Self-Rule Comes to the Tundra

IQALUIT, Canada — Pity Bert Rose. He’s the one with the rumpled hair and the baggy shirt, slumped in a back office with a phone in his ear.

As Canada prepares for today’s inauguration of its first new territory in half a century, he and his co-coordinators are the ones putting on the party: figuring out how to transport 1,200 people from all over the world into a remote quarter of the Canadian Arctic and finding a place for all of them to sleep in this frigid island village of 4,500. Rounding up hunters to shoot enough caribou and musk ox to feed all of them, and shipping in 1,400 chairs and 500 cots. And finally, putting on a show for them, one they’ll remember for the rest of their lives, if they live through it, if they don’t wander out onto the sea ice, or pat a vicious sled dog, or get stranded by a blizzard for so long the town runs out of food.

“Take all the time that you want,” Rose says to a visitor hesitating at his door. “The world is collapsing around me.”

It isn’t every day that they redraw the map of North America. In this case, Canada is carving an official new territory out of the vast plains of tundra and ice of the eastern Northwest Territories, a homeland for tens of thousands of Inuit (once known as Eskimos) who have been the Arctic’s stateless natives for about 4,000 years.

The territory of Nunavut, which comes into being today, is one of the most important experiments in aboriginal self-rule in an era when other nations are closing the books on native land claims in the sparsely populated Far North.

In Alaska, the Inuit population above the Arctic Circle joined other native groups in 1971 in a settlement that awarded them $1 billion and 44 million acres of land but no real autonomy. In Greenland, Inuit residents won home rule from Denmark in 1979 but no financial reparations.

‘A Huge Step for Any Aboriginal People’

Nunavut will have both: a territorial public government that is open to all but in effect controlled by the 22,000 Inuit who live here--84% of the region’s population--and a $730-million trust that will generate $40 million to $53 million a year for new businesses, training programs and social projects. On top of that is oversight of a $411-million annual territorial budget, more than 90% of it handed over by the federal government of Canada. Per-person spending will be by far the highest in Canada.

“This is a huge step for any aboriginal people, in Canada or anywhere. Where they’ve been a minority in terms of the total nation, they now have a political jurisdiction that enables them to govern themselves,” says Mark Dickerson, political science professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on northern affairs.

And so, 1,800 people will gather today in a chain of old military hangars on the tundra about 1,250 miles north of the nearest city, Montreal. There, three new judges, 19 new legislative assembly members (all but four of them Inuit) and a territorial commissioner will be sworn in, and fireworks will rocket over the ice chunks of Frobisher Bay.

The fact that the onlookers will include the Canadian prime minister, the governor-general, several Cabinet ministers and diplomats and news crews from around the world is only part of Rose’s ordeal. The biggest problem, as he sees it, is that Iqaluit’s average temperature on April 1 is 1 degree above zero, and the available electricity in the ceremony hangars may not be enough to keep the heaters and big-screen TVs and satellite dishes running.

“I also think about somebody down in Montreal chartering a plane and saying, ‘We’ll take you up to Iqaluit to see the celebration,’ and 150 people arrive in Iqaluit with the assumption that they’ll be able to find accommodation,” Rose says. “I don’t know what we’re going to do. Jail cells, maybe?”

Nunavut represents a fifth of Canada’s landmass, slung so far over the top of the globe that few Canadians have ever been here. The magnetic North Pole lies in its northwestern quadrant. It is home to half the world’s population of polar bears, three quarters of a million caribou--and about 27,000 people, spread out in 28 communities. None of the locations can be reached except by plane or, during the few summer months when the sea ice melts, by boat.

Iqaluit, the new territory’s capital, was an early outpost of the Hudson Bay Co. and a stop-off point for whalers but didn’t come into its own until the 1950s, when Frobisher Bay served as a marshaling area for construction of the Cold War-era Distant Early Warning radar line across the north.

The U.S. built one of the longest runways in North America here, a strategic refueling point for bombers that might one day be headed toward Russia. The 12,000-foot runway turned the tiny shantytown, once dubbed “the armpit of the Arctic,” into an oddball international crossroads for years.

