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Arctic Yearbook 2013
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Inuit spokesman, Mark Gordon, suggested that to exercise sovereignty on the ground in
this Arctic of ours, there should be more reliance on the people who have actually lived
there for centuries, the Inuit. As he noted, they can live more easily in the cold than the
troops from the warm south, and whereas tanks can make only 21 kilometres a day over
ice and snow, Inuit dog teams could cover twice that distance, and are doing it now as the
small Canadian Rangers teams that scout the territory as best they can (Walker, 1985).
This new sensitivity to indigenous actors was really not so new, however, as Exner-Pirot (2013)
reminds us, its legacy is larger, related to changes occurring throughout the circumpolar North
during the era previous to the Rovaniemi process. It involved not only Inuit, but Sami and
Russia‘s indigenous peoples, and by the time of the internationalization of Northern discourses
reflected in the late 1980s, indigenous interests were embedded within the AEPS. While the
Canadian media reframed the issues in the context of national concerns, addressing cooperation,
indigenous participation and sovereignty as if it was freshly minted in the Canadian North, such
discourses were well-developed elsewhere (Exner-Pirot, 2013).
The 1990s: „Environment‟ Continues
Collective Narratives
The growing importance of environment as the
prima facia
scientific concern continued in the 1990s.
While earlier ‗mastery‘ of cold climates has driven Arctic explorers and expeditions, by the 1990s the
theme was clearly ‗stewardship‘. Table 1 suggests that in the late 1990s, the most important way in
which the Arctic was framed for southern audiences was in environmental terms: namely through
stories and articles focusing upon climate change and thinning ozone layers. Throughout the 1990s,
culminating in 1999, this focus on a ‗shifting environment‘ featured in stories referenced scientific
expeditions, state-funded scientific research, and to a limited degree, governmental responsibility for
remediation, and other state-centred narratives: the Canadian Government was chastised, for
example, for its underfunding of Arctic research. Weather, ocean currents and ice were the central
features of these science and environmental stories. Narratives of mastery and the heroics of
exploration were not nearly as prominent in real time stories, but were very much referenced by a
significant emphasis upon travel and history. For example, the media followed closely the travel
narratives of Pamela Coulston, whose missives were titled in ways which referenced heroic explorers
of the past. On July 25, 1999, for example, Coulston‘s contribution to the Gazette was entitled:
―Nature‘s mighty hand: We camp at the base of Mount Herodier, exhausted from hauling our gear
across the uneven ice. I think about travelers who have died here, and know we are at the mercy of
the land: [Final Edition]‖.
Along similar lines,
The Gazette
opened her article with an explanatory paragraph to the effect that:
―[w]riter Pamela Coulston and photographer Mike Beedell are circumnavigating Bylot Island on
foot, in kayaks and on skis. Their trip through this spectacular landscape is intended as a celebration
of the new territory of Nunavut and the soon-to-be-established Sirmilik National Park. Through
recording and sharing their experiences, they hope to bring a greater understanding of the Arctic to
people in Canada and abroad. Accounts of their adventure will be published each week in the
Magazine‖(1999: C3). Similarly, a rather large category of stories reflected upon the