The Nunavummiut: Politically Engaged Citizens

On April 1, 1999, the political territory of Nunavut came into being: formerly the eastern Arctic portion of the Northwest Territories, it comprised one fifth of the Canadian landmass, 26 settlements unconnected by roads and a total population of 30,000, 85 percent of whom are Inuit. This marked the culmination of two lengthy parallel processes: a land claim dating from 1976 and a linked demand for eastern Arctic autonomy.

On the surface, this might have appeared as a triumph: an indigenous people winning not only a territory and resources by skillful negotiation, but its own government as well. But Nunavut is poor, demoralized and dependent. It receives 90 percent of its revenue from the federal government. The population is afflicted with major health and social problems. As many as half of the children are deaf due to chronic ear infections, requiring the use of classroom microphones by schoolteachers. An epidemic of suicide continues, mostly among young people. The suicide rate, in fact, is a staggering eleven times the national average, equivalent to the city of Ottawa losing more than a thousand youngsters to suicide every year.

Capacity building is hit or miss. Only 25 percent of Inuit children graduate from high school. Inuktitut is the language of instruction until grade three or four; after that the children effectively start over in English. Only 35 percent of Nunavut teachers speak Inuktitut, which is the first language of 75 percent of the Inuit population (15 percent of Nunavut Inuit speak only Inuktitut). The principal language of the government and public service of Nunavut is English.

Within this depressing milieu, Ailsa Henderson sets out to examine present-day Nunavut political culture—the engagement of the Nunavummiut (people of Nunavut) in political processes. She states at the outset that she is viewing them as “citizens in a contemporary polity rather than as members of a particular cultural group.” While she goes on to claim that her analyses are grounded in cultural explanations, I think it is fair to say that this acultural approach is generally the one taken in the book.

Henderson begins with some historical and cultural context, stressing what she sees as similarities between the Inuit and ourselves. Her cultural overview is, however, lacking in a number of respects. She claims that the Inuit had an “Enlightenment ethos,” for example, which is, to put it charitably, naive. The Inuit knowledge system was embodied and experience based, not characterized in the least by abstract rationalism and detached objectivity. Her account of missionization is equally unconvincing. If the transition from shamanism to Christianity was “almost seamless,” it had less to do with a congruence of spiritual beliefs (since when do Christians believe that the “universe is animate?”) than it did with the realities of colonial processes and unequal power relations. Christianity was negotiated, not simply accepted as a new version of traditional Inuit spirituality. In any case this background is only flimsily connected to the political dimension that she proceeds to explore.

Where the book gathers force is in Henderson’s careful tracing of the many complex and overlapping political and administrative processes that led to the carving out of Nunavut from the Northwest Territories. The latter was originally governed by an appointed council composed of white bureaucrats living in Ottawa; only by 1954 were four of the nine members elected. But the eastern Arctic was not integrated into territorial politics until 1966, and that integration was far from smooth.

Henderson is unsparing about the patronizing, paternalist approach to Inuit governance during that period. The Eskimo Affairs Committee set up in 1952 eventually allowed the Inuit to be delegates, and officials were shocked by the eagerness of Inuit to participate. Community councils and a plethora of committees were set up by northern service officers, and again there was no shortage of willing volunteers. Regional councils were attended by Inuit who were inevitably well prepared, and who focused upon policy issues rather than immediate local concerns. To this day, despite the costs, proportionately more candidates run for public office in Nunavut than in the south.

Officials were not a little taken aback by what they had instigated. At the root of their concern was the expectation on the part of Inuit that participation in political processes would bring influence with it: Inuit had no intention of merely taking part in focus groups. The generation of all of this involvement, one might say with hindsight, made a claim for self-government almost inevitable once a land claim had been launched by the eastern Arctic Inuit in 1976. But what form would it take?

Henderson makes a convincing case that the “consensus government” of the Northwest Territories, in which all members are part of the government and political parties do not exist, had nothing to do with aboriginal values. Rather, it arose from the originally unelected nature of the territorial council and the fact that the major players throughout were Liberals. None of this encouraged the injection of party politics into the governance process. But the government of Nunavut, structured in the same way, has reclaimed the notion as traditionally aboriginal.

The Nunavummiut, in fact, chose a fairly conventional form of governance, a modified Westminster system. As in the Northwest Territories, the legislature chooses the premier, the speaker and the cabinet. The only departure from the former Northwest Territories system was an insistence upon decentralization, which proved, however, to be a decentralization of the bureaucracy into the settlements, while decision making remained in Iqaluit.

It is with respect to what should have been at the very centre of her analytical concerns—the political culture of the Nunavummiut—that Henderson flounders. With respect to governance, she continually confuses the “government” with the executive (cabinet), even though the very notion of consensus government includes every sitting member. Worse, however, she falls back almost entirely upon political science theorizing and inconclusive surveys to divine the political culture of Nunavut.

