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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Nicol
While the changes involved in devolution, a deterioration of climate, shifting post-Cold war
geopolitical contexts, and an increasingly global world are detected in these discourses which
represented the North to southern Canadians, several things are clear. First, as Mary Simon noted in
an editorial piece crafted for southern Canadians, their knowledge of Inuit and northern cultures was
woefully inadequate. Still, the lens through which the media saw the North had not overcome this
shortcoming, but contributed to it. Second, the Canadian North continued to be understood
primarily through historical, cultural and travel adventure lenses which stressed its remote, exotic
nature and its ―otherness‖. These foundational discourses continued the conversation in ways
which, as Williams (2010: 241) reminds us, were to continue to position the ‗Arctic‘ and its
discourses within a ―set of three co-mingling and contestable knowledges: that the Arctic is a
colonial, marginalized and indigenous space‖ in the early 21
st
century. But in Williams‘ assessment,
such images were not to be contrasted to a unified understanding of the state in the North – these
were
the discourses of state. Much as Simon reminded us, this resulted in a real deficit of knowledge
on the part of most Canadians, with respect to the details of people and life within the region. Still,
while these public discourses were clearly steeped in a traditional Canadian colonial mentality -
focused on state, myth and environment - the geopolitical imagination they referenced was of a very
different era. Russians were not understood to be natural enemies, for example, but rather allies in
the north. As for the Northwest Passage, while the American position was noted, some questioned
why we needed the Northwest Passage anyway. These were indeed different times, and these stories
reflected the foundations upon which a subsequent generation of geopolitical narratives were to be
overlaid.
The 21
st
Century: New Naturalizations/Reframing Geopolitical Perceptions
By the early 21
st
century, narratives about the North shifted to position the state as an international
actor within an international North (Keskitalo, 2004; Heininen & Nicol, 2007). During the period
from 2000 to 2007, for example, the Canadian Government had produced a series of policies,
reports and general texts, which spoke to this geopolitical positioning (Williams, 2010). This is also
reflected in the percentages of stories and articles printed in 2009, two years after the Russian flag
planting ‗incident‘. Here, 14 per cent of framings, the highest level registered over the forty years
covered by this study, positioned military security and sovereignty as key issues for policy-makers
and Canadians interested in the North. It was a positioning which spoke to cooperation on
environment and indigenous affairs, inclusion and consensus. And yet, as Williams reminds us,
increasingly as the decade wore on, this promising human security discourse took on a residual role
and the themes of sovereignty and security increasingly dominated human security: ―[t]his means
that the issues and discourses not included in the traditional state security problematic (such as
environmental threats and social concerns for indigenous Arctic peoples) take on a residual role,
overshadowed by centralized government control to secure the Arctic‘s land and waters and protect
its sovereignty over them‖ (244).