Northern Writes

Who owns the North? The question is perennially relevant in Canada, where a population clustered near the southern border prides itself on living in the world’s second-largest country, thanks to a sprawl of tundra that most will probably never see. That gap — between claiming land and inhabiting it — has become politically urgent, especially with Donald Trump’s threats to take over Greenland. Quebec has its own take on the matter. Although most francophones live in the St. Lawrence Valley, the province’s borders have steadily extended northward. In 1898, the predominantly Cree territory around James Bay came under Quebec’s jurisdiction. The Inuit villages of Nunavik followed suit in 1912.

Annie Desrochers and Samuel Lalande-Markon set out to experience Quebec’s northern regions for themselves, confronting histories of extraction and colonial dispossession in the process. Transmission documents Desrochers’s week-long road trip to the James Bay region with...