She is no stranger to fieldwork, and in fact carried out a number of interviews that centred on the Inuit transition from a nomadic culture to the current one based in fixed communities. But when it comes to the subject she wants to address, the voice of the people is almost absent. Indeed, in her words, she is deliberately imposing a “Western, scientific lens on political life in the territory. I do not give voice to an over-studied indigenous population, but attempt to map and explain the competing cultural influences that have helped to shape political culture in Nunavut.”

Yet that missing voice, one might have thought, is crucial to the enterprise. Surely the first step in coming to grips with a culture, even in the narrow sense of the word as it is used here, is to talk to the people whose culture it is, ask questions and do a lot of listening. Instead, we are taken for a tour of incommensurable theory, unintelligible tables of data (Ordinary Least Squares regression analysis) and paltry conclusions. The author, in fact, has a knack for stating the glaringly obvious.

“Nunavut” means “our land.” Nunavut Inuit tend to identify more with Nunavut than with Canada as a whole—in fact, only 12 percent identify with the latter. If this is the case, says Henderson, “then the legislature at the centre of that political community will be more important than will a less proximate assembly.” This is her explanation for the fact that Nunavut Inuit turn out in greater numbers to vote territorially than they do federally.

Another less-than-startling finding is that “those most interested in politics and more active in other forms of participation are more likely to cast a ballot.” She finds the “near absence of lawyers from among candidates and MLAs … noteworthy.” Perhaps not, since there are only a dozen or so lawyers in the whole of Nunavut.

We are offered empty comparisons such as the following: “Nunavut … appears to combine the environmentalism of British Columbia, the self-sufficiency of Alberta, the traditionalism of Quebec, and the efficacy and cynicism of Atlantic Canada.” What does this broad-brush comparison with Canadian provinces tell us about Nunavut?

Then we proceed to a survey of “materialist” and “post-materialist” social goals. This paragraph, coming dangerously close to self-parody, sums up the approach:

The Nunavummiut presented “initially puzzling” results: they proved to be less materialist than the rest of Canada. Henderson spends some time trying to analyze these results. The speculation is exhilarating. But at this point the only thing being measured, it seems to me, is the measuring stick itself.

Another observation, repeated here and there by Henderson, is that Nunavut voters appear to have broad territorial concerns, while politicians seem rooted in local issues. This counterintuitive finding, however, proves to be easily explained: it was based upon the responses to two different questions in two different surveys. Nunavut residents were asked in one survey “What is the biggest challenge facing Nunavut?” Election candidates were asked, in another, to identify the most important issues in the election. The questions themselves, as it turns out, generated the finding.

Based upon survey responses, nearly three quarters of Nunavut voters find politics too complicated, while 60 percent of them think they have no say in politics, compared to a mere 40 percent in the rest of Canada. (The number for Canada seems questionable. For example, a few years ago the Centre for Research and Information on Canada found that more than 70 percent of respondents agreed with the statement “I don’t think governments care very much about what people like me think.”)

Meanwhile, Nunavut electors vote in territorial elections in greater numbers than do Canadians in any other province or territory, and 25 percent of them watch their legislative proceedings on television nightly, or at least three or four times a week. Maybe someone should ask them why.

Henderson is on much stronger ground in her analysis of Inuit qaujimajatuqangit, usually shortened to “IQ,” a codification of Inuit cultural values and epistemology that first appeared in 1998. The values listed—such as inuuqatigiitsiarniq (respect for others), pijitsirniq (serving family and community) and aajiiqatiglinniq (decision making through consensus)—can vary in number. Divorced from the land-based embodied knowledge whence it sprang, IQ has become a kind of ethnic marker that is too often the stuff of mission statements and political rhetoric. Supposedly it indicates an Inuit approach to governance, but no one can agree on precisely how. In fact, Henderson hits the nub of the matter thus: “there may be a fundamental incompatibility between IQ and the worldviews underpinning Euro-Canadian bureaucratic structures and processes.”

Overall, however, it must be said that Henderson’s study is not particularly coherent as an account of Nunavut political culture. It was originally a series of conference papers, and it shows. Moreover, it is written in a frankly rebarbative style. But all that could be overlooked if only she had gone directly to the people whose political culture she was studying, rather than forcing a complex array of attitudes, practices and values into the straitjacket of simplistic questionnaires and imported theorizing.

What we need, and still do not have, is an analysis of the detailed accounts that only the Nunavummiut can provide: how they perceive politics, how they engage in them and why for so long they have involved themselves with enthusiasm in political processes that outsiders have designed. Given the urgency of the social problems that appear to be a part of the very fabric of Nunavut today, how is this political engagement brought to bear on them, what possibilities does it offer, what hope does it hold out? These key questions, surely at the root of any serious analysis of Nunavut political culture, remain unanswered.