Protecting the Arctic

Indigenous Peoples and Cultural Survival

Mark Nuttall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN: 9789057023552
• eBook ISBN: 9781135297374
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Protecting the Arctic explores some of the ways in which indigenous peoples have taken political action regarding Arctic environmental and sustainable development issues, and investigates the involvement of indigenous peoples in international environmental policy- making. Nuttall illustrates how indigenous peoples make claims that their own forms of resource management not only have relevance in an Arctic regional context, but provide models for the inclusion of indigenous values and environmental knowledge in the design, negotiation and implementation of global environmental policy.

Chapter 1
INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND THE
ARCTIC ENVIRONMENT

In recent years concern over global warming, atmospheric pollution, ozone depletion, overfishing and uncontrolled resource extraction has focused international attention on the Arctic as a critical zone for global environmental change. Thé global quest for natural resources, the expansion of capitalist markets and the influence of transnational practices on the periphery has resulted in an internationalisation of the circumpolar north. The anthropogenic causes and consequences of environmental change and degradation demonstrates how regional environmental change in the Arctic cannot be viewed in isolation, but must be seen in relation to global change and global processes. Development and the threat of irreversible environmental damage has precipitated intense debate about the correct use of natural resources and proper ways forward for Arctic environmental protection. Indigenous peoples’ organisations, environmentalists and, more recently, national governments, have stressed the need to implement appropriate resource management policies and environmental protection strategies. Yet science-based resource management systems designed to safeguard wildlife and the Arctic environment have, for the most part, ignored indigenous perspectives.

This book illustrates some of the ways indigenous peoples have mobilised themselves to take political action on Arctic environmental and sustainable development issues. While these issues are of urgent concern to indigenous peoples throughout the Arctic, this book discusses them with particular emphasis on Alaska and Greenland. These are two areas I have come to know through fieldwork and research and I draw on some of my ethnographic experiences and first-hand knowledge in the chapters that follow. While the geographical focus may be somewhat limited, the topics I discuss and the themes I explore are nonetheless generic. It would be difficult to go into detail about the particular situations of every indigenous group and to cover every region of the circumpolar north in a thorough and comparative way. My aim is to both stimulate debate and to lay the groundwork for future research and analysis. With specific reference to the Inuit this book illustrates how, in setting out to protect the Arctic environment, develop strategies for sustainable development and gain international recognition as resource conservationists, indigenous peoples make claims that their own forms of resource management not only have relevence in an Arctic regional context, but provide models for the inclusion of indigenous values and environmental knowledge in the design, negotiation and implementation of global environmental policy.

While they have environmental concerns, indigenous peoples nonetheless argue that resource development in the Arctic is not wholly incompatible with its protection. With few choices available on which to base the economic development of many circumpolar communities, indigenous peoples are increasingly involved with the extraction of nonrenewable resources. To ensure a workable participatory approach to the sustainable management of resources indigenous knowledge is being incorporated into the design of environmental projects and the implementation of environmental policy. Indigenous groups have begun to outline and put into practice their own environmental strategies and policies to safeguard the future of resource harvesting, while indigenous peoples’ organisations see themselves in the vanguard of indigenous human and environmental rights not only in the circumpolar north, but worldwide.

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND CULTURAL SURVIVAL

The Arctic and sub-Arctic regions are homelands for diverse groups of indigenous peoples, each having their own distinctive cultures and languages, histories and economies ranging from reindeer herding, subsistence seal hunting and sheep farming to more commercial pursuits such as industrial fishing, salmon canning, timber production, oil-related business or financial enterprise. In Alaska they are known as Inupiat and Yup’ik Eskimos, Alutiiq and Athabascans; in Greenland they are the Kalaallit and Inughuit; in northern Fennoscandia the Saami; and in the Russian North the 26 so-called ‘Northern Minorities’ include the Chukchi, Evens, Evenks, Nenets, Nivkhi, Saami, Sakhas and Khants. Often, in their own languages these names mean simply ‘the people’ and they are the original inhabitants of northern tundra, forest and coast. As they enter the 21st century the indigenous peoples of the circumpolar north will continue to rely on natural resources for their economic and cultural survival, but they are increasingly tied to global networks of production and exchange and subject to the consequences of globalisation and modernity. Technology, industrial development, environmental problems, social change, immigration and tourism all pose threats to traditional lands, livelihoods and cultures. In response indigenous groups have fought for and, in some cases, have achieved increasing political power and self-determination, as well as a degree of control over resource development and management.

