COMING TO TERMS WITH THE ARCTIC.

AuthorMastny, Lisa

By melding ancient hunting traditions with modern political technique, Arctic indigenous peoples present a baffling challenge to environmental diplomacy. As the Arctic ecology itself begins to change, the need for a common understanding is growing increasingly urgent.

Last July, the elders of Pelly Bay, an Inuit community on Canada's Arctic coastline, carefully packaged up six hand-carved marionettes and shipped them off to a master puppeteer in the U.S. state of Rhode Island, for fine-tuning. The dolls, which had taken a year to assemble, depicted Kiviuq and his companions, legendary travelers in the stories of the Inuit, the people long known in Western mainstream culture as "Eskimo"--a term now rejected as derogatory. The mythical travelers were slated to be the stars of a new video that would teach children in Nunavut, Canada's youngest and northernmost territory, about their Inuit heritage.

Just across the border, in Buffalo, New York, U.S. federal agents seized the packages and re-routed them to a lab in Oregon, where the puppets were subjected to forensic testing. The crime? Attempting to cross the border without a permit, according to officials with the Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency responsible for the seizure. The dolls, it turned out, had been carved from whalebone and clothed in seal skin, two substances specifically barred from entry into the United States under the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA).

The case of the impounded marionettes was just one of thousands that have crossed the desks of U.S. wildlife enforcement officers. As far as the officers were concerned, that case was closed when the dolls were shipped back to Pelly Bay. But for the Inuit, the interrupted odyssey of the marionettes is part of a much larger saga. Most traditional Inuit products--whether craft work like sealskin slippers or foods like mattak, a delicacy made from raw whale blubber--are derived from animals. But in recent decades, growing concerns about declining wildlife populations have led governments to pass a number of laws like the MMPA, which are preventing many of these products from reaching world markets.

This increasing exclusion of their products comes as a blow to many Inuit communities, who are struggling to find ways to jumpstart their economies after centuries of social and cultural devastation. Early explorers like Samuel Hearne, an English trader with Canada's Hudson's Bay Company in the late 1700s, had scoured the North for furs, ivory, copper, and other goods to feed eager markets back home. These efforts opened the way for colonial settlement, which would permanently scar Inuit and other indigenous Arctic peoples. The new colonial governments systematically dismissed local land claims, relocated or assimilated nomadic groups, and disparaged traditional ways. Outsiders also brought measles, smallpox, and influenza--European diseases against which natives had little immunity. "The days of the Inuit are numbered," wrote the American explorer Charles Francis Hall after visiting the Frobisher Bay area of Canada in 1861. "Fifty years may find them all passed away, without leaving one to tell that such a people ever lived."

Fortunately, Hall's prediction never came true. Despite suffering a major blow to their numbers, some 150,000 Inuit survive in scattered communities across northern Alaska, northern Canada, Greenland, and the Chukotka region of eastern Siberia (see map, page 26). Together, these Inuit make up barely 4 percent of the Arctic's total population of 3.8 million, the majority of whom are ethnic Russians who moved north during the Soviet era. In all, nearly 50 distinct indigenous peoples inhabit the Arctic, but the plight of the Inuit, who have occupied the region for some 5,000 years, is in many ways the best single barometer of the far North, as both a political and a geographic space.

In recent decades, the Inuit have regained a high degree of control over their lands and experienced widespread cultural and political renewal. They now have what may be a unique opportunity: a chance to create a self-sustaining economy in a region relatively insulated from the intense population and resource pressures that jeopardize indigenous cultures in so many other parts of the world. In this respect, the Inuit represent a "best case" scenario for indigenous development. And yet the tumultuous social changes, the controversial politics of hunting (the Inuit's primary economic activity), and the uncertainties of resource exploitation in the delicate Arctic environment--all of these factors make the Inuit cultural renaissance still a very uncertain affair. That uncertainty is compounded by global environmental pressures, which are now working fundamental changes in Arctic ecosystems. In both cultural and natural terms, the far North may be on the verge of profound transition.

