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potential for large scale environmental destruction and unalterable change to indigenous lifestyles in
the north, counterpoising the politics of environment, in this region against the politics of resource
extraction industries. In this way, the perception of the Canadian North as a resource frontier pitted
environmental protection against economic development provided an entry from which indigenous
perspectives could be inserted into a southern Canadian worldview which otherwise saw little but an
empty, resource rich, northern space. Indeed, for Stuhl (2013), the 1970s stories were quite
contradictory, but the hegemony of ‗economy discourses‘ reflected the hegemony of a state-centred
perspective. It is this understanding of a state-centred, although unstable assemblage of Arctic
discourses, which the media seemed also to reflect.
[E]cologist Cowan McTaggart described the human ‗appetite for energy and minerals‘ as
unleashing untold ecological and human consequences across the world, and potentially
throughout the north. Scientists pointed to these concerns to advocate for the expansion
of wilderness areas on the Beaufort Sea coast – namely to grow the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge (legislated into being in 1960) into an internationally protected area to
prevent the most-likely route for pipelines out of the region...Jean Chretien redressed
ecological protection as colonialism, because locking up the north as a sanctuary would
squash Inuit aspirations for jobs and leading roles in oil extraction. Development had
become both imperialism and decolonization, and conservation had become the tried and
true trope of ‗neglect and indifference‘ (Stuhl, 2013: 110-111).
Nation-Building and the National Glue
As Stuhl (2013) reminds us in his analysis of the ‗new North‘ rhetoric of the 20th century, there was
a considerable degree of ‗déjà vu‘ in the Arctic media discourses constructed in the 1970s. Indeed, in
ways very similar to the Victorian era, in the 20
th
and even today, this 1970s era saw the Arctic as a
key piece in the building of nationhood in ways which are concerned less with acquiring territory,
and more with the symbolic importance of that territory for larger nation-building agendas. This
nation-building discourse was not lost on southern Quebeckers. Their provincial government, much
like other southern Canadian governments, moved north in the 1970s. For Québec it was to the
James Bay and Northern Québec, to claim resources and control over a vast hinterland which was
crucial to Québec‘s own sovereignty agenda. The outcome, the Northern Québec and James Bay
Agreement (NQJBA), was mixed. Despite its disastrous environmental and socio-economic legacy
for indigenous peoples, the massive industrial complex energy it spawned was, at the time, seen as
iconic by non-indigenous Canadians, reflecting the potential of the North to produce unlimited
resources, once its indigenous claims had been settled.
It was not just the state, state actors, large corporations with political clout, or state agencies that
constructed state-oriented Arctic discourses. ―Can the North be the glue that holds Canada
together‖, a younger Franklyn Griffiths mused in the Globe and Mail in 1979, asking if the imagery
of the North and its potential for nation-building could overcome the divisions imposed by a French
and English Canada? (Griffiths, 1979: P7). Such narratives built upon the idea of North, or the
mythical North (Grace, 2001), much in the same way that Victorians, for example, saw the
exploration of these icy climes as a metaphorical testing ground for both manhood and national