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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Natural News, State Discourses & The Canadian Arctic
renewed debate about the relationship between identity, sovereignty, resources and, indeed,
territorial and military security. The ‗frontier/homeland‘ dichotomy, which was to become reflected
in the moniker for Chief Justice Berger‘s (1977) report on the Mackenzie Valley pipeline inquiry,
clearly reacted to this problem, but it was a problem mainly pitched in environmental terms outside
of media circles. Indeed, the concept of ‗frontier and homeland‘ had more traction from a state-
centred, southern Canada environmental perspective than from a post-colonial perspective.
Environment
While the media focused almost exclusively on oil and liquid natural gas bonanzas to be had in the
Canadian Arctic,
The Nature of Things
, a CBC environmental programme, devoted an entire
programme to raising the alarm about the impacts of oil spills on fragile Arctic environments in
1979, a programme reported on in the Globe and Mail, under the headline: ―CBC stacks oil deck
against oil industry‖ (
Globe and Mail
, 1979: P16). While not entirely subscribing to the environmental
alarm raised, the reporter had the wits to know that this
was
news. Moreover, in context of the
positioning of indigenous versus environmental homeland, the CBC reporter found it surprising that
the program said nothing about the impact of such a disaster on indigenous communities in the
Arctic.
Throughout 1979, a series of stories about the destructive potential impacts of oil exploitation in the
Arctic were released, some, for example, commenting upon the difficulty of capping oil spills in the
event of an accident in offshore drilling as if it were merely an inconvenience. None worried about
indigenous communities. For example, the Globe and Mail reported in 1979, that:
For offshore drilling operations in the Beaufort Sea and the Eastern Arctic, the major
stumbling blocks are ice and a short drilling season. The latter, because of the ice, would
make drilling a relief well in the event of a blowout virtually impossible for almost a year.
This would mean a runaway well would gush uninterrupted under thick layers of ice until
work crews could get into the area at the start of the next drilling season (Malarek, 1979:
P19).
Environmental worries in the press were few and far between: stories of potential disaster was less
well covered than those which promised oil rigs and platforms. Much like the Cold War era,
environment and nature were non-human agents to master and overcome. Indeed, of all the
newspaper stories accessed through the Canadian Newsstand data base between 1970 and 1979, only
about 7 per cent discussed environmental issues at all, compared to nearly 10 times that number
which referenced the Arctic from an economic resource perspective. Indeed, it was in this context
that Berger (1977) coined the phrase ‗homeland/frontier‘ as his way of positioning local versus
corporate and state interests in the North.
But this was not the entire story, of course. Outside of the press, a volley of reports, stories and
more widely circulated texts by a number of scholars and practitioners resulted, beginning with
Thomas Berger‘s report on the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline in the 1970s (Berger, 1977). Such reports
and approaches identify the special nature of Canada‘s Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, the issues and
challenges to its human populations, and the potential threat of large resource-oriented extraction
projects like the proposed Mackenzie Valley pipeline. These early assessments rightly identified the