Famous Visitors Over the Years

Before the jet age, PanAm, SAS, TWA and KLM all stopped off for fuel in Iqaluit on their Los Angeles-to-Europe polar routes. Even now, private jets often touch down for a top-off. Members of the British royal family have been frequent guests. Julio Iglesias tiptoed down from his jet in his pajamas; Tom Cruise, Sylvester Stallone, Charles Lindbergh, Ginger Rogers, Shimon Peres, Nelson Mandela and the late shah of Iran have all gazed out on Iqaluit’s muted cityscape of prefab housing and igloo-like domes.

In the old days, when the U.S. military and imported contractors dominated the town, the Inuit couldn’t drink in contractor bars and, indeed, couldn’t vote in federal elections until 1960.

The territory they are poised to assume (Nunavut means “our land” in Inuktitut) carries the wounds of the years the Inuit were forced to attend English-language schools and weaned out of migrant hunting camps into communities that offered few jobs.

Today, the unemployment rate hovers at 22%, with at least 3,000 Iqaluit residents on welfare. The youth suicide rate is six times the national average; the sexual assault rate is seven times higher, as is the tuberculosis rate. Jim Bell, the local newspaper editor, says surveys have shown that half the adult population of Iqaluit uses marijuana regularly, 17% of residents use cocaine, and alcohol is so much a part of the community that “the collective result is mayhem” every weekend.

The number of youths sniffing dangerous inhalants is 26 times higher than in the rest of Canada. And the sheer number of youth is staggering: Nunavut’s is the youngest population in Canada, with 48% of its people younger than 20. The annual birthrate, an astounding 16.4%, means that the new government will spend the bulk of its energies finding new housing and jobs for decades to come.

“The most important thing is we have always been governed by somebody else, from somewhere else. This is the first time our government will be here in our homeland,” says John Amagoalik, 51, who worked for decades to negotiate the Nunavut agreement and who heads the commission implementing the settlement. “The government will be our friends, our relatives, our neighbors. They will speak our language, they will know our culture, and they will understand our priorities.”

Amagoalik was born in a tent in a northern Quebec hunting camp. He was only 5 when the Canadian government, worried about a possible famine in the south among native peoples and seeking to establish sovereignty in the Arctic, relocated large numbers of families into the Far North.

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police had promised them that they would not be separated from other families in their groups, that they could go home if they didn’t like it, he remembers. But as soon as the ship carrying his family and neighbors reached Ellesmere Island, now at the far north of Nunavut’s boundaries, half the passengers were forced off the ship and the other half told they would be going on to Resolute, on Cornwallis Island.

“That’s when the crying started,” he remembers. “The women started to cry, and the dogs joined in, howling. That’s when I realized something was wrong.” When they unloaded at Resolute, it was worse. “We were basically dumped on the beach. There was nothing there--absolutely nothing. Nothing but gravel or snow as far as the eye could see. It was like landing on the moon.”

But the family set to building igloos and hunting seals. “We were Inuit,” he says. “We were used to surviving.”

‘We Didn’t See Human Beings for Weeks’

Today, Josie Kusagak, born in such an igloo, keeps a canvas tent and a camp stove on the balcony of his home in Iqaluit, where he heads Nunavut Tunngavik Inc., the corporation set up to develop economic enterprises out of the $730-million financial settlement.

“Although we’re working today with computers and all that, think of the Snow Age, consider the primitive: It’s still just a memory away,” Kusagak says. “We didn’t see human beings for weeks or months on end when I was in Resolute Bay, at the trading post. We didn’t know anything about Coca-Cola, or money you put in your pockets. And now we’ve fast-tracked to modern civilization--our own territory! So you need a buffer. That’s what the tent does for me, in an odd way.”

Kusagak and others are confident that Nunavut will be able to establish a viable economy in the coming decades with its substantial mineral resources and the many possibilities unfolded by Arctic tourism, which is growing.

As a territory, Nunavut will not enjoy the sovereign control over resources and lawmaking accorded to provinces. However, its elected legislature is delegated broad authority by the federal government over a wide range of governmental affairs, including education, health, social services and local environmental regulation. Its residents, like those of other territories, will have representation in the Canadian Parliament.

