the Friday of an awful week in politics, and scholarship continues...

In previous posts (here, here, and here) I introduced the chapters in Ice Blink: Navigating Northern Environmental History, soon to be published by the University of Calgary Press. Last week, I began a series of posts (here's the first one) that present some key themes that our authors considered as they discussed the environmental history of northern Canada. Today, we're examining a second theme: Indigenous dimensions of northern environmental history.

Our presentation below is organized into two parts. First, we present an excerpt from the Introduction, which outlines one perspective on Indigenous peoples and northern environmental history.  Then, we present an excerpt from the Conclusion, where we outline how selected chapters in Ice Blink have contributed new insights to this perspective.

The Indigenous North

Northern Canada is an Indigenous landscape. Historians have described the relations between Indigenous ways of life and the northern environment: how people travelled, hunted, shared food, organized their communities, and formed knowledge about the world. Much of this study has been framed in the context of colonization: treaties, resource exploitation, expansion of education, health, and social services, community relocation and other aspects of the extension of southern authority into the north. Colonization has taken a distinctive form in the north compared to elsewhere in North America. Throughout this history, Indigenous people and newcomers have formed relations mediated by or with consequences for nature. Early in the twentieth century, explorers like Peary relied on Indigenous technology and survival strategies. Fur traders formed economic relations with Inuit trappers, tying their well-being to factors beyond their control, including fluctuations in fox populations and foreign demands for furs.

Official views on Indigenous people evolved over the decades: from encouraging traditional subsistence activities, to, by the 1950s, more firmly interventionist policies, motivated by the ambitions of an activist state, a declining fur trade, signs of destitution, and a tendency to view Indigenous people as wasteful and irrational. Wildlife conservation reworked hunting, food sharing, and other aspects of community life. Relocation, whether motivated by insecurities about sovereignty, conservation concerns, or the desire to avoid welfare dependency, disrupted relations with the environment. So did residential schools and resettlement of Inuit from camps to larger communities, illustrating how colonization merged environmental and social change.

However, Indigenous people have not been passive recipients of colonization, but active participants in shaping the north and their place within it. Land claims and treaty negotiations, devolution of authority to territorial governments, legal decisions, co-management arrangements, and the planning of national parks and reserves have provided the basis for asserting authority over environmental relations, including hunting, fishing, and the regulation of development. To assert their claims, Aboriginal groups have had to demonstrate their indigeneity in particular places. In the 1970s, the Inuit Land Use and Occupancy Project showed how their hunting and travel experience could be translated into cartography, and Thomas Berger�s Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry assembled testimony regarding the experience and meaning of landscapes. Energy projects have prompted changes in northern governance to be more consistent with Indigenous ways of life. For example, the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement was intended to ensure that Cree culture would continue, even while opening the region to hydroelectric development. This has also encompassed a reconsideration of the environmental impacts of development: not in terms of an imagined, pristine nature, but in relation to how people use and understand the environment, and equitable ownership and access to benefits. This acknowledges that country foods�caribou, seals, walrus, fish�remain essential in many northern communities, reinforcing the relevance of Indigenous knowledge and ways of life.

Indigenous people have also had to work out relations with interests beyond their control, including industry, governments, and scientists. Their implications have been evident in, for example, land claims, co-management agreements, and other aspects of the long-term process of transferring political power to Aboriginal people. But while ensuring that hunting and other traditional activities can continue, these have also been reframed in terms of science, property, and bureaucracy, potentially undermining the ways of life they were intended to preserve. Indigenous knowledge still often carries less weight within management systems accustomed to quantitative models, particularly when their combination is seen as merely a technical task, neglecting the power relations that accompany knowledge.  Animal rights activism has undermined the sealskin and fur trades, fuelling distrust between Inuit communities and environmental groups. Other tensions have arisen regarding polar bears and claims regarding their status as an endangered species. Indigenous people have also asserted their interests internationally, including, as already noted, their opposition to the Great Whale Project; more recently, they have used circumpolar institutions to express their views regarding contaminants, climate change, and sustainable development.

And from Ice Blink's conclusion�

Several chapters in this volume considered the evolution of Indigenous peoples� relations with nature, particularly in the context of environmental change, resource development, and the initiatives of governments and other actors. Liza Piper considers the changing sources and meanings of food. Hans Carlson explores, with the Quebec Cree, their landscape after the James Bay hydro project. Paul Nadasdy examines peoples� relations with wildlife and one another in the Yukon territory. Arn Keeling and John Sandlos examine the consequences of mining developments for Indigenous health and livelihoods, explaining how remediation and redevelopment is forcing communities to revisit these difficult histories. Matt Farish and Whitney Lackenbauer note the implications of the DEW Line for Indigenous ways of life. Other chapters consider these relations in terms of reindeer herding, prospecting, or contaminants.

Throughout this history, people from elsewhere have perceived the relations between Indigenous people and nature in various ways. In the 1920s, prospectors and others believed that through contact with outsiders Indigenous people had lost much of their knowledge of the land. As Tina Adcock explains, this was for some a matter of regret because of nostalgia or because of concerns regarding traditional diets. Others considered this merely the inevitable consequence of assimilation and modernization, made necessary by the uncertain fur economy, shifting caribou migration routes, incidents of scarcity and starvation, and the conclusion that the northern environment remained beyond control, implying the need for an agriculture-based diet. This perspective had a variety of consequences. For a time, reindeer herding was seen as a path toward a more secure northern food economy�and an occupation for which, as Andrew Stuhl explains, Inuit were thought to be particularly suited. But as Piper notes, food also became central to more ambitious interventions, including relocation, economic development, and wildlife management, all consistent with the shift from traditional foods to food from the south that was being encouraged by Family Allowances, nutrition surveys, relief rations, and education. In addition, new settlements were often situated in places that responded to southern priorities (like access to natural resources or transport routes), but that were distant from local food supplies.

Interventions had other implications for Indigenous environmental relations. Indigenous people were often kept at a distance from state and industry initiatives, including resource development, aviation, and military projects. But other interventions focused directly on Indigenous communities. As Tina Loo describes, sustainable development meant encouraging more cohesive Inuit communities, in part through communication projects and applied anthropology, and efforts to enable Inuit to continue living on the land even while joining the wage economy. And as Nadasdy explains, the division of Indigenous people in the Yukon into bands and the imposition of property and territorial regimes has devalued non-territorial forms of organization, encouraging bureaucratization of their relations with animals and each other. The results of these interventions could often be ambiguous. Yukon co-management arrangements are the product of resistance to colonization, but are also rooted in colonial administration and state-based practices of territorial governance. And while the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement maintains a Cree presence on and understanding of the land, it also established a new language of environment, embodying Western ideas regarding the division between nature and culture. This accommodation reflects, as Carlson notes, how development co-exists with traditional ideas of the bush, sometimes producing compromises, like the 2002 �Paix des Braves� agreement, which reflect the challenges involved in navigating this complex landscape.

However, while describing these interventions, our authors have, as have other historians, portrayed Indigenous people as active agents in northern environmental history, acting on the basis of their knowledge and values, even amidst the colonizing agenda of political, military and economic actors. Resisting wildlife regulations, insisting on changes to government relief and rations, influencing research activities, negotiating land claims, and asserting their views regarding contaminants and climate�through these and other means, they have sought to redefine their relations with government, science, and nature.