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Arctic Yearbook 2013
Natural News, State Discourses & The Canadian Arctic
areas. His government has created huge new national parks in the North and granted
devolution to the government of the Northwest Territories, effective next April.
The theme of this year‘s northern tour is economic development through extraction of
natural resources, which makes a lot of sense. The North is indeed a great storehouse of
resources, from hydrocarbons in the Mackenzie Valley and Delta to diamonds and
minerals in the Canadian Shield. The Liberals and New Democrats also have a valid point
when they say Mr. Harper should pay more attention to social issues among native people
in the North, but the two approaches are not incompatible. As Bill Clinton said,
channelling Ronald Reagan: ‗The best social program is a good job.‘
Reinforcing State or Breaking New Ground?
This analysis brings us to the conclusion that the geopolitical underpinnings and justifications for
action in the Canadian Arctic have always been, over time, embedded in media assumptions about
which state-centred understandings of Arctic as universal, comprehensive and unchallengeable are
normalized. More recently, however, a resurgence of naturalized geopolitical rationales which
organize assemblages of perceptions, practices and actions, allow the media to play upon the popular
understanding that the Arctic is Canadian, and to authorize the idea that the interests of the state,
defined from the perspective of ‗southern‘ and international interests, pre-empts regional,
indigenous or local agency. In doing so they recalibrated existing representations of science,
environment, security and technology, and repositioned them in evolving grand narratives which
reference familiar icons. Such themes are also recycled in the context of different geopolitical
rationales and by different actors and agencies who, like the Canadian press, were not state agencies
but who, much like the Canadian press, supported and reproduced representations and discourses in
support of state agency and agenda or ‗the idea of state‘ (Penrose, 2011).
Conclusions
This article is not meant to present an empirical ‗measure‘ of the state of geopolitical discourses,
although it uses a rather basic content analysis and coding approach whose methods reflect a
grounded theory approach. Rather, it makes a case to show how state-centred geopolitical rationales
develop, shift and change, even when constructed by non-state actors, and yet retain agency in both
shaping and reflecting the broader discourses in which they are embedded. Currently, a distinctive
assemblage based upon a ‗naturalized‘ geopolitical discourse has developed within southern
Canadian political and media accounts to create the tropes which inform southern engagement with
the Arctic and which continue to fuel Arctic political relations. They do work to reinforce a
distinctive and compelling, and seemingly unified, ‗Canadian‘ perspective on the North. In other
words, this unified discourse is also a constructed and iterative assemblage, reflecting a variety of
voices, but also describing a highly unstable and shifting consensus of sorts: much like a ‗running
average‘ in statistics.
This brings us to the conclusion that much of the media and public texts that today inform
Canadians about the Arctic still produce an assemblage of naturalizations, or naturalized popular
geopolitics, which reinforce state-centred, if not neo-colonial options for northern development,