Book review: A starry-eyed egghead’s view of Nunavut

IQALUIT — If you decide to read this book, you’ll get a lot more out of it if you possess two things: a deeply compassionate heart and a relentless bullshit detector.

You’ll need the former to understand why the now-tarnished dream of Nunavut still gives rise to gushing hyperbole, and the latter to sift through the nonsense that fills the last half of the book.

The people who contributed to this collection of 11 essays are all passionate advocates of the Nunavut project, so if they’re a little starry-eyed, forgive them. Much of this book was written either before April 1, 1999, or soon after. That’s when the Nunavut government’s conspicuous weaknesses were obvious only to an observant few. Nunavut was and is a labour of love for them, and they truly believed it would turn out better than it did. But despite its flaws, this book is still worth reading

In a 500-word reprint of one of his Nunatsiaq News columns, John Amagoalik lashes back at all the southern journalists who in the 1950s and 1960s called the Arctic a wasteland inhabited by a disappearing people — the Inuit.

“Perhaps they would write that this bunch of nobodies are doing some remarkable things in their distinct homeland,” Amagoalik writes.

There’s also an amusing piece of cheerleading by Nunavik politico Zebedee Nungak, and several pieces of droning academic sludge. Ludger Müller-Mille’s essay on Inuit place names contains some interesting insights, but they’re lost under a suffocating pile of verbiage and obfuscation.

There’s also an embarrassing piece by Laila Sørensen on the Inuit Broadcasting System that the editors should have spiked. Kenn Harper’s piece on writing systems in Nunavut, on the other hand, is clear, organized, and assiduously researched.

The heart of the book, and its strongest chapter by far, is an 86-page essay by the Nunavut government’s director of statistics, Jack Hicks, and Graham White, a political science professor at the University of Toronto. Of course, they’re both unabashed defenders of Nunavut. But they avoid the shallowness that mars so many of the other contributions, and they pose tough questions about what the Nunavut government must do to prove itself to its people and the rest of the world.

Hicks and White tell you what Nunavut is, and what it isn’t, mostly for the benefit of non-Nunavummiut, and with text-book-style rectitude. If you’re a senior high school teacher or college instructor looking for material on Nunavut, this is an ideal chapter to photocopy for your students.

They describe, in brief, the history of colonialism in the Arctic, and how Inuit responded to it. They explain what “public government” means, and how the consensus system works in territorial legislatures. They explain the separate but parallel processes that led to the Nunavut Accord and the settlement of the Nunavut land claim agreement. They describe Nunavut’s economy, climate, geography and the make-up of its population.

They also provide a somewhat sanitized account of how Ottawa, the GNWT and Nunavut Tunngavik planned for the creation of Nunavut through the Nunavut Implementation Commission and the Office of the Interim Commissioner. For example, they provide some tantalizing information about how the NIC came up with what’s turned out to be one of the Nunavut government’s biggest headaches — a plan to decentralize government jobs and functions throughout 10 communities outside the capital.

They report that this method of decentralization “won out to the surprise and disappointment of those who had believed that popular support for the principle of ‘not recreating Yellowknife’ … would result in entire departments being located outside the capital … .”

Now that Iqaluit, having been successfully re-colonized by Nunavut’s social and political elite, is well on its way to becoming another Yellowknife, it would be useful to know how that happened. Unfortunately, Hicks and White just don’t tell us enough about it.

But their essay gets better when they confront Nunavut’s social and economic realities, and to their credit, they make no attempt to prettify the situation. “To an outside observer it must seem like there is no end to the depressing statistics … ,” they write, referring to Nunavut’s shocking rates of social dysfunction and disease.

They point out that at least 34 Nunavummiut killed themselves in the first 16 months of Nunavut’s existence, and that 12 of those were residents of Nunavut’s capital. “Looking to the future, it is possible to be both optimistic and alarmed for the Inuit of Nunavut — optimistic about the opportunities … yet alarmed about the future of Nunavut itself,” they say in their concluding section.

In the essay that follows, “Inuit and Nunavut: Renewing the New World,” Peter Jull, a veteran Inuit-organization official who now teaches in Australia, reminds us of the discriminatory treatment that Inuit endured at the hands of Canadian government officials well into the 1970s. He also reminds readers that, “For Inuit, Nunavut is an astonishing achievement.”

But he warns that Nunavut must not re-impose the social inequalities that led to its creation: “Nunavut is an Inuit response to inequality, as well as a positive assertion of territorial rights. Nunavut’s ideals and legitimacy demand that it not fall prey to social division itself.”

Unfortunately, much of the text in this book is riddled with typographical errors and stylistic inconsistencies, giving it the look and feel of a home-made vanity press publication. The essays at the back of the book vary so much in quality and tone, they appear to have been thrown in at the last minute to fill out the book.

Nunavut: Inuit regain control of their lands and their lives is edited by Jens Dahl, Jack Hicks and Peter Jull and published by the International Workgroup for Indigenous Affairs.