Nunavut: The Still Small Voice of Indigenous Governance1

Nunavut, ‘our land ’ in the Inuit language, is 2,000,000 sq. km. of treeless tundras, coasts, and islands occupying one-fifth of all Canada’s land area. C. 29,000 people, 85 % of them Inuit, make up the population. Most of the non-Inuit are short-term residents, e.g., teaching and technical staff. Caribou are important food in many areas, especially the south-west mainland where great herds migrate from south to north and back annually from their winter range. No less important is the land-fast sea ice on which Inuit hunt, travel, and camp for much of the year, and the floe edge rich in food species. The seas of Nunavut include a large portion of Hudson Bay, together with many straits, gulfs, channels, and part of the north-west Atlantic. The Northwest Passage creates problems – the American navy abuses Canadian public opinion regularly by insisting on rights of passage of its ships, notably submerged nuclear submarines. Canada ‘discovered ’ Nunavut and other far northern regions and their peoples in the early 1950s (Robertson 2000), but through the Cold War 'two solitudes ' existed. One was a Northern or Arctic policy centred on future technology (especially the extraction and transport of natural resources), economics, international law, military systems and strategies, and utopian fantasies. The other was the daily North of inadequate housing, alcohol problems, social welfare, racial discrimination, and