Nunavut’s new leaders are also determined to ensure that Inuit share the benefits. The original proclamation that 85% of all the jobs in the new government would go to Inuit has been scaled back to half, at least for the moment, in recognition of the reality that only 6% of Nunavut’s Inuit have a college degree (indeed, only 15% graduate high school at age 17; the rest either graduate later or not at all). There are no Inuit doctors in Iqaluit, no biologists, no statisticians and just two nurses. There is a single Inuit lawyer, Paul Okalik, who has been elected as the territory’s first premier.

Okalik went to college and then law school only recently, after serving time for stealing liquor; he has now given up alcohol altogether. Okalik says he didn’t feel comfortable speaking English until the ninth grade.

What better man to lead the new territory out of its past, Nunavut residents say. An astonishing 88% of them voted in the legislative assembly elections earlier this year--up to 99% in some precincts--and Okalik wasn’t the only candidate on the ballot with a troubled past. The new minister of education, James Arvaluk, recently got out of prison for sexually assaulting two women at a hot tub party in his home.

“You’ve got to remember, we were a hunting and gathering society 30, 40 years ago. To go from that to creating our own self-government is no small feat. If we hit a brick wall, we’ll go around the brick wall. What we have is a steely determination to keep moving forward,” says Jack Anawak, a former Canadian member of Parliament who will serve as the new territory’s minister of justice, community government, housing and transportation.

‘Just 19 Grubby Little Politicians’

Some of the few thousand non-Inuit living in Nunavut are more skeptical. Because it is a public government, and not a tribal council, they are eligible to vote in the new territory and cannot be excluded from its borders. But Bryan Pearson, a Liverpool native who was Iqaluit’s first mayor and one of the town’s most enduring entrepreneurs, says the failure to establish political parties and clear platforms is likely to leave the new government foundering.

“There’s no concerted effort, no guidelines, no five-year plan, no nothing--just 19 grubby little politicians grabbing anything they can for themselves,” says Pearson, who runs a new cinema on a bluff overlooking the bay. “It can’t work.”

Around the corner at the Tulugaq Bar, one of the few establishments in Iqaluit licensed to sell liquor, manager Bill Strickland ran for the assembly but received only 55 votes. With business this good, who cares?

Strickland, a chain of cigarettes at the ready, surveys what may easily be one of Nunavut’s most lucrative enterprises, which on one Friday night, with a line waiting to get in, carries several warning signs on the door: No knives. No fighting. No leaving your kids unattended while you drink.

“For me, running this place, I have to be a bar manager, I have to be a social worker, a loan manager and Jerry Springer--to break things up. Let’s put it this way: a 137-seat bar, for the amount that we sell, we would make any nightclub owner in downtown L.A. envious. But it comes with some prices too. I’ve been stabbed twice, I’ve been probably in more fights than Evander Holyfield, I’ve lost my family. . . .”

Is he worried about the coming of the new territory? “I think if somebody was to say no, they’re not worried, they’re lying,” he says. “If they’re not worried, it’s because of one of two things: Either they’re going to be back down south when the building boom ends or they’re not smart enough to figure out what’s going to happen.”

Rose is back at his desk, which is covered for the moment with a scale model of the airfield hangars and the seats inside them, the seats that won’t possibly be enough. Rose moved to Iqaluit from southern Canada years ago. He raised his children here, sent them to Iqaluit schools. He’s proud that his Inuit neighbors trusted him enough to include him in their new territory, he says.

“Those of us who elected to stay, to set up roots in the community, are 100% in favor of what’s going on. We have been treated royally by the people we live with, and now I can say we’re getting our payback, they’re welcoming us in,” Rose says.

“It’s true, we have the highest suicide rate in all of Canada. But that hasn’t allowed the people here to slide into utter despair. I don’t know what happens when an entire culture gives up. It dies out, I guess.”

His voice trails off for a moment, and then he points out the window, to the turquoise sky suspended over fresh snow. “You walked over this morning,” he says. “Would you give up on a day that looks like this?”

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Canada’s Newest Territory

Nunavut, formerly part of Northwest Territories, takes up

more than 750,000 square miles, more than one-fifth Canada’s landmass, and is home to about 27,000 people. Nunavut means “our land” in Inuktitut, the

language of the Inuit.

Capital: Iqaluit (pop.: 4,500)

Population: 27,000

Economy: Biggest employers are territorial and federal governments.

Also, potential for oil and mineral development, but federal funding needed.

Source: Associated Press