Canadian Inuit

DOI10.1177/002070201106600415
Date01 December 2011
Published date01 December 2011
Subject MatterIII. Civil Society
/tmp/tmp-17iwEYrz7sIHUM/input Mary Simon
Canadian Inuit
Wherewehavebeenandwherewearegoing
Let me begin with terminology. Reflecting current Inuit usage, the name
used for the entire area of lands and waters that make up the four Inuit
homelands across the circumpolar Arctic, stretching from Chukotka
to Greenland, is Inuit Nunaat, and the name used to describe the Inuit
homeland within Arctic Canada is InuitNunangat.
In order to consider the first half of the challenge posed by the title
of this article—how Canadian Inuit have come to be where we are today—
we must consider some geography and some history. The Arctic is roughly
one-third of Canada’s land and marine mass, with 50 percent of Canada’s
shoreline. It is the homeland of Canada’s Inuit.
We are some 55,000 in number, approximately one-third of the total
Inuit population living around the circumpolar world, in Chukotka, Siberia,
Alaska, Greenland, and Canada. There are 53 Inuit communities in Arctic
Canada, numbering from a few hundred to more than 5000 inhabitants.
Inuit are the solid majority of the permanent population in the Canadian
Arctic as a whole. We are also a clear majority in all permanent communities,
Mary Simon is the president of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami. She would like to thank John Erik
Fossum of the Nordic Institute for Canadian Studies for his invitation to contribute this
article to the issue.

| International Journal | Autumn 2011 | 879 |

| Mary Simon |
with the exception of Inuvik and Iqaluit. Inuit are also becoming more
numerous in some southern cities, such as Ottawa, Montreal, Winnipeg,
and Edmonton.
Inuit have lived in the Arctic since long before historical records. Our
existence in the Arctic was built around the opportunities, risks, and realities
of a hunting and gathering way of life. Until relatively recently, most Inuit
lived a nomadic lifestyle with very little contact with the outside world. There
are Inuit living today who were young adults before they ever encountered
non-Inuit.
We lived on the land, hunted, gathered, and fished. We organized
ourselves around immediate and extended family. We spoke a very complex
and nuanced language.
The depth of contact between Inuit and European peoples was limited
on a day-to-day basis before the first half of the 20th century. But our
relationship to the world changed forever as a result of that contact. From the
time of Martin Frobisher’s ill-fated voyage and continuing through centuries
of activities involving naval ships, whalers, traders, missionaries, police, and
public servants, Inuit have been engaged in an ever-evolving intersocietal
relationship with qablunaaq(our word for non-Inuit people).
More specifically, we have experienced a tight political and legal
relationship with the crown—first the British imperial crown and then
with the crown in right of Canada. In the period leading up the 1960s and
1970s, the relationship between the Europeans and Inuit was a grossly one-
sided one. We Inuit suffered a steady loss of control over our ability to make
decisions—decisions for ourselves and for the lands and waters that have
sustained us for thousands of years. We became a colonized people. We were
pushed to the margins of political and economic and social power in Inuit
Nunangat.

The low points of this one-sided relationship were experienced in the
period when entire family camps were wiped out by measles, when Inuit
households were coerced into relocating thousands of miles in order to serve
agendas developed elsewhere, and when Inuit children were taken away to
residential schools.
A society’s loss of control cannot be illustrated more pointedly, or more
painfully, than through the forced rupturing of the bonds between parents
and children. Within a few generations, Inuit were forcibly resettled. We
were converted to a new religion, and that religion was presented as hostile
to many aspects of our old culture.
| 880 | Autumn 2011 | International Journal |

| Canadian Inuit |
We suffered terribly from contagious diseases. Our children were
dispatched to residential schools. And we saw family members sent to
tuberculosis sanitariums, some never to return. We became part of what
many Canadians viewed as Canada’s “native problem.” We were caught up
in policies seeking assimilation on the one hand, and the relentless push
to extract or develop natural resources in the interests of Canadians on
the other. Our rights as aboriginal peoples—let alone our preferences and
sensibilities—were not part of the picture.
This lack of voice, this invisibility—even close to home—was painfully
apparent in our early efforts to engage the rest of the world.
In his book Who Owns the Arctic, University of British Columbia law
professor Michael Byers relates a telling story: “John Amagoalik, as the
former president of the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, recalls attending a meeting
of the United Nations where a foreign diplomat blithely stated that ‘nobody
lived in the Arctic.’ Amagoalik approached the diplomat afterwards, held out
his hand, and said ‘Hi, I’m nobody’.”
Yet we did not reconcile ourselves to our colonization or our
marginalization. We mounted a great effort, along with First Nations and
Métis peoples in Canada, to make our voices heard. We did everything we
could to reassert our say over our lands and waters of Inuit Nunangat.And
over our future.
To make our case, we used meeting halls. And the airwaves. And
negotiating tables, when we could get people to talk to us. And when we
couldn’t, the courts. And even from time to time, the streets.
Starting in the 1960s, a succession of young Inuit decided to take on
the larger society that had colonized us and to regain at least a degree of
control over our own lives. We did this by studying the larger features and
assumptions of Canadian society and by deciding how we could develop and
promote a political agenda that would adapt and employ those features and
assumptions to our benefit.
In the late 1960s and 1970s, we quickly came to see three major
opportunities available to us. First, new issues of common-law aboriginal
title and aboriginal rights arose in a series of landmark court cases. These
court cases reopened what had been considered long-settled case law
rejecting legal rights flowing from aboriginal use and occupation.
Second, there was the growing search for constitutional reform in Canada.
This was fuelled largely by Québec’s restlessness but was accompanied by
other issues, such as guarantees for fundamental protection of individual
and minority rights.
| International Journal | Autumn 2011 | 881 |

| Mary Simon |
And third, the internal map of Canada left much of the Arctic—for
example, the Northwest Territories and regions such as nouveau Québec and
northern...

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT