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allowing Canada to plug the Davis Strait hole in the GIUK gap [Greenland, Iceland and the British
Isles] (ibid).
Although Soviet submarines still commanded attention, and this was a period where fascination with
Cold War topics were popular in cultural representations; it was the potential for energy resources,
liquid natural gas and oil that riveted the media‘s attention in the Arctic. Despite the fact that the
Cold War was well underway, less than one per cent of newspaper articles in the 1970s combined
references to the Arctic with military themes. Instead, these media texts were more commonly
associated within two discursive categories: economy and environment.
A Colonial Economy
As we have already seen, by the late 1970s, the Arctic was more generally framed by the media
(through a series of texts, articles and images) as an economic frontier. But it was a frontier
increasingly linked to the south, in ways which played to a burgeoning Canadian sense of national
pride, a public history focused on ‗staples‘, and a state-cultivated lust for natural resources. The
exploits of Dome Petroleum, in mastering the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean, for example, were late
20
th
century narratives that rivalled those of heroic Victorian explorers. For example, in framing the
report of the deployment of the
Kigoriak,
in September 1979, for Dome Petroleum, French again
wrote, and more enthusiastically than ever:
Canadian Marine Drilling Ltd., the shipping arm of Calgary based Dome Petroleum Ltd., is
out to set a new record for the length of time spent by an icebreaker in the Beaufort Sea
this winter. The ship that will attempt to ride the Arctic onslaught is the, Kigoriak, a new
addition to the Canmar fleet with an ice-handling rating of Arctic Class IV; second in
power only to the Canadian Coast Guard's Louis St. Laurent. With the shipyard paint still
fresh on her sides, the vessel left Halifax a week ago on her way north (French, 1979: B10).
Like French‘s reportage, many of the other contemporaneous articles which framed the North for
southerners in the 1970s did so with reference to the point of view of ‗singular‘ state interests. To
some extent this was because between the 1950s and late 1970s, northern economic development
boomed, but was heavily reliant upon the state (Bone, 2009). Any number of mineral and energy
developments, like the Pine Point in the Northwest Territories, the Faro mine in the Yukon, or
Normal Wells were funded or subsidized with federal funds, although most of this development was
focused upon sub-Arctic rather than Arctic regions. But it was also a highly ‗colonial‘ discourse.
Indeed, if we further interrogate these data, we find that within the category of economic
development, newspaper stories were mostly still concerned with oil and liquid natural gas, and were
preoccupied with the news of development on these fronts. Positioning the Arctic more
prominently in relation to southern Canada, it countered a discourse which otherwise positioned
Inuit as minor actors and ―others‖. Indeed, a negligible number (only about 2.5 per cent) of articles
on the Arctic were concerned with the indigenous peoples who actually lived in the region.
Moreover, few of these articles recognized the existence of two worlds in the North. Inuit societies
were generally described as under threat and malingering, desperately in need of jobs and economic
development. This discourse opened the doors to large-scale corporate interests, but also to a