Article 1 of the International Labour Organisation’s ‘Convention concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples in Independent Countries’ (ILO No. 169) defines indigenous peoples as

people who are regarded as indigenous on account of their descent from the populations which inhabited the country, or a geographical region to which the country belongs, at the time of conquest or colonisation or the establishment of present State boundaries and who, irrespective of their legal status, retain some or all of their own social, economic, cultural and political institutions.

Furthermore, the ILO Convention states that ‘self-identification as indigenous or tribal shall be regarded as a fundamental criterion for determining the groups to which the provisions of this Convention apply’. In other words, being indigenous is what people can regard themselves as being (or not being). It is a socially constructed identity with reference to putative similarity or difference (Jenkins 1996, 1997). The flexibility of this definition of indigenous peoples allows for many different groups already identified in ethnic terms to claim the right to be recognised as indigenous populations, be they Palestinians or Scottish Highlanders (e.g. for a discussion of the Scottish case see Jedrej and Nuttall 1996). In such cases it is notable how politically potent being ‘indigenous’ can be, and why the assertion of ‘indigenous-ness’ matters, especially in situations where land rights and the legal, social and economic status of minority or ethnic groups remain controversial issues. As Plant (1994:7) points out when minority groups cannot be easily seen to be indigenous peoples, ‘they are now likely to seek to identify themselves as indigenous peoples, precisely because of the greater protection offered under emerging international law’.

In the Arctic political movements to achieve self-determination and land claims settlements have been fuelled and propelled by the construction and assertion of ethnic and cultural identity and notions of aboriginality and ‘indigenous-ness’. To claim that one is a member of an indigenous, rather than a local or even a minority group, is to play on the rhetorical value of these notions in articulating, displaying and defending one’s social identity and to claim that one belongs to a group or place. The use of such rhetoric has become essential for Arctic peoples as they argue that their demands for ownership of or title to lands and resources are based on two undisputable claims: that they have a unique and special relationship to the Arctic environment which is essential for social identity and cultural survival; and that they have never given up their rights over lands and resources in the first place—rather, land has been expropriated and resources exploited without due regard to indigenous peoples. Claims to lands and resources are thus based on cultural and historical rights: the Arctic environment not only sustains indigenous peoples in an economic sense, it nourishes them spiritually and provides a fundamental basis for the distinctive cultures and ways of life they are fighting to protect.

Whatever the differences in culture, language and economy, or whether they live in remote villages or large urban centres in Greenland, Siberia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Canada or Alaska (Iceland has no indigenous population), indigenous peoples have remarkably similar histories in relation to their experiences of colonialism and culture contact. The indigenous peoples of the Arctic have suffered especially because the circumpolar north has been regarded as a wilderness or wasteland. At the same time the Arctic has been viewed as a vast storehouse of natural resources which have often been exploited with scant regard for the people who live there. The exploration and exploitation of the Arctic from the sixteenth century, but especially during the nineteenth, resulted in frequent and extended contact between indigenous peoples and outsiders. As well as economic and ideological influences, whalers, traders and adventurers brought diseases such as smallpox, influenza, typhoid and tuberculosis, which struck at and undermined the social and spiritual fabric of everyday life, as well as virtually wiping out the population of some areas.

Non-Native attitudes to the Arctic environment have been influenced by the idea of the circumpolar north as a frontier, an idea that has shaped both the course of economic development and the post-contact history of indigenous peoples. As an economic frontier, the circumpolar north has played a significant role in the development of those nation-states with Arctic and sub-Arctic territory, and social scientists have tended to analyse resource extraction, economic development and social change in terms of classic models of metropolitan/hinterland or core/periphery relations, while the concept of internal colonialism has been used to analyse and interpret socioeconomic and sociocultural development (see Young 1992:37–55).

The colonisation and settlement of Arctic regions has often taken place primarily with resource extraction in mind. The development of Alaska, for example, has been made possible by the exploitation of sea otter furs, whales, gold and oil. In Canada, an expansion in mining activity, together with the development of hydrocarbon projects following the Second World War, reinforced a southern Canadian vision of the north of the country as a source of boundless wealth, and since the 1960s oil and gas exploitation has shaped the industrial frontier of the Canadian Arctic. Siberia played a similarly important role in the development of the Soviet Union, and while Denmark was a more benign colonial master with regard to Greenland, the indigenous Inuit were nonetheless implicated in a trade network based on sealskins and blubber.

