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understanding of why, the Arctic today has become such an important topic in national and inter-
national politics.
While Dittmer‘ et al.‘s point is taken, in exploring the everyday world of Canadian media texts, I
suggest that the Arctic continues to be represented, on a daily basis, by a foundational geopolitical
context promoting nation-building through state-centred discourses. Moreover, if Stuhl (2013), is
correct in his assessment that a series of continuous stories position Arctic spaces in relation to
science, sovereignty and technology – and I believe that he is – one reason why the state remains so
clearly in focus is the constant interplay between these media discourses, more general perceptions
of the Arctic and the understanding of ‗state‘ as a singular actor. Indeed, as Penrose (2011) reminds
us more generally, the ‗idea‘ of state is constantly recycled by non-governmental agency and private
actors outside of the purview of state itself. It results from non-state agency‘s conscious selection of
familiar and readily identifiable national icons for the purposes of territorial representation, for an
imagined national audience. These iconic representations, in turn, brand the outcome through the
lens of the nation-building discourses they reference. This is not to diminish the importance of other
ways of understanding the North, outside of a state-centred perspective, nor is it mean to diminish
the power of other points of reference such as indigenous texts and documents. Instead, it is a point
made to assist us in understanding why non-state perspectives, like indigenous versions of Arctic
sovereignty, are not well-served through normative channels like forms of media which serve a
national audience.
Over the history of North American exploration and state-making, a series of geopolitical
perspectives on the North have contributed to the positioning of the Canadian Arctic within a
national narrative. These have been well described by a series of authors and in a series of Canadian
cultural and historical studies (Berland, 2009; Grant, 2010; Coates et al., 2008; Stuhl, 2013). They
also show how the Canadian Arctic was captured in different eras, through a series of colonial,
naturalized and ideological geopolitical discourses, from the Victorians through the extended organic
metaphors of organic state and evolutionary ‗science‘, to the ideological stand-off between
superpowers, during the Cold War. Such discourses lead to the privileging of ‗science‘ and the
mastery of nature, as well as the continuation of colonial representations of empire and then Cold
War ‗super-empire‘ (Stuhl, 2013; Grant 2010). By the mid-20
th
century, they had positioned the
Canadian Arctic in ways which reinforced its role as an economic and military frontier for both the
Canadian state and as well as for the international community more broadly (Coates et al., 2008;
Stuhl, 2013; Farish 2010). Today, in the early 21
st
century, however, neoliberal and globalizing
discourses which inform the world economy are resonating in the North, and are being met by both
neo-realist assessments of state sovereignty and security on one hand (see Borgerson, 2008 and
Dittmer et al., 2011 for discussion), and a resurgence of indigenous rights discourses on the other
(see Nicol, 2010). On the whole, however, such discourses are being presented in the media as
threats: threats to sovereignty, threats to security, threats to economic viability.
Indeed, while there are many different ways of positioning the Arctic (Dittmer et al., 2011),
according to most contemporary media accounts, as we shall see in this article, a ‗naturalized
popularized geopolitics‘ fixated on changing climate and environment and the impact of this change