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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Natural News, State Discourses & The Canadian Arctic
accomplishments of Arctic explorers, and books or exhibits regularly reinterpreted their
accomplishments‖ (Coulston, 1999).
Culture and Metaphor
Combined with this focus upon Arctic legacy was a rather well-developed sense of the Arctic as a
cultural context. This was the era of the Nunavut negotiations, and a time of change for both Inuit
and non-native alike. Art, books, film and theatre referenced the Arctic – the Inuit as well as
European Arctic that is – while the media focused upon history, Inuit life and those non-natives
who had ‗pioneered‘ in the Arctic, through their involvement in exploration, education and health
initiatives, for example. What was still evident, however, was the way in which such cultural images,
referenced rather colonial views ‗from the south‘, and reasserted the ‗Canadian context‘ of the
North. Moreover, and this I think is rather significant, there were a large number of articles in which
the term ‗Arctic‘ was used frequently as an adjective to refer to cold climates, air masses, snow
storms, products and colours, or remote conditions existing outside of the north, as part of a
normative practice of abstractly capturing and embedding the North in the south by metaphor.
Moreover, what was almost entirely absent from media accounts was a sense of the Arctic as a
geopolitical context, quite a striking observation when comparing these to media texts a decade later
where fully two thirds of articles referenced security, military and geopolitical competition.
Human Security and Arctic Peoples
Where was the state? Relatively absent in public discussions in the late 1990s? Or present in new
form? Towards the end of 1999, media texts discuss the establishment of Nunavut, positioning it as
a monumental political accomplishment in governance as well as for indigenous societies. The
positioning of Inuit as Canadian citizens, or as actors centrally implicated within the framing of
Canadian identity and geography was limited, however, to consideration of Inuit within Nunavut,
rather than a more general consideration of Aboriginal self-governance. This was a period when
through international forums like the Arctic Environmental Programme (AEP) the Canadian state
was involved in an international reframing of the Arctic in ways which stressed human security and
multilateralism (Heininen & Nicol, 2007, Williams, 2004). The Arctic was crucial to this exercise, and
with the development of both an international environmental security agenda and a domestic
Northern Dimension of Foreign Policy, policy-makers attempted to reposition the Canadian Arctic
within a broader human security context. Still, while environmental cooperation was the leitmotif for
the process, and the role of indigenous peoples emphasized as integral to this agenda, for the media
the North remained a significant source for historical narratives; informed reading on exotic
indigenous cultures; and fed a contested field of scientific inquiry. Stories concerning the
international North, geopolitics or even the Arctic Council were lacking. Only a few dozen articles
appeared in the press concerning the Arctic Council, for example, despite its 1996 description by
Circumpolar Ambassador Mary Simon, as ―a breakthrough‖ in the Arctic (Barthos, 1996). Still,
curiosity pieces found their way to print: for example the story of the Inuit community whose
sealskin puppets were seized at the American border, and which required considerable diplomatic
action on the part of both Inuit and the federal government, to retrieve.