CULTURE SHOCK

In 1922, Robert Flaherty, a surveyor for Canadian railways and mining companies, attracted an international audience with his film about a year in the life of an Inuit hunter named Alakarialak ("Nanook") and his family. The first feature-length documentary ever, Nanook of the North fed the popular imagination a rare glimpse of Inuit culture--of a people who seemed hardened by nature, willing to endure the chill of an igloo and the gloom of a sunless winter's day. The film awakened the world to a culture apparently isolated from "civilization." The only evidence to the contrary was a brief shot of the protagonist biting at a mystifying gramophone record during a visit to a trading post.

But even by the early 20th century, "Nanook's" isolated world was rapidly disappering. For some 200 years, European commercial whalers and their North American counterparts had hired skilled Inuit hunters to serve as guides on trading expeditions or as crew members on whaling vessels. While many Inuit welcomed this new employment, their communities suffered greatly from European diseases. In 1900, the arrival of a single whaling ship carrying influenza sparked the deaths of more than 200 Inupiat (the Inuit group living near the Beaufort Sea), who were trading their goods at Point Barrow. In the Inuvialuit region of western Canada, the Inuit population fell from around 2,000 to only 40 in the first 20 years after contact. In Greenland, the entire Inuit population fell by one-half. Disintegrating Inuit communities were dealt another painful blow in the early 1900s, in the form of widespread unemployment, when world markets for whale oil and baleen collapsed following the development of petroleum products and ne w synthetic materials.

Efforts to assimilate the Inuit into mainstream national life proved equally disastrous. When the Danish government began to colonize Greenland in the early 18th century, missionaries encouraged the island's nomadic Inuit groups to convert to Christianity and move to fixed settlements, which were often poorly supplied for the winter. The Canadian government did much the same thing in the 1950s and 1960s, luring igloo- and tent-dwelling Inuit into settlements with promises of housing, food, medicine, and education. These relocations, though mostly well-intentioned, disconnected many hunters and fishers from their customary ways of life and fostered a paralyzing loss of self-respect. Robbie Tookalook of Nunavik, in northern Quebec, was only 14 years old when Mounted Police rounded up his father's sled dogs and shot them, ostensibly to stem the spread of diseases like rabies and distemper. Yet he remembers the consequences clearly: his father could no longer reach traditional hunting grounds and, like other hun ters, was forced to turn to government assistance to purchase the supplies needed for settlement life. Once the dogs were gone, the barren life of the settlement enclosed them completely. Entire communities suffered this fate, and many are still hoping for an official apology from the Canadian government.

On the Russian side of the Bering Sea, in Chukotka, a region about the size of France, the assimilation was far more thorough. As early as the 1920s, the Soviet government began to integrate Arctic indigenous groups into its elaborate schemes for industrializing the Russian north. As in Canada, the authorities systematically replaced nomadic ways of life with centralized settlements and modern houses, schools, and hospitals--in large part to lay down the infrastructure required for further development of the region. The Inuit and other indigenous groups like the Chukchi were viewed as a ready source of labor to feed the growing industrial machine; they were "granted" employment in the new state-owned fisheries and reindeer farms. But many native workers ultimately lost their jobs to ethnic Russians and other immigrants who were attracted by the higher wages and early pensions offered in the North.

Today, Inuit communities across the Arctic are only beginning to recover from this cultural upheaval. Recent decades have brought new political and cultural prospects, and in all of their homelands but Siberia the Inuit have come a long way toward winning greater legal authority over their resources. One of the earliest milestones was the Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, in which residents with at least one-fourth native ancestry were granted financial compensation for appropriated land, and collective rights to 11 percent of the state's territory. Eight years later, in Greenland, decades of political activism and worker's strikes culminated in the Home Rule Act of 1979, bringing the Inuit there what many regard as the greatest degree of political autonomy enjoyed by any Arctic native group. In Canada, the Inuit have been party to five different federal land-claims agreements since 1975. Last year, one of those settlements served as the basis for the founding of Nunavut, a vast Inuit-controlled jurisdiction that includes what was formerly the central and eastern part of...

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