As indigenous peoples have been brought within the economic and cultural mainstream of the nation-state, they have experienced disruption and cultural change, and have been drawn into situations of political subordination and cultural and economic dependency. Young (1992:39) argues that while the sources of dependence can be traced to early contact with Europeans, some ‘extreme cases of economic dependence are an outgrowth of social transformations taking place during the twentieth century’. Like many other scholars, Young identifies the beginnings of economic dependence with the onset of the fur trade, which involved indigenous peoples in international market economies. The introduction of a cash-economy has altered social and economic relationships, assimilationist policies have meant that nomadic groups have been settled into permanent communities and forced in some cases to abandon traditional activities, and the imposition of state education systems has conflicted with traditional ways of learning. While these changes have consequences for Native groups all over the circumpolar north, it is in Russia where some of the severest problems are to be found, and where the policies of a previously totalitarian state have led to an ‘ethnic catastrophe’ (Vakhtin 1994:32). The transformations taking place thoughout Russia have prompted international concern both for the Arctic environment and for the one million or so indigenous peoples living in the country’s northern regions.

While remote, the diverse regions which make up the circumpolar north are developed, modern populated areas, not frontiers or wilderness areas (Coates 1994). In some parts, especially in Russia, they are heavily industrialised. Arctic regions are also integral parts of complex nation-states and are influenced by and dependent upon dominant legal systems, economies and cultures. As such, they are characterised by what Coates calls a ‘culture of opposition’ resulting from the interaction between indigenous and incoming populations and the social, economic and political institutions the latter are seen to represent. Indigenous communities are also characterised by their mixed economies of informal (i.e. subsistence) and formal activities, but many have limited market opportunities and are heavily dependent on government transfers.

Indigenous peoples have become minorities (except in Greenland, where they constitute the majority population), dominated economically, politically and culturally by nation-states and by ‘white settlers’ and incomers who are often agents of those states. Sojourners and outsiders, who have long been part of the social and cultural landscape of the Arctic (whether as whalers, traders, colonial administrators, missionaries, police, doctors, nurses, wildlife biologists, anthropologists, or transient migrant workers), today make up an increasingly large percentage of the population of the Arctic regions, often out-numbering indigenous peoples in many places, particularly in urban centres.

Out of a total population of some ten million living north of 60° only about 1.5 million (or one sixth) are defined as indigenous peoples. As in the past, many migrants to the circumpolar north do not stay long. They move to the Arctic on short-term contracts, staying from anywhere between several weeks to several years, fully intending to leave once their work is completed, or their contracts expire. For example, many of the Russians and members of other ethnic groups who moved to the Russian North and Far East this century did so as a result of Soviet economic development plans. They were needed to provide the skills necessary for large-scale development, but while some Russians were volunteers, others were forced labour, sent to the farflung reaches of the Soviet empire as a punishment (Armstrong et al 1978:50). According to Vakhtin (ibid.: 50) between 1917 and 1926 ‘the incomer population of the North grew between 5 per cent and 8 per cent per annum but between 1926 and 1935 the growth was 15–20 per cent. In 1926 the Northern Minorities constituted 20 per cent of the total northern population, by 1937 their population was estimated at a mere 7 per cent’.

Increasing numbers of migrants either stay on, or move to the Arctic on a more permanent basis. For some, a move to the northern regions represents a lifestyle option attractive to those jaded by life in large cities, or to those excited by the prospect of challenge and adventure. These people likewise call the Arctic home and this gives them a claim in having a say in development and policy making. Today, for instance, the Native peoples of Alaska make up 15% (about 85,000 people) of the total population and the state is home to Americans from all over the United States. Some work in the oil industry, some are military personnel. Others are successful and wealthy lawyers, while still more are academics, environmentalists, national park wardens, storekeepers, trappers, fishermen, cannery workers or seasonal labourers. Like most states, Alaska is a microcosm of the cultural and ethnic mosaic that defines the United States. Anchorage, known by many Alaskans as ‘Los Anchorage’ (and, as a local saying goes, is only twenty minutes from Alaska) is a true American metropolitan area with a population of some 250,000, roughly half the population of the state. It is a city of migrants (Cuba 1987), with a growing population of not only white Americans, but also attractive to Koreans, Filipinos and other ethnic groups. Similarly, Alaska’s other major urban centres, Fairbanks and Juneau, have their share of Asian minority communities, in addition to Alaska’s own indigenous urban migrants (those who move or drift to the towns from rural villages).

This picture of ethnic diversity is a similar one in northern Canadian towns such as Whitehorse, Dawson and Yellowknife, and in the Russian North, in such places as Murmansk, Noril’sk and Yakutsk. Although Native peoples make up the majority in parts of Canada’s Northwest Territories, northern Quebec and Labrador, in Yukon Territory the indigenous population comprises 25%. In Greenland, while the majority of non-ethnic Inuit residents are Danes, the traveller will also bump into itinerant Moroccans, Norwegian and Faroese doctors, Italian mechanics, Dutch geologists, Irish helicopter pilots, Thai hotel maids and many other people from different parts of the world who, for some reason or other, have ended up in the country.

The consequence of such changing demography is that indigenous peoples fear that not only are they outnumbered, but that their lands are constantly in danger of being expropriated. As a result, there is often conflict between indigenous and incoming residents. Some of this conflict is evident in the social and economic impact on small predominantly indigenous communities of short-term economic development such as mineral exploration and exploitation. Migrant labourers may be resident for short periods, and this is especially the case with the construction of oil and gas pipelines, roads and buildings. The lifestyles of newcomers to Arctic settlements contrast sharply with those of the indigenous population (e.g. Brody 1975, Paine 1977). They are often from different cultural backgrounds and speak a different language. They may disregard and have disdain for local culture, beliefs and rituals, and believe themselves to be culturally and morally superior to the locals, whom they dismiss as ‘primitive’.

This sense of superiority is reinforced by the high wages and special status which incomers are afforded by governments and their employers. Greenland, for example, was long considered a ‘hardship posting’. Although this is no longer the situation, Danes were given better housing than Greenlanders, good pay, free return travel home and other benefits, breeding resentment amongst the indigenous population. In Canada, the Inuit were regarded as wards of the state, which only made them seem more childlike in the eyes of the colonial administrators, teachers and health workers sent North to care for them and bring them into the modern world. And in Russia, a 1932 law divided the entire population of the Russian North into two categories: ‘The first category comprised professionals…who received a 10 per cent yearly increase of salary, a 50 per cent reduction of taxes, privileges in allocation of apartments, university entrance and so on’ (Vakhtin 1994:51). There was also a relatively small number of indigenous people who fell into this category and who received the same benefits. The second category comprised the rest of the population. Vakhtin (ibid.) describes how this group

could enjoy these privileges only if they came as workers to the North from other areas of the USSR, which automatically excluded the vast majority of the native population and created two categories of payment for the same work. For example, two carpenters, a Russian and a Chuckchee, who worked together in the same team, would receive different payments. This was the germ of the ugly situation that still exists today throughout the North: the differences in wages for the same work can reach three times and more.

Indigenous peoples also face challenges to cultural survival from environmental problems originating from both within and outwith the circumpolar north. Threats to land, animals and people not only come from the impact of non-renewable resource extraction, such as hydrocarbon development, but from airborne and seaborne pollutants such as cesium isotopes, lead and mercury entering the Arctic biosphere from industrial areas far to the south. As the various chapters of this book show, in setting out to counteract such threats, indigenous peoples argue that environmental policy-making will only be successful if it includes local knowledge and recognises cultural values. However, as a background to later discussion of the policy responses of both indigenous peoples’ organisations and state governments to environmental problems, it is necessary to give a brief overview of exactly what those environmental problems are and how they constitute a threat to the traditional homelands of Arctic peoples.

AN ENVIRONMENT AT RISK

The Arctic has the unenviable advantage of being a natural scientific laboratory for studying global environmental issues. Some of the most alarming illustrations in recent years that Arctic environmental problems are global rather. than regional concerns include the contamination of lichen and reindeer (which eat the lichen) in northern Scandinavia in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, the discovery of PCBs in the breast milk of Canadian Inuit women (which were found to be four times higher than those found in women living in southern Canada), and Arctic haze, which provides the best example of long-range transportation of atmospheric pollution. A photo...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• CHAPTER 1: INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND THE ARCTIC ENVIRONMENT
• CHAPTER 2: ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AND SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT
• CHAPTER 3: SUSTAINING ENVIRONMENTAL CO-OPERATION
• CHAPTER 4: WAYS OF KNOWING, WAYS OF ACTING: THE CLAIM FOR INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENTAL KNOWLEDGE
• CHAPTER 5: HUNTING AND THE RIGHT TO DEVELOPMENT: THE CASE OF ABORIGINAL SUBSISTENCE WHALING
• CHAPTER 6: CULTURAL PRESERVATION THROUGH CULTURAL PRESENTATION: INDIGENOUS PEOPLES AND ARCTIC TOURISM
• CHAPTER 7: CONSTRUCTING INDIGENOUS ENVIRONMENTALISM
• AFTERWORD: CULTURAL SURVIVAL AND CULTURAL DIVERSITY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY