1
Iron Ore and Well-Being: Inuit Engagements with Mining
Katherine Sinclair
Department of Anthropology
McGill University, Montreal
April 2017
A thesis submitted to McGill University in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
© Katherine Sinclair 2017
2
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table of Figures ...... 4
Abstract ...... 5
...... 7
Acknowledgements ...... 9
Chapter One: Working, North and South ...... 13
Neoliberalism ...... 17
The Mine ...... 22
Dissertation Overview ...... 27
Chapter Two: The History of Mining in Nunavut ...... 37
Introduction ...... 37
Historical Overview ...... 39
A Sequence of Important Mining Operations in Nunavut/NWT ...... 46
Resource Extraction and the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement ...... 55
Culture and Other Continuing Trends ...... 61
Chapter Three: Nanisivik, the State, and the Market ...... 74
The History of Nanisivik ...... 75
The Legacy of Nanisivik ...... 84
The State and the Market ...... 90
The Indigenization of Modernity ...... 100
Chapter Four: Training ...... 106
Capacity Building and the Company as a Partner ...... 108
The Canadian Institute of Mining Convention ...... 117 3
Training at and by Baffinland ...... 122
Capacity Building in the Community ...... 123
Growing People at the Mine Site ...... 128
Improving the North ...... 130
Skills and Traits ...... 137
Chapter Five: Home ...... 139
Space and Place ...... 144
Existing and New Kinship ...... 151
Kinship and Family Livelihood Traditions ...... 158
Land and the Mine Site/Land as Home ...... 161
Multiple Homes ...... 168
Chapter Six: Living Well and Well-Being ...... 172
Territoriality ...... 176
Life Projects ...... 182
The Mine, Well-Being, and Vertical Threads ...... 185
The Value of Work ...... 187
Skills and Engagement at the Mine Site ...... 191
Working at the Mine and Relationships ...... 195
It’s Not All Well-Being ...... 197
Friction ...... 200
Conclusion: Inversing Neoliberalism ...... 204
References ...... 215
4
TABLE OF FIGURES
Map of the North Baffin Region (Nunatsiaq News 2012) ...... 23
...... 35
Nullujaat at the Mary River Project (author’s own) ...... 36
Map of Past and Present Mines in NWT and Yukon (Gibson 1978) ...... 47
Legend for Map of Past and Present Mines in NWT and Yukon (Gibson 1978) ...... 48
Letter from Arctic Bay (Gibson 1978) ...... 79-80
5
ABSTRACT
This dissertation explores the intersection of governmental and extractive industry expectations of Inuit employment in mining with Inuit self-reported experiences of the mining industry. It is based on approximately fifteen months of fieldwork in Igloolik,
Nunavut (primary field site); the Mary River Project (iron ore mine) in the North Baffin region; and at a number of mining consultations, open meetings, conferences, and events in several other Nunavut and southern Canada locations. In trying to understand Inuit engagement with employment in the mining industry and with mining policy, I ask the following questions: what are the implications for development if the material and discursive conditions for self-governance are met (such as in Nunavut)? How are the interactions of global mining processes with local communities in Nunavut conditioned by the history of mining in Nunavut? How could living well, with a focus on land-based livelihoods, be maintained when faced with an industry that notoriously destroys land? I suggest that various federal and Territorial governments as well as companies in the mining industry have long taken a certain understanding of Inuit employees: Inuit cultural traits that are thought to conform to neoliberal capitalism are pointed to as leading to successful employment in the mining industry, whereas cultural traits that are considered to be contrary to neoliberal capitalism are classified as employment failures. By contrast,
Inuit who spoke to me during my fieldwork indicated that the successful employment – where work in the mining industry best contributes to well-being as defined by Inuit employees – happens where Inuit culture diverges from neoliberal capitalist expectations.
This position has implications for governmental and industry-promoted policies and training strategies that try to support Inuit benefits from the Mary River Project. More 6 broadly, it suggests that the way Inuit employees are inversing neoliberal logic at the mine site is an important point of consideration in an increasingly neoliberal global economic environment. As such, this work seeks to contribute to analyses within the anthropology of development around questions of neoliberal subject creation, the strategic use of culture, and place-based notions of living well.
7
RÉSUMÉ
Cette thèse examine comment les attentes des gouvernements et des industries extractives par rapport à l'emploi des Inuit dans l'industrie minière se comparent aux perspectives des
Inuit sur leurs expériences de cette industrie. Cette thèse se base sur une recherche de terrain d’environ quinze mois à Igloolik, Nunavut (terrain principal) et sur le site du projet minier de Mary River (minerai de fer), au nord de l’île de Baffin. Elle repose
également sur la participation à plusieurs consultations minières, réunions publiques, conférences et événements dans plusieurs autres régions du Nunavut et du sud du Canada.
Dans le but de mieux comprendre l’implication inuit dans l'industrie minière et dans les politiques minières, je pose les questions suivantes: si les conditions matérielles et discursives nécessaires à l'autogestion sont respectées (comme au Nunavut), quelles en sont les répercussions en matière de développement? Comment les interactions entre les fonctionnements de l’industrie minière à l’échelle internationale et les communautés locales du Nunavut sont-elles conditionnées par l'histoire de l'exploitation minière au
Nunavut? Comment une manière de bien vivre, mettant l'accent sur les moyens de subsistance fondés sur la terre, peut être maintenue face à une industrie réputée pour sa destruction du territoire? Je suggère que plusieurs instances gouvernementales fédérales et territoriales ainsi que des entreprises faisant partie de l'industrie minière ont depuis longtemps adopté une compréhension particulière des employés inuit: les traits culturels inuit qui apparaissent plus conformes au capitalisme néolibéral sont considérés comme menant à une intégration à l’emploi réussie dans l'industrie minière, tandis que les traits culturels considérés comme contraires au capitalisme néolibéral sont catégorisés comme des facteurs d’échecs en emploi. En revanche, les Inuit qui ont échangé avec moi au 8 cours de cette recherche ont indiqué que les expériences d’emploi réussies – celles où le travail dans l'industrie minière contribue le mieux au bien-être, tel que défini par les employés inuit - se produisent plutôt lorsque la culture inuit diverge des attentes capitalistes néolibérales. Cette position a des répercussions sur les politiques publiques et les stratégies de formation qui sont promues par le gouvernement et l’industrie pour faire en sorte que les Inuit bénéficient du projet Mary River. De façon plus générale, la manière dont les employés inuit sur ce site minier inversent la logique néolibérale est un point important à prendre en considération dans un contexte économique mondial de plus en plus néolibéral. En tant que tel, cette thèse cherche à contribuer aux études, au sein de l'anthropologie du développement, qui se penchent sur des questions liées à la création d’un sujet néolibéral, à l'utilisation stratégique de la culture et aux notions de bien vivre rattachées à des lieux spécifiques.
9
ACKNOWLEGEMENTS
This dissertation would have been impossible without the help and support of so many people. Thanks first to my supervisor Colin Scott, who has supported me in my academic endeavors; created opportunities for me; brainstormed creative solutions; and enormously improved my thinking and my writing over the past five years. George
Wenzel likewise has been instrumental to my development as a scholar. He deserves thanks for not only the extensive feedback on my work he has given over the years, but the hours spent encouraging me to think about Canada’s North in new ways, always having a useful reference at hand, and providing invaluable fieldwork and scholarship advice. Thanks go to Ron Niezen for guiding my thinking about communication media, institutions, and theory that has been instrumental in my understanding of policy and the complex of institutional structures that make up Nunavut historically and today. And finally, thank you to Ismael Vaccaro. Although a late addition to my committee, Ismael guided me extensively through my understanding of space and place, how to set up a dissertation, and how to prepare for what comes after.
Equal to my committee in importance for this dissertation is everyone in Igloolik who so graciously and with infinite kindness and patience welcomed me into their communities, their homes, their workplaces, and their lives. Any small piece of understanding or insight about the Mary River Project is thanks to the few interlocutors who wanted to be recognized by name, and the many who did not. By speaking with me in interviews, in town, and allowing me to job shadow them at the mine site, these employees, former employees, family members of employees, and interested community members were beyond generous with their time and themselves. An enormous thank you 10 to Rosanne Kangok, Josiah Kadlutsiak, Joan Iyerak, Jack Haulli, Josh Sattuqsi, Zach
Kunuk, Jon Frantz, Johnny Qumangati, Theo Ikummaq, Terry Uyarak, and those who would prefer to remain anonymous but who are no less important.
In addition to the above names, individuals within QIA and IsumaTV were also instrumental in informing my thinking about mining in Nunavut, and showed me ways in which mining can provide real benefits. Baffinland Iron Mines opened their doors to me to job shadow Inuit employees at the mine site. This openness is unique among the mining industry, and without this opportunity this dissertation would have been a very different – and less complete – work. Greg Missal and Beatrix Weiner in particular were instrumental in facilitating my time at the mine site. Finally, individuals at the Nunavut
Research Institute were key to enabling my time in Igloolik, both in terms of research approval and making sure I had a roof over my head. Thank you to Mary Ellen Thomas,
Mosha Cote, Rick Armstrong, and Jamal Shirley.
This study was made possible thanks to the funding from several sources: Le
Fonds de Recherche du Québec - Société et Culture (FRQSC) Doctoral Scholarship, The
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Doctoral Award, The
Bronfman and Paterson Top Up Award, The Northern Scientific Training Program Grant,
The Wolfe Graduate Fellowship, and the McGill Graduate Excellence Fellowship.
Without the help of several amazing people in Igloolik my time there would have been sad, dark, and lonely. Thanks first must go to Ruby Irngaut, the NRI research coordinator in Igloolik when I first arrived. Ruby met me coming off the plane for the first time, met me with a smile and a conversation every time after that, and has sadly since passed away. 11
Thank you to Jessica Rose Ikummaq, Rhoda Angutimarik, Sally Qaunaq, Jo-Anne
Idlout, Jesse Oolateeta, Benedicte Uttak, Levy Uttak, Peter Autut, and Victoria Perron for the friendship, fun, hockey games, workout sessions, and hours spent together. Thanks to
Sylvie LeBlanc and Rachel Qitsualik for the constant intellectual stimulations and challenges, conversations about life in the North, and the home cooked dinners. Thank you to Richard and Lee Turbide, Morgan Anderson, Mel Wilson, and John Johnson for opening their homes, the many laughs, and the many board games. From Lauren Towne and Bernardete Miranda I learned about life in Igloolik and the Nunavut educational system – thank you. Huge thanks to Jon Frantz, Zach Kunuk, and Carol Kunnuk at
IsumaTV for letting me hang around, and teaching me all things film and many things mining. And finally, the support of Guillaume Szor, Jo-Annie Charbonneau, and Gillian
Bigsby Frantz was much appreciated.
My PhD cohort and colleagues have been key to so many areas of progression and learning, starting from our first theory class. This long list includes but is not limited to
Phil Messier, Catherine Larouche, Josh Friesen, Peter Rudiak-Gould, Darcie DeAngelo,
Jennie Glassco, Julia Bailey, Gillian Chilibeck, Raad Fadaak, Kristin Flemons, Julianne
Yip, Brodie Noga, Katherine Scott, Katie Strand, P.A. Paquet, Daniel Ruiz-Serna, Sarah
Moritz, Qiuyu Jiang, Ian Kalman, Anne-Elise Keen, Camilo Gomez, and Evans Kirigia.
Additional mention goes to the writing group to which I belonged: Darcie DeAngelo,
Catherine Larouche, Qiuyu Jiang, Katie Strand, Jennie Glassco, Nicole D’souza, and
Megha Sedev. This group provided me with motivation, feedback, and a space to discuss any and all ideas. Finally, a huge thanks to those friends outside of McGill who were 12 unwavering in their support, their intellectual contributions, and their socializing: Olya
Zarapina, Michael Pedruski, Sarah Sandham, and Kate Jongbloed.
Huge thanks goes to Sarah Sandham for her copyediting work with bibliography software and formatting, and to Catherine Larouche for her very short-notice editing and translation of the dissertation abstract from English to French.
To properly recognize the contributions of everyone who contributed to this work would be impossible, and as such these acknowledgments are incomplete. Any errors in these acknowledgments, as well as throughout the dissertation, are entirely my own.
Finally, it would have been impossible to complete this dissertation without the unwavering support of my family: Suzan Shaske, Bob Sinclair, Laura Sinclair, and Ed and Lucy Shaske. Their encouragement started at the idea of application and extended all the way through to 11th hour proofreading for typos. And finally, Asad Kiyani – legal scholar, cheeseburger lover, MarioKart pro, and partner – has been at the heart of the process. Thank you for challenging my thinking, for cooking me dinner, for making me happy, and for reminding me that there’s more to life than writing.
13
CHAPTER ONE: WORKING, NORTH AND SOUTH
It’s an early afternoon in March 2015 and I’m sitting in the cabin of a very small plane flying between Igloolik and the Mary River Project mine site, an open pit iron ore mine located in the North Baffin region of Nunavut. I am tagging along with the regular mine employees – heavy equipment operators, kitchen staff, housekeeping staff, janitorial staff, and administrative staff - who are returning to work after their two weeks off.
Despite the wide range of careers, there are less than a dozen of us in the plane. We are all wearing earplugs against the very loud engine, making it impossible to talk, and yet some people sleep. My friend turns around, flashes me a smile, takes a selfie of the two of us. She points out the window as we fly over Igloolik and we admire the crescent- shaped community slung around the bay. The landscape, covered in snow and ice, is shades and shadows of white. I will follow her and the other employees in this plane during my upcoming two weeks at the mine site, sometimes alternating between day and night shifts, and we will return together on this same plane in two weeks, exhausted but happy to be returning to the hamlet we are now leaving behind.
September 2012, two and a half years earlier, I work in a sunny graduate student office at McGill University. Two of the four walls are windows, and my desk faces out, overlooking a leafy tree and an alley. I’m good about keeping regular nine-to-five hours, and at least one of my colleagues, Phil, is always in the office. Neither of us yet know that over the coming years he will become my sounding board, editor, brainstorming partner, application proof reader, and friend. Sitting in this office I read for the first time a news article on Nunatsiaq News, the northern newspaper, about Baffinland Iron Mine’s
(BIM) Mary River Project. Iron ore is doing very well on the international mineral 14 market, with China’s focus on infrastructure development driving prices up. This, combined with the fact that this deposit has some of the purest iron ore remaining in the world, provides incentive for the internationally-based company to develop a mine in the
North Qikiqtaaluk (or Baffin) region. Because the ore body is on Inuit Owned Lands
(IOLs), the company must sign an Inuit Impact Benefit Agreement (IIBA) with the
Qikiqtani Inuit Organization (QIA), the regional Inuit organization for the area on which in the mine is located. BIM promises jobs to Inuit. BIM promises royalties to the territorial and regional Inuit organizations. BIM promises a bright future for the economy of Nunavut.
I’m hooked.
These two snapshots together capture some of the questions and themes that would come to occupy my mind during my PhD work. What are the implications for development if the material and discursive conditions for self-governance are met (such as in Nunavut)? Drawing on interest in anthropology about mining, global trends, and local realities (Jorgensen 2006; Walsh 2010; Golub 2014; Kirsch 2014), what are the outcomes of the intersection of global mining processes with communities in Nunavut?
How are the outcomes and interactions conditioned by the history of mining in Nunavut?
What are the implications of governmental and Inuit bureaucracies mining policies for the lived everyday experiences of Inuit? More broadly speaking, I was curious about the nature of work and labour. In what ways, overt and inferential, was the work I was doing
– my daytime office job in southern Canada – different from working at a mine site at latitude 71N? What is the nature of coworkers or colleagues in shaping experiences of work? And finally, perhaps the most pressing question of all: how would ‘living well’ 15
(Blaser 2004) be maintained for communities that placed importance on land-based livelihoods when faced with an industry that notoriously destroys land?
Armed with these questions and a winter jacket that was nowhere near warm enough, I set off for Igloolik, Nunavut. Igloolik is an island community of about 2,000 people located in the North Qikiqtaaluk region, about 400 kilometers south of the mine site. As such, it is one of the five North Baffin communities deemed to be most affected by the mine and privy to certain special privileges and hiring priorities, as determined by the IIBA. Igloolik is sometimes called the cultural capital of Nunavut due to its high prevalence of native Inuktitut speakers (about 98% speak it as their mother tongue), the wide-spread sewing, hunting, and harvesting practices, and of course as being the home base of Nunavut Independent Television/Kinguliit, more widely known by its original name Isuma Productions. It was here that I hoped to speak to people about their experiences working at the mine site. As time went by, I became increasingly interested in not only these lived experiences but also federal and territorial policies around mining in Nunavut, trends in Nunavut bureaucracy, and the motivations of the mining company.
These inquiries would ultimately take me not only into different homes, businesses, and public spaces in and around Igloolik but also to Iqaluit (Nunavut’s capital), Pond Inlet
(the community closest to the mine site), the Mary River Project (the mine site itself), and
Montreal, Quebec.
A questioning of these intersections has resulted in this dissertation, an exploration of governmental and industry expectations of Inuit employment in the mining industry and Inuit experiences of employment in the mining industry. The Government of
Nunavut (GN), the federal government, and the northern mining industry have long cited 16
Inuit culture as the source of Inuit success or failure in employment in the mining industry. More specifically, Inuit cultural traits that are thought to support neoliberal capitalism are pointed to as examples of successful employment, whereas cultural traits that are considered to be contrary to neoliberal capitalism are classified as employment failures. Governmental policies and industry strategies for increasing and maintaining
Inuit employment historically were based on this premise, and continue to be based on this premise today, be it in training, life at the mine site, or life in employees’ home communities. By contrast, during my fieldwork Inuit in Igloolik and other North Baffin communities shared with me a different type of relationship between employment in the mining industry and some aspects of Inuit culture.
My argument in this dissertation centers on the idea of Inuit successes in employment in the mining industry. Governmental framing of Inuit engagement with mining in terms of “success” and “failure” mentioned above continues today. These explanations, along with the presumed examples of success and failure themselves, have guided government relations with industry, and have been drawn upon when developing policies and strategies to facilitate Inuit employment in the extractive industry. However, these notions have typically been defined by the government itself for its own uses, and have tended to fall into dominant political and economic understandings. Success is illustrated in the instances where Inuit seem to conform to neoliberal capital actions, and failure is manifested where Inuit employees act otherwise. These understandings of success and failure have not always corresponded to Inuit priorities for well-being in terms of work in the mining industry: both what might happen at the mine site and how the money or other benefits from mining may be used in home communities. Therefore, 17 the importance of explaining successes and failures comes in part from how these explanations have been used to guide political and economic action, and how, despite possible best efforts by government, has not always placed the perspectives of Inuit as central to its understandings of success and failure.
Unlike the understandings of success and failure that have been held historically by Territorial and federal governments, success in this dissertation refers to how engagement with mining contributes to well-being as defined by Inuit at the mine site and in home communities. This type of well-being is not one that necessarily holds wage employment as the more important factor in living well, but rather draws on different aspects of Inuit culture to promote well-being. I therefore argue that Inuit successes in employment in the mining industry are not a question of where Inuit culture intersects with neoliberal capitalism, but rather where it diverges. Instances where Inuit work in the mining industry, interact with coworkers at the mine site, and interact with family members at home under different, non-neoliberal assumptions, are some of the places where well-being is manifested. Taking this understanding as a starting point means that the mining industry can be used as a source to support Inuit well-being in Nunavut today when approached with Inuit-driven priorities and control.
Neoliberalism
The question of neoliberalism is central to this discussion. Different types of global capitalism have long been discussed in anthropology (some of which are addressed in this dissertation), and the form of capitalism that exists in Canadian governmental priorities about resource extraction is largely (but not exclusively) one grounded in neoliberal assumptions. Neoliberalism has also been characterized in a large variety of 18 ways, ranging from neoliberalism in development (Ferguson and Gupta 2002) to a focus on shifting economics (Duménil and Lévy 2011). The understanding that I elaborate in this dissertation is one stemming from the work of Wendy Brown (2015) and Michel
Foucault (1979). While Brown focuses on the effects of neoliberalism on democracy, her understanding of neoliberalism as a normative reason is particularly useful for understanding what is happening in terms of the broader context in which the Mary River
Project operates. Foucault, by contrast, provides an outline of the effects of neoliberalism on the individual subject, particularly in terms of employment, offering a way forward to help understand how these forces act on individual Inuit employees at the Mary River
Project.
Brown’s conceptualization of neoliberalism, which is also influenced by Foucault, focuses on the expansion of market values as a governing rationality to areas of life that were previously considered to be non-economic spheres. These areas include not only democracy (the main focus of her book), but also ‘every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves’ (2015, 10). The human individual then acts with market rationality not only when engaged in work for wages, but also continues to be driven by the same logic outside of the strictly economic areas of life. According to Brown, the same phenomenon happens equally to states and governments: even policies that appear to be based on goals of social welfare will be, and indeed need to be, justified by references to economic efficiencies and market values. She therefore defines neoliberalism as ‘a distinctive form of reason, of the production of subjects, a “conduct of conduct”, and a scheme of valuation… an order of normative reason that, when it becomes ascendant, takes shape as a governing rationality extending a specific 19 formulation of economic values, practices, and metrics to everyday domains of human life’ (ibid., 21; 30).
The implication for the individual and the state of this particular form of reason is that both are expected to behave in such a way that maximizes economic value in the present and enhances their value in the future, with a focus on entrepreneurship, investment, and self-improvement. For the state, this results in a changing of the political character of the core democratic elements into economic ones; for the individual, a striving to enhance their own value (monetary and nonmonetary) across all aspects of one’s life, especially through competition. The failure of the individual to act in such a way may result in impoverishment, a lack of approval for credit, a loss of self-esteem, and an inability to secure economic survival, at the extreme. However, neoliberalism does not necessarily mean a direct monetization of these different areas. Rather, it expands the model and logic of the market to all domains and activities including those that do not involve money. For example, this expansion does not mean literally incorporating money into personal or family relations, but rather to be guided by the market rationality in these relationships. This expansion, as mentioned above, changes humans to market actors in all domains including previously non-market domains.
The neoliberal rationality that makes the human being into human capital is particularly important today in terms of the human as investment capital, according to
Brown, rather than solely entrepreneurial capital, as outlined by Foucault – both of whom relate the idea of human capital to increasing one's rating or value (ibid., 32). Brown argues that this investment capital becomes individuals’ most important attribute.
Investment capital refers to individuals’ abilities to gain capital (in its relevant form) not 20 only now but also in the future, in an ever-increasing fashion. Increasing one’s investment capital could be done, for example, through training. One implication of the human as investment capital for Brown is that individuals and groups become human capital not just for themselves but also for the state and industry, who are likewise concerned about their own competitive positioning (ibid., 37). The state and industry will therefore encourage humans to increase their investment capital as self. However, because states now have an economic focus, they will try to reduce their costs of making and developing human capital as much as possible, putting that cost on the individual or private sector, which Brown argues increases inequalities between individuals and groups
(ibid., 42). The ultimate potential end result of this for Brown is that everything about being human becomes consumed under economic reasons: humans lose all drives except the economic drive, and democracy crumbles (ibid., 44).
Foucault’s theorization of neoliberalism has much overlap with Brown (in part because Brown draws on Foucault for her conceptualization), but Foucault’s focus on human capital provides an additional pathway into understanding Inuit engagement with the Mary River Project. Neoliberalism for Foucault is not only a normative order but also a governing rationality, a new art of governing by the state that emerges in response to the economization of the individual, what Foucault, in The Birth of Biopolitics (1979) calls homo oeconomicus. Part of what the state does as part of this governing rationality is encourage individuals to increase their ability to have and make capital, which
Foucault defines as 'everything that in one way or another can be a source of future income' (1979, 224). Capital is a type of potential for income, one that is cultivated by and within the individual, and as such is intrinsically tied to the individual: a subject’s 21 capital cannot be separated from the subject him/herself. Wages, for example, are the income of a capital. The capital of that wage is labour, 'the set of all those physical and psychological factors which make someone able to earn this or that wage, so that, seen from the side of the worker, labour is not a commodity reduced by abstraction to labour power and the time [during] which it is used' (ibid.). Labour is therefore a capital in that it is an ability or skill that produces an income and is inseparable from the person who possesses it. According to Foucault it is not only their acquired skills, but also those they are born with. Human capital therefore has both a side that is gained through training, and a side that is unique to the subject.
Homo oeconomicus for Foucault is this individual who is also human capital. As in Brown’s conceptualization, Foucault’s homo oeconomicus acts with market rationality in all areas of life, without necessarily having direct monetization in all areas. The individual is an entrepreneur of him/herself, someone who is his/her own capital and producer (ibid., 226). Homo oeconomicus aims to always improve his/her own capital in order to be more competitive. Foucault’s governmentality in this context changes the human entrepreneur by changing his/her environment, with a goal of increasing human capital and, for the purposes of this dissertation, fitting people into the workplace.
Managers try to transform employees into self-entrepreneurs, 'individuals that self- regulate, self-direct and are continuously in a process of redefining their competencies and of learning, in order to get the human capital considered necessary for the ever changing production conditions’ (Cotoi 2011, 116). This is therefore not just a question of workers adapting to different industry cultures and schedules but rather changing and 22 self-managing themselves in order to be competitive entrepreneurs for the state and industry.
The Mine
The Mary River Project is arguably one manifestation of neoliberal capitalism in
Nunavut today. It is an open pit iron ore mine owned and operated by Baffinland Iron
Mines (BIM), which is jointly owned by ArcelorMittal (based in Luxembourg) and Iron
Ore Holdings (an investment conglomerate out of Houston, USA). At about 65% purity, the iron ore at the Mary River Project is believed to be among the purest in the world, making extraction in this area a potentially attractive venture. As a result of the high quality of the ore there is minimal on-site processing, which has both environmental and job creation implications. The company was first granted its project certificate in
December 2012, with construction of the mine site starting in late 2013, and an Inuit
Impact Benefit Agreement (IIBA) reached in September 2013 between the Qikiqtani
Inuit Association (QIA) and BIM.1 BIM initially planned to build a railway between the mine site and Steensby Inlet to ship eighteen million tonnes of iron ore annually.
However, as a result of the subsequent global mineral market crash (with iron ore at $155
US per tonne in 2013 dropping to $55 US per tonne in 2016) the company scaled back its initial plan to an Early Revenue Phase plan, putting the railway on hold and building a tote road instead to nearby Milne Inlet, with plans to ship 4.2 million tonnes during the ice free season. More recently, BIM has now proposed to amend its project further to replace the tote road with a railway, add icebreakers, and ship twelve million tonnes per
Because the Mary River Project is mostly located on Inuit Owned Land (IOL), BIM underwent a long process of negotiation with the QIA branch of Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. (NTI), as the mine is located in the Qikiqtani region of Nunavut (the Baffin region). This process, spanning ten years, was undertaken with the involvement of many interested parties sitting on the Nunavut Impact Review Board (NIRB), including QIA, the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs, and the Government of Nunavut. 23 year out of Milne Inlet. This plan has sparked some concern among the five North Baffin communities, particularly Pond Inlet, as this route will potentially cut off Inuit access to important hunting, harvesting, and recreational land, as well as reduce their ability to travel on the sea ice out of their community.
Map of the North Baffin Region2
The Mary River Project employs a combination of people both from Nunavut and outside Nunavut, either as permanent Baffinland employees or as contractors. Fly-in/fly- out employment at the Mary River Project represents a change from recent employment opportunities in the five North Baffin communities, but draws on a regional history of employment at the Nanisivik and Roche Bay mine sites. This fly-in/fly-out employment
Image adapted from Nunatsiaq News, December 3, 2012. 24 works on a two weeks in-two weeks out rotation schedule, with hiring priority going first to Inuit from the five North Baffin communities; secondly to Inuit from the Baffin region more broadly; thirdly to Inuit from Nunavut; then to anyone from Nunavut; and finally, anyone from outside of Nunavut. However, despite these stated hiring priorities, Inuit employment remains relatively low, reaching only 21% in 2014 and 17% in 2015.
In addition to these hiring priorities, the IIBA outlines measures that must be taken to help ensure adequate Inuit education for employment in the mine. These types of
IIBA provisions are common, yet meeting labour requirement agreements continues to be a problem for many reasons. Even when Inuit are successful at securing employment at the mine site, they are not always interested in returning long-term for many different reasons ranging from family, alternative livelihood strategies, workplace insensitivity and cultural conflicts, dislike of the job, lack of opportunities to advance, changes in interest, other work opportunities, and more. Importantly, dislocation from home and community can be a barrier for fly-in/fly-out labour for community members, especially when workplaces are not supportive of the implications of working at a distance from home communities. Therefore, despite the IIBA, which is intended to remove the barriers to
Inuit employment at the Mary River Project, there are many factors that go into the decision to take up distant employment that are unrelated to hiring priorities or education levels. It is therefore necessary to examine the decision making process people use to decide whether or not to leave their home communities for work, and to understand the factors that go into their decision. It is also necessary to have open channels of communication among Baffinland, QIA, and communities in order to have continued 25 consent for the project from Inuit, as well as to have ongoing informing capacity between all groups.
One of the five North Baffin communities deemed to be most affected by the
Mary River Project, and therefore subject to hiring priority, is Igloolik. While there is much interest in Igloolik for working at the mine site, the number of people from the community hired at the mine remained low during the course of my fieldwork, peaking at around thirty and declining as time went on. These employees were split between contract positions and permanent BIM positions, with most people working in heavy equipment operation, housekeeping, janitorial, kitchen, and two in administration.
However, the total number of Inuit from Igloolik who had at some point worked at the mine was much higher, over 100 by the first June of my fieldwork (2014), which was the only chance I had to check the former employee numbers. There was therefore a double challenge to employment at the mine site in Igloolik: receiving a job, and then staying in it.
Reasons for leaving jobs at the mine site range from personal to professional.
Some employees were let go due to contract renegotiations, the slow-down of the global iron ore market, or other workplace reasons. However, most chose to leave rather than being let go. One of the most common reasons for leaving employment at the mine site was the difficulty of being away from home for two weeks at a time. This distance and time from home sometimes put stress on family relationships, with employees and partners, parents, and children left at home missing the other. Questions of jealously, whether founded or unfounded, sometimes also came up, with concern that camp life would lead to new relationships. This concern would sometimes result in mine employees 26 quitting their job and returning full-time to life in town in order to alleviate the pressure on their relationships. Others found that over time they did not enjoy the work at the mine site or the long hours, or even the long hours at home without any work on their weeks off, sometimes resulting in boredom. It is into this multifaceted environment that people struggled to both enter and stay in the mine workforce.
Aside from employees of the mine, people in Igloolik had mixed responses to the
Mary River Project. The mine initially planned to ship out of a port closer to Igloolik
(Steensby Inlet, rather than Milne Inlet by Pond Inlet), and this was a cause for concern for many Iglulingmiut (people from Igloolik). The initial proposed shipping route would have been through walrus calving grounds and through an area where some older people in Igloolik had grown up on the land. This plan also involved a five billion dollar railway from the mine site to the port site, potentially interrupting caribou migration and disturbing an inuksuit trail. This trail, composed of almost 100 inuksuit (human-made stone landmarks) was used as a navigational and directional system from Steensby Inlet to an inland lake. Importantly, it is the longest intact Inuit navigational system ever documented (LeBlanc 2011, 4). Although voiced at every community consultation, some community members felt that their concerns over land and sea degradation were not being taken seriously by BIM. With the market crash and the changed shipping route some of these concerns were assuaged, but concerns over degradation of the land and environmental contamination at the mine site itself remain among members of the community.
There are also concerns in the community over the human impacts of working at the mine site. As mentioned above, disruptions to family life is a factor that almost all 27 employees expressed to me to some degree, and time spent away from Igloolik also means missing hunting and harvesting opportunities, community events, and family events. There is also a concern, particularly among elders, that the use of drug and alcohol increases when people return from the mine site, due in part to increased income.
Some elders also say that this increased income changes family relationships, with younger people not sharing the income as much as they should and viewing themselves as more important than other non-wage earning family members.
However, many community members also support the operations of the mine.
There are few wage employment opportunities in Igloolik – the two stores, the Territorial government building, and the hamlet being the three biggest employers – and some have welcomed the mine as an opportunity for jobs. Some of these potential employees have the skills needed to work at the mine, such as heavy equipment operators license, and no chance to have this job in Igloolik due to job unavailability. Some hope that the mine will be around long enough for their children to also work jobs there when they are older.
Others believe that the mine will provide benefits through its IIBA with QIA and taxes and royalties paid to the Government of Nunavut, which they hope will trickle down into improved housing, health care, and social benefits in Igloolik. While some of the mine supporters do have environmental concerns, these concerns are outweighed by hopes of potential benefits in terms of income opportunities and community monetary benefits.
Dissertation Overview
With these theoretical and field contexts in mind, I develop my argument through five main chapters of the dissertation. These chapters all center on the questions of well- being and the mine, the intersection of neoliberal approaches from the government and 28 industry with Inuit experiences, and Inuit agency and life projects in the face of extractive policy.
The next two chapters relate to the history of mining in Nunavut and some of the transitions that Inuit political and economic identities have undergone in relation to the state and the market. In particular, these chapters draw on Karl Polanyi’s approach to the
West’s transformation to a market economy and Marshall Sahlins’ conceptualization of the indigenization of modernity. Chapter Two provides an overview of the material and discursive conditions present in the history of mining in Nunavut and the ways this history informs the current state of the industry in the North today. This history demonstrates a gradual transition from predominantly state-controlled industry, with development seen as being in the hands of the government, to primarily market- controlled industry, with development as a responsibility of industry, a key characteristic of modernity outlined by Karl Polanyi explored in Chapter Three. This history starts before the creation of Nunavut as a political entity separate from the Northwest
Territories, with resource extraction (mostly mining) starting on a large scale in Nunavut after World War II, due in part to an increased interest in strategic minerals. Through experience with a number of different mines the Government of Canada gradually refined its approach to how mining should be done in Nunavut, and who should benefit. Part of this involved an increasing emphasis on Inuit employees at the mine. Starting especially in the 1970s, labour in the mining industry starts to be framed as one of the most important ways to “develop” Canada’s North and provide employment for Inuit. It is at this point that the government and mining industry begin to draw on their idea of Inuit culture to explain successes and failures in adaptation to mining employment, a discourse 29 that persists today. Inuit employment in the mining industry is addressed again with the signing of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement (NLCA), which sets forth specific processes, rights, and responsibilities of different parties when it comes to resource extraction in Nunavut, some requirements for hiring Inuit, as well as codification of Inuit- owned lands. Chapter Two concludes with a discussion of the ongoing governmental focus on extraction as the best way to “develop” Nunavut, illustrated in part by the former federal Conservative government’s emphasis on northern resource extraction and the Government of Nunavut’s Premier’s focus on job creation in Nunavut via extractive industries. Taken together, these trends in the history of mining in Nunavut set the stage into which Baffinland Iron Mines and the Mary River Project enter, helping to shape their approach to how to operate a mine in Nunavut in the 21st century.
The third chapter delves deeper into mining in Nunavut, considering the ways that mining has historically been held in high hopes of contributing to “developing” the North, but in fact has failed in legacy building. This position is developed through an examination of one specific example, the Nanisivik mine. Nanisivik is significant because it is a major mine that operated in the same region of Nunavut as the Mary River
Project, employed many Inuit from the nearby communities (including some who now work at the Mary River Project), and closed relatively recently in 2002. This chapter starts with the history of Nanisivik and a discussion of the potential legacies, positive and negative, left in Arctic Bay after the mine closed. Based on the general history presented in the second chapter and the more specific history of the Nanisivik case study, the third chapter argues that development in Nunavut has been, and continues to be, equated with
Inuit employment, and that the state has long held the position that this employment and 30 development should come via extractive industries. The theoretical framework of Karl
Polanyi is used to consider the reasons why a focus on the extractive industry as a route to “development” has not historically been as successful as had been hoped by the
Government of Canada and the Government of Nunavut. To Polanyi’s approach I add
Marshall Sahlins’ concept of the indigenization of modernity. By arguing that Indigenous peoples may draw on the market economy to continue their own modes of existence,
Sahlins indicates that the market economy can be understood in many different ways in the local context. Importantly, Sahlins brings to the fore the notion that engagement with market economies does not automatically equate to adoption of neoliberal cultural traits.
The chapter’s conclusion suggests that these two authors together provide a framework to understand both the threats and opportunities for Inuit in Nunavut that come with the global market economy.
The following three chapters have a focus on ethnography and draw on the theoretical bodies of subject creation, place/space, and Indigenous livelihood. These chapters illustrate, in part, what has arisen in Nunavut as a result of the historical context of state and industry priorities of Inuit employment, some characteristics of Inuit employment at the mine site, and what is happening in Igloolik today as a result of the mine. Chapter Four examines training strategies used by BIM to prepare Inuit for work at the mine site. These strategies are part of a larger global mining complex, another indication of the global mineral market flowing down into the local. The training strategies of BIM have shifted from ‘capacity building’ to ‘growing people’, representing different but related attempts by the company, in partnership with the Government of
Nunavut, to make Inuit into specific type of subjects. These training approaches are seen 31 not just at BIM, but globally as well, as the crash in the mining industry has changed the ways that companies train people. These training regimes are ways that both the company, and by extension the market, try to make people into certain types of subjects. The GN and BIM work together here to make Inuit into human capital that is not only “ready to be used” by the mine, but that will self-regulate and act in the “correct” fashion outside of work as well. This best way of acting outside of work involves how Inuit should use the money gained from working at the mine as well as how they should acquire skills to work at future, yet uncreated jobs in Igloolik. Participation in training, then, becomes entrepreneurship and self-investment. This idea of governing and making of subjects is unpacked by Tania Li, who combines a Foucauldian power analysis with a Marxist capitalist analysis. Her approach is particularly useful for understanding how, through its training initiatives, the mining company positions itself as a good partner in developing the North (one of the goals of the government) via providing skills, training and income for Inuit (goals of the government and Inuit organizations), and also is perceived as responsible to its shareholders (one of the goals of the company) both because of its good reputation and because of the labour it is providing to actually do the mining. Attempts at
“using” and “improving” Inuit go hand-in-hand, with efforts to “make” people both for work and outside of work being tied closely together.
The next chapter, Chapter Five, focuses on the Mary River Project itself and discusses some of the ways Inuit speak about working the mine site and living in the mining camp. While productivity at the mine site and being a good employee are important to both BIM and to Inuit working there, the two different parties frame the mine site in different ways. While the mining company frames the mine as a remote place 32 of productivity, Inuit are framing the mine as a home place via their engagement with technology, other employees, and the land in and around the mine site. Therefore, while neoliberalism is often cited as expanding the market into the home sphere, what is happening at the Mary River Project is an inverse of this logic: the home sphere is expanding into the market space. These home experience are framed somewhat differently by two different groups of Inuit employees: BIM (full time) employees and
Qikiqtani Industry Limited (QIL) (contract) employees. Engagement with technology is the starting point for this experience among BIM heavy equipment operators (HEOs).
HEOs use the radio to stay in contact with different employees during their shift about their shared and different tasks. This radio use, and constant contact, results in a strong feeling of teamwork and being part of the same crew. This crew then becomes the employee’s family at the mine site – a type of kinship is born. Among QIL employees, there is less engagement with mining technology, but people work closely together on teams to clean rooms, work in the kitchen, etc. Inuktitut kinship terms then start to be used among these crews – for example, calling people their grandma, daughter, or brother.
In both cases, home is somewhere where kin are, and where strangers are not. This making of kinship, through technology and otherwise, transforms the mine from being only a workplace to being a home place. The second factor that works towards transforming the mine into a home place is the landscape and working outside in a truck on the land. Inuit employees stated that this engagement with the landscape is another factor that makes the mine more like home because being on the land is an activity that is done in their home communities, and the landscape is similar in some places. Finally, some Inuit at the mine site say they work there because it the same kind of work their 33 parents did. Some employees at the Mary River Project now have several generations of mining or industry related work history in their family, and working in this family line corresponds to historical Iglulingmiut ideas about family and generational work and labour. Home is then family (present), land, and work (as in line with kinship history).
The relationship between these two spheres – home and work – is explored in this chapter through reference to space and place literature.
Finally, Chapter Six moves away from what is happening at the mine site to what is happening in Igloolik as a result of the influx of wages (real and potential) from the mine. In this chapter I suggest that strategically engaging with the mine site in Igloolik is a way of maintaining an Inuit community-based ‘life project’ (Blaser 2004) and well- being. This approach recognizes that Indigenous communities are not necessarily striving to return to a pre-contact ideal, but rather are striving for ‘political autonomy, to be in charge of their lives, which [draw] on a long history of value related to ideas of personal autonomy and authority, with their basis in land ownership’ (Myers and Petersen 2016,
18). The first way that engaging with the mine was talked about as a potential source of well-being was with an emphasis on the value of work, either working at the mine or working on the land, and an emphasis on the importance of not receiving income support.
A direct comparison between what is framed as “traditional culture”, self-reliance, and working at the mine site is made via the link of bringing self-esteem to the individual workers, and the potential that working at the mine has as a way of regaining self-esteem through work. The second way that engaging with the mine was talked about as a potential source of well-being was with an emphasis on the value of being meaningfully engaged through using skills and avoiding boredom. The Inuit value of pilimmaksarniq 34 means the concept of skills and knowledge acquisition and improving skills through practice and is opposed to the idea of boredom, representing a lack of meaningful engagement. Finally, the third way that engaging with the mine was talked about as a potential source of well-being was with the value of reinforcing social relationships through either working together or sharing the wages earned from working at the mine.
Engagement with the mine is being used as a way to promote well-being both through working relationally with others and as a way to reinforce social relations through sharing wages. Therefore, well-being here is able to strategically draw on engagement with employment at the mine site that manifests the ability of Inuit to use the mine as is important to them, rather than have the mine unilaterally dictate the outcomes. This may be considered part of an Inuit life project, as per Mario Blaser (2004), that draws on development projects to use the aspects that further Indigenous agendas of well-being without necessarily subscribing to the entirety of the global development agenda.
This dissertation therefore takes up a question about structure. What happens when people are living at the intersection of two different livelihood and subject positions
– Inuit livelihood priorities and neoliberal ones? It wonders about the possibility of the state and the market both separating and intertwining in new ways, and the implications this has for Inuit working at their meeting point. It considers the consequences of extractive history in Nunavut for what is happening at the level of the employee in current mining operations. Finally, taking from Myers and Peterson’s (2016) discussion about the Australian government’s push to promote gardens and Australian Indigenous peoples’ own livelihood priorities, this dissertation is also a reflection on the differences between ‘Indigenous aspirations for autonomy and governmental/mission concerns for 35 learning to labor as a basis for “self-sufficiency”’ (6): the different life and livelihood priorities that a people have for themselves and those that the state and industry have for them.
Igloolik, Nunavut3
3 Photograph author’s own 36
Nullujaat at the Mary River Project4
4 Photograph author’s own 37
CHAPTER TWO: THE HISTORY OF MINING IN NUNAVUT
Introduction
The application, approval process, and operations of the Mary River Project, operating in the Qikiqtaaluk region today, have their roots in a long history of mining in the former Northwest Territories and contemporary Nunavut; this chapter provides an overview of the material and discursive conditions present in this history and that configure mining today. Historically speaking, the story of mining in Nunavut is much older than the creation of Nunavut as a land claim territory or as a separate political territory, with small-scale explorations beginning in the early 1900s. Resource extraction only started on a large scale after World War II, in the portion of the Northwest
Territories that would later become Nunavut, and at this time it was more of a state- driven project than a market-driven one. This gradual transition from predominantly state-controlled industry, with development seen as being in the hands of the government, to primarily market-controlled industry, with development as a responsibility of industry, is a key characteristic of modernity outlined by Karl Polanyi and will be explored in greater depth in the next chapter.
A new era of resource extraction was then brought in with the signing of the
Nunavut Land Claim Agreement (NLCA) in 1993. This contemporary land claim agreement, or modern treaty, represents a type of governance that was not imagined by
Polanyi. As such the NLCA adds a layer of complexity to understanding mining in
Nunavut that can be introduced by Polanyi’s model, but ultimately goes beyond it. The creation of the NLCA codified the ways in which extraction must be done in Nunavut, who has rights to what lands, and who benefits. The NLCA also outlines the approval 38 process a company must go through before it is allowed to start developing a mine. This new approval process instituted by the NLCA represents an attempt to move away from either state or market control and instead to place more decision making power in the hands of Inuit to control what mines operate in Nunavut and how. The framework, signing, and implementation of the NLCA and subsequent IIBAs illustrate Marshall
Sahlins’ notion of the indigenization of modernity (developed in the next chapter), in which Indigenous communities and individuals use dominant capitalist economics and state systems to bolster their own ways of life.
Underlying these developments of mining in Nunavut are the discursive conditions that drove the specific policies and strategies for developing northern
Canada’s extractive industry. Firstly, shifting understandings of the relationship between, and the responsibilities of, the state and the market have resulted in variable levels of government involvement in the mining industry. Secondly, the government and mining industry have drawn on their idea of Inuit culture to explain successes and failures in adaptation to mining employment, a discourse that persists today. Finally, a governmental focus on extraction as the best way to “develop” Nunavut endures, illustrated by successive federal governments’ emphasis on northern resource extraction and the current
Government of Nunavut’s Premier’s focus on job creation in Nunavut via extractive industries. Taken together, these trends in the history of mining in Nunavut set the stage for Baffinland Iron Mines and the Mary River Project, helping to shape its approach to how to operate a mine in Nunavut in the 21st century. 39
Historical Overview
The idea of the Canadian Arctic as a resource frontier has a long history and continues to inform political ideas and plans for northern resource extraction and economic development (Nuttall 2010). Nuttall suggests that Canada has historically approached the idea of a frontier as a space for immigration and settlement, understanding it as a symbolic representation of ‘limitless opportunity’ (ibid., 31). This understanding continues today with the growing need for subsurface energy resources, resulting in an imagining of the Canadian and global Arctic as a new frontier for extraction. However, Nuttall highlights that the Canadian Arctic has long seen the destruction of Indigenous livelihoods and environment as a result of industrial activity and modernization, with Indigenous communities having borne the brunt of economic, environmental, and social impacts of extractive industries (ibid., 32-33). It is into this imaginative understanding of Canada’s Arctic/frontier that Inuit experiences with the mining industry may be situated.
Broadly speaking, Inuit have a long history with northern resource extraction, corporations, and the government, and little of it has been positive. Historically Inuit viewed the resource extraction industry as unreliable or unsupportive of their concerns, as consultation with Inuit peoples and organizations was not taken seriously and corporations did not often give prior notice of development (McPherson 2003, xviii).
Further, one significant result of mineral exploration in Arctic Canada was the development of new Inuit settlement patterns and permanent communities (Nassichuk
2003, 232). These new communities had their disadvantages: for example, once mines closed, people found themselves out of work and settled in an unfamiliar area. 40
In addition, resource extraction may come into conflict with other land uses, such as hunting, harvesting, and subsistence. Niezen (2003) argues that the continued ability to pursue subsistence on the land is an important part of autonomy and power for
Indigenous peoples, one that is threatened by resource extraction industries that ‘continue to erode the viability of subsistence economies, contributing to the social pathologies of dislocation without extending to these peoples the full benefits of ownership, revenue sharing, or employment’ (Niezen 2003, 90).
Hence, ownership benefits and Indigenous control of natural resources and their extraction are crucial considerations. Taking away or denying Indigenous control of the land, whether that control of land is used to pursue subsistence or extract resources, has been linked to increased poverty among Indigenous peoples. Studies completed in the
USA have shown that ‘the success of Indian sovereignty, nation-building and economic development are tightly interdependent; that nation-building and “de facto” sovereignty have indeed been the most important preconditions for successful economic development in “Indian country” […] and that “tribal sovereignty” generates substantial net economic benefits for surrounding non-Indian economies’ (Scott 2004, 308; citing Cornell and Kalt
1998). Among James Bay Cree and Inuit in Nunavik, who have relatively more control of their lands, there are fewer welfare and unemployment problems than among other
Canadian Indigenous groups (Scott 2004, 308). However, states are often reluctant to allow Indigenous self-governance because it leads to a loss of state control and ownership over some of the natural resources of ceded areas.
It is in this broader context – of new permanent settlements, resource extractive potential and conflicts, and questions of control of land – that the history of mining in 41
Nunavut is situated. When resource extraction started on a large scale in Nunavut after
World War II, what are now Nunavut and the Northwest Territories (NWT) were one entity, with Nunavut taking definition as an officially separate territory only in 1993
(through the land claim) and 1999 (as a politically discrete territory). Hence, for purposes of this section, the NWT refers to the original region comprised of both current day NWT and Nunavut. During this time period, the state had a more direct role in the development of resources, working in partnership with industry, a theme that will be explored further in the next chapter.
Exploration and development of subsurface natural resources in Arctic Canada started in earnest in the early 1950s, focusing first on minerals and later on oil; however, only from around the 1960s has there been a concern in policy about the impacts of extraction on northern Inuit communities (Nassichuk 2003, 219). Small-scale resource production before WWII involved mostly gold and silver, with a shift to what were considered strategic minerals, such as tungsten-, antalum-, and lithium-bearing minerals during and immediately after WWII (ibid., 222). Both private corporations and the
Canadian government started to become increasingly interested in oil starting in the late
1950s, at which point both began to undertake large-scale surveys and mapping projects.
By the 1970s oil extraction technology had developed to the point of being able to drill in
Arctic Canada in the summer and fall, and by 1982 oil drilling could be done year-round.
In recent years the melting polar ice has fuelled a “race to resources” mentality in a drive to secure increasingly exposed oil and mineral resources. However, despite optimistic projections, many assumptions about oil, gas, and mineral reserves have yet to be confirmed (Huebert 2012, 29). 42
In the 1950s-1970s the federal government had become increasingly involved in the approval and implementation of mining projects (Gibson 1978, 15). Before WWII, the federal government had very little involvement in the development of Canada’s territorial North. After WWII, the government’s interest in northern resource extraction was fuelled by a perceived need for a Canadian presence in the North, and a growing awareness that the traditional culture and economy of northern Indigenous peoples had been undermined. The initial governmental focus was therefore on housing, medical, and education services, and financial assistance (ibid., 27). The government/mining industry relationship was described as a partnership, and the government gave incentives to this end, including subsidies, tax exemptions, exploration assistance programs, and infrastructure grants (ibid., 27). The government believed that the exploitation of natural resources would promote economic growth and be beneficial to the region as well as to the country.
However, this assumption started to be questioned in the late 1960s, as the environmental and social costs threatened to outweigh the expected benefits: ‘increasing attention was focused on the outflow of economic wealth, on the threatened and actual damage to sensitive northern ecological systems, and on the severity of the social costs associated with resource exploration and exploitation in a land to which native residents had never ceded title’ (ibid., 28). These observations led to a major change in policy in the 1970s that attempted to develop Canada’s North in a way that ensured greater environmental protection, as well as greater benefits to northern residents. Mining, however, remained at the core of these goals during the 1970s, as ‘exploration for and development of mineral resources were seen as important steps in the economic growth 43 and development of the North, and indeed of Canada’ (Graham, McEachern, and Miller
1978, 8), according to the federal government. By the late 1970s, the mining industry accounted for 1/3 of the territorial GDP, with 11% of the labour force and 25% of the wages and salaries (Mining Management and Infrastructure Directorate, Natural
Resources and Economic Development Branch 1986). However, of particular interest as context for this dissertation was the lack of employment benefits to Indigenous peoples around the mine sites.
As a result of this increasing awareness of the potential and existing impacts of pre-1970s mining (stemming from little northern mining regulation), 1972 brought a policy shift involving increased state-imposed industry responsibilities, and by 1978 the discourse was around ‘development for the north and not of the north’ (Graham,
McEachern, and Miller 1978, 9). Development for the government now had as a central component ‘participation by residents of the area in which the industry is located’
(Marshall 1980, 52). Mining projects needed to make direct and ongoing contributions to northern residents: ‘the policy emphasis has shifted away from economic growth towards the resolution of social, environmental, and political problems in the north’ (Graham,
McEachern, and Miller 1978, 9). This shift included moving away from hiring exclusively southern workers, while predictions of potential levels of northern Indigenous employment were optimistic. The state and industry expected Indigenous employment to be initially limited by relative lack of industrial skills, and to therefore compose 25% of the workforce.5 This number was expected to grow as an increasing number of northern
Indigenous people became bilingual from participation in secondary and trade schools
This number of at least 25% employment has only been met by one mine site currently operating in Nunavut: Meadowbank. 44 and gained familiarity with Canadian institutions (Marshall 1980), but this was also believed to be a long-term process: ‘however, the high skill requirements of the capital- intensive mining industry and the advanced calibre of management necessary to operate remote developments will continue to limit participation by northern residents to a minority position during the coming decade’ (ibid., 51).
The question of the benefits and impacts of rotational labour for northern
Canadian Indigenous residents was also a question for state and industry as well as academia. Hobart (1982) undertook a study comparing the experiences of Inuit men who had relocated to mine sites versus those who worked on a rotation basis, outlining what he saw as the benefits and challenges of each employment strategy. He concluded that
‘industrial rotation employment offers the opportunity for maximum wage income with minimum cultural impact’ (1982, 61), due to the continued ability to hunt (via money gained from working at the mine and the time off between shifts to hunt), a continued daily routine of the home community due to the distance from the mine site, and avoiding a disruptive move of wives and children to a mine site community. Similarly, Wenzel
(1983) evaluated the effects of rotation labour from Clyde River to the Nanisivik mine, focusing on the need for money to continue subsistence activities with the decline of the fur market, and the importance of kinship and interpersonal relations. The money gained from employment at the mine was used to purchase hunting equipment, which itself was shared, mirroring the traditional modes of sharing meat and other animal products of hunting. He therefore suggests that the money bolstered hunting via equipment purchases, but also that ‘this equipment may be directly linked to the structurally integrated sharing system and may well form an important contemporary facet of that system’ (1983, 89), 45 representing the adaptability of the Inuit sharing system to include both the products of hunting and the equipment used to hunt. He concludes by highlighting that rotation employment at the mine for Clyde River residents was a method of ‘restabilizing the subsistence component of the economy’ rather than a long-term shift to wage employment (ibid., 90).
In more recent years authors have addressed mining in terms of long-term sustainable development in Nunavut (or lack of it: Bowes-Lyon, Richards and McGee
2009) and how mining impacts are experienced variably within a single community
(Gibson and Klinck 2005). Important for work at the Mary River Project is also the question of fly-in/fly-out rotational labour. Fly-in/fly-out labour in Canada was historically considered to be a way of including Indigenous employees, who may live in remote locations, in industrial labour with a minimal amount of disruption to social interactions, since the rotational schedule allowed them to remain at home for part of the year and not relocate for work (Storey 2010, 1169). However, fly-in/fly-out labour is not without its problems. It may result in a loss of local volunteers, community leaders, and skilled workers, and may also import specific social issues such as increased use of drugs and alcohol, increased gambling, increased sexually transmitted infections, missing important family and community events, and increased stress on family relationships
(ibid., 1173-1174). Therefore, while mining in Nunavut from post-WWII to the 1970s was hoped to provide development, positive impacts, and greater skills development and income opportunities for Inuit, the strategies and policies behind these actions did not always result in the goals being achieved.
46
A Sequence of Important Mining Operations in Nunavut/NWT6
This section offers an overview of three of the past important mines in Nunavut, enabling a grounded view of the Canadian government’s approach to mining and Inuit labour in Nunavut. The approval processes and subsequent operations at Rankin Inlet nickel mine (39 on map), Pine Point lead-zinc mine (9 on map), Anvil lead-zinc mine (10 on the map), and the Nanisivik mine (11 on map) have all contextualized the current mining environment in Nunavut today. Although these mines are geographically distant from one another, because present day Nunavut and NWT used to be administered as a single region many of the lessons learned from one mine were then applied to the administration of others throughout the old Territory. For example, federal government policy to attract Inuit labour to mines – with a pressure on companies to employ Inuit men, give vocational training to help improve Inuit employee potential, and help Inuit travel for work – was common across Canada’s North (Williamson 1974, 111). It is therefore necessary to consider these mines in relation to each other and how the historical context of their development continues to have implications for mining in
Nunavut today.
Map and legend from Gibson 1978, 30-31. 47
48
49
The Rankin Inlet nickel mine was the first major mining operation in the
Canadian Arctic. It operated from the mid 1950s to the early 1960s and involved both mining and concentration of nickel ore. The mine started production in 1956, pursuant to an increase in nickel prices on the market in the early 1950s, and was acquired at this time by Mogul Mining Corporation. In the early stages of development it was predicted that the ore body would last six years. The government enacted no significant restrictions, regulations, or assistance in the development phase of the mine, leaving the company in relative freedom. The company had trouble retaining southern workers in the early days of production, and so a consultant recommended that the company hire local Inuit employees instead of importing labour (Gibson 1978, 15). As a result, in 1956 the company actively started to recruit Inuit, especially those from Chesterfield Inlet, Eskimo
Point (now Arviat), and Baker Lake. Their efforts were a success: Inuit were deemed to perform as well as, or better than, southern workers, and the company now had a reliable and inexpensive labour force (ibid., 17). However, the majority of Inuit working at the mine made barely enough money to pay for their basic monthly expenses and as such were often in debt to the local Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) (Williamson 1974, 111;
121).
The company implemented a hiring and rotational system that was progressive and culturally sensitive for its time, in which developers attempted to gradually introduce
Inuit to the rigid schedules and hierarchal authority of the mine workplace and full time employment. This included attempts to incorporate traditional Inuit organizational structures into their workplace by hiring the heads of two extended families as straw bosses and organizers. The Inuit employment numbers quickly increased, from five or six 50 in April 1956, to fourteen in November 1956, to over seventy by the end of 1957, and after that to eighty Inuit men and some Inuit women (Gibson 1978, 17). The only direct government involvement in this mine during the mid-1950s was helping the company recruit Inuit workers by paying their fares to Rankin Inlet. However, this support was withdrawn when eleven of the thirteen Baker Lake employees left within a year, as the local government did not want to encourage others to migrate to the mine site. Some Inuit worked at the mine only temporarily to supplement their hunting incomes, and others quit because they did not like the ‘regimentation of industrial employment’ (ibid.).
Furthermore, some Inuit employees found the noisy and enclosed space depressing, and missing work to go hunting was an often-cited reason for absence (Williamson 1974,
116).
In addition to being the first major mine in the Canadian Arctic, this was also the first mine in Arctic Canada that created a permanent community at the mine site or, in this case, three small communities. One was for the White employees, the second was for
Inuit and their families (characterized by poor housing conditions [Williamson 1974,
122]), and the third was made up of ‘tent-shack’ houses build by Inuit who moved to the mine site but did not work at the mine (Gibson 1978, 18). There was little preparation or planning by the mining company in the recruitment and relocation process, and as a result there ended up being social problems in the camps, including fighting, drinking, and poor infrastructure. Furthermore, the industrial community affected the structures and traditions of Inuit culture, as the area was not good for traditional activities or hunting.
The Inuit employees were not informed of the limited life expectancy of the mine when they were recruited, and so when it closed in 1962 after only eight years of production, 51 the former Inuit employees, who had come to rely on the monetary income from the mine, no longer had any income (ibid., 18-19). Some tried to make a livelihood out of hunting on the land, but there were not enough resources in the area; therefore, the only economic base of Rankin Inlet was lost. Inuit felt that the White people had left, but that they themselves could not similarly return to their former lands and settlements. Furthermore, many Inuit felt that had they known beforehand that the mine would operate for only a short period of time, they might not have gone to work there. The Department of Indian
Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND) attempted to create new employment, but the development of economic alternatives took several years, and in the meantime Inuit living in Rankin Inlet began to rely on social assistance.
From the federal government’s perspective, there was one drawback regarding
Inuit labour at this mine site: ‘the Inuit were trained to be labourers – not citizens. Those
Inuit who were frugal, hard-working, punctual, and cooperative were “desirable” to the mining company. Those who did not adjust easily were rejected and forced to leave the community’ (ibid., 18). However, as this was primarily a profit-oriented mine, it was designed and implemented to minimize economic costs to the company. As such, due to these narrow company interests and lack of government involvement, there was no consideration or mitigation of long term social, environmental, and economic costs. This first major mine in the Canadian Arctic therefore was significant for future mining developments for several reasons: it ‘demonstrated that successful mining practices and technologies could be developed for arctic locations. It showed that Inuit could adapt to wage employment and could perform industrial tasks at least as well as workers imported from the south. But most importantly, the Rankin experience taught that such projects 52 require comprehensive planning in their design and implementation if serious problems are to be avoided’ (ibid., 19).
As a result, the next major northern Canadian mine, the Pine Point lead-zinc mine, had a higher level of government involvement. In 1954 the mining company, Cominco, persuaded the government to build a railway to Pine Point. The government hoped this rail line would promote economic development in the region via lower freight rates, encouraging mineral development in the NWT, by helping agriculture and forestry activities in northern Alberta, and by improving access to the North for national and continental defence purposes. Furthermore, the Indigenous peoples’ traditional livelihoods were collapsing at this time around Pine Point due to a downturn in fur prices and caribou populations and the federal government was worried that the Indigenous peoples would become dependent on government relief. This predicted dependence on welfare was paired with governmental assumptions of a loss of ‘their capacity for self- reliance and constructive work’ (ibid., 21), and so the government wanted Indigenous peoples to be employed in wage positions as quickly as possible. The government therefore granted support for the Pine Point project as long as the project adhered to the government’s regional development and Indigenous employment goals, the underlying assumptions of which were that ‘a major natural resource exploitation project and its infrastructure would have a widespread and favourable effect on the economic well-being of the region in which it was located’ (ibid., 23).
The government started in the late 1960s to promote Indigenous employment at the mine via housing programs and a training agreement with the company. This initiative at first seemed to be successful, with Indigenous employment rising from 4.6% 53 in 1967 to 17% in 1970, but dropping to 7.2% in 1975. However, the ultimate result of this mine was extensive environmental damage (most notably the lowering of the ground water table in the region) and a disruption of Indigenous trap lines. This perhaps indicates that, despite a stated interest in Indigenous livelihoods, this concern extended only so far as to include the type of livelihoods that the government deemed best.
The Anvil Lead-Zinc mine in the Ross River Area of the Yukon Territory started negotiations with the federal government in 1967. The federal government again expressed their goal of making sure the project would contribute to regional development and provide employment for Indigenous peoples. The government provided money for infrastructure but less than they had given for Pine Point, and less directed to the exclusive benefit of the mining company. However, all that Anvil was required to do was make a ‘bona fide effort’ to employ Indigenous peoples in the mining project (ibid., 25).
However, Indigenous employment was a failure, ranging from 1% to 10%, with not enough sensitivity to Indigenous employees’ attitudes and hopes – too much focus on fitting the worker to the job and blaming the victim for unemployment. Furthermore, the problem again arose of taking away trapping areas, resulting in decreased hunting and trapping activities of Indigenous people (ibid., 26).
What were the lessons government learned from these mines? Rankin Inlet indicated that without government supervision and anticipatory planning, mining could have significant negative impacts on the people of the region. However, Pine Point illustrated that extensive government involvement in infrastructure would not necessarily ensure that the economic benefits of the project would contribute to regional development or Indigenous employment goals (ibid., 24). These two mines both resulted in the very 54 thing that government wanted to avoid: economic growth in a northern region without benefits to that area, characterized by the fact that ‘an unduly large share of the benefits accrued to the mining company and an unnecessarily small share went to the people of the region being “developed”’ (ibid.). The Anvil mine finally dispelled the assumption that economic growth alone would serve socio-economic development, and this led, in part, to the policy changes early in the 1970s in which the Nanisivik mine was developed
(ibid., 27). It was at this point that the government decided to become a key actor in the decision making process of mining development, from the design phase to the implementation phase (ibid., 26).
The new federal policy, announced in 1972, emphasized ‘efforts to improve the well-being of northern people and to protect the northern environment, and that it would adopt a more careful and critical attitude towards the exploitation of natural resources’
(ibid., 28). It put a greater emphasis on the needs of the Indigenous people of the North, and stated that the people themselves must direct the social benefits. More specifically, the government wanted to help northerners have “‘a higher standard of living, quality of life, and equality of opportunity’”, and to do it in line with their own preferences and goals (ibid., 28; citing Government of Canada 1972). Extractive companies now had to undergo greater social and economic assessments, and also indicate fewer environmental impacts.
This history of early mining in Nunavut framed the development of the Strathcona
Sound Project, which is also called the Nanisivik mine. This mine is important for current employment at Baffinland: some Inuit previously worked at Nanisivik, and the 55 perspective of some on their employment at Baffinland references these earlier experiences. This mine will be discussed in greater detail in the next chapter.
Resource Extraction and the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement
One key difference in the political, social, and economic landscape of northern resource extraction from the early 1970s until today is the number of comprehensive land claim agreements, a mechanism that more clearly defines Indigenous rights (Nuttall 2010,
78-80). As a result, any research project about current subsurface resource extraction in
Nunavut needs to be understood in the context of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement
(NLCA) (1993) that prefigured the creation of Nunavut as a Canadian Territory in 1999.
The NLCA specifies that about 18% of Nunavut is classified as Inuit Owned Land (IOL), and about 2% of Nunavut (about 10% of the 18%) is classified as subsurface IOL. On subsurface IOLs, 100% of the royalties from resource extraction go to Nunavut
Tunngavik Incorporated (NTI), the organization that represents Inuit under the NLCA, rather than the Government of Nunavut, which is the government of the territory that is responsible toward both Inuit and non-Inuit and was developed as a result of Nunavut gaining Territorial status. On resource development on Crown land (which is federally owned rather than provincially owned, as Nunavut is a Territory rather than a province),
Inuit additionally have the right every year to be paid 50% of the first $2 million of resource royalty received by the Government of Nunavut (GN) in that year and 5% of any additional resource royalty received by the GN in that year, payable to Nunavut Trust
(NLCA 1995, 203). The IOLs were chosen during the NLCA negotiation project strategically, with an eye not only to land with cultural significance but also land with extraction potential. 56
The NLCA also outlines the steps in the approval process that a company must undergo before starting their mine, which are broadly outlined here. An extraction company must first present its project to the Nunavut Planning Commission (NPC), who decide whether the project is in conformity with the land use plan as set out in the NLCA.
Broadly speaking, if the project is in conformity, or a variance has been approved, the
NPC will forward the project proposal with its decision and recommendations to NIRB for screening (ibid., 105). If the NPC denies the application, the company has the option to approach the federal government for an exemption and to therefore progress to the next stage of the approval process. If the federal government upholds the decision of the NPC, then the project has the option to amend its project proposal and resubmit; to request that the NPC consider changing the land use plan to allow the project to go forward; or to leave the approval process.7
If the NPC approves the project, it then goes to the Nunavut Impact Review
Board (NIRB), an institution of public government, for the next stage of review. NIRB first screens the proposal to determine if it has significant environmental or social impact potential and, if so, whether it requires a full review, including, in part, an environmental assessment, social impact assessment, and public hearings (ibid., 106). If the project is deemed to require review, NIRB will ask for an impact statement from the proponent, which may include a project description, anticipated environmental and socio-economic impacts, steps proposed to avoid and mitigate those impacts, steps to maximize benefits at the community and regional levels, steps to compensate interests that are negatively impacted by the project, monitoring programs, interests in lands and waters that the
Baffinland Iron Mines experienced this process last year when the NPC denied its application to move to the NIRB approval process for a project amendment. BIM appealed to the federal government, who overturned the NPC decision, and cleared the way for BIM to progress to NIRB review. 57 proponents has secured or wants to secure, options for implementing the proposal, and any other matters NIRB deems relevant (ibid., 108-109). To that end, NIRB’s assessment of the project may bring together many stakeholders at different levels, from the federal government down to community participants (via public hearings [ibid., 101]); each assesses the project and gives their opinion on it. NIRB then weighs the information and makes a decision about whether the project can go forward or not, or if amendments are needed. NIRB will then submit its recommendation to the Minister (‘a Minister of the
Government of Canada or a member of the Executive Council appointed as Minister, as the context requires, responsible for the subject matter referred to’ [ibid., 5-6]), who has the final decision making power on whether a project will proceed or not.
As per the NLCA, when the mine is on IOLs the proponent and the regional Inuit organization must sign an Inuit Impact Benefits Agreement (IIBA), a specific type of
Impact Benefits Agreement (IBA). An IBA is a ‘legal contractual document outlining
(mainly) corporate commitments designed to maximize project benefits to local communities and minimize adverse impacts’ (Storey and Hamilton 2003, 284-285). More specifically, the Qikiqtani Inuit Association (QIA), the regional Inuit organization for the
Qikiqtaaluk, or Baffin, region, outlines that an IIBA includes ‘ensuring wise stewardship of land, air and water; protecting Inuit rights to land use and traditional activities; promoting Inuit language and culture; ensuring effective education, training and life skills; promoting individual and family well-being; protecting social rights and values, and advocating for Inuit interests; maintaining good community relations and communications; maximizing Inuit benefits’ (Qikiqtani Inuit Association 2016). The goal of the IIBA is to mitigate the potential negative social and environmental impacts the 58 project might produce, and also to promote increased benefits to Inuit deemed affected by the mine. This process is separate from the permitting and approval processes, which also act as a safeguard against some environmental and social impacts.
The NLCA further outlines the guidelines to which developing an IIBA must adhere. Especially relevant for the mine in this dissertation are the following provisions:
26.3.3 Negotiation and arbitration of IIBAs shall be guided by the following principles: (a) benefits shall be consistent with and promote Inuit cultural goals; (b) benefits shall contribute to achieving and maintaining a standard of living among Inuit equal to that of persons other than Inuit living and working in the Nunavut Settlement Area, and to Canadians in general; (c) benefits shall be related to the nature, scale and cost of the project as well as its direct and indirect impacts on Inuit; (d) benefits shall not place an excessive burden on the proponent and undermine the viability of the project; and (e) benefit agreements shall not prejudice the ability of other residents of the Nunavut Settlement Area to obtain benefits from major projects in the Nunavut Settlement Area. (NLCA 1995, 206).
An IIBA might therefore include provisions for ‘preferential employment and business contracting opportunities, training and education (including apprenticeships and scholarships), equity participation, revenue sharing, cash compensation, social and environmental monitoring and/or mitigation measures, archaeological site preservation, access to facilities and infrastructure, information exchange, agreement management, and dispute resolution mechanisms’ (Hitch 2006, 1). IBAs, including IIBAs, can result in long-term social and economic benefits to Indigenous groups faced with resource extraction on their territory. However, the impact of IBAs can be difficult to gauge, as they are often confidential and take place outside of the main regulatory process. There are few monitoring follow-up studies of IBAs in terms of income and employment, and fewer still on wider social change and IBAs (Storey and Hamilton 2003, 285). IBAs have 59 more broadly been critiqued on a practical level for not always putting in strong mitigation measures, and on a discursive level, for failing to contribute to a critical examination of the impacts of development (Tester, Lambert, and Lim 2013).
Furthermore, specific to Nunavut, although certain measures might be required by the IIBA, implementation continues to be a problem. For example, in terms of employment, even if people work at mine sites, they are not always interested in returning long term. This phenomenon will be discussed in more depth later in this dissertation, but I will give a few examples here. Wage employment sometimes has a short-term goal of getting money for a major purchase or to pay off bills, and/or the workplace may ultimately not be an environment where people would like to remain.
Dislocation from home and community is often difficult for people, whether it be going to southern Canada or Iqaluit for post-secondary education, for health care, or for employment. Finally, barriers in the community may prevent people from working at the mine, such as a lack of childcare options at home or jealousy issues with a spouse.
Therefore, despite IIBAs, which are intended to remove the barriers to Inuit employment at mine sites, there are many factors that go into the decision to take up distant employment that are unrelated to hiring priorities or education levels. It is therefore necessary to examine the decision-making process people use to decide whether or not to leave their home communities for work, and to understand the factors that go into their decisions.
Could any of these decisions be considered a form of resistance? James Scott suggests that resistance happens not only at the large scale – such as the work of QIA and negotiations leading up to the signing of the NLCA – but also at the small-scale, 60 everyday level. For the purposes of this chapter I take Scott’s understanding of resistance from two of his books. In the first, Weapons of the Weak (1985), Scott argues against the idea that resistance comes only from large-scale, formal organized political activity undertaken by the middle class and intelligentsia. Scott came to this position during his observations in a Malaysian village that he calls Sedaka. Sedaka has seen a growing economic disparity between the wealthy landowners and the poorer smallholders and landless workers. The implication that resistance only happens as large-scale organization is, Scott argues, a dismissal of the peasantry, casting them as ‘a political nullity unless organized and led by outsiders’ (Scott 1985, xv). Rather, there is a need to look at the everyday forms of peasant resistance against others – such as states, private industry, and upper class individuals– who try to take labour, money, or other resources from the peasantry; and the ideology behind these relations of inequality. Resistance in this instance is not outright collective defiance but actions taken in small, everyday ways by relatively powerless groups, such as ‘foot dragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage, and so on’ (ibid., 29).
A few years later, in Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990), Scott refines his understanding of these forms of resistance by looking at similarities across different settings in relations between those who are empowered and those who are relatively disempowered. He argues that the subordination is contested behind the scenes rather than openly, and that the powerful similarly try to maintain their position of dominance in a hidden way: ‘every subordinate group creates, out of its ordeal, a “hidden transcript” that represents a critique of power spoken behind the back of the dominant. The powerful, for their part, also develop a hidden transcript representing the practices and claims of 61 their rule that cannot be openly avowed’ (Scott 1990, xii). While the public transcripts are the open interactions that take place between the subordinate and the dominant groups, hidden transcripts are ‘the discourse that takes place “offstage”, beyond direct observation by power holders… produced for a different audience and under different constraints of power than the public transcript” (ibid., 4-5). These hidden transcripts include speech acts such as gossip, rumours, and jokes, but may also include other forms of resistance such as intentional ignorance or non-participation. The space between the public and hidden transcripts is, for Scott, a place of everyday forms of class struggle.
Insights about power relations can be gained when looking at how both parties take on specific representations of self in their interactions with the other.
Is Scott’s analysis of hidden transcripts and resistance relevant to Inuit experiences of deciding whether to take up employment at the mine site? Insights from his approach may be useful when thinking about how Inuit are framing their employment at the mine site, as discussed in Chapter Five. Another instance of hidden transcript resistance may be present around public meetings about the mine that are happening in
Igloolik and other communities. For example, is low turnout at consultation meetings a form of resistance? Is speaking to other community members during the breaks at these meetings a hidden transcript? What about commenting anonymously online about mining newspaper articles? Although this dissertation does not take everyday forms of resistance and hidden transcripts as central to its approach, it could be a direction of future consideration for Inuit engagement with mining in Nunavut.
Culture and Other Continuing Themes 62
The mining industry continues to operate in Nunavut today, although the recent drop in the global mineral market has put some projects into care-and-maintenance, has slowed others, and has inhibited exploration. There are many different minerals found across Nunavut, including gold, diamonds, lead, zinc, uranium, and iron ore, and two mines are currently actively producing. But perhaps what is most important about mining in Nunavut today is the way that historical approaches to mining continue to inform and be present in mining practices. This is most clearly seen in industry experiences with the approval and hiring process; culture used as an explanation for both Inuit successes and failures in mining employment; and mining being presented by the state as the path to
Territorial development and Inuit employment.
There are some areas of resource extraction in Nunavut today that persist from the policies developed while the region was all part of the Northwest Territories. For example, the problem of streamlining the approval process between industry and government remains an issue, especially around not understanding application requirements and processes (Graham, McEachern, and Miller 1978; personal correspondence at the NLCA workshop in Ottawa 2013). Another commonality is that the international market continues to play a key role in the Canadian mining industry. For example, in the 1950s and 1960s, there was steady world economy growth, and a corresponding expansion of mineral production in Canada, in particular around the 1973-
1974 commodity boom (Graham, McEachern, and Miller 1978, 7), and then a world-wide recession in 1981-1982 (Price Waterhouse Associates 1983). Similarly, with the mining industry in Nunavut today, the global market drives what and how much is produced, with impacts for local employees and Baffinland Iron Mines (BIM). Furthermore, local 63 suppliers to the mine sites felt left out in the past, and that companies should make more of an effort to use local suppliers (Stevenson Kellogg Ernst and Whinney Management
Consultants 1987); this problem continues today and attempts to be addressed in the IIBA
(The Mary River Project Inuit Impact Benefit Agreement 2013, Article 6). There was even recognition by the industry in the 1980s of the difficulties of consultation around employment. For example, a Syncrude representative, when speaking about improving employment integration of northern Indigenous peoples into the workforce, stated that
‘there is no point in asking native people who have no concept of the mining industry, what job would you like to have? In most cases they cannot answer realistically. We need to provide understand through workshops in their home settlements as well as the site.
Schools can help by providing students with a better idea of what is out there’ (Gordon
1980, 64). This is the exact criticism leveled at QIA by members of the Pond Inlet
Hamlet Council. In 2014 QIA conducted a survey to see which jobs Inuit in the five
North Baffin communities were interested in having. However, Council members in Pond
Inlet criticized QIA for not informing people about what jobs were available and realistic to achieve, and for therefore gaining inaccurate and not useable results (QIA and NTI
Baffinland Hearing 2, Pond Inlet, audio file).
Reports from this time (government and industry) highlighted certain issues about
Inuit employment. Retaining labour from the south was a problem for northern extractive industries, with turnover rates of 50%-200% a year in the late 1950s (Dubnie 1959). A pattern developed, and companies found that if they hired inexperienced workers and always upgraded their own employees, they would have the lowest turnover.8 Inuit were
This emphasis on hiring inexperienced workers and training them on site to meet site specifications persists today with BIM. 64 therefore seen as a valuable potential labour source, and the idea of Inuit culture was used to describe both failures and successes of Inuit in the work force. For example, in his
1959 report for the Department of Mines and Technical Surveys (Ottawa), Dubnie writes that the ‘use of Eskimo labour eliminates costly transportation charges normally accruing from use of transient Whites but present experience with Eskimo labour – perhaps based on the Eskimo attitude toward accumulation of wealth – shows considerable absenteeism and loss of efficiency. Other qualities of the Eskimo, such as cheerfulness and acceptance of authority, offer promise for the future when Eskimos become accustomed to regular employment’ (1959, 41). Similarly, DIAND tried to justify fly in-fly out labour at
Nanisivik by appropriating Inuit culture for their own purposes – specifically, the history of Inuit as a mobile people was referenced to argue that Inuit as a whole were well-suited for rotational labour (Tester, Lambert, and Lim 2013, 28). Culture persists today as a trope to explain both Inuit successes and Inuit failures in employment retention and performance at the mine site, in regard to mobility and rotational labour, cheerfulness,
“work ethic”, and “money management”, as will be explored further in a later chapter.
This emphasis on the use of Inuit culture to explain successes and failures in adaptations to mining employment does have its benefits. For example, it is important to pay attention to barriers to entering, and remaining within, the work place for communities who are marginalized or do not have experience in wage employment. This is the position that QIA takes to increasing and maintaining Inuit employment. QIA aims to help Inuit take advantage of employment at the mine to the greatest degree possible, through, for example, consultation with communities about impacts from the mine, 65 supporting community members with questions about banking or financial planning, and planning work-ready programs.
However, the use of culture to explain Inuit successes and failures at the mine site also has potential to be used in a dangerous way. Firstly, drawing uncritically on the idea of culture reifies it as something that is static, unchanging and a priori for Inuit in
Nunavut. This runs the danger of not taking into account the diverse ways that Inuit engage with and experience the mine site. Secondly, explaining Inuit successes and failures via notions of Inuit culture forecloses an examination of the ways that these successes and failures may come from other sources. Rather than suggesting that the failure of an Inuk working at the mine is because of culture, the failure could alternatively be framed as a failure of the mine to retain the employee. By placing the emphasis on the relatively marginalized employees, the extractive industry avoids taking responsibility itself for the possible failures of Inuit employment. Although work is being done to create a “culturally sensitive” and aware environment at the mine site, the use of culture – an immutable quality in this perspective - to explain Inuit employment at the mine site ultimately puts the burden of maintaining employment on Inuit, while the employment expectations and routines of the company are naturalized as the taken-for-granted norm.
There is importance placed on cultivating the aspects of culture that will help maintain employment at the mine site, and diminishing those aspects of culture that reduce employment, the result of which is that cultural traits that align most closely with neoliberal economic frameworks are emphasized.
As is discussed in greater depth in the next chapter, the persistence of this discourse can be at least partly understood according to Polanyi. According to Polanyi, 66 the dominant, modern, neo-classical economic paradigm posits that the market system is a natural extension of human nature. Markets, in this context, were assumed to be natural institutions that would spontaneously arise from human society if not interfered with, and the self-regulating market relied on economic self-interest for its regulation. Furthermore, this type of economy took as a basic starting point that ‘human beings behave in such a way as to achieve maximum monetary gains’ (Polanyi 1957, 68). This approach is in line with Polanyi’s 19th century thinkers, who ‘assumed that in his economic activity man strove for profit, that his materialistic propensities would induce him to choose the lesser instead of the greater effort and to expect payment for his labor; in short, that in his economic activity he would tend to abide by what they described as economic rationality, and that all contrary behavior was the result of outside interference’ (ibid., 249).
Polanyi’s ‘outside interference’ manifested in Nunavut is framed as culture, and the use of culture to explain both successes and failures works to maintain the legitimacy of the underlying logics of the extractive industry. When what is perceived as Inuit culture aligns with the values held by this market system – such as equating Inuit historical mobility with inclination to work rotational schedules – these values are emphasized as evidence that working in the extractive industry is a natural fit in Nunavut, and therefore an appropriate way of “developing” the North. Conversely, failures are explained by recalcitrant features of Inuit culture, putting the blame on local community members for failing to adapt to the economic system rather than the failure of the extractive industry to adapt to the local context. Both approaches take as their starting point what Papaschase scholar Dwayne Donald (2004) considers the project of the settlement and development of Canada, a focus on ‘the capitalist model of the production 67 of material goods and physical matter as a way to achieve a state of economic prosperity’
(Donald 2004, 47). In this way, when Inuit culture is seen to align with this system, it bolsters the understanding of system as a universal; when Inuit culture contradicts this approach, it is understood as a problem with the culture rather than the paradigm. For this reason, the discourse of using Inuit culture as an explanation for successes and failures in the mining industry in Nunavut has been particularly effective at legitimizing the understanding of development in Canada more broadly, and its relationship to the bigger ideas of market economies.
Finally, an emphasis by the state on mining as a solution to providing labour opportunities for Inuit continues today, with a renewed focus on mining as the most efficacious way to “develop” Nunavut. These two hopeful end results are emphasized by
Nunavut Premier Peter Taptuna. Premier Taptuna envisions the mining industry as contributing in two significant ways to Nunavut: in terms of infrastructure construction, such as roads, and in terms of employment, as in providing employment to Inuit who do not otherwise have it.9 In that way Taptuna carries on the governmental approach of development being for the North instead of just of the North, with an emphasis on Inuit employment rather than resources extracted for use in the southern provinces. For example, when speaking about how oil and gas revenues might pay for infrastructure,
Taptuna is quoted as saying that ‘“development can’t be realized unless northerners have the opportunity to find employment in these very important sectors”’ (Nunatsiaq News,
December 2, 2014). This emphasis on the close tie between development and
Nuttall (2006) made a similar observation in discussions about the Mackenzie gas project. Some Indigenous leaders indicated a position that oil and gas development in the region was the only way for Indigenous communities and economies locally, and the Northwest Territory economy broadly, to achieve jobs and prosperity. 68 employment opportunities for northerners illustrates the position of development for the
North. He frames Nunavut as having significant potential for development – development here meaning an increase of industries but also progression of the territory from an
“underdeveloped” to a “developed” state – with mining, fisheries, and other natural resources industries being central to that progression.
Premier Taptuna therefore focuses on natural resource development as the key to providing jobs in Nunavut today and in the future. In fact, he argues that finding jobs for young people10 is one of the key foci of his government. When asked about his involvement in overturning a Nunavut Planning Commission (NPC) decision and helping to pave the way for a mining company to expand their operations, Premier Taptuna justified his actions in the following way: ‘“The government’s mandate is the three E’s: education, economic development and employment. With our young population, we’re going to need over 800 jobs within four years and thousands of new jobs going into the future,” he said. “And with this, whether you call it politicizing a project, it doesn’t really matter. That’s our job to ensure that our people find employment”’ (Nunatsiaq News,
June 1, 2015). Furthermore, for Premier Taptuna, these jobs must come from industry
(again equated with the driver of development) rather than the state: ‘“it can’t be the government doing the hiring. We’ve got to have development”’ (ibid.).
Therefore, for Premier Taptuna, mining is the key driving force behind development and the economy in Nunavut, and, in turn, Inuit employment. He stated that
‘“it’s something we’ve got to do now because there’s a lot of unemployment, there’s a lot of young people that are going to be looking for work in four and five and 10 years down
Although Premier Taptuna references young people rather than young Inuit, it is important to note that the majority of Nunavut’s population (84%) are Inuit, and therefore most of the young people in Nunavut are young Inuit. 69 the line and if it’s just employment within the government, that’s not going to work…they’ll perpetually be on the welfare line or on social assistance. There has to be some economic activity and at this point, mining and exploration is one of the key things where Nunavummiut can actually, really benefit from. On average, we’re going to be looking for 2,300 potential new jobs among a population of 4,600 youth and we can’t sit by idly and hope for the best. There has to be something for them”’ (Nunatsiaq News,
July 22, 2015). However, if the history of mining in Nunavut is anything to go by, the potential employment benefits from mining rarely flow in any significant amount to Inuit or other northern Indigenous peoples. This approach therefore does not take into account ways of encouraging other economic modes that may also be beneficial to Inuit in
Nunavut, such as financing hunting, harvest, and other land-based livelihoods, as well as the service sector, rather than the extractive sector.
The equation of mining development with modernity has been problematized by
James Ferguson in his book Expectations of Modernity (1999), an exploration of large- scale copper mining in Zambia. In the 1960s the Copperbelt – the industrial core of
Zambia – was framed as a symbol of Africa emerging into the industrial, Western, developed modern era, with workers moving from rural to urban areas. However, by the
1990s the declining value of copper on the global market meant that poverty reigned in the formerly prosperous region. This decline in the market and loss of job opportunities resulted not only in lost income but also had implications for sense of self among former
Zambian mineworkers. They reported a loss of hopefulness, self-respect, and optimism that was in part framed and constructed by the discourse of progressive modernity: the
Copperbelt was now slipping backwards. The combined result of this former “myth of 70 modernization” and the collapse of the mining industry was a crisis of meaning, ‘in which people the way that people are able to understand their experience and to imbue it with significance and dignity has (for many) been dramatically eroded’ (Ferguson 1999,
14). Expectations of modernity were grim.
Ferguson characterizes modernization as a “myth” in two senses: the colloquial sense of something that is false, and as something with a social function, giving categories and meaning for experiences. He argues that both are seen in development discourses and practices in Zambia. Expectations of Modernity critiques the notion of ‘a linear metanarrative of emergence and progress’ that Ferguson believes is still present in development (ibid., 16). He argues that antiquated anthropological notions of progress in
Africa continue to underlie assumptions surrounding urbanization, with rural Africans becoming modern, urban, industrial, and therefore more “developed”. This approach upholds unilineal evolution’s understanding of distinct stages (from primitive to civilized, traditional to modern, and pre-capitalist to capitalist) and ideas of “typical” figures while ignoring differences and varieties of the ways people draw on urban and rural resources.
Ferguson argues that this approach reproduces a common analytical approach of viewing
Africa as a clash between two different systems: the older tribal system and the newer urban and industrial system. This analytical approach, according to Ferguson, is upheld in part by globalization and its related processes. He argues that globalization links the world together but also creates differences and inequalities. The perception of places as underdeveloped and disconnected is the result of global structures and processes rather than any inherent characteristics of diverse places and peoples (ibid., 238).
Like Ferguson’s ethnography of urban life and mining in the Zambian Copperbelt, 71 there is an assumed connection between mining, modernity, and development in Nunavut implicit in government approaches to the industry. As in Ferguson’s account, this connection is one that stretches from the past into the present. The current emphasis by
Taptuna on the place of industry to provide jobs to Inuit is in line with the historical trajectory of mining in Nunavut and, broadly speaking, the brief history outlined in this chapter indicates a trend of decreasing governmental involvement in managing the mining industry. Taptuna’s neoliberal capitalist approach to mining likewise falls into the approach as outlined by Polanyi of the shift of emphasis from the state to the market over time. By equating mining with development, and development with jobs, Taptuna arrives at the conclusion (as quoted above) that ‘“it can’t be the government doing the hiring.
We’ve got to have development”’ (Nunatsiaq News, June 1, 2015).
Although Nunavut was originally based in a very different economic approach than the European history from which Polanyi develops his theoretical orientation, the mining industry operates under this same Western neoliberal model. Having to operate within the same system, that has developed out of a specific historical economic context,
Taptuna, by nature of his political and historical positions, is similarly situated within an approach that sees less state involvement and more market freedom as characteristic of modernity in Nunavut. The role of globalization is central here as well, with the increasing need for minerals stemming from the interconnections between countries. It is these connections that drive the development of mines in Nunavut, and, by extension, that drive Taptuna’s vision of Nunavut development and Nunavut’s modernity. However, as will be discussed in the next chapter, the Government of Nunavut can also be fragmented and heterogeneous in its approach to the mining industry, and is also only one of the 72 players who have a voice about what and how mining operates in Nunavut.
One further reason that Taptuna may hold this position of supporting the extractive industry and, by extension, the promotion of a neoliberal economic model is the historical and current position of Nunavut as a Territory that exports raw materials.
As written about by Wenzel (1991), the fur industry provided a way of maintaining a hunting and harvesting lifestyle while also making enough money to support that lifestyle.
The collapse of the fur market therefore not only dangerously reduced the monetary income from fur sales, it also threatened the ability of hunters to continue going out on the land, as they now had to find alternative sources of money to continue to do so. This model of extracting raw materials is closely related to a global capitalist and neoliberal economic model, and given Nunavut’s continued position in that system, Taptuna falls into the same approach by advocating the extractive industry as an important source of jobs. A popular view of Nunavut as a resource frontier has a long history (McGhee 2005;
King and Lidchi 1998; Grace 2002) and Nunavut continues to be framed as a resource frontier in the speeches of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Sinclair 2016).
Supporting the extractive industry as the main way to provide jobs for Inuit is therefore in line with the history of Nunavut.
The next chapter examines in more depth the discursive and theoretical underpinnings of the shift from state-run development to development based on the market, along with an examination of one of the region’s most significant mines, the
Nanisivik Project. In this case, the market is seen as the driving force behind development, with the state’s responsibility, as per Polanyi on modernity, being to support the market conditions that make development possible. However, Polanyi’s 73 conceptualization of modernity is best taken in conversation with an approach to modernity that recognizes the ways that Indigenous communities also take control of their experiences with the market economy. As such, Sahlins’ approach to the indigenization of modernity offers a different voice, one that allows space for Inuit engagement with mining in a way that supports alterative livelihoods. Together these authors provide part of the structure on which the subsequent chapters are situated.
74
CHAPTER THREE: NANISIVIK, THE STATE, AND THE MARKET
With the broader historical trends of mining in mind, this chapter gives greater background on Nanisivik, which is important to understanding the current engagement with Baffinland among the five North Baffin communities today. This history and legacy, presented in the first part of the present chapter, includes a discussion of the change in government policies, consultation (or lack thereof) with Inuit in Arctic Bay, and Inuit employment goals and realities. The second part of this chapter makes the argument that in Nunavut development has been, and continues to be, equated with Inuit employment, and that the state has long held the position that this employment and development should come via extractive industries. The theoretical framework of Karl Polanyi can be used to understand the relationship between the state and the market in Nunavut as well as the reasons why a focus on the extractive industry as a route to “development” has not historically been as successful as had been hoped. However, while Polanyi’s approach is useful for highlighting the threats that mining has brought and may bring to Nunavut,
Marshall Sahlins’ concept of the indigenization of modernity provides a vital complement to Polanyi’s framing. By suggesting that Indigenous peoples may draw on the market economy to continue their own modes of existence, Sahlins indicates that the market economy can be understood in many different ways in the local context. The chapter’s conclusion suggests that these two authors together provide a framework to understand both the threats and opportunities that come with the global market economy.
Setting the tone for the remainder of the dissertation, this approach avoids the either/or distinction between wage employment (capitalism) and “traditional” activities (culture). 75
The History of Nanisivik
The Nanisivik mine is arguably the historically most important mine in the
Qikiqtaluuk region, and certainly the one that has had the most important implications for
Inuit employment at the Baffinland mine. Nanisivik drew on Inuit from all five of the
North Baffin communities for employment, and its former employees took back to their communities the experiences they had while working at the mine site. Some lived with their families at the mine site, and their children therefore grew up in a different environment outside of their communities. Some Inuit who worked at Nanisivik now work at Baffinland, and both former employees and non-employees often use the earlier operation as a reference point in assessing Baffinland’s operations and impacts. It is therefore important to consider the Nanisivik mine and its legacy in greater depth, with an understanding (from Chapter Two) of the ways that Nanisivik itself was contextualized by the earlier mines and mining policy in the NWT.
The minerals at Nanisivik (16% lead-zinc ore) were first discovered in 1910-1911 and were explored in greater depth in the late 1950s. The exploratory phase hired both
Inuit and White employees at very different rates of pay. White employees were paid
$3.50/hour plus bonus, while Inuit were paid only $1.75/hour with time and a half after
48 hours per week (straw bosses $2.00/hour).11 Texas Gulf, the exploratory company, also gave Inuit lunch and supper, gas for snowmobiles, fuel, extra canvas and plywood for tents, and some fresh food for their families. These wages paid to Inuit represented the lowest in the region, and Texas Gulf refused to agree to government rules about
While these wages may seem high for the 1950s, the cost of living in Nunavut was and remains significantly higher than southern Canada. 76 employment of Inuit (Gibson 1978, 31-32). After exploration, Mineral Resources
International (MRI) became the majority owners in Nanisivik during operation.
MRI claimed that it could mine out the entire deposit in eight years. However, the government indicated that they would help with infrastructure only if the company mined at a slower rate to stretch out the timeline to fifteen years, as DIAND ‘wanted to ensure employment and training of native workers in the project’ (ibid., 34). This longer project timeline was also a measure to try to avoid the boom and bust cycle of Rankin Inlet; to give Inuit longer to adjust to wage labour; a longer time period to train; and to start other projects that would employ Inuit after the mine closed to avoid the regional poverty resulting from the mine closure at Rankin Inlet (ibid.). MRI also was interested in employing local labour to resolve the problem of high turnover rates and a shortage of skilled workers – two difficulties resulting from recruiting labour from the south.
Nanisivik was to set a precedent. It was the first major industrial project in the
Eastern Arctic and all others would be judged by its standards – both in the eyes of industry and those of Inuit (ibid., 67). It was the first mine that fell under the government’s new policy focus, announced in 1972 (as described in Chapter Two), that claimed to emphasize the well-being of northern residents (together with self-directed preferences and goals), environmental protection, and a more critical approach to resource extraction. The development of Nanisivik therefore ‘[reflected] a new awareness that regional, social, and economic benefits do not automatically accompany such projects’ (ibid., 66). The government, for the first time, now took the position that development projects should be fully assessed before receiving government approval. 77
Unfortunately, as so often happens, the gap between policy and implementation was significant.
Despite a stated policy emphasis to take into account the development preferences of Inuit, there was no effort to involve Inuit in the negotiation of the development agreement. Befitting the lessons learned from earlier mines in the NWT, the federal government insisted on more emphasis on wage benefits for Inuit, fewer environmental impacts, more benefits to Canadian producers and suppliers, and a more hands-on role for itself throughout the process (ibid., 51). However, when it came to the preferences of the
Inuit of Arctic Bay, the federal and Territorial governments continued to act as they had in the past. Inuit in Arctic Bay wanted more consultation about the mine, and objected to parts of the project. They did support the project, albeit with some stipulations – in particular, they wanted employment as long as it did not affect their hunting grounds and wildlife. However, ‘there is no record of any serious attempts by the companies involved, or by the federal or territorial governments, to provide satisfactory information to the people of Arctic Bay’ (ibid., 70). People therefore felt dependent and powerless, but had a great deal of concern for their land. Furthermore, at this time, Arctic Bay was one of the healthiest communities in the Eastern Arctic, with good income levels, no problem of unemployment, no RCMP, and no alcohol (ibid. 59-61).
This federal lack of interest in local community concerns about the mine was exemplified by the creation of a mining community outside Arctic Bay. The company and the government decided to make a town site where employees of the mine could live.
It was more expensive than rotational labour, but they hoped it would reduce turnover.
However, this was not in line with the expressed desires of the people of Arctic Bay. 78
Feeling like they were not being consulted about the decision making around the mine, the people of Arctic Bay sent a letter to the company consultants in November 1972 indicating that they wanted to have a say about how the project was developed (see
Figure below). Importantly, they wanted only a bunkhouse at the mine site, and for the families of the Inuit workers to live in Arctic Bay, along with the facilities that would allow this (such as a road, airport, and health and education facilities) (ibid., 36). Inuit of
Arctic Bay wanted to commute to the mine site (rather than live at the town site), and they wanted opportunities for labour skills development (ibid., 78). However, these values and desires were not taken into account during the development process.
The ensuing February 1973 meeting in Arctic Bay between MRI, consultants,
Territorial and federal governments, and the Arctic Bay Settlement Council (local Inuit representatives) was more a public relations campaign than consultation. The community was not provided information before the meetings and no alternatives for implementation were communicated, so the opinions of Arctic Bay Inuit were ‘based on rumours and second hand information, rather than on adequate information thoroughly considered and discussed throughout the community’ (ibid., 37). Furthermore, language barriers exacerbated uneasy communication. Based on this lack of meaningful consultation the government and company decided that there would be no Inuit opposition to the project and that there was no need for future community hearings until near the end of the feasibility study (ibid.). DIAND believed the mine would be socially and economically viable, with national and regional benefits, and gave approval for Nanisivik to go forward.
Just as in the earlier mining projects, the concerns and preferences of Inuit were not taken into account, they had no decision making power, and no significant research on potential 79 social effects was undertaken. The other four North Baffin communities – Pond Inlet,
Igloolik, Hall Beach, and Clyde River – were excluded from the consultation process to an even greater degree (ibid., 78; 90).
Letter from Arctic Bay12
Figure from Gibson 1978, 155-156. 80
81
An important priority for DIAND was Inuit employment. The employment goal for the proportion of Inuit labour at Nanisivik was 60% within three years. The work schedule was sixteen weeks of work followed by one week of paid holiday or three weeks of unpaid holiday annually, with Sundays off (ibid., 94). The company planned to have 219 workers, 111 of whom would be Inuit. Inuit were to be hired from Arctic Bay and Pond Inlet, the two closest communities, and Igloolik and Clyde River, which were considered to have large labour pools. Inuit from Hall Beach were to be included as well as they had Distant Early Warning (DEW) line experience (ibid., 98). However, neither the company nor the government knew how many Inuit were actually available for employment, and did not take into account Inuit priorities of being on the land and hunting and harvesting. It was assumed that Inuit would leave land and family to work at the mine, but there was no evidence to support this assumption. Furthermore, Inuit were not given information about what it would be like working at the mine, and the government did not draw on the experience of Inuit who had worked at Rankin mine
(ibid., 99-101).
DIAND believed that Inuit of the region were underemployed, and so Inuit employment was thought to be the most significant positive aspect of the mining project:
‘it was expected to increase Inuit income sources, reduce government assistance requirements, and even provide an international example of enlightened resource development’ (ibid., 41). Inuit would have more disposable income, other Inuit would get mine employees’ old jobs, and there would be training opportunities for future industrial employment. Furthermore, it would ‘mold the Inuit into a mobile and highly skilled workforce available for employment in a succession of Arctic resource extraction 82 projects’ (ibid., 62), the assumption here being that once Nanisivik closed down, the Inuit labour source would move from mine site to mine site. This imagined string of mines with Inuit employees was expected to provide a stable economic and employment base for Inuit. This desired model was good for MRI and future mining companies, that would have a labour force, but was not attractive or secure for Inuit, as it would not provide a reliable long term economic base and would possibly bring negative social impacts to the community such as alcohol. There would also be problems of relocating people to the mine, and social disruption when the mine closed (ibid., 63). Furthermore, at this time there was not a job shortage in Arctic Bay, so the logic of providing more jobs would not be effective in getting more Inuit into the work force. Since there were no social or environmental impact assessments of the project, these assumptions were not based in any reality, and there were critics of these employment assumptions even within the federal and territorial governments.
As such, although the federal government authorities assumed that Nanisivik would contribute positively to northern development, this assumption ‘was not based on any thorough research. No concerted effort to identify the possible implications of the various aspects, to find alternative means of implementing the project, and to examine these in the light of previous experiences was undertaken during the government’s evaluation of the project proposal’ (ibid., 61). Furthermore, the federal government wanted to push the project through quickly because they believed that ‘a delay of government approval would risk loss of Inuit support for the venture’, meaning that the federal government believed that as Inuit more fully came to understand land claim issues and their rights, that they would come to oppose the project (ibid., 47). This was in the 83 era of the early Contemporary Land Claims Agreements, and there was governmental and industry concern broadly across Canada over the implications of Inuit demands for land rights for mining projects.
In summary, there was not enough information at the time of proposal, development, and operations to assess the project’s potential social impacts. There was inadequate consultation with Inuit in Arctic Bay, who were not given enough information to assess the project or the desirability of working at the mine, and Inuit were not involved in the decision making process, despite the policy goal of increased northern resident input and participation. This lack of consultation was based on an important assumption of senior government decision makers: that ‘the economic future of most native northerners will be one of industrial wage employment in non-renewable activities’
(ibid., 105). Furthermore, government and industry were both working under the dominant ideological belief that ‘industrial economic expansion necessarily brings net benefits’ (ibid., 149), and this position was used to justify an alliance between the two bodies. There were expected economic benefits to the government through royalties and corporate tax revenues, and through employee income taxes and reductions in transfer payments. There were expected economic gains for Inuit and other employees through direct employment as well as service industries such as Arctic shipping (ibid., 135).
However, this type of extractive industry employment did little to sustain and much to undermine Inuit traditions, such as community cooperation and sensitivity to ecological imperatives (ibid., 105). There was ‘no evidence of serious and immediate Inuit needs and desires for industrial wage employment’ (ibid., 150), and as there were no social or 84 environmental impact assessments done, there was no real understanding whether it would be good for the people of the region or the environment.
Therefore, the actual practice and implementation of the new policy developed in the 1970s went against the expressed desires and goals of the policy. These actions indicate that government officials maintained their dedication to resource extraction as the most important tool for northern development. Rather than changing the strategy of northern development, the government undermined its own policies: ‘the government entered into the Strathcona agreement without having opinions about the proposed project from the people to be affected by it and without having exhibited real and effective concerns about the attitudes of the Inuit towards permanent employment at
Strathcona Sound’ (ibid., 103), and without having an understanding of the environmental impacts or critically assessing the project.
The Legacy of Nanisivik
Hence, one of the main justifications used by the federal government to support and push through the Nanisivik mine was the argument that the mine would provide lasting benefits to Inuit communities and boost northern development. Was Nanisivik indeed successful in creating a lasting positive legacy in Arctic Bay? The discourse of
‘legacy building’ in terms of mines is one that is currently heard in Nunavut today. For the purposes of this paper legacy will be understood as the impacts (either positive or negative) of a closed mine that continue to affect a community after the mine’s operation.13 This section will give an overview of the positive and negative impacts of the
When ‘legacy building’ is popularly used in Nunavut it is meant to mean positive lasting results of the mine, especially in terms of employment and skill development. However, legacy here will be qualified as either positive or negative, and will be used to refer to lasting impacts of mines other than in terms of employment. 85 mine site as discussed by Arctic Bay residents and conclude with the position (as indicated by literature) that Nanisivik did not provide a long lasting positive legacy, and therefore did not meet the development goals and justifications outlined by the government when arguing for its existence.
Before examining the legacies of Nanisivik that continue today, I will first give a brief overview of some of the impacts on social life reported to have been experienced at the time of Nanisivik’s operation, drawing heavily from Brubacher & Associates’ 2002 study.14 In terms of engagement with the mine during operation, there was a diversity of opinions and experiences among Inuit at Arctic Bay. Some Inuit who worked at the mine expressed feelings of economic empowerment, with the sharing of money strengthening the social fabric of families and communities (Brubacher and Associates 2002, 49).
Similarly, others indicated that Nanisivik was a welcome source of money in the period of transition from a domestic economy to a wage or mixed economy. However, with these positive impacts came the negative as well, the most significant of which during
Nanisivik’s operation was the increased availability of alcohol (including drunk driving incidents between Nanisivik and Arctic Bay [Bowes-Lyon, Richards, and McGee 2009]).
Other reported negative impacts were parental absence, stress, loneliness (on the part of the spouse), and marriage breakdowns. Separation from families was the most often cited reason among all Inuit employees for quitting Nanisivik, with Arctic Bay employees citing this as the most difficult aspect of working at Nanisivik (Brubacher and Associates
2002, 50-51).
While not an academic source (the potential downfalls of which are discussed below), Brubacher and Associates’ report provides the most comprehensive survey of the historical and contemporary impressions of the legacy of Nanisivik from Arctic Bay residents, having extensively interviewed Inuit in Arctic Bay about the social impacts of the mine and specific areas of community development. 86
Aside from the positive opportunity to work in wage employment and the negative impacts of alcohol and separation from family, positive or negative impacts on other areas of life were ambiguous. Migrant labour in northern extractive industries is one instance of potential long term social, political, and economic changes in local
Indigenous communities (Nuttall and Wessendorf, 2006). In the case of Nanisivik, little cultural exchange or cross-cultural interaction was reported between southern workers at the mine site and northern Inuit employees, but some Inuit recounted that it was useful to work in a “Qallunaat15 work culture”, as this provided experience and skills of working in a money-based economy. However, this was a one-sided learning, as ‘most of the cultural learning took place amongst the Inuit – the mine never changed’ (ibid., 52). In terms of economic change, some money was used at the time as ‘productive money’ enabling a ‘household to increase its economic productivity’ (ibid., 54), or to increase social status. However, according to a 1978 report by the Government of the Northwest
Territory (GNWT), the increased income earnings from mine employment relative to social assistance were marginal (ibid., 55). There was a small positive effect on the Arctic
Bay business community, with some money from the income spent in local stores, accounting for 10%-15% of the business of stores (ibid., 56). Therefore, despite hopes
(the government of Canada and NWT) and fears (community of Arctic Bay) about the
Nanisivik mine, social and economic impacts of the mine during the time of operation do not appear to be as significant as predicted by either side, as the physical and cultural separation between the town of Arctic Bay and the Nanisivik mine site mitigated some of both the positive and negative social impacts (ibid., v).
Non-Inuit or “White”. 87
When looking at the lasting legacy of Nanisivik in Arctic Bay, Brubacher and
Associates divide their data into four elements of community development vis-à-vis
Nanisivik: human impacts, social impacts, financial impacts, and infrastructural impacts.
Community development is defined here as the ‘capacity of a community to achieve its social and economic objectives’ (ibid., 63), one of the main reasons the government held for supporting Nanisivik. Impacts refer to not only those who worked at the mine, but also the impacts that spread to other community members.
The lasting human impacts of the mine site were mixed. Some Inuit who worked at the mine indicated that they experienced personal growth and development, and some of their children attended the Nanisivik school, gaining skills that have now translated to local hamlet jobs (ibid., vi). However, the skills that were developed from working at
Nanisivik were mostly in the areas of infrastructure creation and maintenance, two skill sets that are not widely needed in the community now and do not contribute to current
Arctic Bay community development goals, which now call for skills such as administrative, entrepreneurial and research skills (ibid., 71). Furthermore, the mine site did not provide certification that would allow their training to be transferred to other employers (Bowes-Lyon, Richards, and McGee 2009, 388). As for social capital legacy, despite a fear of increased individualism, kinship and sharing networks were maintained and perhaps even supplemented by increased access to money (Brubacher and Associates
2002, v). However, while working at the mine site added more money into the sharing networks at the time of Nanisivik’s operation, this cannot necessarily be linked to a lasting positive legacy (ibid., 71). 88
In terms of financial capital, there was no lasting increased capacity to finance local business start-ups or expansion. Some of the wages earned at the time of operation replaced social assistance payments from the government, some went to income tax, and some became discretionary income. Some might also have been converted to social capital via sharing, or spent to promote individual health and well-being, such as by reducing stress associated with poverty or uncertain income (ibid., v). However, there is not much evidence of the lasting impacts of this money in Arctic Bay. Finally, the infrastructure of Arctic Bay saw few, if any, lasting benefits. There was a small increase of tourism due to cruise ships docking at Nanisivik, and a small reduction in the amount of public money invested into Arctic Bay infrastructure, but the level and quality of infrastructure in Arctic Bay remains comparable to the other North Baffin communities
(ibid., 72). Finally, despite a desire from the community of Arctic Bay to have and use the buildings from Nanisivik post closure, the infrastructure was destroyed with the exception of ten houses that were relocated from Nanisivik to Arctic Bay (Bowes-Lyon,
Richards, and McGee 2009, 386).
Therefore, there is little evidence for many lasting legacy impacts, either positive or negative, to Arctic Bay’s development capacity as a result of the Nanisivik mine
(Brubacher and Associates 2002; Tester, Lambert, and Lim 2013; Bowes-Lyon, Richards, and McGee 2009). To have had positive lasting impacts the government could have kept a consistent focus on the mine’s role in Arctic Bay’s own development goals or had continuous consultation with the community over the mine’s life (Bowes-Lyon, Richards, and McGee 2009, 386), or the public investment in Nanisivik could have been spent directly on local development capacity building (Brubacher and Associates 2002, 73). As 89 per Polanyi, these conclusions of Brubacher and Associates and Bowes-Lyon, Richards, and McGee are important: increased state involvement in Nanisivik mine could have reduced some of the negative impacts of the mine and increased a positive lasting legacy.
Therefore, although there were some small-scale positive impacts during the mine’s operations and, they suggest, few negative lasting impacts, these authors argue that
Nanisivik could have provided Inuit with more benefits had Inuit preferences been heeded and had there been increased state, rather than market, involvement.
While these different studies are useful for understanding the applied or material aspects of the Nanisivik mine and the ways in which mining may be used for community development more broadly, they do not take into account the subtler and discursive impacts that may have a lasting legacy to today. In particular, Brubacher & Associates’ report provides useful guidelines for the re-signing of the IIBA between QIA and BIM that will happen at the next IIBA review in order to guide policies that will hopefully provide increased benefits to Inuit today. However, considering only the guidelines in
Brubacher & Associates’ report will not address the underlying tensions and opportunities underlying development narratives and approaches that may doom development strategies before they even begin (Li 2007).
A perspective is therefore needed that brings together both the material and discursive elements of the mining complex in Nunavut to fully assess the lasting legacy of the Nansivik mine on Inuit experiences with Baffinland today. For example, many
Inuit in Igloolik who had worked at Nanisivik continue to consistently hold jobs, an unusual feature in a labour environment that is characterized by high job turn over and high unemployment rates. This correlation between working at Nanisivik and continuing 90 to reliably work in wage employment indicates a discursive legacy of the Nanisivik mine that is not easily measured or categorized into solely a community development analysis.
It may suggest a potential threat to an alternative northern economy through a hegemonic adoption of capitalist ideology, as outlined by Polanyi, or a strategic opportunity that draws on wage labour with awareness, as argued by Sahlins. Importantly, this is not necessarily a question of either/or: lasting legacies from Nanisivik and dominant development narratives in northern Canada may act as both positive and negative forces for Inuit in Nunavut. Employment at historical and contemporary mines may act as both a threat to Inuit and local communities’ well-being and provide opportunities to further that well-being. The interactions between the material and discursive factors in the mining industry (and how they may be a benefit or a threat, or both) is a theme that continues throughout the dissertation, and the first step in approaching this question draws on theory addressing the relationship between modernity and economic involvement. It is for this reason that drawing on Polanyi and Sahlins is particularly useful in understanding the implications on economic and social life from the mine site.
The State and the Market
At the time of the development of Nanisivik and earlier, government and industry were both working under the dominant ideology that ‘industrial economic expansion necessarily brings net benefits’ (Gibson 1978, 149). The notion that mining is good for the Territories and ‘should continue to be one of the cornerstones of the territorial economies’ (Mining Management and Infrastructure Directorate, Natural Resources and
Economic Development Branch 1986, 7) continued to be held by Indian Affairs and
Northern Development beyond the development of Nanisivik. In a 1986 publication, 91
Indian Affairs stated that the goal of the government should be to make the necessary environment for industry to maintain and expand, and that this contributes to the well- being of Territorial economies and northern residents. The goals of this policy were three-fold: ‘give industry an atmosphere of certainty about federal government intentions’
(ibid., 2); ‘increase industry competitiveness by giving improved geo-scientific services and minimizing federal government costs’ (ibid., 3); ‘encourage dialogue between mining industry, public, and both levels of government’ (ibid., 11). A final goal was to enhance certainty in access to land in the three Territories so that exploration would not be disrupted by future changes in land status, including Indigenous land claims settlements, conservation initiatives, and northern land use planning. On this issue, Indian Affairs took the position that ‘without diminishing the importance of finalizing the native claims process, the federal government recognizes that economic activities cannot be held in abeyance awaiting its resolution’ (ibid., 13), and so would not put further bans on staking areas that were not already included in the native claims process, and if that land later becomes part of a land claims, the exploration/mineral claims would remain valid. Indian
Affairs argued that resolving land claims would give Indigenous people the lands, rights and institutions they wanted along with a greater stake in the economy and increased clarity and certainty to economic development.
This position did not fundamentally depart from the history of mining in Nunavut, and is a good example of the contemporary relationship between the market and the state in the mining industry in Nunavut today. It also illustrates the relationship between the two entities as outlined by Karl Polanyi. Using Polanyi’s framework as a starting point, with the arguments from Brubacher & Associates and Bowes-Lyon, Richards, & McGee 92 as case illustration, it is possible to offer one explanation for why mining in Nunavut has thus far not resulted in the positive lasting impacts and development results for which the state has consistently hoped. This approach will then be tempered with the framework employed by Sahlins, which indicates where positive results may be found despite the lack of large-scale benefits.
Polanyi theorized the reasons behind and process of the shift in the 19th century to a new economic order: the (allegedly) self-regulating market economy, defined as ‘an economic system controlled, regulated, and directed by markets alone; order in the production and distribution of goods is entrusted to this self-regulating mechanism’
(Polanyi 1957, 68). This type of economic system therefore required the separation of economics and politics, with no intervention of the state in the market. The self- regulating market system was based on the principle of gain, which was the justification of action and behavior in everyday life. This type of market system was materialistic and premised on the idea that ‘all human problems could be resolved given an unlimited amount of material commodities (ibid., 40). However, Polanyi argues that in reality the market is an uncontrolled system that has caused social devastation and destroyed social cohesion, as the market has not, in fact, regulated itself. Polanyi’s main thesis is therefore that ‘the idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness, and so society tried to protect itself, but this changed the self-regulation of the market’ (ibid., 3). 93
According to Polanyi, one of the related key factors in the rise of the market economy was the impact of the new economic order on societal organization. 19th century society was a departure from what Polanyi believed was the normal economic order, which was a function of, and contained within, the social. By contrast, the new economic system that he discusses, now controlled by the market, resulted in social relations being embedded in the economic system rather than the economy being embedded in social relations. Society then became an appendage to the market: the market economy could only exist in a market society. A market economy must include all elements of industry including labour, land and money, but labour and land are human and environmental, and
‘to include them in the market mechanism means to subordinate the substance of society itself to the laws of the market’ (ibid., 71). For Polanyi, modernization is this ‘reduction of man to labor and of nature to land under the impulsion of the market economy’
(MacIver 1957, ix).
Polanyi also argues that the essence of human nature was posited to be a factor in the rise of the market economy. Markets were assumed to be natural institutions that would spontaneously arise from human society if not interfered with, and the self- regulating market relied on economic self-interest for its regulation. Furthermore, this type of economy took as a basic starting point that ‘human beings behave in such a way as to achieve maximum monetary gains’ (Polanyi 1957, 68). However, Polanyi argues that bartering is not common in human nature, and ‘economic history reveals that the emergence of natural markets was in no way the result of the gradual and spontaneous emancipation of the economic sphere from governmental control. On the contrary, the market has been the outcome of a conscious and often violent intervention on the part of 94 government which imposed the market organization on society for noneconomic ends’
(ibid., 250).
This very brief overview provides the background necessary to grasp several of the key supporting features within Polanyi’s argument that are relevant to understanding mining in Nunavut: substantivism versus neoclassical economics, the separation of the political and the economic, and the commodification of land and labour.
Polanyi’s approach first relates to Nunavut in his understanding of economics, based on the relationship between human society and the market economy. Polanyi addresses two approaches to economics, the first of which is the neoclassical approach.
This is premised on the idea of humans as naturally maximizing beings, and their decision-making is run by logical actions to maximize money (or other resources).
However, Polanyi takes a different approach, known as substantivism. This approach to human economics is not focused on scarcity and rational decision making toward maximization. Rather, it looks at the ways in which humans make a living via interaction with their social and natural environments. In this conceptualization, economics is the way that society meets its material needs and connects to his argument that ‘never before our time were markets more than accessories of economic life. As a rule, the economic system was absorbed in the social system, and whatever principle of behavior predominated in the economy, the presence of the market pattern was found to be compatible with it’ (ibid., 68). There is nothing a priori better about markets or exchange, and there is no natural human inclination towards it. Maximization is one possible outcome or type of human/societal economics, but only one out of many. At the broader level of discourse, Polanyi argues that the myth of humanity’s inclination to trade and 95 barter is used to try to mold human nature to fit these modern market based economies and institutions.
This theorized disjuncture between neoclassical approaches and substantivist approaches to human economic nature is present in the assumptions underlying, and discussions about, mining in Nunavut today. When it comes to employment in mining, the neoclassical approach informs the expectations of both the government and industry about Inuit employment. This approach is in line with Polanyi’s 19th century thinkers, who ‘assumed that in his economic activity man strove for profit, that his materialistic propensities would induce him to choose the lesser instead of the greater effort and to expect payment for his labor; in short, that in his economic activity he would tend to abide by what they described as economic rationality, and that all contrary behavior was the result of outside interference’ (ibid., 249).
As discussed in Chapter Two, Premier Taptuna talks about the mining industry as bringing development to Nunavut by bringing jobs. He is working under the assumption that these jobs will be filled by Inuit, and that the superior wages associated with these jobs will bring more money to Inuit: Inuit are presumed by the state to want to maximize their capital accumulation and therefore work as much as they can or do whatever they can to maintain a job in the mine. Polanyi’s ‘outside interference’ manifested in Nunavut is framed as culture. Inuit culture has historically and contemporarily been framed as one of the main sources of failure for successful long-term Inuit employment in the mining industry, and training programs are put into place to try to “teach” Inuit to be economic maximizers, such as programs about how to do banking, saving money, and budgeting – all of which might negate such other parts of societal economics as sharing money. 96
Failure to act in a maximizing way is understood as a failure of Inuit to successfully act as proper economic citizens. From the perspective of Polanyi’s substantivism, we can begin to understand the ways in which the market economy is embedded in a larger socially defined economic system, and wage labour is only one part of northern livelihoods and well-being.
Secondly, Polanyi highlights that this creation of the market economy is necessarily accompanied by a separation of the economic and the political: ‘a self- regulating market demands nothing less than the institutional separation of society in an economic and political sphere. Such a dichotomy is, in effect, merely the restatement, from the point of view of society as a whole, of the existence of a self-regulating market’
(ibid., 71). Among other things, states should not inhibit the formation of markets, incomes should be made only through sales, and the state should not interfere with market conditions via fixing prices or regulating supply and demand. In fact, the only way the state should interact with the market is by implementing policies and protections
‘which help to ensure the self-regulation of the market by creating conditions which make the market the only organizing power in the economic sphere’ (ibid., 69). The separation of the previously incorporated economic and political sphere arose during the
19th century and ignores the fact that, historically, markets developed under the mercantile system were under the control of centralized administration: therefore, the separation of the political and economic is not present in the historical origins of market economy.
This separation of market and state as a key characteristic of modernity and modern economic systems is exemplified in Nunavut. Over the history of mining in 97
Nunavut the state has fluctuated in terms of its involvement in the extractive industry
(representative of the market), but the current trend is reduced involvement and therefore generally less integration between the state and the market. Today, the GN participates on the Nunavut Impact Review Board (NIRB), an institute of public government created by the NLCA to assess the possible impacts of proposed development projects before granting approval for the project to go forward. The GN is only one actor among many who contribute to this process, along with the Government of Canada, hunter and trapper organizations, the public, regional Inuit associations, hamlets and municipalities, and finally the proponents. One GN interlocutor shared with me that within this framework, the GN almost always encourages mining, as it aids in infrastructure such as roads. The mining industry is further encouraged by the GN by offering fuel tax rebates for mineral exploration and mining activities.16 Aside from these promotions of mining, the
Government of Nunavut does not involve itself to any great extent with the mining industry, for example by placing Inuit hiring requirements on mining operations. As discussed in the previous chapter, if the mine is located on Inuit Owned Lands (IOLs), the company makes their Inuit Impact Benefit Agreement (IIBA) with the relevant regional Inuit organization and it is at that point that Inuit hiring requirements will be negotiated. If the mine is located on Crown Land the GN will receive some monetary benefits but generally not place hiring requirements. In neither case is the GN involved heavily in the process of mining.
This dominant and historical tendency in Nunavut of encouraging the market to be a major organizing power in the economic sphere of resource extraction is further
However, since writing this chapter the GN has started to pull back its tax rebates for mining companies (Nunatsiaq News, May 3, 2016). 98 illustrated by Taptuna’s actions as the GN Premier, the main representative of the
Government of Nunavut. To reference the example in Chapter Two, Taptuna secretly appealed to the federal government to overturn the NPC decision to put restrictions on
Baffinland’s development. Here, the state at both the territorial and federal levels intervened only to clear the way for the economic sphere to operate uninhibited.
Furthermore, Taptuna sets up a distinction between where potential for job growth is located (the economic sphere) and where not (the political or governmental/bureaucratic/administrative sphere). According to Taptuna, the mining industry is therefore necessary because it will provide employment. To reference a quote from Taptuna in Chapter Two, ““And with this, whether you call it politicizing a project, it doesn’t really matter. That’s our job to ensure that our people find employment”’
(Nunatsiaq News, June 1, 2015). In this quote, it is possible to see that Taptuna is working from the understanding that the role of the political sphere is to facilitate the operation of the economic sphere with an eye to promoting Inuit employment.
However, the GN itself is a heterogeneous organization with differing priorities within and between departments, and the GN’s position on mining is not singular, simple, or cohesive. For example, according to one former GN employee, within the Government of Nunavut there has been at times tension between the Department of the Environment and the Department of Economic Development and Transport (ED&T). The Department of the Environment has tended to argue that there should be greater government involvement in environmental studies and protection at the sites of mining exploration, development, and extraction. However, the Department of ED&T argues that increased government intervention will discourage industrial development and thus reduce mining 99 interest, in turn reducing Inuit employment opportunities. Despite the history of lack of long term Inuit employment at mine sites, the GN often takes the position of ED&T as their starting point. Therefore, while Taptuna may act as a mouthpiece for what is decided “behind the scenes” to be the focus of the GN, these decisions are not uncontested or necessarily accepted uncritically.
Finally, using Polanyi’s framework and critiques of market economies, it is possible to start to understand why mining has not advanced northern development in
Nunavut as hoped by the Territorial and federal governments. In Nunavut, the market is seen as the driving force of development, but support of the market by the state has not often resulted in the state’s development goals (which are not themselves always in line with community development goals). For Polanyi, the market economic system is one that hurts, rather than helps, humans. Due to its failure to regulate itself it has not yielded greater wealth for the greater number of people, but rather has resulted in great wealth for some and poverty for others. Furthermore, for Polanyi this type of economic system is
‘improvement at the price of social dislocation’ (Polanyi 1957, 34). It destroys society rather than supporting it and alienates people from an economic system that is embedded in society. In Nunavut the societal economics of Inuit include not only wage labour but also hunting, sharing, providing care for family, friends, and community members. These are all parts of an economic system that has developed in society over a long historical period that is very different from market economy development. Wage labour is not automatically seen as the most important part of this economic system, and therefore
Inuit cannot be considered to be the neoclassical economic maximizers; as such, an economic system based on these principles will not necessarily succeed. Therefore, trying 100 to premise human well-being on an economic system that is not beneficial to societal stability and does not take into account the existing alternative economic system will not yield positive results.
The Indigenization of Modernity
However, Polanyi’s approach, while useful for providing a framework within which to understand why mining in Nunavut has not yet met government expectations for development, fails to take into account the agency of Inuit in local communities in
Nunavut. The notion that Inuit resist forms of capitalism is not a new idea. For example,
Tester, Lambert and Lim argue that Inuit choose culture over employment when the two might conflict: ‘the Nanisivik mine’s employment and turnover rates suggest the indelible and enduring importance of culture in defining and maintaining Inuit identity.
Where employment interfered with or restricted other culturally important activities, employment opportunities appear to have been sacrificed’ (2013, 29). Other approaches suggest that Indigenous peoples strategically engage with the mining industry to focus on the benefits that are useful for them (Blaser 2004), a position that will be discussed later in this dissertation. For the purposes of this chapter, Polanyi is unique among these scholars in that he posits and explicates a close tie between economics and modernity, and as such his approach can fruitfully be put in conversation with the approach taken by
Marshall Sahlins, who also approaches the question of economics and modernity. In contrast to Polanyi, Sahlins, writing about what he calls the indigenization of modernity
(1999), argues that modernity and its economic systems do not necessarily overwhelm local Indigenous livelihoods and may, in fact, bolster them. 101
Sahlins highlights that hunting and gathering societies still exist today and draw on modern technologies to maintain or complement their subsistence life styles. This approach to technology is termed in his paper ‘develop-man’ and refers to ‘the use of foreign wealth in the expansion of feasting, politicking, subsidizing kinship, and other activities that make up the local conception of a human existence’ (Sahlins 1999, ix). For
Sahlins, this represents an Indigenous adaptation to the global, the capital, and/or the
Western. In this way, global homogeneity and local differentiation have developed together, with native cultural autonomy as a response to global homogeneity. Therefore, diversity, rather than the assumed inevitable homogeneity resulting from globalization, is one important characterization of modernity.
In Sahlins’ conceptualization of the modern world, this diversity is not a freezing of cultures in the past. Rather, communities, particularly those in the third and fourth worlds, are living and defending their cultures by drawing on the very elements that modernity brings: ‘what the self-consciousness of “culture” does signify is the demand of the peoples for their own space within the world cultural order. Rather than a refusal of the commodities and relations of the world systems, this more often means what the Enga sang about, a desire to indigenize them. The project is the indigenization of modernity’
(ibid., x). Sahlins argues that this active engagement with international or capitalist forces allows some groups, such as the Enga and other New Guinea Highlanders, to pursue their unique cultural orders in line with their own preferences. According to the local peoples, this strategic use of external capitalist or Western elements is not a move towards cultural inauthenticity but rather a process of culturally indigenizing those formerly external elements. Using these elements is therefore drawing on a Western technique, rather than 102 adopting Western culture: it becomes not a question of being a culture of resistance but rather a process of ‘resistance of culture’ (ibid., xvi).
Sahlins goes further to argue that not only is it not a question of resistance, but that cultural subversion is the common practice: ‘involving the assimilation of the foreign in the logics of the familiar – a change in the contexts of the foreign forms or forces, which also change their values – cultural subversion is in the nature of intercultural relations’ (ibid., xvi). This is in opposition to the Western view of culture, which posits a
‘total system erected upon its technological foundations’ (ibid.). These non-Western peoples’ own versions of modernity therefore undo Western oppositions of tradition versus change, custom versus rationality, and tradition versus development. In this way, traditional cultures are therefore not necessarily incompatible with or vulnerable to capitalism: diversity, rather than the assumed inevitable homogeneity resulting from globalization, is one important characterization of modernity. However, Sahlins argues that problems arise when these cultures are not able to get enough money to support their traditional way of life.
Sahlins therefore provides an important complement and counterpoint to
Polanyi’s approach to modernity, takes into account a multiplicity of ways that Inuit are drawing from the mining industry, and illustrates how the modern economic system may be more than just a threat. Taking Sahlins’ approach as a starting point, Inuit are active participants who act with the economic system rather than only being acted upon by it.
One important example of this is the use of wages garnered from working in the mining to pursue hunting activities. Wenzel (1983) noted that Inuit living in Clyde River and working at Nanisivik as rotation labour in 1976 found that the mine site gave a new 103 source of money, which was scarce in the small North Baffin communities (1983, 82).
Wenzel argues that historically in the area around Clyde River the resources required for survival were available on the land to be accessed through hunting and harvesting.
However, as money became an important new resource, Inuit in Clyde River found themselves in a position of scarcity, with only a few part-time positions in the town and income for other community members gained through the sale of furs and transfer payments (ibid.). In particular, in 1974 there was a decline in both the art market and the polar bear skin market, resulting in even higher levels of scarcity of money in the community. This decline in the availability of money put pressure on Inuit opportunities to go hunting for either subsistence or for furs to sell, as the costs of equipment had not decreased.
Wenzel points out that the older men from Clyde River who worked at Nanisivik used the money gained from working there to buy hunting equipment for either themselves or their family members, with benefits shared more widely within Clyde
River. The sharing of money gained from working at Nanisivik therefore was
‘structurally similar to traditional modes of biological resource distribution within and between families’ (ibid., 89) rather than a different system of using money that might have been expected to come in with the mining industry. Furthermore, the money gained from working at the mine was needed to continue pursuing hunting activities that were core to Inuit livelihoods in Clyde River at the time: ‘the closely woven networks, based on kinship and economic orientation into which the Clyde Inuit are aligned, facilitated the integration of these monies into the local economy… disposal of this outside income cannot be clearly separated from the traditional economic mode of the community’ (ibid., 104
90). Wenzel concludes that money must be viewed as part of the local subsistence economy, as a resource alongside others contributing to the local existing livelihood system, with Clyde River Inuit using the money gained from working at Nanisivik for
‘furthering the maintenance of a traditional activity pattern in which a critical resource was temporarily lacking’ (ibid., 91).
Many Inuit in Igloolik who work for Baffinland use money in a similar way. Lack of money is a barrier for many people in Igloolik to going out hunting, and working at the
Mary River Project therefore provides a source of funds for some to continue going on the land. This influx of money was paired with the work schedule, which also facilitated hunting. Some Inuit men reported to me that as a result of two weeks on – two weeks off rotational schedule they had time to go onto the land for hunting. If working a Monday through Friday schedule, there was the chance that the weekends would have bad weather, with then limited opportunity during the work week. By contrast, although they missed the opportunity to hunt during their two weeks at the mine site, working the condensed schedule meant that they had more opportunities while in town, with less of a chance that weather would take away all of their opportunities to get out. Similarly, most of the Inuit employees I spoke to at the mine site indicated that their wages were shared with their immediate or extended family members – sometimes almost entirely. These wages were shared in a variety of ways, ranging from indirect transfers (such as buying food, paying bills, or purchasing luxury items such as iPods) to direct transfers (for example, giving hard cash to family members or leaving a debit card with a family member).
The influx of money in Igloolik via working at the mine site therefore did not automatically result in a change to a different way of life, and indeed was often used to 105 bolster existing economic modes and livelihoods. However, this evidence does not dismiss the importance of Polanyi’s approach. Polanyi is particularly useful for understanding the broader economic trends in Nunavut. He highlights well the possible dangers of the separation of the political and economic spheres that are present in
Nunavut today, and helps bolster an understanding of the areas where this “modern” economic system has failed.
Taking Polanyi and Sahlins together, then, is particularly fruitful for sketching the outlines of the mining phenomenon in Nunavut: Polanyi helps to explain the dangers of the emergent and emerging economic framework at the state and market level, while
Sahlins illuminates reasons why the intersection of dominant global economic systems with Indigenous local economic systems does not necessarily result in the elimination of traditional livelihoods. Although the dominant structural challenges outlined by Polanyi represent threats to traditional livelihoods in Igloolik, Sahlins shows how wage employment can also be brought to serve Inuit non-market economies: that is to say, while market structure has important and significant impacts, it does not have unlimited power. For some Inuit working at the Mary River Project, it is not necessarily a choice between “wage employment” and “culture”, but rather a synthesis of the two. The interplay between these two positions – the power of the market economy and its affiliated traits, and the power of the local – will be a framing theme of this dissertation.
The interplay is evident in the next chapter, Chapter Four, when discussing training programs and subject formation; Chapter Five in the differing ways of place creation; and
Chapter Six when considering how the mine might be used to maintain well-being.
106
CHAPTER FOUR: TRAINING
‘Capacity building’ is a term that is often heard in Nunavut. It’s used at the
Nunavut Mining Symposium when talking about employment. The Government of
Nunavut (GN) uses it when talking about community development. The Territorial and regional Inuit organizations reference it when talking about important benefits flowing from the mine to the communities. It is also a term that is used by Baffinland when talking about their training programs. In this chapter I will address how training is talked about and conducted by the Canadian mining industry, how these training strategies relate to the global mineral market, and what the implications are for the North Baffin communities and Inuit working at the mine site. I suggest here that the mining company,
Baffinland, acts as a mediator between capitalist/neoliberal values of what makes a “good worker” and the subjects of these values (Inuit). This is done through the company’s relationship with other institutions in Nunavut; the company’s embeddedness in the global mineral market; and two specific training strategies (“capacity building” and
“growing people”). In capacity building, less monetary and time investment is spread out over multiple, expendable bodies, whereas in growing people, there is greater investment in an individual, and as such the “grown” person becomes a greater asset to the company.
The term “capacity building” has been used in different contexts within and beyond
Nunavut; this chapter focuses on how capacity building is used in mining.
The mining company, Baffinland, is situated in a partnership for developing
Nunavut along with the Government of Nunavut and the Territorial and regional Inuit organizations via an Inuit Impact Benefit Agreement (IIBA) and other permitting agreements contracted with the Government of Nunavut, the Canadian federal 107 government, and other actors. Baffinland’s role in this development scheme is via training – capacity building and growing people. By training people, the company is doing the social welfare work formerly done by the state, a key feature of contemporary neoliberal forms of governance (Rigillo 2015). These two training strategies draw from the global mining market: as such, they are tied not only to what people need to work at the mine, but current trends in the mining industry, in particular, mineral prices on the global market. Furthermore, these ways of training focus not just on giving people certain skills, but changing peoples’ relationship with work – that is to say, it tries to make them into different types of workers. Skills in this context refer to the specific “hard skills” that people need to do their jobs, such as heavy equipment operation. Traits refers to “soft skills” or aspects of peoples’ personalities, either individual or cultural, that the company and the state perceive to be necessary to be in the wage workforce.
These dual characteristics of the mining company as a type of corporation in a partnership with the government and the Inuit organizations, and as a force that works to make a certain type of subject can be usefully understood through Tania Li’s (2007) idea of the will to improve, in particular her combination of a Foucauldian power analysis with a Marxist capitalist analysis. The mining company positions itself as a good partner in terms of developing the North (one of the goals of the government) via providing skills, training and income for Inuit (one of the goals of the government and Inuit organizations).
It is also perceived as responsible to its shareholders (one of the goals of the company) both because of its good reputation and because of the labour it is providing to actually do the mining. The mining company therefore acts in part as an institution of mediation of these goals and desires, these ‘wills to improve’ and use Inuit. This chapter is about 108 attempts to make people (for) work, whereas the possible resistance or alternative responses to these attempts are explored in the next chapter.
Capacity Building and the Company as a Partner
Capacity building and growing people are two terms that are used in different ways in many different fields. For the purposes of this chapter, I will be using a definition that was given to me by Baffinland that is contextualized by an understanding of how these terms are used more broadly in the Canadian mining industry, and how they relate to notions of capacity building that arise out of the NGO development world and the management strategy world. Training and development strategies as they relate to capacity building are diverse, and the reason I am using a very specific definition is that it enables me to elucidate how capacity building and growing people operate in my field site.
Capacity building and growing people, in this context, have several key characteristics, all of which relate to the ways that people are trained for employment. In
Nunavut I asked Baffinland VPs what the difference is between capacity building and growing people. They replied that these two terms are, to some degree, mining colloquialisms: what people refer to as ‘capacity building’ is more accurately called
‘external capacity building’, and what is popularly called ‘growing people’ is properly termed ‘internal capacity building’. However, for the purposes of this chapter I will maintain the common usages, as they are the ones I heard in the field. (External) capacity building, I was told, is a strategy used to prepare people for potential future employment
– that is to say, not to be employed immediately. Capacity building makes a pool of people in the community who can be drawn on for present or future labour via hiring 109 them into the company. By contrast, growing people is something that is done with people who already work within the company. An additional distinction that was explained to me at the Canadian Institute of Mining Convention (but that was not explicitly told to me by Baffinland), was in the number of people being trained for what roles: whether the company is trying to “develop” a large group of people for a single job each (capacity building) or whether the company is trying to “develop” an individual to do many different jobs (growing people). In brief, when the company trains a larger number of people for a number of (potential) jobs it is capacity building, whereas growing people involves training one person to do many jobs. One implication of these strategies is temporal: capacity building (training a large number of people) tends to be an event (i.e. a course on heavy equipment operation) whereas growing a person is a process
(training in a number of different areas over time).
The term “capacity building”, however, has its roots in the NGO development world, where it is manifest in full complexity and specificity. For the purposes of this chapter I take my exploration of capacity building from Deborah Eade (International
Development and Humanitarianism) (1997). Her approach to capacity building is especially relevant for this case study as she gives a good background about the basics of capacity building, capacity building’s relationship to development, and capacity building as a process. However, as mentioned above, capacity building in the Nunavut mining context draws on aspects of the NGO/development context, but also differs in significant ways. When used by NGOs, capacity building is commonly referenced as an approach to development, as something that is needed if development is to be sustainable and people centered (meant to improve the lives of people), while also recognizing that it can mean a 110 range of things for different organizations. Capacity building in this context is often used to refer to the improvement of the individual in part through institutions, helping
‘enabling institutions to be more effective in implementing development projects.
Institutions are thus the instrument by which certain goals can be reached, and may be governmental or non-governmental’ (Eade 1997, 34).
One important aspect of capacity building in the NGO context is an emphasis on empowerment of the subject: ‘capacity building is itself a strategic approach to enhancing the autonomy of those who are excluded, and which is expressed in many practical ways
[…] Overall, a capacity building approach is more concerned with enhancing people’s capacity to articulate their own interests than with strengthening institutions per se.’ (ibid.,
51; 89). Training alone is too narrow a focus for development, especially if it emphasizes higher education and not primary education, which will result in the exacerbation of social and economic divisions (ibid., 78). Education and training are not capacity building activities in and of themselves: ‘rather, it is the organizational setting and overall purpose – what is intended, what is being achieved, and by whom – that define them as such’ (ibid., 79). That is to say, the intentions behind the capacity building activities, as well as the activities themselves, are important. Because of this dual importance of intentions and activities, it is important to understand the underlying or existing inequalities before implementing capacity building activities, as the structure and behavior of the developing organization can reflect or reproduce the inequalities (ibid.,
30).
The notion of capacity building, external and internal, also refers to strategies used in institutional and managerial discourses, where capacity building relates to the 111 broader business strategy of creating value for stakeholders for any organization, not just a corporation. In this paradigm, money, people and technology are converted by leadership policy and strategy (via equipment, processes, and systems) to value provided to the stakeholders (output) (Mayo 2016, 18). In this way, all organizations create value and benefit to the stakeholders, but depending on the organization this value is not always, or exclusively, financial. Examples of non-financial value added to business stakeholders may include investor confidence generated through positive media; having a good parent company reputation; or benefits going to customers and employees who are also stakeholders (ibid., 327). However, organizations in this paradigm are not necessarily limited to business corporations. For example, governments in democracies are complex organizations primarily directed at providing positive outcomes for the public rather than for financial investors (ibid., 10). By contrast, ‘a commercial organization may see this process simplistically as: the organization takes in costs and converts them to revenues, and in so doing generates a surplus called profits for the owners’ (ibid., 19). In almost any organization there may be both primary and secondary stakeholders, and value outputs therefore often go to both, taking into account a multiplicity of priorities. Such, I suggest, are the dynamics of mining in Nunavut. The company Baffinland has responsibilities to many different stakeholders17, and these responsibilities are reflected in their operations and, for the purposes of this chapter, their training procedures – manifested as capacity building and growing people – as they relate to their multifaceted relationships.
These stakeholders include (but are not limited to) Baffinland’s investors; Baffinland’s parent company; the regional and Territorial Inuit organizations; the local communities; the permitting agencies; the Government of Nunavut; and the Canadian federal government. 112
The type of capacity building that is encouraged in Nunavut draws from both corporate and governmental models, which at first glance seem very different but ultimately are closely entwined. When related to NGO activities, capacity building is framed in terms of empowerment, while in institutional development approaches capacity building is framed in terms of returns to stakeholders. Capacity building as encouraged by the GN draws on the NGO idea of empowerment, with the underlying goal that Inuit can take charge of their lives post-extraction rather than just gain skills for the moment.
The GN and Territorial and regional Inuit organizations want Inuit to be able to participate in the workplace after the mining company leaves, and in this way to “take advantage of the opportunities” that may come with mining, so as to alleviate current poverty assumed to be stemming from a lack of wage employment today, and potential continued economic poverty in the future. In contrast, capacity building for a corporation, such as the mining company in Nunavut, may not necessarily be undertaken with humanitarian goals or motivations, but rather to meet the requirements of the company – for example, to fulfill the terms of a permitting agreement; because it may ultimately provide the mine with a long term work force by promoting loyalty among the employees
(Hirschman 1970); and because of the reputational benefits to the company (Mayo 2016).
However, what is important to recognize is that, whether ideas about capacity building come from the NGO world or the mining world, they are grounded in the same logic: the idea that the individual should develop himself or herself and become a good contributor to neoliberal capitalism. Whether capacity building goals stem from humanitarian motivations or from a responsibility, business or otherwise, to stakeholders, both strive to help the individual to continue to participate in neoliberal capitalist pursuits 113 long term. This is the approach taken by Aradhana Sharma in her book Logics of
Empowerment (2008). Sharma argues that this shift from talking about “development” to talking about “empowerment” represents a parallel shift from a focus on state funded welfare to encouraging people to enact development through the neoliberal market. In this way, under neoliberalism empowerment becomes a means of Foucauldian governance, ‘the preferred tool with which to produce self-governing and self-caring social actors, orient them toward the free market, direct their behaviours towards entrepreneurial ends, and attach them to the project of rule’ (Sharma 2008, xx). Therefore, a Government of Nunavut emphasis on empowerment through the extractive industry, and a corporate focus on producing good employees for their mine site both benefit from and contribute to empowerment as a strategy that may reproduce neoliberal power relations. However, as Sharma argues, there remains room for resistance and subaltern voices in this paradigm, a topic that is addressed in my next chapter.
This idea of working with different organizations in a partnership is important to understanding the position of the mining company in Nunavut. This institutionally partnered approach draws on the idea of ethical capitalism (a goal also embodied by
Corporate Social Responsibility [CSR]), but the notion of ‘connected capitalism’ focuses on the importance of these partnerships rather than the company acting “socially responsibly” as an individual actor – a perspective that is particularly relevant for the instance of mining in Nunavut. One key difference between connected capitalism and
CSR more broadly is the emphasis on partnership. Whereas both frame the company as an ethical actor undertaking charitable activity18, whether mandated or not by the state
‘The corporate social responsibility (CSR) movement coalesces around the conviction that “doing good” is good for business’ (Rolston 2014, 37). 114
(Rigillo 2015), CSR may or may not be conducted by the company alone, whereas connected capitalism always involves the company in relation to another organization.
Foster writes about the ways in which for-profit companies promote themselves as partners with governments and NGOs to help address social problems. This moves beyond Milton Friedman’s argument (1970) that companies act responsibly solely to increase profits. Foster argues that this new approach is not merely CSR, but rather, drawing from Neville Isdell, defines connected capitalism as the phenomenon in which corporations, ‘nonprofits, and governments work together as partners to satisfy their own particular interests, including the long-term profitability of business’ (Foster 2014, 248), a form of managerial capitalism in which the corporate is viewed as a social institution with certain responsibilities beyond pleasing the shareholders. At the heart of connected capitalism is therefore a requirement for corporations to collaborate with external organizations, especially NGOs. This relates also to the distinction discussed above between being responsible to stakeholders, not just shareholders: acting in the interests not only of investors but also of customers, employees, or community members, while still serving the long-term business interests of the company.
These partnerships may have economic value, such as improving the image of the company and thus increasing value for shareholders, or political value, to be viewed as responsible and thus to face less opposition to extractive activities (ibid., 251). However, these partnerships also have important implications for the position of the state and its activities. Foster argues that partnerships create a certain view of the world, ‘in which the win-win solutions epitomized by corporate-NGO partnerships do the social work formerly done by regulatory states acting in the name of citizens. Indeed, states and 115 citizens inhabit this world uncomfortably. For all the happy talk about alliances that include governments as equal partners, the role of government in connected capitalism seems uncertain, if not subordinate’ (ibid., 253). Like the idea of capacity building, these partnerships are oriented towards individual self-sufficiency and empowering the individual to ‘fix their own problems’ (ibid., 254), and so move towards replacing charities. To conclude, Foster suggests wide-reaching implications of connected capitalism as an instrument of control: ‘connected capitalism promises to resolve the antagonism between state and market, and between social accountability and business-as- usual. In so doing, however, it displaces politics as a confrontation between different and irreconcilable interests’ (ibid., 255).
This notion of connected capitalism is manifested by Baffinland, which frames itself as a responsible partner in mining, by engaging in relationships with two different institutions in Nunavut: the regional and Territorial Inuit organizations, with whom they are required to engage as per the regulatory requirements of Nunavut, as well as the
Government of Nunavut (GN). Importantly, for purposes of this chapter, this connected capitalism in Nunavut is manifested in Baffinland’s training strategies that are framed to be simultaneously good for the GN, the Inuit organizations, the community members, and the company. This partnership between Baffinland, the Government of Nunavut (GN), and the regional and Territorial Inuit organizations is manifested in the expectation that
Baffinland will train Inuit for jobs that will translate into wages earned at the mine now as well as long term benefits of being trained to be able to work in the community later.19
To these ends, there are training and employment requirements written into the Inuit
This emphasis on long-term benefits is sometimes termed “legacy building” in mining discourse in Nunavut. This emphasizes benefits to the communities (not just in terms of training) that are long, rather than short, term (for example, local business development, ability for families to buy houses, or savings). 116
Impact Benefit Agreement (IIBA). As discussed earlier, Baffinland had to sign this agreement in order to receive their permit because the mine is located on Inuit Owned
Land. Therefore, while it is impossible to speculate on whether Baffinland would have voluntarily entered into an IIBA had it not been required, the reality is that due to the regulatory requirements (as stemming from the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement),
Baffinland is in a partnership with the Inuit organizations and with the Government of
Nunavut. This partnership is, in part, codified in the IIBA and dictates some of the actions around employment that they must take. For example:
2.1.1 Underlying the provisions of this Agreement is the principle of mutual benefit, collaboration and consultation for both Inuit and the Company from the Project. Benefits for Inuit shall include financial participation, a comprehensive training strategy, target levels of Inuit employment, capacity building, business opportunities and Inuit content considerations in contracting. To the extent that Inuit achieve these benefits the Company will then be able to rely on efficient, high quality Inuit Firms, a well-trained local work force, Project support and stability.
And
8.1.2 The Company will, in cooperation with QIA, give priority to the development of practical skills and educational qualifications that will be necessary for Inuit men and women to: a) Maximize their prospects for employment in the Project workforce; b) Do their jobs effectively; c) Advance according to merit, abilities and aspirations; d) Contribute to the well-being of their communities; and e) Reduce barriers and seek to maximize Inuit participation in the Project workforce throughout the life of the Project.
This dual framing of the mining company in Nunavut – as an actor who engages in training with an empowerment framing and who is in partnership with Nunavut institutions in providing training for Inuit – gives the mine the air of an ethical player, a mining company that takes on moral authority (Rajak 2014). By engaging this discourse, the mining industry can represent itself as an actor that works towards positive 117 development. Furthermore, by aligning itself with the Government of Nunavut and the regional and Territorial Inuit organizations with their goal of capacity building in
Nunavut, the mining company becomes a different type of corporation: it is perceived as a partner in development rather than an adversary. This framing of the mining company as a partner working towards the same goals as other important organizations in Nunavut in the question of how to make sure Inuit benefit from the mine has important implications.
The Canadian Institute of Mining Convention
My understanding of capacity building and growing people in the mining industry is informed more broadly by my attending the Canadian Institute of Mining Convention.
The Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy, and Petroleum (CIM) is a not-for-profit society of professionals in the Canadian mineral industry. With about 15,000 members,
CIM’s goals are ‘to facilitate the exchange of knowledge and technology; to foster networking, professional development and fraternity; to recognize excellence and outstanding achievements in the minerals industry’ (Canadian Institute of
Mining 2016). To these ends, CIM hosts a convention every year. It is mandatory to be a member in order to attend, and it features presentations and panels on a wide variety of topics, workshops, private meetings, a trade show, meals, and social and networking events. I attended this convention in Montreal from May 10-13 2015, at which I had the opportunity to introduce myself as a student, pose questions to industry participants and leaders, and to sit in on open sessions.
The two spaces of richest ethnographic data for my topic during this event were the ‘CIM Expo’ and the social and networking events. The Expo is an enormous room 118 where different mining industry equipment and service providers set up booths to exhibit their products and services, provide information, and network in hopes of making a sale.
The Expo is open throughout the entire conference and participants circulate through and talk to providers as they wish. The Expo also serves lunch, appetizers, and alcoholic drinks to encourage attendance. The social and networking events typically occurred towards the end of the days of presentations or after hours, but were still organized and paid for by the convention. These events also included appetizers and open bars, with a final formal dinner and dance towards the end of the conference. For purposes of this chapter I will be discussing my conversations at the Expo, where I spoke to representatives at booths ranging from small companies that are trying to market their products or services to mining companies, to the major mining company representatives.
My conversations about employee training were undertaken with representatives including those working in mining optimization, companies that focus on employee retention and improvement, and the recruitment booths of major mining companies. I raised questions about the distinction between capacity building and growing people, and several themes continuously emerged: the significance of the availability of a labour force, the influence of the market on training strategies; and the difference between individuals and groups.
Before discussing these main themes about training strategies it is necessary to first touch briefly on the context of the convention more broadly, as many of the differences between capacity building and growing people relate to the state of the global mineral industry today. One of the major concerns that was ever-present over the course of the convention was the current market crash (as discussed in Chapters Two and Three). 119
Minerals, including iron ore, were (and continue to be) at a low point, and this has important implications for almost all aspects of the mining industry – mine closures or temporary pauses (mines going into “care and maintenance”), reduction of mine operations, less hiring and more layoffs, changes in training, sometimes less community engagement, and more. One example of how the market crash changes how mining companies spend their money was shared with me at a strategic solutions company’s booth. This company is one that is hired by mining companies to improve efficiency and safety, which is usually done by mining engineers who translate between what the corporate side of a mining company wants from the technological side of the company, and vice versa. This company’s representatives talked to me about the cyclical nature of the mining industry, one they have seen many times over. They indicated to me that when the industry is down, the mining companies focus ‘more on trucks and less on strategic solutions’: that is to say, when the global mineral markets are in a slump, companies focus on producing as much as they can in order to meet their bottom line rather than to spend money on reorganizing their company. Furthermore, in order to save money, mining companies look for efficiencies in technology rather than saving money on consulting. However, the representatives also indicated to me that ‘safety always sells’, and in this way they felt secure: even when they would not be engaged necessarily about strategic solutions, they would always have work available in the safety sector.
This emphasis on the importance of safety was another theme that came up continuously during the convention. While the importance of safety was talked about in some sessions quite broadly, in other conversations safety at the mine was closely tied to money. For example, a major mining heavy equipment manufacturer representative 120 explained to me that if injuries occur on the job money is lost both through loss of time associated with these incidents and through employee compensation. Furthermore, mine safety is important to the public image of the mining company, another theme that came up many times over the course of the conference. In the context of a poor mineral market, mining companies need to be well-respected by the public in order to have social license to operate: not being respected means being closed out of operating in certain jurisdictions.
Public perception plays a role in environmental issues and approvals for the mine, with the public having a greater role than they realize in impacting governmental permitting decisions. In this way, I was told that as resources are becoming scarcer, community relations are becoming increasingly important, with a greater role for CSR.
One panelist stated that ‘human ethics will become what the environment used to be’; the environment was once a more marginal topic but is now central to the approval process and operations.
It was in this context – of a struggling global mineral market and a convention that focused on cost-reduction, safety, and public perception – that booth representatives at the Expo spoke to me about the distinction between capacity building and growing people in the mining industry. Broadly speaking, booth representatives talked almost exclusively about a current shift away from capacity building and towards growing people. They emphasized the significance of the availability of a labour force, the influence of the market on training strategies, and the significance of the individual employee. The first of these, availability of labour force, can be mapped onto a decrease in capacity building, remembering that capacity building here refers to building a pool of 121 labour potential external to the company. One Canadian mining company I spoke to argued that the emphasis on growing people (within the company) comes from a talent shortage – a population or labour force that does not have the skills needed by the company. Mining companies, she said, are not always able to get skilled labour to fill positions, so they moved towards training people in their own company. This shift in training and hiring strategies is done to answer the question of ‘how do we get all the people in our company to get the skills we need’? Rather than hiring more people to do different jobs, the company will train one person to do many jobs.
So why aren’t companies creating these labour pools through capacity building today? This idea of a lack of suitable potential employees external to the company points to discourse I heard about numbers of employees and the influence of the market on training strategies. A shift to growing people is not only about talent shortage, but shortage more broadly. Because the global mineral market was, and continues to be, in a serious slump across the board, companies no longer had the money to train and hire a large number of employees. Whereas before companies had capital, they were now looking to reduce costs as much as possible in order to continue to make profits or, at the very least, stay out of care and maintenance. One of the few ways to do this, as one mining optimization company explained to me, is getting more money through improving efficiencies. While this can apply to technological efficiencies, it can also apply to employment efficiencies: in capacity building, many people are trained to do a number of jobs, but when growing people one person is trained to do several jobs. Growing people therefore allows a company to hire fewer people and cut back operations during a time of less money, while capacity building allows a company to create a pool of labour to draw 122 from during a time of more money. This also, practically, results in fewer or more community members receiving skills training that may or may not be transferrable in the community
The market crash therefore is closely tied to the last theme, the importance of the individual employee. I was informed that growing people means giving existing employees (rather than potential, outside employees) the opportunity to move upwards and laterally via training. This was a particularly good strategy to move people inside the company rather than hire from externally because it resulted in less turnover, and turnover, I was told, is expensive. Hence, cost efficiencies are improved in two ways: one person is now doing the jobs that were formerly done by more than one person, and expensive turnover is reduced. Furthermore, growing people was described to me as a more personal process, one that recognizes what people can do in terms of not only their professional qualifications but also their personal skills. An employee management company further explained to me that this focus on internal staff means growing people can occur at all levels – not just in operations but also among managers and company leaders. The idea behind this management strategy, she said, is that it is not only about gaining new skills, but also needing and providing encouragement to use those skills.
Training at and by Baffinland
The emphasis on the dual importance of skills and traits discussed at the CIM convention is significant for training strategies in Nunavut. Creating a certain type of
Inuk worker has a long history in Nunavut, and continues today dressed up in different clothes. What was imparted to me in Igloolik by the mining company, interviews, and observation at the mine site is that when looking to employ people (Inuit, but also non- 123
Inuit from the South), the most important factor for training is good work ethic and motivation. However, this emphasis on the desirability of certain traits is often lost in communication between the mining company and community members. This section explores how the distinctions between skills and traits, capacity building and growing people, are manifest in Nunavut, while the last section will touch on the implications of these training strategies and priorities.
Capacity Building in the Community
This difference between capacity building and growing people was manifested in the training strategies employed by Baffinland in Igloolik and at the mine site. One example of capacity building that the mining company undertook in Igloolik and the other four North Baffin communities was the “Work Ready Program”, a single event lasting a number of days rather than an ongoing process. This course was done in Igloolik in February 2013, before I was in the field, and as such I did not have the opportunity to attend or observe the course. Work Ready was a ten-day course offered in both Inuktitut and English and was open to course applicants (people who were planning on or interested in applying to the mine) and their spouses, for a total of about thirty people per course. The goal from the company’s perspective of the Work Ready Program was to communicate information about working at the mine as well as company expectations for mine employment – to give people the information that Baffinland thought community members needed to know before applying for a job at the mine. This information came in two different forms: basics about the job (such as work rotation at the mine site) and also potential expected life style changes at home, particularly what the company saw as the challenges of leaving home for two weeks at a time and how to organize family life to 124 accommodate that absence. The course therefore had four areas of focus: preparing for fly-in/fly-out rotational labour, communication at work and home, money management, and stress management.
In an “Addendum to Final Environmental Impact Statement for NIRB,” added
June 2013, Baffinland outlined what they saw as the successes of the completed course in two communities, including specific quotes from participants. I am including them in full here:
• "I now have better communications with my husband" • "It's one good step towards making social life better for people in the north" • "This program should be done in high schools and for every worker in the north" • "People are getting help to work with a particular company" [rather than general training] • "The program shows [the company] cares for the people who will be working for them" • "The program is not just for the employee, but for all members of the family" • "Before the program, people went around with their heads down, once they took the program they were smiling more and held their heads up" • "People had more self confidence, felt worthwhile, ‘I'm important’" • "Unilingual Inuit felt more capable being able to participate fully"
These quotes indicate that the company has provided both skills (“People are getting help to work with a particular company" [rather than general training]) and traits
("Before the program, people went around with their heads down, once they took the program they were smiling more and held their heads up"), as well as characteristics that may be understood as a combination of the two ("I now have better communications with my husband"). Furthermore, as discussed above, the company comes to be seen as an ethical partner with and for the community ("The program shows [the company] cares for the people who will be working for them"). 125
Attending this course was significant in that its participants were told that it would give them an advantage, but not a guarantee, when applying for a job at the mine.
Nor was it required to have completed the course to be hired for a job at the mine site –
Inuit who had not taken the course could also apply for jobs, although the company said it went to people first who had done the program. This Work Ready Program offered in
Igloolik is an example of capacity building – training a large number of people to be a pool of labour that can later be drawn from by the mine for employment. Furthermore, it is an example of training that tried to teach both skills and traits, as it addressed not only specific skills for jobs needed at the mine but also personality traits that would make someone a good employee both at the mine and at home. Therefore, in addition to giving training on some specific skills that can be used in the workplace and at the mine site, the
Work Ready Program was also delivered ‘in order to help the local population decide if the lifestyle of fly-in/fly-out work at a mine is suitable for them and for their families. Knowledge beforehand and good preparation should help to improve the performance, productivity and retention of Inuit employees and contribute to their ongoing success at the Mary River Project during the construction and operations phases’
(Baffinland Iron Mines 2013).
Some participants (Inuktitut first language) experienced this dual nature of the course, and reported enjoying the course.
Respondent: Ah, we were having course ’cause it's gonna be really hard, cause it's two weeks in and two weeks home? ’Cause it's really short, even sometimes we're starting, like, arguing, like, husband or common law or all those things. So it [is good] to be in a course first, then understand, yeah.
Interviewer: Ok. So it was more about that than, say, how to cook, or something.
Respondent: Yeah, all those. 126
Interviewer: Oh that too! Ok.
Respondent: We were course everything, like science, math, English, Inuktitut, or how to being, like, good, friendly, or yep. All those things, yeah.
[…]
Interviewer: What did you think of the course?
Respondent: I was in course for those maths, science, all those things. Even my book, my big book from Baffinland, and then I have to starting read from start to from over 1000 pages.
Interviewer: Woah that's huge!
Respondent: Then read, read, read, read. Yeah.
Interviewer: And it's all about these same things?
Respondent: Yeah, it's all about work from Baffinland, and then I have to be understand first.
Interviewer: Did you like the course?
Respondent: Yeah, it was really good, really helped. Lotta fun. Yes.
Therefore, this participant reported on receiving both skills training and traits training. However, what was lost in communication between the company and community members was the relationship between attending the course and being hired – that is to say, the implications of capacity building. Some people who took the course and were hired believed that it was because they took the course that they were hired (that is, that the course was the sole reason rather than just one factor).
Respondent: Yeah, after I heard it by the radio, and there’s a two weeks course in here, two weeks course. And I started applying there and for course. And I got choosed. I went two weeks in for course, and I got certificate. Maybe that's why? I had a certificate then after three weeks they hired me and since December I've been going back and forth, yes.
However, other people who had participated in the Work Ready Program, who had 127 taken other training courses (such as heavy equipment operation), or others who already had other skills relevant to working at mine sites were not hired and were upset and confused, as they had believed that having the skills or participating in capacity building meant they would be hired. Those who felt that they should be hired because they had
“capacity”, either from taking the Work Ready Program, other training programs, or having existing skills, were vocal at public meetings between the mining company and the regional Inuit organizations. For example, at one public hearing:
Inuk man who had not been hired: […] I’ve applied for a job on two occasions and I was working at a mine site for two years, so you mentioned, no wonder we don’t have experience. Only if we have experience with a certain job do we apply. We have experiences on oil rigs, but even if have experience, we don’t get jobs.
What is important here is that this is an instance, not uncommon in Igloolik, where someone has the skills, has worked at mines in the past, and still does not get hired. In particular, the expectation was that if you have the skills, then you should be hired – there is a breakdown of communication about the fact that the company is looking not just for skills but also for traits. This disjuncture is also paired with experiences of people who had jobs at the mine site but felt like they were being treated in a racist manner. For example,
Inuk man who used to work at the mine site: During the winter I briefly worked at Milne [the port of the mine site]. I did not go twice and was laid off as a result. We were surveyed. Myself, I had health problems. There was a family loss, legitimate reasons. It was not fair to be laid off like that, when I had legitimate reasons. At the mine, Inuit are treated as second-class, low level. […] Inuit are very capable even if they don’t have a documentation that says they can drive heavy equipment. We’re very capable.
What was missing in the communication between Baffinland and communities was what Baffinland meant, specifically, by capacity. While Baffinland did want a pool to draw from in terms of employment, they were looking more for specific personality traits, 128 not just skills. At a public meeting during a break a Baffinland VP told me that what is most important for training is good work ethic and motivation – not just for Inuit but for southerners as well. This relates, for example, to being able to make your flights to the mine; to be on time for work; to have a good attitude; to be able to move up in the company. Furthermore, while at the mine site I learned that, in fact, specific skills training can be a hindrance to working at the mine, as it is harder to un-train someone’s bad habits than to train someone fresh. Some of the skills learned in specific courses, such as heavy equipment operation, are skills that are not for an extraction context.
Therefore, these capacity building events, such as the Work Ready Program, try to create a certain type of worker with specific characteristics – those characteristics that will provide good results at the mine site – rather than just promote skills.
Growing People at the Mine Site
In addition to engaging with capacity building programs in Igloolik and the other
North Baffin communities, Baffinland also practices “growing people” at the mine site.
As discussed above, growing people refers to training a person within a mining company to do many jobs instead of just one. Growing people is one example of a cost saving measure a company may undertake, and it therefore may relate to either having less money to hire employees or be a result of a potential skilled labour shortage. Finally, it is typically a longer-term process than capacity building events, and focuses on an individual rather than a group. The first time I heard the term ‘growing people’ was while job shadowing at the mine site. During my fieldwork I had the opportunity to do two, two-week rotations at the main extractive site as well as the port site. On the first rotational schedule I job shadowed mostly heavy equipment operators, and on the second 129 rotation I job shadowed mostly housekeeping, janitorial, and site services. Each rotation I also had the chance to spend some time in the administrative offices, and meals and breaks also provided valuable chances to speak to people in informal settings.
Growing people was manifested, for me, in two ways at the mine site. The first was instances where the Baffinland administration indicated to me that they were growing a specific employee. In this instance, emphasis was put not only on specific skills development but also supporting certain personality characteristics. In terms of skills development, the company was actively training the employee in different skill sets to accomplish a greater number of different activities. Whereas the employee was initially hired to do one job, based on the existing skill set she had, over time at the mine site she performed very well in their position and the decision was made to ‘grow’ the employee by providing more and varied training. However, the specific job skills alone were not seen by the company to be enough to ensure the success of the employee, and both the existing positive characteristics and the potential areas of drawback were highlighted. For this employee, shyness and being quiet were described as ‘obstacles’ to best job performance, as she worked in a position where she had to interact quite a bit with other mine employees. However, this employee was also talked about as being liked by many people, which was seen as a positive work characteristic. Therefore, in addition to growing the employee in terms of work skills, the company was also focusing on growing the employee in terms of personality traits.
This strategy of growing people was not so explicitly outlined to me in all areas of the mine site, but was observable in other instances. For example, training heavy equipment operators to work on multiple machines rather than hiring new people to work 130 individually on one or a few machines each manifested growing people. This change in strategy may have occurred in part as a result of the iron ore market crash.
Improving the North
Traits and skills – the characteristics that are needed to work and excel at the mine that are at the heart of the two training strategies – are promoted from several sources: the
Government of Nunavut, historically and contemporarily (as discussed Chapters Two and
Three), the IIBA, and the mining company, who in this case has been charged with the responsibility to train Inuit for employment. Moreover, these employment values are flowing to local actors from the global mineral market that is driven, in part, by capitalist and neoliberal values. These encouraged skills and traits that are trying to be trained into
Inuit come from a production logic that requires certain types of workers and certain paradigms in order to be successful. In this way, in addition to gaining some perceived legitimacy, reputation for benevolence, and responsibility via its associations with the government and Inuit organizations, Baffinland also acts as a mediator between the global and the local via its training strategies and policies. By providing these skills and training, Baffinland is, in part, doing the work that the government wants to see done: create a certain type of Inuit who can undertake wage labour in the community and/or larger region after finishing working at the mine. As discussed in Chapter Two, this is, in part, what the government frames as development in Nunavut.
However, what is specific to this context about the relationship between larger actors and local communities? Mining has a long history of attempting to create or bring in labour from many different marginalized or distant communities, where it acts as if it were creating sustainability in a non-sustainable job market context. What is specific to 131 this example of Nunavut is the colonial aspect, more particularly the pre-existing circumstance of ‘welfare colonialism’. Welfare colonialism is a term coined by Robert
Paine (1977) in the northern Canadian context. Paine developed the notion, while considering Inuit/White relations in the former Northwest Territories (NWT), to address the fact that White behavior towards Inuit was sometimes caring and liberal rather than exploitative and repressive. In particular, the rise of this new type of colonialism started during World War II and the Cold War, when the Canadian Arctic became a strategic location and thus the focus of new scrutiny. Canada’s concerns about its international reputation, together with the rise of social welfare programs in southern Canada, prompted the development of programs for Inuit “rehabilitation”. These most notably included a focus on health (resulting, in part, in tuberculosis relocations) and education
(including Residential Schools – another example of the expectation that Inuit absorb suitable skills and traits).
Welfare colonialism, Paine argues, refers to ‘an administration that apparently wishes to increase Inuit control of their own affairs [but] is, nevertheless, colonial’ (Paine
1977, 4). Welfare colonialism is characterized by a context in which ‘the colonizers are illegitimately privileged, whereas the colonized are illegitimately devalued’ (ibid., 3); an exclusion of the interests of Indigenous peoples as central to development; where colonialism is tied to concepts of social welfare; top down governance; decisions made for rather than by the colonized; and decisions made by the colonizers for the colonized having a dual nature of both benefiting and disadvantaging them. Paine concludes by arguing that the most alarming result of welfare colonialism has been to ‘make Inuit aware how decisions are “made for” them by the Whites’ (ibid., 47). 132
The concept of welfare colonialism in the Nunavut context is particularly relevant for thinking about Nunavut during the time of Paine’s writing in the1970s. The political dynamics in Nunavut have changed since then, most significantly with the signing of the
Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. The NLCA represents an effort at decolonization by granting some recognition to Inuit owned lands and Inuit political autonomy. It also created several different Inuit organizations that function to promote Inuit priorities and well-being; QIA and NTI are two examples of these types of Inuit organizations.
Furthermore, although the Government of Nunavut is not an ethnic government, it does have a large Inuit majority in decision-making positions, some of whom are engaged in ongoing struggles for increased Inuit recognition and rights. These decolonizing trends represent a major change in the structure of the government between the 1970s and today.
However, I suggest here that while welfare colonialism has changed, it has not completely disappeared and still manifests in government actions in subtler ways.
Welfare colonialism, then, is still relevant today for understanding how historical trends may continue into the present, but the differences in the political environment also means that the manifestation of welfare colonialism has transformed.
Welfare colonialism in Nunavut today could perhaps be characterized by the GN’s continued insistence on a certain type of development for the territory broadly and region specifically, and now a focus on making Inuit good workers.20 This is not to suggest that in these actions the GN is a monolithic institution. Rather, it is a complex network of strategies and policies that sometimes conflict. Welfare colonialism in this instance is
Lisa Stevenson (2014) argues that an emphasis on Inuit being good Canadian citizens continues today via suicide interventions and maintaining the value of life. If Inuit do not survive, it is framed as their own fault because they had been provided the resources to maintain life. Extending Stevenson’s argument, it could be suggested that if Inuit do not succeed in the work place, they are also blamed, since they have been given training. 133 therefore not a phenomenon that is unilineal and uncomplicated. It is also not a force that is manifested in all parts of the GN, and in addition to having the state as an actor, welfare colonialism in Nunavut today includes corporations and other actors. Therefore, these training strategies may be reproducing welfare colonialism to some degree, but not by all parts of the government, and not in a straightforward manner. Highlighting welfare colonialism here emphasizes the history of government approaches to the mining industry and Inuit that continue to inform approaches to preparing Inuit for work in the industry today.
Today in Nunavut there is an emphasis on improving the existing system and improving the people within it. Therefore, this approach to training and the relationship with “improvement” – training people at the mine so that they can also successfully work in communities later – relates to Tania Murray Li’s notion of the will to improve rather than welfare colonialism. Welfare colonialism could therefore be thought of as changing through time to something more like Li’s idea of will to improve. Will to improve allows space for welfare colonialism to combine with new institutional structures (and the Inuit within them), and programs of improvement that seem to have at their center goals of promoting Inuit well-being. The notion of will to improve is flexible enough to accommodate how these different aspects shift in priority over time and with different political and economic trends.
Drawing on Foucault’s ideas of power, Marx’s conceptualization of capitalism, and
Gramsci’s notions of resistance, Li’s book The Will to Improve (2007) examines the ways in which programs that were developed to improve the problems of Indonesia have made the conditions for the problems to exist, looking at the intersection of governmental 134 programs with the society in which they try to enact change. Particularly relevant for the
Nunavut context is the way that Li considers improvement initiatives: ‘how programs of improvement are shaped by political-economic relations they cannot change; how they are constituted, that is, by what they exclude’ (Li 2007, 4). In Nunavut, these political- economic relations include, but are not limited to, the history and continuation of colonialism, the global and national desire for minerals, the advent of wage labour, the relationship between wage labour and hunting, the administration and bureaucracy of the regions, and more.21 Therefore, to give one small example, these factors and others constrain the GN to encourage programs of improvement that focus on wage labour with
Inuit based in permanent settlements rather than, say, livelihoods based on hunting and harvest. Li argues that this excluding of political questions and the refusal to take into account these political-economic questions limits and shapes what improvement can be done via developments initiatives. For example, as discussed in Chapters One and Two, mining in Nunavut has not historically provided lasting positive legacies. Therefore, the colonial history of Nunavut and the ways colonialism continues to be manifested today must be addressed, as Li argues, rather than focusing on the capacities of the poor to the neglect of larger scale change.
Furthermore, central to this emphasis on political-economic relations is Li’s notion of trustees, ‘a position defined by the claim to know how others should live, to know what is best for them, to know what they need’, specifically in terms of having the intent to develop someone’s capacity (ibid., 4-5). The objective here is not to dominate another, but to ‘enhance their capacity for action, and to direct it’, with an emphasis on the good
Li defines political economic questions as ‘questions about control over the means of production and the structures of law and force that support systemic inequalities’ (Li 2007, 11). 135 intentions of the organization (ibid., 5). The history of the Canadian government in
Nunavut is an early example of a trustee relationship, in terms of welfare colonialism.
The GN today continues to act as a trustee with their focus on mining as being the best way to improve (develop via training and employment) the Qikiqtaaluk region.
Baffinland is arguably another trustee in this relationship, as their training programs aim to help Inuit gain and maintain employment at the mine site. The GN therefore supports the extractive industry to train Inuit for jobs in order to promote Inuit well-being, and as a method to achieve this goal the extractive industry brings with it wage based capitalist jobs that continue to support the existing neoliberal economic structure. However, as Li argues, despite these good intentions of trustees, improvement programs are trapped to operate within the capitalist discourse and a result reproduce existing inequalities.
From Foucault, Li takes the idea of governmentality, a government that operates by changing and directing individuals’ habits, hopes, beliefs, and desires. In this model, people do what they should by following their own self-interests: ‘when power operates at a distance, people are not necessarily aware of how their conduct is being conducted or why, so the question of consent does not arise’ (ibid.). For Li, the governmental rationality here is that the government has the right way of doing things, has many goals and therefore many tactics. What is important to recognize from Foucault for the Nunavut context is that governmentality is not only about the government proper. Rather, according to Foucault’s conceptualization of governmentality, power can flow from a variety of different institutions, organizations, or individuals. Therefore, in Nunavut governmentality can relate to the GN but also to the mining company, but the power of governmentality may act on each actor differentially (Povinelli 2006). Governmentality 136 in the extractive industry in Nunavut therefore relates to the emphasis on traits as well as skills. The improvement structure set up by the GN privileges work in the extractive industry as a source of income now, as well as the basis for securing future jobs in the community. It is therefore in peoples’ best interests to have a job at the mine site.
However, in order to receive and maintain this job they must comply with the acquisition and exercise of suitable skills and traits, which come from the mining company rather than from the GN.
This emphasis on creating types of labourers relates to Li’s addition of a Marxist analysis of capitalism to her Foucauldian exploration of programs of improvement. At the most basic level of capitalism, the global mining industry needs growth in order to function, and as such expansion is central to mining in Nunavut. However, perhaps more importantly, capitalism for Li is significant because it brings certain modes of being that start in the workplace but spill over more broadly into other parts of life. She writes that
‘capitalist relations serve double duty as a vehicle of extraction and a vehicle of importing the habits of diligence, responsibility and the careful weighing of costs and benefits that characterize, in liberal thinking, the ideal, autonomous subject of rights. It is, in part, recognition of the “improving” effects of capitalist discipline upon sections of the population deemed to lack these habits that prevents experts from proposing the restructuring of relations of production as a solution to poverty. Competition, the experts argue, spurs efficiency’ (Li 2007, 20). As mentioned above, the training strategies of capacity building and growing people not only try to give Inuit specific skills, they also try to train Inuit to be good employees: to have good work ethic and motivation.
Furthermore, in Nunavut, as per Marx, capitalism is not an autonomous system, and 137 public money is often invested in infrastructure, and Li outlines that experts justify this public intervention as a measure to optimize the general good (ibid.). However, Li argues that experts need to pay attention to the displacement and impoverishment that are co- produced with growth. In Nunavut, neoliberal capitalism is also drawn on as the right way to develop. In this way, the training programs bring together both a Foucauldian analysis of power and making of good citizens, and a Marxist analysis of what characteristics a good citizen has.
Skills and Traits
Acting in partnership with other actors in Nunavut, the mining company works to instill certain values in Inuit community members that are relevant both for working at the mine site as well as (presumed) to be working in the community after the mine’s closure. These skills and traits originate not with the company or GN themselves but flow from the global mineral market specifically, and the capital/neoliberal global world more broadly. The two training strategies through which this mediation between the global and the local are manifested are capacity building (more superficially reaching a larger number of people) and growing people (concentrating on a single individual more intensely), and fit in not only with the contemporary push to successfully employ Inuit in the extraction industry, but also with the historical push to do the same.
Are these strategies successful? How do Inuit talk about working at the mine site, and do these skills and traits spill over into life back in the community? Does an adoption of some or all of these skills and traits mean the success of the state and market of the acculturation/assimilation of Inuit into capital or neoliberal agendas? These questions are addressed in the next two chapters, with an emphasis on Inuit experiences of working at 138 the mine site.
139
CHAPTER FIVE: HOME
As discussed in the previous chapter, the efforts of the Government of Nunavut
(GN) and the mining company work in tandem to employ Inuit at the mine site and to prepare them for continued employment in the community post-mine closure. This involves, in part, drawing on the logics of the global mineral economy (and its current economic successes or failures) and attempts to form Inuit employees into certain types of economic actors. The question this chapter will now explore is what effects, if any, the subjectification process described above has on perceptions of place and senses of well- being of Inuit working at the mine site. How do work and workplaces operate in peoples’ lives? These questions will be explored by looking at what Inuit think about working at the mine. This approach necessarily focuses on the agency of Inuit working at the mine site, and how they are actively involved in creating well-being, making the mine site into a certain type of space/place, and how they then also exist as certain types of actors who are not necessarily, or solely, actors conforming to a neoliberal model. More broadly, this chapter sets the stage for the next chapter of the dissertation, which reflects on the ways people spoke to me about how they understood, maintained and created well-being in the midst of large scale extractive industry.
At the heart of this chapter is a discussion around the ideas of space and place.
Drawing on the theorists discussed below, I conceptualize place as space that has gained definition and meaning (Tuan 1977; Smith 1984). Place, as opposed to space, is a specific location where unique combinations of material and discursive elements make places different from one another (Harvey 1982; 2009). Phenomenologically, privileging of an on-the-ground knowledge of a location and an emphasis on human perception is central 140
(Casey 1996). From the standpoint of cultural relativism, however, since distinctive cultural schemas differently render spaces meaningful as places, it may be said that place is space endowed with texture and value. In the case of the Mary River Project, making the mine a specific and meaningful place involves the different cultural approaches brought by Inuit and southern employees. While the perspectives of the southern employees will not be discussed, I will touch briefly on the ways that northern space is conceptualized as a certain type of place in the policy speeches made by former Prime
Minister Stephen Harper. These framings of Canada’s North are in contrast to those made by Inuit working at the mine site.
There are many points of difference in the ways the mine site is talked about by the government of Nunavut, the mining company and the Inuit employees. For example, in line with federal government conceptualizations of the Canadian Arctic in policy speeches (Sinclair 2016), the mining company similarly frames the mine site as a remote, isolated place of production. In this case, the physical location and landscape of the mine itself are of significance, as different ways of representing land bring landscape within cultural boundaries, with groups prioritizing aspects of the land according to cultural values (Strang 1997). At a very basic level, this is manifested at the mine site by the different names for the ore deposit itself. In Inuktitut the ore mountain is called Nullujaat
(meaning buttocks or like buttocks, due to its rounded shape) and was historically used as a reference point for navigation, an important function for the historically nomadic Inuit lifestyle. Now, Nullujaat is known as Deposit One, so named by the mining company.
This difference in the name and use of the mountain illustrates the differences in cultural priorities between historical Inuit priorities and capitalist extraction culture today. 141
As discussed in Chapter Four, the mining company’s Work Ready program and on-site training encouraged Inuit to adopt a certain approach to work and a certain approach to the mine site, primarily as a place of productivity. However, many Inuit interlocutors from Igloolik and other North Baffin communities who participated in this research indicated to me that, in fact, they experience the mine site as a home rather than an extraction frontier or an untouched wilderness. This chapter therefore analyzes how
Inuit socially construct the mine site, amalgamating productivity and home. This turning of the space of the mine site into a home place is an active process involving, in part, current kinship relations, family livelihood heritage, and relationship to the land. This process is part of creating well-being and actively exercising agency in constructing and maintaining ‘life projects’ (Blaser 2004). This process will be discussed in the next chapter.
The idea of home that will be used in this chapter is one that brings together notions of community, time, and location – represented in this chapter through kinship, historical livelihoods, and landscape. The connections Inuit have to home may play a contributing role in deciding whether to take up and maintain employment in the extractive industry and, as such, the ideas and experiences of home are important factors to consider both from a critical perspective and as part of state or market run development strategies (as discussed in Chapters Two and Three).
Kinship and family relations are central to community life in Nunavut, with many people being related in town. Many Inuit I spoke to in Igloolik equated this presence of family as essential to notions of home, and indeed this same sentiment was borne out at the mine site. Many Inuit from Igloolik stated that one of the reasons the mine site felt 142 like home was because they had family there – either family they created or family they already had. In thinking about kinship here I take as starting points David Schneider’s conceptualization of kinship as a cultural system (1984), and Marilyn Strathern’s observation that people have diverse ways of relating and kinship is not just relationships based on blood relations (1992; 2005).
Jessica Rolston (2014), in a different context, has written about the importance of fictive kinship in the mining industry. After doing fieldwork at a mine in Wyoming she argues that ‘kinship, specifically what I call workplace relatedness, animates social relationships in the Powder River Basin coal mines… miners construct relatedness with one another not simply by working together in the same place but by sharing the uniquely demanding temporal regime of rotating shift work’ (Rolston 2014, 8). She suggests that by viewing their coworkers as a family, miners treat each other as unique individuals rather than as numbers. Focusing her ethnography around gender, Rolston writes that women concentrate more on human issues at the mine site (such as safety, finding meaning, and making respectful relationships) than on gender issues. The ‘crew families’
(ibid.) that result are characterized as egalitarian relationships with a shared respect for hard work. These coworkers become family because they spend so much time together in the same place, created over time through shared experiences.
However, an important difference between Rolston’s ethnographic example and the Mary River Project is that the miners who spoke to Rolston did not identify the mine site as a home despite having crew families there. In contrast, at the Mary River Project, kinship is combined with other factors to create a space or place that some Inuit I spoke to identified as another home. This difference indicates that just having kin at a mine site 143 is not enough to consider it a home place. An additional factor at the Mary River Project that contributes to the social construction of the mine site as home is temporality. The relationship between home and temporality has been theorized in relation to practice in home building (Hage 1997) and home in terms of the future rather than the past (Jansen
2009). This consideration of temporality in ideas of home is of particular relevance to experiences of home at the Mary River Project mine site, where the relationship between home and temporality is manifested by peoples’ relationships with family work histories.
Finally, the third way that Inuit employees at the Mary River Project construct the mine site as a home is through a relationship with the land around the mine site. The equation that connects land to home has been central to the idea of Nunavut from before the land claim process, with landscape thought of as homeland (held by northern Inuit) rather than resource – or royalties-bearing real estate stemming from southern-based policies (as exemplified by Harper’s Northern Strategy). Historical connections and claims of “land as home” have been absolutely central to the Canadian Treaty making claims and process, of which the creation of Nunavut is a part, through a modern land claim agreement. Future relations to the land as home may also be relevant in terms of optimism, hope for the future, and hope that participation in the mining industry will make improvements to home communities via influxes of money. This large-scale association of land as home is further manifested at the mine site on a micro scale by some Inuit employees’ relationship with the land at and around the Mary River Project.
Here, the importance of being on the land that is lived in peoples’ home communities is mirrored by an importance of being on the land at the mine site, with an emphasis on 144 working jobs that allow time spent viewing the land from trucks, or trying to find ways to be outside during the work day.
Home was therefore socially constructed in this sense via three modalities at the mine site: relationship with kin (by seeing distant family at the mine site and making new kinship relationships), relationship with historical family labour (by working within the same livelihood strategies as past family members), and relationship with the land (by being able to be ‘on the land’ in the community and at the mine site). The focus of this section is on the question of how Inuit have socially constructed the mine site. This discussion is framed by key themes of space and place literature intertwined with issues of subjectivity and collective identities (kin) that are employed to illuminate the process by which this transformation of the mine site is accomplished. The first theorist discussed is David Harvey, whose notion of the process of space creation is illustrated by the active creating of new kinship relations. Secondly, I rely on Neil Smith’s idea of relative space.
Thirdly, the question of differing ideas about the mine site is illuminated by Yi-Fu Tuan’s conceptualizations of place as imbued with meaning, while Edward S. Casey’s arguments about the close connection between place and experience allow a comparison between the mine site as home and the community as home. Finally, Inuit employees’ engagement with the landscape at the mine site can further be understood through Keith Basso’s discussion of the power of place to hold people together in localized versions of self-hood.
Together these theorists provide a framework for conceptualizing the relationship between space, place, and experiences of work at the mine site.
Space and Place 145
Before diving into the ways in which Inuit employees transform the mine site into a home, it is useful to consider the ways that home may be thought of as a space and/or a place, and the ways in which it may be constructed. The literature about space and place does not offer a clear, single definition of either term, with many authors having areas of conceptual and theoretical overlap. I therefore attempt to unpack in this section the aspects of space/place literature that reflect the areas of importance for my interlocutors and the ways in which the mine site manifests as both a space and a place, with an emphasis on the actions of Inuit that work towards socially constructing it as a home. I therefore take as my starting point Harvey’s argument that what is important is not necessarily what space is, but ‘how it is that different human practices create and make use of different conceptualizations of space’ (Harvey 2009, 140). For the purposes of this chapter, I draw from literature in disciplines of geography and anthropology, blending aspects of theoretical contributions to both space and place to illuminate Inuit understandings of the mine site. In particular, from these theorists I draw an emphasis on process in space creation (Harvey); the conceptualization of relative space (Smith); place as imbued with meaning (Tuan); the close connection between place and experience
(Casey); and the power of place to hold people together in localized versions of selfhood
(Basso). These aspects of space and place manifest at the mine site in the process of how the mine is turned into home.
A first framing of space that is particularly useful for my ethnography addresses the question of how space can be characterized and how it is transformed through lived experience. David Harvey, informed by Marxism, provides a strong starting point for addressing this question, as he examines how social processes produce spatial forms, 146 arguing that space is not an absolute. Here, social practices and processes create spaces, and these spaces then constrain, enable, and alter those practices and processes. For example, Harvey talks about rent as ‘that theoretical concept through which political economy (of whatever stripe) traditionally confronts the problem of spatial organization’
(Harvey 1982, 337). For Harvey, rent is a form of social control over the spatial organization and development of capitalism. Rent is the process behind how the land is owned, used, and charged, making the land a certain type of space. Furthermore, landowners have an active role in the process of creating this space: the space is not something that is just a given. In this case, the production of the spatial configuration is an active moment in the complex of capitalist accumulation and social reproduction (ibid.,
374).
When defining space (2009), Harvey argues that it has three components: materially sensed, conceptualized, and lived. It intersects with time as well, with space and time both being characterized as absolute, relative, and relational. Absolute space,
Harvey outlines, is fixed and immovable, pre-existing, empty, and separate from time.
Relative space is the space of processes and motion and connects history to geography.
Relational space is space when it is in relation to others, with ‘the idea that processes produce their own space and time is fundamental to the relational conception’ (Harvey
2009, 136). Places are therefore all three of these levels: ‘the three conceptions of absolute, relative and relational need to be held in dialectical tension with each other if we are to understand space as a condition of possibility of all other forms of knowing’
(ibid., 141). 147
For Harvey, in contrast to space, place is a specific location. Particular combinations of environment, infrastructures, cultures, and people make locations different from each other. However, according to Harvey, places are not absolutely distinct since they remain linked by the capitalist global economy. Just as with space, place and self exist in a recursive relationship: ‘in making places (such as a home), we make ourselves, and as we remake ourselves, so we perpetually reshape the place we are in, materially, conceptually as well as how we live within them’ (Harvey 2009, 176).
However, importantly, for Harvey there is little difference between space and place. He attributes similar characteristics to each – for example, both can be absolute, relational, and relative; both can be individual or collective; and both can be materially experienced as well as conceptualized in abstraction. What makes place different, then, is found in the method of place formation, which involves ‘a process of carving out “permanences” from a flow of processes that simultaneously create a distinctive type of spatio-temporality… places are, in short, always contingent on the relational processes that create, sustain, and dissolve them’ (ibid., 190). Space and place, however, are closely connected, as Harvey states that ‘the production of space, in short, proceeds alongside of, as well as through, the production of places. Interplace competition produces in turn new spatio- temporalities’ (ibid., 191).
Neil Smith (1984) breaks space down into absolute and relative space. Similar to
Harvey, Smith describes the historical geography understanding of space as what is now called absolute space, defining it as ‘emptiness, as a universal receptacle in which objects exist and events occur, as a frame of reference, a co-ordinate system (along with time) within which all reality exists. This view of space appears so self-evident that, despite its 148 vagueness and the ambiguity that results from continually being pressed into service as metaphor, in everyday usage we are almost wholly uncritical of it. Space is simply a given universal of existence’ (Smith 1984, 68)22. Smith emphasizes that this is just one understanding of space, which was often formerly taken up by science and geography.
By contrast, the notion of relative space arose when adding social space into this empty absolute space. Social space is the field where social activities and events happen:
‘the relativity of social space is determined by the particular social relations that obtain in a given society’ (ibid., 74). He writes against the idea that space and society are seen as separate realms and only interact with each other. Rather, relative space for Smith is both a cause and effect of socio-economic processes, where different socio-economic processes may produce different spaces that in turn may reproduce or alter those processes: ‘different societies use and organize space in different ways and the geographical patterns which result bear the clear imprint of the society which uses and organizes this space’ (ibid., 76-77). Smith argues that this idea of the production of space eliminates the notion of space and society as two separate spheres, and they become unified in the concept of relative space where ‘the production of space, human practice and space are integrated at the level of the concept of space “itself”’ (ibid., 77). This notion of relative space therefore takes into account the physical production of space but also the making of meaning, concepts, and consciousness of space that are connected to the production and experience of physical space. In this way, space is something that is produced, at either or both the physical and social levels, rather than just something that
This conceptualization of space also relates to the notion of terra nullius (Latin for nobody’s land) that was used to justify colonial expansion in the Americas, and that was used in the Middle Ages on maps to indicate areas without known information. 149 occurs, and with this shift from absolute to relative space, society and space become fused together.
For Yi-Fu Tuan (1977), similar to Smith, (abstract) space becomes place once it gains definition and meaning: ‘what begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value’ (Tuan 1977, 6). He goes further to give each specific attributes, with place connoting security and stability/space connoting openness and freedom, and place giving pause whereas space allows movement. This pause in movement is what ‘makes it possible for location to be transformed into place’
(ibid.). For Tuan, experiencing space is something that is done from a distance, with knowing space being characterized by indirect, conceptual experience that is mediated by symbols. By contrast, knowing place involves direct and intimate experience. According to Tuan’s logic, one important implication of this differentiation in knowledge acquisition is that it is only possible to experience meaning (the meaning of place) when living in a specific location.
This connection of bodily experience and sense of place is also found within anthropological literature of place through a focus on place and phenomenology. Edward
S. Casey (1996) argues that to be in a place is to become aware of one’s own consciousness and embodied presence in the world, with place being ‘the most fundamental form of embodied experience – the site of a powerful fusion of self, space, and time’ (Feld and Basso 1996, 9). 23 Like Tuan, Casey emphasizes place as particular and specific. However, he aims to subvert what he sees as the usual prioritizing of space as primary, with place being carved out of space by arguing that in fact place is prior to
Harvey critiques Casey for taking the definition of space as the ‘absolute space’ definition, which, Harvey says, has already been critiqued and moved past in geography (Harvey 2009). 150 space, using phenomenology as a lens through which to make this argument. In this way, for Casey, place is closely tied to experience, with a privileging of local knowledge of place before the idea of space: ‘place is no empty substratum to which cultural predicates come to be attached; it is an already plenary presences permeated with culturally constituted institutions and practices’ (Casey 1996, 46). Casey argues that it is only possible to know a place by being in it, and knowledge of place is therefore part of perception. In this way, humans are in and of places. Place is more of an event than a thing, and is unique in that sense, recognizing the importance of the lived body’s emplacement and the gathering power of the place: ‘as places gather bodies in their midst in deeply encultured ways, so cultures conjoin bodies in concrete circumstances of emplacement’ (ibid.). This gathering is an event, and places are not static but rather always changing. However, although places are elastic, they are coherent enough to be considered the same. Therefore, Casey concludes that space and time are contained in place rather than vice versa, and none are autonomous spheres on their own.
Keith Basso (1996) concerns himself simply with place, with ethnographic disclosure of the inseparable bond between a feeling of place and the ideas tied to it.
Similar to Harvey’s emphasis on process, what is important for Basso in a sense of place is not where it comes from but rather what it is made with, and the ways in which it holds people together in a localized version of selfhood: ‘fueled by sentiments of inclusion, belonging, and connectedness to the past, sense of place roots individuals in the social and cultural soils from which they have sprung together, holding them there in the grip of a shared identity, a localized version of selfhood’ (Basso 1996, 85). Basso takes from
Heidegger the idea of dwelling, which emphasizes the forms of consciousness with which 151 people understand space, with a sense of place being ‘a kind of imaginative experience, a species of involvement with the natural and social environment, a way of appreciating portions of the earth’ (ibid., 83). It is a commonplace occurrence and encompasses not only what people feel, but also what they do. For Basso, ‘wisdom sits in places’ in that the Apache landscape conveys pieces of wisdom to those who have the heightened mental capacity to perceive them. This wisdom takes the form of avoiding harmful events by discerning threatening circumstances before they are apparent.
Rather than labeling the Mary River mine site as either a “home space” or a
“home place” I will touch on the ways in which the approaches offered by these theorists provide insights that help illuminate Inuit experiences of working at the mine site and conceptions of the mine site as a home. As mentioned above, the process of space creation (Harvey) is instanced in the active creating of new kinship relations; the idea of relative space (Smith) is demonstrated by how the use of space points to important aspects of a society (here, how Inuit from Igloolik make meaning at the mine site via their approaches to work); place as imbued with meaning (Tuan) in terms of differing ideas of the mine site; how the close connection between place and experience (Casey) allows a comparison with the mine site as home and the community as home; and how the power of place to hold people together in localized versions of selfhood (Basso) is manifested in Inuit engagement with the landscape. These dynamics of space and place manifest at the mine site in the process of transforming the mine into a home and then, being a home, in the way it recursively feeds into these dynamics.
Existing and New Kinship 152
Early on in my tenure at the mine site, an Igloolik Inuk made an important statement to me. It was on a night shift in March at latitude 71 North, meaning -50
Celsius, dark, and, despite other people also working on the night shift, relatively isolated.
We were alternating between working outside the truck and warming up inside it. While talking about what it was like to work at the mine site, the employee I was job shadowing said to me: ‘[it’s] not like home here, too many strangers. You get to know someone and then it changes.’ I wondered then if the inverse might also be true: if a place is not like home because there are too many strangers, is a place like home when more of the people are familiar? The more time I spent at the mine site, the more I came to understand how kinship networks and relations underlay the work and social relationships at the Mary
River Project. As mentioned above, kinship here is central to notions of home in Igloolik, and I realized that kinship was also central to feelings of home at the mine site. The experience and importance of kin at the mine site was therefore manifested in two ways: through seeing existing family members at the mine site, and creating kinship relations at the mine site with people who were not formerly considered family.
This first experience of kinship at the mine site was experienced through seeing and visiting family members who lived in different communities but who also worked at the mine site: the mine gave an opportunity to visit relatives who were otherwise too far away to visit. The mine site relies, in part, on people from five different North Baffin communities for labour: Igloolik, Pond Inlet, Arctic Bay, Clyde River, and Hall Beach.24
The mine works on a two-weeks-on, two-weeks-off, fly-in fly-out rotational schedule.
This priority on hiring Inuit from the five North Baffin communities is outlined in the Inuit Impact Benefit Agreement between the regional Inuit organization (the Qikiqtani Inuit Association) and the mining company (Baffinland Iron Mines). However, despite this stated priority, Inuit employment at the mine site in 2015 was only about 17% – and not all of this 17% represented Inuit from the five North Baffin communities. 153
Many community members from Igloolik have close family connections with Pond Inlet and Hall Beach, in particular. While Hall Beach is relatively close to Igloolik (about seventy-two km: a three-hour snowmobile drive in the winter or an expensive fifteen- minute flight), Pond Inlet is much more distant, being about 395 kilometers away.
Working at the mine therefore offers people the opportunity to see family members who they otherwise are not often able to see. For example, one employee stated that ‘when I come here I say I’m going to a family reunion’, as the rotational labour provided the opportunity to see their cousins who live in different communities but commute to the mine site every two weeks to work.
This connection with already-existing family members and kinship relations was experienced either by working on the same shift or crew with a family member, or visiting with them during off-time. However, it is important to note that working on the same shift or the same crew with a family member was relatively rare due to the large number of people working at the mine site and the variety of different jobs. Therefore, visiting with family members at breakfast or dinner, or socializing after their shifts in the few free hours before having to go to bed (this socialization time included visiting in the cafeteria, watching TV or a movie in one of the common rooms, playing pool, or other activities) was more common and the primary opportunity to connect with existing family members at the mine site. These already existing kinship relations ranged from mother and child, to cousins, aunts/uncles/nieces/nephews, the adoptive parent of a coworker’s biological child, among others. These family members may be from the same community, but were often also from other communities, and it was these relationships from a distance that were unique in their visiting-from-afar capacity. 154
The second type of kinship relations that emerged at the mine site involved those that were created between people who were not formerly considered family. This manifested primarily as family-type relations that were created between Inuit or between
Inuit and non-Inuit within crews. In this case, crewmembers came to be referred to as peoples’ family at the mine site: their ‘work family’. The types of crews discussed in this chapter are the groups of people that are placed together on the same rotational schedule, work the same shift, and work in the same department on a shared task. These groups of people therefore work together for the majority of their shifts, whether it is in departments that take the ore out of the ground and transport it; do site maintenance; or work in kitchen, housekeeping, and janitorial, to give just a few instances of areas of mine operation with crews. An example of a crew might be a group of several individuals who work together to take iron ore out of the ground on a night shift: two to drive the haul trucks, one to load the haul trucks, one to grade the roads, and one to drill. A crew could equally be the kitchen staff on a shift, involving one or two dishwashers, two cooks, a sandwich maker, dessert maker, and one re-stocker/general cleaner.
Many Inuit from Igloolik I spoke to reported that their crew comes to feel like a family. They work together over long periods of time and build up relationships of trust and team work via sharing work tasks, visiting during meals and breaks, or through gift exchange. The first instance where I witnessed this kinship building among crewmembers was while job shadowing on a janitorial/housekeeping crew. Inuit at the mine site are over-represented in the site services areas (and under-represented in the higher paid jobs that are considered “skilled” labour), and some crews in site services were made up entirely of Inuit employees. One janitorial/housekeeping crew I job shadowed in this 155 instance was at the smaller port site, which some Inuit told me also felt more like home due to its smaller size and higher number of Inuit employees. In this instance, Inuit on the same crew were composed of individuals who were not related to each other biologically, who did not know each other before working together at the mine site, but who started to call each other Inuktitut kinship terms, in particular, little sister and grandmother. This crew would share not only work time together but also pieces of information about their life outside of work, such as pregnancies or other family stories.
The other instance that I experienced where Inuit working at the mine site reported feeling like a family with their crew was when job shadowing people working as heavy equipment operators (HEOs). I had the opportunity to sit with members of the
Mine Operations (“Mine Ops”) department and the Materials Handling departments.
These crews were more usually mixed Inuit and non-Inuit crews, and had an additional mediator – the radio, which was used to keep in contact and communicate about their job.
While housekeeping/janitorial/kitchen crews work together for some or all of their shift in face-to-face contact, HEOs work physically alone in their trucks or other heavy equipment machines and see each other normally only outside of shifts. However, they are in constant contact over the radio over the course of their shift. For example, when driving up and down the ore deposit (the mountain) or on the tote road (between the mine site and port site), HEOs must announce what kilometer they are at on the public radio station for that area, a precaution taken for safety reasons. Communication will also happen on the radio when a loader is loading ore or ‘waste rock’ into the back of a haul truck. The haul truck operator must inform the loader when the weight limit has been reached. ‘Chatter’ on the radio is officially not allowed, but there remain small 156 opportunities in these and other moments to make jokes or other comments, and crews recognize each others’ voices and personalities over the radio. Furthermore, although radio communication is technically only allowed in English (as not everyone at the mine site speaks Inuktitut), Inuktitut still filters in in small ways, with English-only crewmembers coming to learn key words. These words also end up manifesting into some of the place names at the mine site, with the top of the deposit popularly being called ‘Pit-Nullujaat’.
In this way, the radio technology comes to act as a mediator of social relations
(Pinch 2010; Bessire and Fisher 2012) and, thus, in this instance another actor in the creation of space/place25. Even though people were not working in constant physical contact, the radio provided an opportunity to continue to have human contact over the course of the twelve-hour shift. This bringing together of operators as part of a team was reported to me as essential, where I was told that not only does working on a crew feel like a family, but that in fact it is necessary to ‘work as a family’ at the mine site in order to accomplish the employment goals. In addition, kin terms were reported to me to be used by heavy equipment operators (HEOs), in English. Some of these drivers will call each other ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ over the radio, using the kinship terms as nicknames.
Even though everyone physically worked alone, they had to work together to complete the jobs, and the radio allowed them to stay in the constant connection that would allow them to do this and also to conceptualize their crew as a family in the absence of face-to- face contact.
Technology also operated as a factor in making the mine feel like home when people talked about having TV or bringing their gaming systems to the mine site. They told me that using these familiar technologies at the mine site also made it feel like home, as they were technologies that they used all the time in their home communities. 157
This creating of new kinship relations, and the connection between that creation and the sense of home, illustrates Harvey’s emphasis on process in the creation of space.
Whereas existing kinship relations (from home communities or other communities) act as ready-made connections between the mine site as home and the community as home, kinship relations with other Inuit or non-Inuit coworkers must be actively formed. The aspect of process, therefore, manifests both in the process of making kin and in the process of kin making home. This process further illustrates the three levels of both space and place outlined by Harvey: absolute (bounded, fixed), relative (interconnected), and relational (internalizing forces, powers, influences, and meanings from elsewhere). The mine is an absolute space/place in that it is a physical, fixed location. It is relative in that it connects the history of mining and mining policy in Nunavut to a specific mine site.
Finally, it is relational in that by using kinship as a way to organize that mine site as a home, meanings are brought to the mine site from the North Baffin communities. In this way, the emphasis on process is most clearly indicated by kinship relations through the relational categorization of Harvey’s conceptualization of space and place. Furthermore, although the social practices and processes create (home) place here, the space then constrains, enables, and alters those practices and processes. Kinship, in part, makes home, and in turn comes to be considered one of the central aspects of home. In that way, the very notion of the mine as a home place constrains, while also enables, the idea of kinship, with the two becoming inseparably linked.
However, in this HEO context I was also informed that the ‘crew – they’re your family, support each other’ but that ‘it’s not my home family, but it is my work family.’
Therefore, even though work relations are being re-conceptualized as family relations at 158 the mine site, there is still a distinction being made between the type of family one has in one’s home community, and the type of family one has at the mine site. This relates to
Casey’s conceptualization of the relationship between place and experience, making theoretical space for a comparison between embodied experiences of community and mine as different homes. Casey argues that place is specific and particular (as opposed to the idea of ‘absolute space’, which, however, has also been critiqued within geography) but although there is diversity among and between places, there is an elastic nature to this diversity that allows changes and variety but retention of coherence. This has to do, in part, not just with the characteristics of places but how people phenomenologically experience them. In this way, although differences are recognized between the mine as home and the community as home – with the family one has at work and the family one has at home – there remains enough embodied experience of both as home to have them both be considered as homes. In this way, as per Casey, it is only possible to know either the mine or the community by being there, and this knowledge is closely tied to perception. This emphasis on the local knowledge of place allows for a diversity of practices, locations, and experiences to be classified as home by Inuit employees at the mine site.
Kinship and Family Livelihood Traditions
What is important to consider here is that work is being conceptualized not only relationally rather than individually, but also, importantly, as family based. This connection of work with family draws on a traditional idea of work relations based on kinship. In Igloolik I learned through conversations that family heritage is significant in 159 relation to livelihood. For example, during an interview, one interlocutor told me that in earlier traditional hunting practices, different families did different types of hunting:
‘Certain families were walrus hunters. Certain families were caribou hunters, certain families were seal hunters […] in the Inuit world. So if you look at the polar bears, some bears are hunting the land fast, like, solid ice, some are hunting on moving ice, and that's what they prefer, that's what they teach their young. Same with us humans. What our fathers, brothers, taught us, is where we went. My, my father and brothers were walrus hunters. Actually, my whole family was walrus hunters. From way back.’
This relationship between work and family heritage was one I saw reproduced in town as well as at the mine site. Tying work to family heritage is not unique to Inuit culture but has been observed in a variety of non-capitalist societies globally (Evans
Pritchard 1940; Qayum and Ray 2003; Raghuram 2001; Vaid 2014). For Inuit, drawing on family work heritage evokes livelihood strategies and identities that connect current engagements with capitalism to non-capitalist elements of past and present Inuit society.
Inuit with whom I spoke referenced the family genealogy of their labour in a variety of occupations, such as working in an office, with heavy equipment, or at a mine, in a manner seemingly modeled on their family histories of hunting occupations. This discourse connected, in particular, to Nanisivik which, as discussed in Chapter Three, was the first major mine site in the North Baffin region, operating from 1976-2002.
Importantly, some people who worked at Nanisivik during its later years of operation are still in the workforce today and have chosen employment at Baffinland. Some of their children, now old enough themselves to entering the workforce, work at the Mary River
Project. Speaking with one individual about her employment at Baffinland, she told me that her father and mother had worked at Nanisivik, and ‘so mining work was in my 160 family’, indicating an ongoing connection between family heritage livelihood and contemporary employment choices.
This connection between work and kinship extends to some of these same skills outside of the mineral extraction context. Beyond the mine site, many of these jobs that are associated with permanent settlement – such as office administration, water and sewage truck operation, heavy equipment at the airport, graders, snow removal – are also now in peoples’ family work history. Therefore, while some Inuit employees working at
Baffinland frame their employment at the mine site in terms of non-job specific, family history of work in the extraction context more broadly, one employee told me that her employment at the mine site had more to do with a specific occupation. Her grandfather had worked with heavy equipment and her father had worked as a heavy equipment operator at the airport in town. Therefore, she said to me that ‘it’s [heavy equipment operating] is in my family’ for three generations. For this interlocutor, what was important was not where she worked as a heavy equipment operator, but rather the fact of pursuing that family profession, whether it was at the mine site or in town.
Hence, working in line with family historical livelihoods provides an ongoing connection to past kin, and in this way working at the mine site (generally or in specific jobs) is another way that kinship is manifested through work. Working in the mine continues to be in line with historical connections between kinship and labour. This relates to a widespread tendency in space and place literature to connect the notion of time to notions of space and place. Here, time, manifested by the relationship with past labour networks, is central to thinking of the mine site as a home place. Therefore, what 161 is important when thinking about space/place is not only the physical or geographic location, but also how that relates to past, present, and future experiences.
Land at the Mine Site/Land as Home
Finally, the third way that Inuit transform the mine site into a home place is through a relationship with the land that starts in the community and extends to the mine site. This is manifested either as the Mary River Project feeling like home because of being able to work on the land, or from the ability to spend time outside more broadly.
“Being on the land” or “going out on the land” is an important concept in Igloolik. It can refer to going out hunting (for animals) or harvesting (such as for eggs), or just to go out recreationally. It usually involves taking a snowmobile and possibly a qamutiik (sled pulled behind the snowmobile) and leaving town for some amount of time ranging from a few hours to a number of days or weeks. People report that in addition to being a way to get country food, use hunting skills, or to have fun, it is also important for mental health.
Being out on the land is relaxing, a good break from town, a way to feel more calm.
When forced to be in town too much, some people will feel uncomfortable, unsettled, anxious, or feel they need a break on the land to reset. Going out on the land is therefore a very important part of life in Igloolik.
Similarly, having the opportunity to work or be on the land at the mine site is considered important. Being on the land in the context of working at the mine site for the
Inuit with whom I spoke generally referred to the work done by heavy equipment operators. This included driving haul trucks up and down the ore deposit, driving haul trucks along the tote road to help expand the road, driving the water truck along the tote road between the lake and port site, driving road maintenance equipment, and less 162 commonly, driving heavy equipment around either the main extraction site or the port site.
Some of these driving jobs result in people working in areas where the landscape appears untouched by the mine aside from the road, where the driver may not see any other people or trucks for some time, or where there are views of the landscape that do not include any visible signs of human activity. Therefore, even though a driver may be working as part of a team and be in relatively close proximity to other employees and equipment, there is a close relationship with the land and a being-in-space/place that can feel away from a settlement, in the same way being on the land can feel positive. For many people the opportunity to work or spend time outside at the mine site is important, and for others having the opportunity to work on the land at the mine site was directly related to a feeling of home, and some skills for being on the land around Igloolik translated directly into the ability to read the land around the mine site, as discussed below.
But first, in order to lead into the question of the relationship between land and home it is important to briefly touch on how many Inuit at the mine site, from Igloolik and elsewhere in Nunavut, indicated to me that it was important for them to have the opportunity to work outside or spend some part of their day outside, even if it did not necessarily mean working on the land in the sense discussed above. For example, one
Inuit employee indicated to me that his favourite machines to operate were those that allowed him to stay outside all the time, stating that he would not want to work in the office because then you cannot be outside. Someone else told me that when he first started working at the mine site it bothered him to not be able to go outside, although now he has gotten used to it. Someone who works in one of the offices reported to me that 163 initially she was based in one of the main buildings and had the opportunity to be outside when she had to walk between buildings a few times everyday. Now she is based in a single building and she misses going outside. A few people in housekeeping/janitorial expressed a preference and desire to work outside, with the favourite parts of their days being when they have to go outside for trips to clean other places. Finally, someone stated to me that he preferred working at Nanisivik because there were fewer rules, one of which was that employees were able to go outside. At Baffinland, the mine states that due to safety reasons, during the time employees are not working they are not allowed to go for walks around the site, with the walking distance being restricted to the distance between the main building’s door and the smoking area. Indeed, the mine site has had one fatality so far, resulting from a walking man being hit by a truck.
It is important to recognize that many Inuit who had the opportunity to work outside expressed greater enjoyment of their job than those who worked inside, even if the inside work was similarly classified as “skilled labour”. Furthermore, with employees from Igloolik there was less turnover of the jobs that were based outside than the jobs based inside. Therefore, while outside work at the mine site was generally welcomed, working inside was sometimes a factor that was found to be discouraging and was one aspect of working at the mine that was alienating rather than positive, as it moved Inuit away from their preferred lifestyle while in Igloolik.
Keeping this importance of being outside in mind, some heavy equipment operators I job shadowed reported specifically that the mine site felt like home because of the landscape and how their job placed them in the land. This was manifested further by the familiarity some Inuit felt with the landscape, and their ability to read the landscape 164 both around Igloolik and around the mine site. One person from Pond Inlet told me that
‘it’s like home here’ because he grew up coming onto this very land from relatively nearby Pond Inlet, and another HEO from Igloolik told me that he used to come to this area to get soapstone, with positive memories associated with these times of having the soapstone in a tarp and having the tarp pull him down the mountain. Now, this operator takes pictures of the landscape on his smoke breaks, highlighting to me its beauty.
Someone else from Igloolik likewise stated to me directly that it ‘feels like home here because of the landscape’, which he identified as similar to the landscape around
Igloolik. This same individual was able to read the land around the mine in the same way he was able to read the land around Igloolik. For example, while driving, he explained to me about how, even though we could not feel it on the equipment, you could tell that the wind was blowing strongly higher up because of how the snow as moving on the tops of nearby hills. From this same reading, the operator was able to understand how the wind was coming into the area. Another operator on the tote road explained to me that being able to drive on the tote road everyday was one of the most important aspects of her job.
She stated that she loves the scenery and as a result of going out on the land frequently at home, she knows how to read the land from hunting and from her grandfather. ‘The landscape is always different’, she explained to me, and as such driving is always varied.
In the course of driving on the tote road this operator highlighted to me how she was able to read both the natural landscape – pointing out the lines of cloud in the sky, as we were setting out, that indicated a blizzard was coming – as well as the interaction between the man-made and natural landscapes – showing me that as we could not see exhaust or lights in the distance we knew there were no other trucks coming at that time. In this way, 165 the operator told me that the mine feels like home because of the land and from how she went out on the land with her family.
This equating land with home at the mine site relates to Basso’s conceptualization of how the power of place holds people together in a localized version of selfhood. As mentioned above, for Basso there is an inseparable connection between the feeling of a place and the ideas that make up the sense of that place. Here, the idea of being on the land is important not only for the idea of a home place, but also the idea of Inuit identity.
Being on the land is an important part of Inuit life historically, as a mobile people, as well as today in the community. Like Basso’s use of ‘dwelling’, this focus on being on the land at the mine takes into account not only what people feel (feeling good both during and after being on the land) but what they do (how they use and relate to the land).
Continuing to put importance on being on the land at the mine site is a way to connect with the idea of home as well as the idea of what it means to be, and how to redefine being, Inuit. Furthermore, this emphasis on being on the land at the mine site represents a close connection between the natural (landscape) and social (Inuit practices) environments, which demonstrates the position put forward by Basso in his study of one aspect of Apaches’ relationship with landscapes about wisdom. In the Inuit case the wisdom that sits in the place is not a wisdom that focuses on moral stories and lessons as with the Apache, but it is a wisdom that comes from being able to read the land and act accordingly.
More specifically, the mine site was a place where some people from Igloolik went to collect soapstone for carving. Other people from Igloolik spent time growing up or living as an adult in an outpost camp close to the current mine site. For some 166 employees, therefore, there is a pre-existing connection to the land that continues to their current employment. This connection is manifested, in part, by telling personal histories and stories about the landscape. Another way it is manifested is by place names. The top of the mountain that is being mined is being called Pit Nullujaat, a combination of
Inuktitut and English names, with, as mentioned above, Nullujaat being the name of the mountain in Inuktitut, and Pit referring to the act of mining the top of the mountain (the
Mary River Project being an open pit mine). These relationships with the landscape specifically at and around the mine site complement the relationships with the landscape that is experienced more broadly as similar to land around Igloolik. Selfhood through connection with land is therefore both in the specificity of the place for those who spent time there in the past, and in the new daily relations at the mine site now for those who are new to the landscape but relate to the landscape with experience from Igloolik.
These instances of space and place making by Inuit at the mine site relate to
Smith’s explanation of relative space, in which the use of space points to important aspects of a society. In this case, family, history, and landscape are each important to
Inuit life in the communities, and as such are mirrored in the Inuit construction of the mine into a home. This approach unifies the formerly separate notions of space and society, an assumption of separation that continues to underlie some discussions of employment at mine sites in Nunavut today, where it is assumed that working out of a community at a mine site will mean that Inuit are taken out of their “culture” and put into a different milieu. While this is true to some degree, it fails to take into account the ways that people bring society with them to any space, and in this way the space of a mine site is better thought of as relative space rather than absolute space. As Smith argues, ‘the 167 production of space also implies the production of the meaning, concepts and consciousness of space which are inseparably linked to its physical production’ (1984,
77). The development of the Mary River Project began with one set of societal values, but has now become imbued with an additional set of meanings. However, where Smith conceives of nature as absolute space, the example of Inuit relationship with the landscape at the mine site and in the communities indicates that this ‘nature’, too, is relative rather than absolute space.
Imbuing a location with meaning is also in line with Tuan’s theorization of the conversion from space into place, focusing on space becoming less abstract and given value once people get to know it better. Key for the mine site is the process of intimately coming to know the mine first-hand (making it a place) rather than experiencing it mediated from a distance (knowing it only as space). This difference is manifested by the different ways the mine site is experienced by the federal government and Inuit employees who work at the mine site. As discussed in the Introduction, the federal government in Ottawa, which dictates to some degree extractive policies in Nunavut, describes Canada’s North in policy speeches drawing on common tropes to represent a homogenized and generic Arctic space. In contrast, this space is made particular and given meaning as a place by Inuit employees who work at the mine site. The difference between space and place, as conceptualized by Tuan, maps onto the difference between how the North is thought about at a distance by state officials (as space, experienced by indirect, conceptual, symbolic knowledge), and how it is thought about as a place by Inuit working at the mine site, as a location of meaning known through direct and intimate experience. In this case, mining is construed by external state and industry actors as 168 undertaken in a remote location – in absolute space (Smith) or location (Tuan). Inuit who work at the mine site gain first hand experiential knowledge and some come to think of the mine site as a home.
Multiple Homes
Regardless of whether the mine site is classified as a space or a place, what this body of literature can help illuminate are the ways in which the mine site may become a home. By understanding the process behind which it is transformed via kinship relations, how the history of Inuit livelihoods form an important part of home, and how relationships with the landscape may act as a connector of home, work, and selfhood, key theorists within the space/place body of literature contribute to an appreciation of Inuit as active participants in the mining complex, rather than as passive subjects on which mining has impacts. What is further important to recognize here is that the mine remains a location of multiplicity. It is a home, but Inuit also identified it as a space/place of productivity, work, money, stress, satisfaction, learning, racial prejudice, and more. This capacity to reframe the mine site in multiple ways allows an active role for Inuit employees to strategically understand and experience their work environment and its relationship to their home communities.
This ability to create multiple homes relates to feminist art historian Marsha
Meskimmon’s notion of ‘becoming-denizen’, a term she coins in order to describe ‘the active practices of belonging, of making oneself at home in multiple locations across and between the present limitations of citizenship that constrain (sometimes forcibly), but never wholly contain, the potential for creative change’ (Meskimmon 2016, 13). This process of making belonging for self in multiple locations is key for understanding part of 169 what is happening at the Mary River Project. It recognizes the continuity between community life and life at the mine site, part of which involves ongoing relationships with land. Becoming-denizen recognizes that people come from somewhere, but that having these roots does not prevent them from making their homes in new places.
Meskimmon continues by stating that ‘if citizenship is instantiated through the powerful tools of myth, which point to and impose its limits, then the becoming-denizen is articulated through heresy, through practices premised upon choosing, taking and constructing against the grain’ (ibid.). Similar to Harvey, Meskimmon emphasizes process in her understanding of activities of belonging: how we actively make ourselves at home in the world and create a sense of belonging in different places, focusing on belonging that is other than association with nation-states or naturalized citizenship.
Becoming-denizen ‘goes beyond the political confines of the natus of nation with its natural citizenship toward the agency of denizenship, the creation of powerful and empowering fictions of belonging across complex and contested homelands’ (ibid., 12) to understand the multiple ways that home and belonging may be created beyond borders and conventional boundaries. Belonging and home-making in multiple localities is an active and relational process. Therefore, while this process of home-making and becoming-denizen can be understood as an action of resistance, it is more fully understood as a process of asserting alternative priorities for self and community: ‘they do not negate the often brutal realities of the limits of nation and citizenship in a global world, but they choose to speak otherwise. They develop alternative and creative forms of belonging, forms I would suggest are the start of denizen ecologies’ (ibid., 14). For
Meskimmon, belonging is therefore both a status and a practice. 170
This emphasis on creating home and belonging in multiple ways is helpful for understanding the transformation of the mine site into home by Inuit employees. It gives space to Inuit agency, with an active role in making themselves “at home” in different places, a capability that is often taken away from them in studies that focus exclusively on the impact of mining on Inuit individuals and communities. This alternative form of belonging, with the mine site as home, is a unique home-making strategy that emerges out of the complex of kinship, history, and land that intersects with the extractive industry.
Furthermore, if the extractive industry may itself be understood as a colonial endeavor, making home at the mine could be understood as an act of resistance. By choosing to speak about the mine site as a home, in addition to their home communities, Inuit employees assert not only their ability to thrive in a wage labour environment, they also reassert claim to the Inuit Owned Land (IOL) on which the mine is located, and products of the labour of the mine itself.
Importantly, making the mine into a home is one component in the active making of well-being. Inuit workers who reported experiencing the mine site as more like home also reported a greater sense of well-being at work. The ways that the mine may be like a home are therefore important to understand not only from a theoretical perspective but also practically in regard to measures and routines at a mine site. Here, helping to create the mine site as a home may also result in positive employment outcomes such as Inuit employee retention, positive self-esteem results from work (a benefit highlighted by
Igloolik elders), and generally increased feelings of well-being. The relationship between work life, community life, ‘life projects’ (Blaser 2014) and political claims to land will now be explored in the next chapter, with a focus not only on how Inuit “indigenize” the 171 mine site, but also the ways in which parts of working at the mine filter back into life in the Hamlet of Igloolik.
172
CHAPTER SIX: LIVING WELL AND WELL-BEING
As discussed in earlier chapters, mining in Nunavut has commonly been framed in two contrary ways: as either a source of salvation, providing much-needed wage employment for Inuit Nunavummiut, or as a curse, resulting in significant negative impacts. The Government of Nunavut often supports the mining industry – in this case,
Baffinland Iron Mines – as a source of wage employment that will help the development of Nunavut by employing Inuit, in particular with an eye to the exploding number of youth (Government of Nunavut 2012). On the other side, the mining industry is often talked about and studied as a source of negative social impacts on local communities
(Pauktuutit 2014). In this case, the mine is framed as a threat to local cultures and as an industry that primarily harms a community. In these two conceptualizations of the mine site, the only results that can be expected are positively economic, from the wages earned, or negatively social, from a disruption of what is considered the current local way of life.
Both these positions take as their starting point an acceptance of the power of the mine as a site at which the powers of neoliberal capitalism and globalization impact the local.
Whether the result is positive or negative, in both analyses the mine acts as a force that overpowers the local communities and the Inuit who live there.
This relationship between capitalism, globalization, and the workplace is one that has been discussed extensively in anthropology, sometimes framed in terms of resistance26. However, more recent literature speaks about how these forces may become
Some of the most influential anthropological writers on this topic published on it in the 1980s: the ways in which missionaries brought not only the colonialism to South Africa but also the means with which to resist it (Comaroff 1985); how spirit attacks by Malay women in the factory act as a form of resistance to dominant masculine and capitalist expectations of women (Ong 1986); and how everyday forms of resistance in Malaysia around work relations may be the most effective form for social change (Scott 1985). 173 indigenized (Sahlins 1999), hybrid (for an overview, see Blim 2000), or, the lens I will use in this chapter, drawn upon strategically. While this strategic engagement of forces involves indigenization and hybridity in these authors’ terms, these processes may be considered bridges in the collective visioning and realization of novel life projects in the making. Taking active and creative use as a starting point, what the two commonly-held positions on mining in Nunavut today fail to take into account are the ways that Inuit in
Nunavut may be drawing on employment at the mine site in a different way, one that does not necessarily reject neoliberal capitalism, but rather uses parts of it for their own advantage. In this chapter I argue that Inuit draw on working at the mine site as a source of well-being that is in line with their own priorities for leading good lives, their own
‘directions of life that emanate from Indigenous histories that are not free of outside influences but are none the less distinctive in their shape’ (Myers and Peterson 2006, 3).
This approach recognizes that Indigenous communities are not necessarily striving to return to a pre-contact ideal, but rather are striving for ‘political autonomy, to be in charge of their lives, which [draw] on a long history of value related to ideas of personal autonomy and authority, with their basis in land ownership’ (ibid., 18).
While there are many ways of engaging with the idea of well-being, I take my understanding of it here from what Inuit in Nunavut indicated as important to their individual and collective happiness, security, health, comfort, and over all “good”, and how they accordingly prioritized certain aspects of their lives. The first of the ways that engaging with the mine was talked about as a potential source of well-being emphasized the value of work, either working at the mine or working on the land, and an emphasis on the importance of not receiving income support. Here my interlocutors drew a direct 174 comparison for me between historical and contemporary modes of livelihood. With forced settlement of Inuit communities by the Canadian government, hunting started to lose its prominence as the main form of livelihood, being displaced by wage labour.
Welfare colonialism (Paine 1977) was the underlying paradigm on which the resettlement was based, and along which lines policies and strategies continued to be enacted in the communities. Hunting, however, was not just a way to procure food but was also a valued part of individual and community life and identity (Wenzel 2000). Wage employment today (as has been discussed) can be hard to come by in Nunavut, while loss of traditional livelihood and adoption of income support threaten well-being. Therefore, a direct comparison between what is framed as “traditional culture”, self-reliance, and working at the mine site is made via the link of bringing self-esteem or confidence to the individual workers, and the potential that working at the mine has as a way of regaining these characteristics through work.
The second way that engaging with the mine was talked about as a potential source of well-being was with an emphasis on the value of being meaningfully engaged through using skills and avoiding boredom. The importance of acquiring, using, and maintaining skills has been recognized in Nunavut as part of Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit
(IQ) (Wenzel 2004; Government of Nunavut 2013; National Collaborating Centre for
Aboriginal Health 2010) and thus codified as a key Inuit value (but see Nadasdy 2003).
The first way that valued IQ is related to working at the mine is through pilimmaksarniq: the concept of skills and knowledge acquisition and improving skills through practice.
Valued skills are not necessarily those associated with historical livelihood pursuits but can also include skills using contemporary technology. Exercising a variety of skills at 175 the mine site is one example of Inuit value that continues today in a wage employment context. Boredom, by contrast, is arguably the opposite of using skills. It has a unique meaning in Nunavut and represents a lack of engagement stemming in part, again, from forced settlement. Working at the mine is being framed today as both a way to use and be proud of skills, and also as a way to alleviate boredom.
Finally, the third way that engaging with the mine was talked about as a potential source of well-being was in reinforcing valued social relationships through either working together or sharing the wages earned from working at the mine. This lines up with another IQ value that has been codified into the Government of Nunavut structure: piliriqatigiingniq, the concept of collaborative relationships or working together for a common purpose (Government of Nunavut 2013). Although there is, among Inuit, an
‘extraordinarily high value on personal autonomy and individual integrity, ideals instilled at a very young age’ (Collings 2014: 59), an emphasis on family relationships, as discussed in the last chapter, is central to community life in Igloolik. Engagement with the mine is being used as a way to promote well-being both through working relationally with others and as a way to reinforce social relations through sharing wages.
What is therefore important to recognize is that although mining may act as a potential source of well-being, it grounds itself in historical and continuing community- based values. For example, wages gained from working at the mine site were invariably cited as an important benefit, one that is necessary for living in the mixed economy of
Igloolik today, but they are not the only benefit, and perhaps not even the most important benefit, cited by elders, employees, and former employees. Well-being as constructed by
Inuit in Igloolik draws strategically on engagement with employment at the mine site, 176 again illustrating the ability of Inuit to use the mine in ways important to them, rather than have the mine unilaterally dictate outcomes. This may be considered part of an Inuit life project, as per Mario Blaser (2004), that draws on development projects to use the aspects that further Indigenous agendas of well-being without necessarily subscribing comprehensively to the global development agenda.
This position – that engaging with the mine site in Igloolik is a way of maintaining an Inuit community-based ‘life project’ and well-being – will be explored through four parts in this chapter. The first section sets the stage by touching on the importance of territoriality for creating the conditions of engaging in wage labour that brings positive benefits and the opportunities for maintaining a distinct way of life for global Indigenous communities. This section concludes with the idea that the creation of
Nunavut as an Inuit territory via the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement paved the way for an opportunity today for Inuit to actively and strategically draw on working at the Mary
River Project in a way that further their own goals that are sometimes distinct, sometimes overlapping, but never wholly subversive to dominant development paradigms. The second section explores in greater depth the ways to understand the concept of life projects and what it entails for how global Indigenous communities, Nations, and individuals engage with development projects. The third section examines the ways in which engaging with the mine site in Nunavut may result in greater self-esteem, relating the ethnographic example back to Blaser’s notion of life projects. Finally, the forth section discusses how this type of engagement represents a sort of ‘friction’ (Tsing 2005) between the global and local levels.
Territoriality 177
Before addressing the importance of life projects in the Nunavut example, it is important to first contextualize this concept theoretically and materially with the notion of territoriality. In the case of the Mary River Project, the Nunavut Land Claims
Agreement (NLCA) gave Inuit rights to the land on which the mine site is located. As discussed in Chapters Two and Three, the NLCA, negotiated between Inuit of what is now Nunavut and the federal government, gives Inuit subsurface rights to approximately two percent of the land mass of Nunavut. These lands were chosen strategically for not only their cultural value but also with an eye to future mineral needs of Canada. For that reason, the majority of the Mary River Project is located on Inuit Owned Land (IOL).
Inuit who spoke to me about the NLCA negotiations expressed the importance for them of these negotiations of past leaders and of having land that was recognized as Inuit territory.
The importance of territory in maintaining a unique way of life in the face of globalization is addressed by Arturo Escobar in a way that is useful for understanding how this earlier Inuit resistance to government appropriation of land now paves the way for a different engagement by workers at the mine site, one that is not framed in terms of resistance but rather maintenance of life projects. Escobar’s book Territories of
Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes (2008) examines the worldviews, knowledge, and place-based struggles of black and Indigenous activists in the Colombian Pacific, arguing that ‘people mobilize against the destructive aspects of globalization from the perspective of what they have been and what they are at present: historical subjects of particular cultures, economies, and ecologies; particular knowledge producers; individuals and collectivities engaged in the play of living in landscapes and with each 178 other in distinctive ways’ (Escobar 2008, 6). Difference here is manifested in three interpenetrating ways: economic, ecological, and cultural, with the imperial global system tending to transform local diverse economies to market economies, specific ecosystems to modern conceptualizations of nature, and place-based local culture to
Euro-Andean culture. The struggle over territory then becomes the struggle over meaning, with territories of difference (what Escobar also calls territories of life) being those places with unique place and region that are created through history, culture, environment, and social life.
Escobar defines place as ‘the engagement with and experience of a particular location with some measure of groundedness (however unstable), boundaries (however permeable), and connections to everyday life, even if its identity is constructed and never fixed’ (ibid., 30). To that end, Escobar argues that displacement is a key part of
Eurocentric modernity and development, a conquest that involves both territory and people. Therefore, strategies for preventing displacement focus on local practices including alternative development for livelihood and food security. Defense of territory
‘entails the defense of an intricate pattern of place-based social relations and cultural constructions; it also implies the creation of a novel sense of belonging linked to the political construction of a collective life project’ (ibid., 68). The struggle for territory is therefore not just the struggle for land but also the struggle for autonomy and self- determination and is ‘seen as the space of effective appropriation of the ecosystem, that is, as spaces used to satisfy community needs and to bring about social and cultural development’ (ibid., 146). 179
The close connection between black and Indigenous rights to land and well-being in the Colombian Pacific discussed by Escobar has a similar counterpart in the United
States and Canada. To give a very concrete example, taking away or denying Indigenous control of the land, whether that control of land is used to pursue subsistence or resource extraction, has been linked to increased poverty among Indigenous peoples. Studies done in the USA have shown the positive relationship between ‘tribal sovereignty’ and economic development among American Indian communities (Cornell and Kalt 1998).
Among James Bay Cree and Inuit in Nunavik, who have relatively strong control of their lands, there are fewer welfare and unemployment problems than among many other
Canadian Indigenous groups (Scott 2004). However, governments are often reluctant to allow Indigenous self-governance because it leads to a loss of state control and ownership over some of the natural resources of ceded areas.
Indigenous authors have also addressed the close connection between impaired territorial self-determination and economic exclusion, with a close interpenetration of the discursive and material elements of state control. For example, when speaking of the
James Bay Cree leader Matthew Coon Come (2004) makes an argument that could easily be applied to many Indigenous groups in Canada: there is a strong link between weak recognition of Indigenous rights and political and economic exclusion. He argues that the current non-recognition of rights and title is the source of many of the problems
Indigenous peoples in Canada face today: ‘any dispossession of our legal status and fundamental rights is a root cause of our ongoing social disadvantage and underdevelopment’ (Coon Come 2004, 160). He views resources and entitlement to be at the heart of the issue, with the state appropriation of resources leading to mass dislocation 180 and involuntary resettlement. Further, he states that governmental seizure of revenue from territorial resources in return for (welfare colonial) “handouts” leads to dependency.
He argues that in order for Indigenous nations to be socially and economically self- sufficient, the Canadian government must distribute land back to Indigenous peoples, and that the amount of land must be enough to promote economic self-reliance, and cultural and political autonomy. This would include exclusive or preferential access to natural and extractive resources (ibid., 162). Here, state ownership of the land has a direct bearing on the identity and opportunities for alternative development available to Indigenous peoples, with state appropriation of land resources being a major factor hindering Indigenous well- being.
Similarly, Colin Scott (2004) also outlines some of the problems associated with the lack of recognition by the Canadian government of entitlement to lands held by
Indigenous peoples, addressing the question ‘to whom do territories and resources rightfully belong and according to what regimes of tenure and authority should they be developed and managed?’ (Scott 2004, 300). In his chapter “Conflicting Discourse of
Property, Governance and Development in the Canadian North” Scott looks at opposing political discourses and their underlying assumptions surrounding questions of
Indigenous entitlement to property. He argues against the dichotomy that has been set up between civil society and a capitalist market on the one hand, and collective property rights and self-governance on the other. Hence, he offers some suggestions about how to address problems associated with land entitlement and resource ownership: that
‘recognition of aboriginal rights and titles to lands, water and resources is one approach to rebalancing the distribution of rights in property, and to implementing certain self- 181 government forms of territorial jurisdiction (including co-management) that retain or restore a degree of Indigenous control over homelands and waters’ (ibid.). An important point to take away from Scott’s article is the notion that ‘the self-governing, jurisdictional dimension of title cannot be divorced from the proprietary dimension’ (ibid., 311).
Scott’s account highlights the intersection of discourse and materiality, while illustrating that the material holding of lands is central to a unique Indigenous identity and development that is land and place based, as his perspective involves promoting and supporting collective and unassailable aboriginal ownership of land, with Indigenous governments leading economic development in those collectively held lands (ibid., 310).
For this reason, while it is important to look at the micro level in Nunavut of how working at a mine may contribute to well-being, it is also important to consider the larger context and the dynamic interaction of the local within the larger Nunavut territory. The struggle to create Nunavut as a territory was, as Escobar says, not just about the land itself but also the opportunity for Indigenous groups to have greater autonomy and self- determination. In particular, the work done to secure some Inuit control over the lands of
Nunavut means that today, as the Mary River Project is located mostly on IOLs, the mining company had to sign an IIBA with QIA (as discussed in Chapter Three), and, as per that agreement, focus on hiring Inuit from the North Baffin region to work at the mine site. Thanks to earlier resistance work done to create and maintain Nunavut as a territory in the context of Canadian contemporary land claims policy, Inuit today can work more productively towards drawing on employment at the mine site as part of developing their life projects.27 The projects of improvement undertaken by the GN and
The Government of Nunavut recently held a referendum on whether Nunavut residents should be able to buy and own land (rather than lease the land on which private and public houses and buildings are located), 182 industry, as discussed in Chapter Four, represent an example of the tension that is produced between neoliberal approaches to development and the active ways in which mining may be, and sometimes is, being used to support unique Inuit life projects in this contemporary Nunavut context.
Life Projects
I find valuable Escobar’s position that ‘the politics of place can be seen as an emergent form of politics, a novel political imaginary in that it asserts a logic of difference and possibility that builds on the multiplicity of actions at the level of everyday life. Places are the site of dynamic cultures, economies, and environments rather than just nodes in a global capitalist system’ (Escobar 2008, 67). Taking Escobar’s assertions seriously means thinking of Inuit engagement with mining as something other than simply another part of the global capital mineral market. It means that place-based engagement with the mine site may be a political action based in a different logic than contemporary neoliberal capitalism. It is then important to query further the relationship between working at the Mary River Project and Inuit well-being; how is the mine being used by Inuit for their own unique socio-cultural agendas? This is where Mario Blaser’s
(2004) notion of life projects is particularly useful. Blaser discusses the ways in which
Indigenous agendas may be different from Euro-North American development goals, even as Indigenous agendas must take place within a playing field defined by the dominant discourse. Blaser argues that rather than being strictly against and solely resisting development, Indigenous peoples strive to maintain life projects. Development
and the proposition was rejected. This was therefore a recent moment in Nunavut where (mostly) Inuit spoke out against a neoliberal type of land ownership in favour of the widely held idea that the land should not be individually owned. 183 here is recognized as having both material (enacting change on the ground) and discursive (making specific world-views and values into universal values) components.
Blaser describes life projects as ‘embedded in local histories; they encompass visions of the world and the future that are distinct from those embodied by projects promoted by state and market’ (Blaser 2004, 26). Rather than having a political goal, life projects themselves are the political goal, the ‘very action of maintaining open-endedness as a politics of resilience’ (ibid., 40). Blaser’s notion of life projects is therefore useful for taking into account the ways in which politics and epistemology are implicit in notions of the local and global, and the types of development discourses that accompany them.
For Blaser a central component of development and life projects is the idea of place, which he sees as a process that involves practices, shaping identities, and resisting power: ‘the immediate experiences of place and identity are inevitably constituted within larger sets of spatial relations’ (ibid., 29). One central part of his argument is therefore that both development and life projects are place based, but while conventional, state-run development emphasizes the importance of ‘horizontal threads’ (spatial trans-place links), life projects emphasize ‘vertical threads’ (grounding place in specific histories and landscapes) (ibid.). These two sets of threads are mutually constitutive, and Blaser argues that one important difference between the development discourse and life projects is based on which of the two they emphasize. While each involves the other, development – based in a Western European modernist background – tends to focus on horizontal threads at the expensive of vertical threads.
In contrast, life projects are not necessarily opposed to development, but focus on having control over life as ‘being-placed-in-the-world’, thus giving weight to both the 184 horizontal and vertical threads (ibid., 35). Importantly, Indigenous peoples often focus on rebuilding and strengthening the vertical threads because these have been attacked through colonization, assimilation, and development. Therefore, while life projects are against development as being a universalizing force, they can sometimes incorporate the opportunities presented by development to further their life projects, since life projects are about living purposeful and meaningful lives. He concludes by saying that autonomy and self-management present the best conditions in which to undertake life projects, and that development discourses should reject universal claims and instead take into account peoples’ unique experiences of self and place.
Hence, what Blaser highlights is that many different types of development can be used to further Indigenous agendas and identities while not necessarily subscribing to the dominant discourses that underlie those development initiatives. In this way, “traditional livelihoods” and resource extraction are two parts of the same development and identity project rather than two separate regimes of identity and development. Applying the idea of life projects in Nunavut challenges the dominant discourses around development, in that it is not just wages that bring positive results; there are also other reasons Inuit may have for working or wanting to work at the mine. These alternative goals represent
Blaser’s vertical threads, which ground engagement with development projects in specific histories and landscapes and as such challenge orthodox norms and measures of development. Here, the goal of development may not be increased accumulation but rather a good life in terms of what is deemed important in Igloolik and the other North
Baffin communities. As discussed in the last chapter, working at the mine is a way to connect to the land in a wage environment; to witness the ‘beautiful landscapes’ while 185 working; work that, ‘like hunting’ counters boredom and loneliness, because ‘you don’t get lonely being outside.’ Here we see Inuit drawing on their own priorities and field of values, weaving them as vertical threads into mining activity to further their own life projects.
The approach taken by the Qikiqtani Inuit Association (QIA) is an example of a similar process happening at the level of regional bureaucracy. Before, during, and after signing the IIBA with BIM, QIA now tries to gain as many opportunities as possible for
Inuit, whether it be through direct employment at the mine site, promoting Inuit companies to receive contracts, helping to develop Inuit companies, or mitigating the negative effects of mining on local environments and land-based livelihoods. Rather than rejecting the mine, QIA is trying to strategically and actively use the powers at their disposal as granted through the NLCA to take what they want from the mine to help support the lives of North Baffin Inuit specifically, and Inuit in Nunavut more broadly.
However, QIA comes against the challenges of encountering a declining number of Inuit employees at the mine site, and reports of decreasing Inuit work satisfaction at the mine site due, in part, to accusations against the mining company of nepotism and racism in hiring practices. These factors are exacerbated by the global drop in iron ore prices, resulting in the company having less money to invest in supporting Inuit employment than previously through training and recruitment programs. There are continuing challenges in taking successful advantage of mining to further Inuit life projects and well- being.
The Mine, Well-being, and Vertical Threads 186
The concept of life projects is useful to understand the ways in which working at the mine can help support Inuit ‘vertical threads’ in Nunavut, and well-being. In this case, working at the mine promotes well-being through practices that are grounded in specific histories and landscapes: the value of work itself (in particular, an equation of working at the mine with working on the land or making clothing and the importance of avoiding income support), the value of being meaningfully engaged (through using skills and avoiding boredom), and the value of relationships (working together with others and being a contributor to the family livelihood). Some of these examples were framed in terms of ‘self-esteem’, and thus I take my understanding of self-esteem here from what I heard in Nunavut.28 The idea of self-esteem here also incorporates the notion of
‘confidence’, as having confidence in one’s self or feeling confident in Igloolik and at the mine site. As per Blaser’s analysis, the emphasis is on vertical threads that are working to maintain values that have been threatened by assimilatory Canadian policies, strategies, and actions. In particular, these have been threatened today by an over-reliance on the welfare system (see Paine 1977 on welfare colonialism) and a move away from hunting as a primary occupation, forced settlement that represents a major shift from former nomadic and semi-nomadic practices (Wenzel 1991; Qikiqtani Truth Commission 2013), and confronting a socio-cultural system that promotes the neoliberal individual over relationships (an aspect of neoliberalism and modernity as outlined by Foucault 1979).
By emphasizing the potential benefits of working at the mine that address these past and continuing colonial actions, people in Igloolik work to rebuild and strengthen the vertical threads of their life projects.
In this case, self-esteem can be understood as a lens through which the aspects of life that are important for a sense of well-being (for the Inuit who spoke with me) are magnified. Self-esteem here may refer to the individual self, the self in relation to others, and/or a more generalized idea of well-being. 187
The Value of Work
The importance of promoting and maintaining well-being through work – wage or otherwise – was one of the first themes that arose from my time in Nunavut. There is recognition of the importance of wages at the mine site, but the significance of those wages was only one part of the well-being that arose from engaging in work; another theme that came up was the importance of self-esteem as an aspect of the relationship between well-being and work. In particular, work, either in the form of wage employment or going on the land, was equated with promoting self-esteem, and as such work was therefore something to be encouraged, pursued and maintained.29 In this case, rather than being something that is located exclusively within the individual or as something promoted by development narratives, the idea of self-esteem that arose in my conversations in Igloolik and at the mine site was complex, sometimes in translation from
Inuktitut to English, ever changing, and was equated more broadly with well-being or confidence than with a single definition.
The first time I heard about the relationship between work and self-esteem was from elders in Igloolik. Early in my conversations with people in Igloolik about the mine
I learned a piece of information that I found surprising at the time: the main point of resistance to the Mary River Project came not from the elders but from the youth of the community. In large part, the elders supported the project: although they had important concerns regarding the specifics of it, such as the (ultimately rejected) shipping route that was to go relatively close to Igloolik and through walrus calving waters, they supported the mine broadly as an important way for young people to have jobs today, to be able to
As discussed in the chapter on home at the mine site, this is another way that working at the mine site may be associated with historical forms of livelihood. 188 make a living, and to therefore increase their self-esteem. In particular, there was an association made between being on income support and having a low self-esteem. One way that income support and low self-esteem were associated was through lack of options. To quote the argument of one elder (in translation):
Young people cannot live on income support because it’s too minimal – it destroys their self-esteem. Once they get a job they can purchase vehicles, such as skidoos, which they cannot do on income support. On income support you can only buy food – there are no options.
It was for this reason that the elder was ‘not trying to stop [Baffinland]’ from developing the Mary River Project, as he hoped that it would bring jobs to the community and thus improve young peoples’ self-esteem.30 The elder believes wages from the mine site can be used to purchase vehicles, which are needed to get out onto the land. Therefore, the wages gained from working at the mine are what will help the young people continue undertaking a valued activity in Igloolik: hunting, harvesting, and generally being on the land.
Another elder further addressed the negative effects of income support. This elder argued that the dangers of being on income support went beyond the small amounts of money it provides. He stated that ‘everyone needs to have a job’,31 and highlighted that in
Igloolik there is a lack of jobs, leading to the problem of the majority of people being on income support. This is significant, he argued, because being on income support is
‘degrading’, and it is ‘better to be working to develop your own self-esteem’. According to this elder, Baffinland therefore provides an important opportunity for Inuit, and
However, this elder also stated that they had not yet seen any changes from the mine site, either positive or negative: that is to say, there had not yet been a significant number of jobs at the mine for community members. This elder similarly critiqued Baffinland’s slow progress on hiring Iglulingmiut to work at the mine site, arguing that even though the mine will be operational for many years, it was not clear whether there will be more Inuit hired in the future. 189 especially Inuit youth, in two ways. The first is potentially providing jobs in a community that has very few jobs available. In addition to other factors that may be preventing people from entering the workforce, the fact remains that there are far more people in town of employable age than there are jobs. Furthermore, of the jobs that are available, not all of them are desirable or require high levels of qualifications, and the coveted jobs usually have low turnover. These factors, among others, contribute to some people remaining on income support and not looking for jobs.
The elder went on to argue that another way Baffinland may be a significant player in increasing employment and therefore self-esteem is through training. He argued that currently for Inuit from Igloolik to be trained for a job they are sent to southern
Canada, such as for a heavy equipment operator course. However, some people are not able to leave for six weeks at a time due to a number of different obligations such as family responsibilities, occasional or casual work, health reasons, etc. For this reason, if training was brought to the community it would be more successful and Inuit would have better jobs. In this way, the elder suggested that it would be good if Baffinland were to provide training at the mine site or in communities, and then hire Inuit into middle level and operations jobs rather than lower income or entry-level jobs. Baffinland could therefore be a contributor to positive self-esteem not only through providing jobs, but also by providing training for jobs at the mine site and jobs that could be worked later in the community. The elder noted that having training in the North would result in a higher success rate of people gaining the skills they need, and would result in Inuit having better jobs. 190
According to this elder, then, the importance of working for well-being is not necessarily how the money is used, but lies in the action of getting off income support.
Income support in this case is considered to be a source of negative feelings about how one might feel about oneself or how one might be viewed by others (‘degrading’), and thus be a barrier to having positive feelings and well-being. Furthermore, Baffinland providing in-community training is significant for this elder in that it will give more
Igloolik Inuit the opportunity to both get more people trained for the jobs (as the barrier of leaving the community would be removed) and get people into higher paid jobs.
Having the higher paid job would allow them to successfully stay off income support, and thus act as a source of self-esteem.
Similarly, some interlocutors expressed to me that both working at the mine site and doing other, non-extractive work contributed to feelings of increased self-esteem, emphasizing the importance of work for well-being broadly. In particular, this was expressed in comparing the benefits to well-being gained through wage employment with other “traditional” modes of livelihood. One interview participant equated all types of work with going on the land, in that both increase self-esteem. Another participant likewise compared working at the mine site to making and selling handicrafts. This former housekeeping and kitchen employee would sometimes make crafts in her home community and sell them at the mine site, and sometimes also make them at the mine site while off shift. Both forms of livelihood here, working at the mine and making and selling handicrafts, increased her self-esteem:
Interviewer: Did working there [at the mine site] make you feel good about yourself?
Respondent: Yes. ‘Cause everybody telling me you’re doing great job, you’re good 191
at it. Makes me feel up and feel better when they tell me you’re doing good job, and it’s good.
Interviewer: Yeah, yeah. I totally know what you mean. Is it the same with your [handicrafts]?
Respondent: Yes.
Here, both working at the mine and making handicrafts increased the former employee’s well-being in similar ways, also framed as increasing self-esteem. This source of well- being is work-specific, whether it is working at the mine or working at crafts. Here, a pre- wage labour and valued practice (handicrafts) and a contemporary wage labour practice
(working at the mine) both act to increase the interlocutor’s well-being. Rather than trying to emphasize a specific type of work practice over the other, the former employee sees work broadly as important for well-being.
Skills and Engagement at the Mine Site
Having and cultivating skills is also an important factor in well-being in this context. As mentioned above, this emphasis on skills has become part of IQ, known as pilimmaksarniq: the concept of skills and knowledge acquisition and improving skills through practice. However, well-being was discussed beyond just exercising skills and extended to the idea of being meaningfully engaged. This is another area where
Iglulingmiut are drawing on engagement with the mine site to extend their vertical threads and promote their life projects. In this case, well-being comes from using skills and taking pride in them, as well as drawing on the mine site as a way to alleviate the negativity that may stem from being stuck in town. Almost without exception, the Inuit I asked who either currently worked at the mine site or who had previously worked at the mine site said that working there positively affected their well-being, at least for a period 192 of time. Specifically, Inuit employees at the mine site said that working at the mine either
‘increases’, ‘improves’, ‘is good for’ their self-esteem or is ‘good for feeling good about myself’. My interlocutors appreciated having the opportunity to use skills, feel pride in their work and not be ‘bored’ (to have something to occupy their time), with the theme of receiving positive feedback present throughout.
These themes arose in both work locales discussed in previous chapters: working with heavy equipment and working in housekeeping and the kitchen. One housekeeper whom I job shadowed told me that, despite housekeeping sometimes being classified as unskilled labour, she did feel housekeeping uses skills, and that working at the mine is good for her self-esteem. In particular, this employee took pride in knowing that she excelled at her housekeeping skills. Another employee offered the example of working in the kitchen making sandwiches. He had pride and ‘good feelings’ when other employees thought his work was good. Other employees eating the sandwiches that he made manifested this recognition of good work. Heavy equipment operators and outdoors site services Inuit employees similarly relayed to me a sense of pride in their work, and the importance of pride for well-being. This pride is also linked to being an expert in their skills, such as knowing how to drive efficiently to make the most trips up and down the mountain.
Aside from well-being coming from a particular set of skills or pride in work, it is necessary to say more on the topic of boredom. Boredom is an important idea in Igloolik, with many people citing it as a problem. Youth in particular complain about being bored.
However, there is a connotation to boredom that goes beyond its usual definition in
English. Boredom in this context is sometimes also used as a synonym for something that 193 is bad or annoying (perhaps closer to the French sense of ennuyant). For example, a youth may find the wind ‘boring’ because it is cold, but school boring both because it is
‘bad’ and also because it is not interesting. Boredom in this sense in Igloolik can start to lead to feelings of oppression, disorientation and depression, being without purpose. In this way, working at the mine site may help fight boredom because it is interesting (as in, something to do to be occupied) and also because it is good in some ways that are specific to the work itself. For example, one employee in housekeeping told me that it is better at the mine than in Igloolik because ‘there’s more to do here’. In this instance, working at the mine combats the feelings of boredom that may come from having nothing to do (as described by interlocutors) in the home community, such as not having the opportunity to work, visit, no interest in attending school, being stuck in town, etc. This same notion of boring was expressed in another interview, where a participant contrasted her experiences of working in their home community with working at the mine site.
When asked whether working at the Mary River Project was more or less professional than her previous job in town (in terms of workplace environment), the interviewee responded:
Respondent: I think it’s more professional there [at the Mary River Project]. Because they work twelve hours a day instead of eight hours a day. Yeah.
Interviewer: Which do you like better?
Respondent: Full time, twelve hours a day.
Interviewer: Really (laughing).
Respondent: Yeah. You don’t spend the day being bored or something. You DO something. It’s like Friday there, I mean it’s like Monday there every two weeks there, being, work there, two weeks in everyday feels like Monday. But when you’re two weeks out, everyday feels like Friday.
194
Interviewer: In a good way or bad way?
Respondent: In a good way.
Interviewer: So you liked this two weeks in, two weeks out.
Respondent: Yeah I like it. I like it way better than like, I want to become a heavy equipment operator or flight attendant. Fly all the time or two weeks in two weeks out.
In this instance, it is the workplace rotation that provides enough variety for the employee to feel good about working there and prevent boredom. This alleviation of boredom contributes to well-being more broadly by providing another sense of purpose to peoples’ days and, in turn, improve feelings of self-worth and happiness due to the potential positive aspects it may bring to their lives.
Finally, some Inuit mine employees talked to me about the importance of going to the mine site as a way of getting out of their home community. In this case, well-being came from the ability to ‘take a break from town’ / ‘it’s good to get out of town’ akin to getting out of town while going on the land. While employees almost inevitably came to miss their home communities, many also expressed the need to leave sometimes. This was framed in different ways: as a chance to escape the gossip mill, enjoyment of being part of a drug and alcohol free environment, as a place to have your own room and own space, or as a way to take a break from boyfriends/girlfriends/husbands/wives/in-laws.
For some, it was also an opportunity for ‘me time’. One employee explained to me that in her home community there are so many demands on her time that there is no time to think. Therefore, while at the mine, she has a moment to plan her time at home. In this case, the employees were not suggesting that they wanted to leave their home communities forever. Rather, some interlocutors said that at times, being in their home 195 communities could be intense, and that having a break was sometimes a relief. In this case, the well-being comes from the opportunity to leave the settlements that were created by governmental forced re-settlement policies, and represents a way that Inuit are drawing on the mine to have an opportunity to escape the pressures or ‘heavy weight’ of being in town for long periods of time.
Working at the Mine and Relationships
Finally, as discussed in the last chapter, relationships at the mine site are important for Inuit well-being. Interpersonal relationships are central to historical and continuing life in Igloolik today. They are manifest, for example, in food sharing, the importance placed on family, and hunting practices. They also connect to the IQ value of piliriqatigiingniq, the concept of collaborative relationships or working together for a common purpose. Strong relationships at the mine were reported to create feelings of greater well-being, again ranging from specific self-esteem to a broader sense of well- being.
The last chapter addressed how work crews helped to make the mine site more of a home place. People also talked about how their relationships with co-workers impacted their sense of well-being. In this interview excerpt, it was not the work itself that contributed to positive self-esteem, but the relationships formed at the mine site that resulted in the employee feeling good about herself:
Respondent: Mmm, when I go to work does my self esteem rise? Is that what you mean? Mmm, when I worked in Baffinland it kinda maybe fell a little bit, yeah. My confidence felt like got a little lower. Umm, the new people I was meeting all the time, leaving my family, mm, when I’d get home I would be all excited, hyper, I’d go back up there (incomprehensible) I’m going back to work [expressed in a sad voice]. So it was, it was, the money was nice (laughing). But the rotation leaving and when I was there, when I’d pick up stuff, my, umm, self esteem would get higher, or when I’d meet my rotation partners, they’re on the same 196
rotation as me, like [name omitted], if she was on the same rotation as me it would be all right, going to work together. When she’s not there it would be a little sadder. And then the two weeks I’d be, the first, first week I’d be kinda sad, and the other week, the last week, be all excited. So it was a combination.
In this instance, leaving her family and community to go to work at the mine site with strangers strained the former employee’s confidence and self-esteem, which are used interchangeably in this interview. However, although this interlocutor would feel better when she was leaving the mine site for Igloolik (‘when I’d pick up stuff, my, umm, self esteem would get higher’), her self-esteem would also rise when she arrived at work and met her ‘rotation partners’. In this case, even though being away from the community would be a blow to her self-esteem and confidence, working with certain coworkers would make her self-esteem rise. Confidence here, then, is equated in part with being among strangers rather than familiar people, be it in Igloolik or at the mine site. This connection between strangers, kinship, and well-being was discussed in greater detail in the previous chapter.
The role of mining in Inuit relationality is also manifest in the use of wages to nurture relationships in Igloolik. For many Inuit workers, parts or all of their pay cheques go to supporting their immediate and extended family. For example, one employee told me that he ‘helps out’ at his partner’s house, where his whole pay cheque goes to food and hunting, as there are nine people living in the house. Another employee stated that although she did not ‘really’ take pride in her work at the mine, she worked there so that her daughter could ‘have things’. In this case, although the labour that is undertaken at the mine site did not in and of itself necessarily provide a sense of well-being, the ability to sustain family-based relationships of livelihood support is a point of importance. This type of sharing practice represents one of Blaser’s vertical threads: an example of an Inuit 197 way of life that is grounded in place and history. The emphasis on family relationships, through sharing wages from working at the mine, represents a focus on this thread, and by extension, a contributing factor to an Iglulingmiut life project based in well-being.
It’s Not All Well-Being
However, it is important to remember that while many employees and former employees of the mine site expressed a positive relationship between work and well- being, this was not the case for everyone. One former employee told me that the stresses of working at the mine site, if not the work itself, negatively affected her self-esteem.
Interviewer: So, when you were working at Mary River or [in town], did it affect your self-esteem?
Respondent: A little bit.
Interviewer: Up or down?
Respondent: When I was in Mary River I really wanted to go for a walks and stuff. But we weren’t allowed to go. Like, when I cope I go for a long walks. I need it go cope and I couldn’t go for a walk.
Interviewer: Hard.
Respondent: Yeah. It’s tough, yeah. You don’t get to see your family, you work twelve hours a day. Yeah.
Interviewer: Yeah. For me when I was there just following people for twelve hours, it’s hard not having “me” time at the end of the day. So tired, just…
Respondent: Take a shower and go to bed. (laughing)
Interviewer: Exactly. (laughing)
Respondent: I used to do that. Go to bed for twelve hours, wake up take a shower, work for twelve hours, after the shift you take a shower and go to bed. Wake up take a shower to go work. After twelve hours shift take a shower and go to bed.
Interviewer: Exactly.
Respondent: Yeah (laughing) I didn’t used to spend my time for free time because I 198
used to sleep twelve hours a day
Interviewer: Woah twelve hours a day. So really you weren’t even getting enough sleep then because shower maybe half an hour, breakfast.
Respondent: Yeah, yeah.
Interviewer: Yeah busy.
Respondent: My first work wasn’t easy. I was shy at first, who are you people. It’s hard to meet people, you know. You never know what they’re like.
Interviewer: I guess I’m surprised because you seem so outgoing and not shy.
Respondent: Yeah. I’m shy at times, I’m like who the hell are you? (laughing)
In this example, the former employee felt that working at the mine influenced her well- being negatively in three ways. The first was due to the restriction by the mining company to not go outside and walk around. This lack of being able to go outside meant that the former employee no longer had that outlet to use as a coping mechanism. The second way the work negatively affected her well-being was through the long shifts.
Working twelve-hour shifts meant that the employee had no chance to do anything but get ready for the next shift, especially in terms of sleeping. Finally, the last way that working at the mine site negatively impacted her well-being was by being away from her family and struggling to meet new people. As discussed in the previous chapter, the closer Inuit employees felt to other employees at the mine site, the happier they were at the mine site.32 This same connection has been noted by Rolston (2014) who, in the context of gender writes that ‘with few exceptions, women and men who are the most satisfied with their jobs and workplace relationships are those who are the most tightly integrated into the crew families and consciously work to minimize perceptions of gender
Inuit at the mine site who did not work closely on a crew with others and who did not have family relations there did not report having a home feeling at the mine site, and, importantly, those who experienced the mine site as home had a greater sense of well-being at work (at the mine site). 199 difference’ (Rolston 2014, 9).
Other mine employees highlighted to me how working at the mine site did change some of their social relations in their home communities. Some North Baffin Inuit shared stories with me of negative changes at home resulting from being away working at the mine site, such as marital problems, jealousy issues, missing their families and children, and the physical stresses of rotation labour and shift work. The influx of money from a new wage employment source also acted as a source of social tension in some cases. One employee told me that now that he is making money from working at the mine site, people in town view him differently. In particular, carvers would now come to his door to try to sell carvings (a phenomenon that almost always only happens to non-Inuit), and his skidoo was vandalized after he refused to lend someone money. Another explained to me that people in town treat him differently now that he has a full time job. His friends always ask to borrow money get mad at him when he replies that, after contributing to the household as the primary monetary provider, he is ‘just getting by too’. These social pressures come from the expectation and community emphasis on sharing resources, but also somewhat false expectations about how much the mine actually pays. While it is a good wage, and a higher wage than many jobs in town, in the northern Canadian reality today, this money goes very quickly. Finally, there also has to be recognition of subtle ways that working at the mine site changes life in Igloolik. For example, one mine employee told me that before working at the mine she did not think about safety in her house in Igloolik in the same way safety is espoused by Baffinland (safety being a key message at the mine site), but now this employee always thinks about it. 200
These examples represent both very tangible negative impacts in peoples’ home communities that come from working at the mine, and a shift in discourse and thinking in
Igloolik that goes beyond the more material and often signposted marks of extractive
“impacts”. However, to ignore the ways that Inuit are strategically framing and drawing from working at the Mary River Project would fail to recognize the active role Inuit have and use to maintain their well-being and to take advantage of the opportunities that are present. Inuit in Igloolik often highlight with pride what they consider to be their adaptive nature (citing their ability to accept and take advantage of the rapid changes in northern
Canada), and drawing on the mine site for benefits aside from wages provided by employment is no exception to this rule.
Friction
How, then, can we think about this multiplicity of relationships with the mine and well-being? Neither the positive nor the negative engagements with the mine site, in relation to Inuit life projects and conceptions of well-being, conform to the benefits of wages or the social impacts expected by neoliberal policy. Here, Anna Tsing’s idea of friction is a particularly useful complement to Blaser’s approach to life projects. Like
Blaser, Tsing looks at the question of what happens when universals do not travel. In the case of the Mary River Project, the two commonly held opinions about the possible benefits versus impacts of mine site take the mine as the most powerful actor: whether the mine brings economic independence or whether it brings a break in the social order, the mine (and its underlying discourses) act as a force imagined to flow relatively unimpeded into the local communities. However, according to Tsing (as well as Blaser), global actors and the universal values that underpin them do not overpower the local 201 agents. The global is not an all-powerful force and does not affect communities smoothly.
However, whereas Blaser focuses on how Indigenous communities actively choose which parts to use to further their own agendas, Tsing’s approach takes as a starting point the unpredictability of the meeting point and the results.
Tsing’s book Friction (2005) looks at the intersection of the global with the local and how claims of universality are changed and enacted in the ‘sticky materiality of practical encounters’ (Tsing 2005, 1). These unequal and diverse encounters result in cultural forms when the local and the global meet that are ubiquitous but unpredictable and unstable due to the differences in the contexts. Cultures, she argues are therefore continually co-produced in these interactions that she calls friction: ‘the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference’ (ibid., 4).
This conceptualization of friction is in response to the way of thinking that Tsing argues was popular in the 1990s. That approach held that the values and material of the global would flow unrestricted and uninterrupted into the local context. However, Tsing argues, motion in any sense of the word does not happen in this way, and her notion of friction therefore highlights the importance of interaction in defining ‘movement, cultural form, and agency’ (ibid., 5).
Friction in this sense is a force that both enables and restricts, in that it is needed to keep global power in motion, but also limits where this power can go. Comparing friction to roads, Tsing states that ‘the ease of travel they facilitate is also a structure of confinement. Friction inflects historical trajectories, enabling, excluding, and particularizing’ (ibid., 6). However, friction does not mean resistance, as the effects of the global on the local can be both empowering or compromising: ‘friction makes global 202 connection powerful and effective. Meanwhile, without even trying, friction gets in the way of the smooth operation of global power’ (ibid.). Collaborators in this context do not always share common goals and work to communicate across difference. Furthermore, collaborations may be productive in themselves, creating new interests and identities that may not benefit all the parties.
Hence, putting Blaser and Tsing into conversation with one another is especially helpful in thinking about the Mary River Project. Whereas Blaser emphasizes the ability of local communities to choose the parts of development projects and discourses they will use, Tsing complicates this perspective, arguing that the results of the intersection of the global and the local are unpredictable. Tsing recognizes that these results may be empowering to local communities, but with a chance of being disempowering as well. I believe that Tsing also takes more power from global forces by suggesting that friction limits where these forces can flow. What I would like to suggest, therefore, is that each brings a different perspective to mining in Nunavut: whereas Blaser’s analysis helps focus on the interaction of global flows (horizontal threads) with local contexts (vertically threaded), Tsing helps bring a better understanding of the discursive dynamics of these interactions. Furthermore, while Blaser gives agency and a capacity to act to the
Indigenous communities on the ground, Tsing puts an emphasis on the unexpected results for both the local and the global. The two perspectives are complementary and each contributes to understanding how mining shapes Nunavut today.
These unexpected results and strategic use of mining in Nunavut for well-being shows Inuit as active players in creating the good life and place-based life projects in the face of the Mary River Project. Up until now, Inuit engagement with the mine site, while 203 not without its pitfalls, has also afforded opportunities to create well-being, be it through value of work, meaningfully engaged, or social relationships. What are the implications of these processes for well-being going forward from the current state of the Mary River
Project? What are the expectations held by Iglulingmiut for how Baffinland should act, and their hopes for benefits from the mine? What of the future? This also raises the question of the implications of well-being outside of Nunavut as well. Can the challenges that Inuit in Nunavut are posing to the underlying assumptions of the neoliberal development model be extended to development narratives in southern Canada? These are questions I take up in the concluding chapter, where I consider the ‘expectations of modernity’ (Ferguson 1999) about mining in Nunavut, and the implications of this ethnography for neoliberal capitalism in southern Canada.
204
CONCLUSION: INVERSING NEOLIBERALISM
Interviewer: Was that land [at and around the Mary River Project] used in the past by people from Igloolik?
Respondent: Not so much used, but it was a landmark that we could recognize that was distinguishable. Now those two mountains are going to vanish. I mean, they're going to vanish. They're going to be no more [ …] oh well, yeah they used them for navigation. They are constantly looking at the horizon to see when you're going somewhere? And then you see these two big mountains, and they're very visible from a long distance, you can use them [ …] not that they would be the only things that you're using, but again they're very notable.
How does Inuit engagement with mining in Nunavut today relate to Inuit priorities for well-being? What roles do the government, company, and Inuit organizations play? How do global mineral market trends affect policies, strategies, and lived realities? This dissertation attempted to address these questions by examining mining in Nunavut historically and contemporaneously, through government and industry expectations and Inuit experiences of employment in the mining industry. As I learned from Inuit whom I job shadowed at the mine site, spoke to in different communities, and heard at public meetings, their engagement with the mining industry does not match government and industry premises and expectations displayed in official literature or at the mining conferences I attended. I suggest in this dissertation that Inuit successes in employment in the mining industry can be attributed not to congruencies of Inuit culture with neoliberal capitalism, but rather to divergences. Success for Inuit employees is understood as well-being in their own terms, at the mine site and in their home communities. In this perspective, wage employment is not necessarily the most important factor in living well, a condition that draws on diverse aspects of Inuit culture for an understanding of the good life. This approach is contrary to the perspective of the government historically, and runs contrary, to some degree, to government and industry 205 approaches today. These approaches assume that the greatest potential for Inuit well- being lies in the compatibility of aspects of Inuit culture with neoliberal capitalism. The chapters that make up this dissertation are centered on questions of well-being and the mine, the intersection of neoliberal approaches from the government and industry with
Inuit experiences, and Inuit agency and life projects in the face of the extractive industry.
Chapters Two and Three addressed ideas in policy history of Inuit success in the mining industry, and asked what insights the theoretical approaches taken by Karl
Polanyi and Marshall Sahlins had to contribute. This history manifests a gradual transition from predominantly state-controlled industry, with development seen as being in the hands of the government, to primarily market-controlled industry, with development as a responsibility of industry: a key characteristic of modernity outlined by
Polanyi. The most effective way to “develop” Canada’s North during this time period, as understood by the federal and Northwest Territory governments, was through the resource extractive industry. Similarly, the most effective way to provide employment for
Inuit was thought to be promoting Inuit employment in the extractive industry, a discourse that continues today. Chapter Three suggests that the experience of Nanisivik challenges this equation of the extractive industry with a lasting positive legacy. Adding
Sahlins’ theorization of the indigenization of modernity to the analysis brings the agency of Inuit to the fore. By arguing that Indigenous peoples may draw on the market economy to continue their own modes of existence, Sahlins indicates that the market economy can act as a diversifying, rather than homogenizing, force. Chapter Three concludes that
Polanyi and Sahlins together provide a framework to understand both the threats and opportunities for Inuit in Nunavut attending the global mineral market economy. 206
Introduced in Chapters Two and Three, and central to the dissertation, is the multifaceted role that the Government of Nunavut has in the web that links Inuit with extractive industries. The Nunavut Land Claims Agreement created in Nunavut a constellation of institutions to support Inuit self-determination, and although the GN is not an ethnic government, a large Inuit majority elects it, and there are Inuit in key decision making as well as middle and lower level positions. This means that the GN creates policies and strategies that aim to support Inuit well-being, but are sometimes based in a neoliberal rationality. Added to this complex is the role of the regional and
Territorial Inuit organizations and their relationships with Baffinland Iron Mines. What emerges is a complex network of institutions that historically and contemporaneously have worked to provide benefits to Inuit, but have also produced some unexpected results that are not always beneficial.
Chapter Four focuses on some of the reasons why BIM’s training strategies in
Nunavut have shifted from ‘capacity building’ to ‘growing people’, as related to the most recent crash in the global mineral market. These training regimes are ways that the company, and by extension the market, try to make people into certain types of subjects.
The GN and BIM work together here to make Inuit into human capital that is “ready to be used” by the mine, and that will self-regulate and act in the “correct” fashion outside of work as well. This idea of governance through the making of subjects is unpacked by
Tania Li, who combines a Foucauldian power analysis with a Marxist capitalist analysis.
Her approach is particularly useful for understanding how, through its training initiatives, the mining company positions itself as a good partner in developing the North (one of the goals of the government) by providing skills, training and income for Inuit (goals of the 207 government and Inuit organizations). At the same time, the company can present itself as responsible to its shareholders by maintaining a good corporate image and by cultivating a source of labour to do the mining.
The implications of this training for Inuit employees are taken up in Chapter Five, which explores Inuit experiences of working at the mine site. While neoliberalism is often understood as extending the market into the home sphere, the experience of Inuit employees at the Mary River Project reflects an inverse process: Inuit working at the mine site are expanding the home sphere into the market space. This inverse process stems from Inuit engagement with kinship at the mine site; landscape at the mine site; and engagement with labour as in line with family histories. Literature about space and place is used in this chapter to theorize the implications of this shift. Home in terms of the
Mary River Project is family (present), land, and work (as in line with kinship history).
Finally, Chapter Six focuses on life in Igloolik and argues that strategically engaging with the mine site is a way of maintaining an Inuit community-based ‘life project’ (Blaser 2004) and well-being. This chapter suggests that the potential of the mine to be a source of well-being is derived from an emphasis on the value of work, being meaningfully engaged through skill usage, and through reinforcing social relationships.
In this instance, Inuit are drawing on employment at the mine site to maintain their individual and community visions of well-being. This is an active and strategic process that highlights the fact that the mine (and by extension the global mineral market) does not have the capacity to unilaterally dictate the outcomes of the mining industry in
Nunavut. This active use of the mine site by Iglulingmiut may be considered part of an
Inuit life project, as per Mario Blaser (2004), that draws on development projects to use 208 the aspects that further Indigenous agendas of well-being without necessarily subscribing to the entirety of the global development agenda.
The suggestions outlined in the above chapter are interesting not only for what they reveal about the mining complex in Nunavut today, but also for the new questions they raise. What are the broader implications of the information that was shared with me by Inuit at and about the Mary River Project, and by non-Inuit at mining events? What is the significance of these perspectives for the future of mining in Nunavut? Can the findings of this dissertation be extrapolated to other engagements with neoliberal processes beyond Nunavut? I have two suggestions. The first is about mining in Nunavut, and the second is about neoliberalism more broadly.
The first suggestion is that strategies in Nunavut to increase Inuit benefits from the Mary River Project may need to be reconsidered. The very fact that these efforts are being made points to the importance of Nunavut’s history as shaped by a contemporary land claim agreement. This agreement has grounded the Government of Nunavut with a focus on Inuit (self-determined) well-being, even if this focus is complex and not always straightforward. It has also created Inuit organizations that have Inuit well-being as their primary focus. The policies and strategies discussed in this dissertation that have been pursued to support Inuit benefits from the mine (including training) are premised on the idea that neoliberal approaches to work are the most likely to provide benefits. However, as discussed in Chapter Five, the areas of greatest well-being at the mine site were the areas where Inuit experiences of work did not match, or were an inversion of, neoliberal expectations. For example, kinship relations at the mine site were one way that Inuit said they experienced well-being while at work. Whereas neoliberalism extends market logic 209 into the family and home life, Inuit at the Mary River Project bring family and home into the neoliberal workplace. At the same time, as discussed in Chapter Six, the influx of money into the community by individual workers is a point of concern for some elders, who worry that this will increase individualism and result in the breakdown of family relationships. Neoliberalism, as outlined by Foucault, posits the individual at the centre of the economic structure, possessing a specific constellation of attributes to fit into certain jobs. Training strategies that support this type of individualized approach to work do not take into account the priorities of Inuit for benefits and well-being from the Mary River
Project.
How might different strategies be developed to better support community members’ own visions of well-being in the face of the Mary River Project? Consultation fatigue is a barrier to ongoing GN, BIM, and Inuit organization community meetings
(sometimes resulting in low turnout), and travel between communities in Nunavut can be prohibitively expensive. This is where the work of IsumaTV and their Digital Indigenous
Democracy (DID) project is important. IsumaTV points out that the ‘inform and consult’ process – when the mining company tells communities about what it will be doing and seeks the consent or approval of the community for the project – typically happens only at the outset of a project, usually before construction has even started. Finding this approach insufficient, IsumaTV launched their Digital Indigenous Democracy (DID) platform, a website that is used to support the human rights of Inuit, specifically to continue to be informed and give ongoing consent concerning the Mary River Project.
The DID website has three components. The first is its capacity to inform and consult, where community members are interviewed about their opinions on the Mary 210
River Project, via radio, video, or at mining approval hearings. These videos are put online in a low-bandwidth form so that people in their own and other communities can watch them. The second component includes videos of the Nunavut Impact Review
Board meetings and IsumaTV’s role as a formal Intervener. IsumaTV applied, and was accepted, to be an Intervener in the NIRB hearings, where they raised questions and concerns about the Mary River Project. They later uploaded the NIRB hearings to the website, making them accessible to anyone, in Nunavut or otherwise, who was unable to attend the hearings that took place in the various communities. Finally, the last component of DID is information about human rights and mining, including a Human
Rights Impact Assessment (HRIA) and more information about the mine. In addition to these videos, the website holds a variety of documents about the Mary River Project specifically and human rights more broadly. Because of the unique technology developed by IsumaTV (Kunuk et al., forthcoming), these hearings can be viewed even with the low bandwidth that is the norm in Nunavut.
DID represents an example of how meaningful consultation may be done going forward, and how Inuit community-based organizations are taking charge of the process.
Rather than being required to attend hearings at specific times to give their opinions, community members can have their voices uploaded to be heard online at any time by members of interested communities and organizations. While barriers do exist for this approach, particularly those around internet access in Nunavut (ibid.), it is an important step in having increased direct Inuit input into how the extractive industry can support unique placed based community life projects. This type of technology – developed by
Inuit and non-Inuit collaborators, in a northern environment – is an example of how the 211
Internet is already being used to support unique place-based life projects.
DID and its technology has implications for subject making. This dissertation has discussed, in part, certain processes in the mining complex in Nunavut that may be attempting to make Inuit into neoliberal subjects, or may be making them into certain subjects as a byproduct of trying to improve Inuit benefits from the mining industry. In contrast, the processes manifested by IsumaTV allow for Inuit to draw on Internet technology to express their own priorities of personhood. It represents an attempt by Inuit from the five North Baffin communities to control the discussion around mining; by controlling the means of the conversation, this may be a way to resist other ways that government and industry programs try to make Inuit into neoliberal subjects. This is part of the way that DID may be used to promote Inuit priorities for benefits from mining: benefit from mining while still maintaining a uniquely Inuit subjecthood.
What are the implications of this study for neoliberalism? What can Inuit engagement with mining and mining policies and strategies in Nunavut tell us about experiences with neoliberalism more broadly? According to Brown (2015), neoliberalism is at the heart of American culture today, whether threatening democracy in the political sphere, increasing inequalities in the economic sphere, or changing the logic of our intimate and family spheres to that of the market. Within this type of governing rationality, the way to live a good life is to embody neoliberalism in such a way that individuals create the greatest advantages for themselves. Because of this, the person who is trying to find a first job needs to make him or herself into a type of human capital – entrepreneurial capital – in order to be accepted as an employee. This involves, in part, portraying oneself as valuable capital on social media (Brown 2015, 34). Individuals 212 must play by the rules of the neoliberal political economy in order to further their own well being. If the government were to create programs and strategies to help the individual succeed within this environment, these programs would logically be those that fit the neoliberal model, or at least helped make the individual into a subject that best fits the model.
However, this case study challenges the assumption that neoliberalism provides the greatest benefit to individuals and groups. In this, it is not alone. Both Brown and
Foucault, for example, argue that neoliberalism is a force that not only acts negatively on the human, but also may destroy society as we know it. Likewise Povinelli (2006) highlights the threats of liberalism/late liberalism/neoliberalism to intimate life, and
Duménil and Lévy (2011) discuss how neoliberalism is a form of global financial hegemony that economically creates and supports inequality. Inuit engagement with mining in Nunavut offers a clear example of how Inuit bring their own logic to the encounter. While the Inuit who very generously shared their stories and experiences with me worked very hard and skillfully at the mine site, contributing to the productivity of the mine and the success of the company, they did so without subscribing to the rationality of the market. They refused the imposition of a neoliberal type of subjectivity in either the workplace, as discussed in Chapter Five, or in their life projects and ideas of well-being more broadly, as discussed in Chapter Six. Audra Simpson (2007), speaking of what she calls refusals, highlights the importance of what happens at the limits: the limits of ethnographic investigation, the limits that Mohawk put on state authority through their political struggles, and the ways that everyday enacted refusals define who Indigenous peoples are. In sharing their experiences of the Mary River Project – at the mine site and 213 in Igloolik – Inuit showed me the limits of neoliberalism in Nunavut.
The everyday refusal of neoliberal logic and governing rationality enacted by
Inuit at the mine site and in Igloolik suggests avenues for resisting neoliberalism more broadly. The core of this refusal is a different way of knowing and existing in the world.
It holds priorities for life that are not neoliberal in inspiration. Indeed, some of these life goals cannot be supported by the neoliberal approach. If neoliberalism involves extreme individualization – the creation of the subject as someone who strives to be their own entrepreneurial capital – then life projects that are focused on goals of collective well- being will contradict the changes in subjectivity advocated by neoliberalism. The power to resist these neoliberal changes stems in part from the active, ongoing engagement by
Inuit in making their voices heard in the process whenever possible. It stems in part from the ongoing role of community in Igloolik and social values of sharing, kinship, and land- based livelihoods. Finally, it stems also from a history in Nunavut of creating institutions and organizations that have Inuit priorities at the centre of their mandates, including several processes by which the Government of Nunavut has come to support Inuit well- being.
What does this mean for the future of mining in Nunavut? The position taken in this dissertation suggests that the mining industry can be used as a source of support for
Inuit well-being in Nunavut today, when approached with Inuit-driven priorities and control. My expectation for the future of mining in Nunavut sees Inuit as continuing to play an active role in how the mine operates and is experienced. As Sahlins argues (1999), one of the major threats of capitalism is not what happens when it appears, but what happens when the opportunities to take advantage of it disappear. When capitalism can 214 no longer be drawn upon to support Indigenous strategies of engagement with modernity, communities with unique life projects are threatened. The same risk exists in Nunavut.
What happens when the mine closes and the jobs are lost? Will more jobs be made available to Inuit so that they receive income to support their life projects? Either way, what I learned during the course of this study is that the power of the mine is not necessarily a given. It is not a unilateral, top down force acting in the communities.
Rather, this power is tempered and shaped by Inuit, who provide an example of how neoliberalism can be resisted and rejected as a source of well-being.
The statement from an interview below speaks to the shift from a nomadic lifestyle to one based in permanent settlements. The closing thought parallels, for me, what is happening with mining in Nunavut today, and looking forward into the future. It highlights that Inuit have not just adapted to change in the north, they have actively shaped it. Just as Inuit took over technology, so too they actively take what is useful from mining.
Respondent: Oh, that's a camp where you're living off the land, pretty much. It’s not a nomadic life; it's a camp that's somewhat permanent. You don't move elsewhere, it's a camp where you've established, you have a cabin, you have everything in there. You have boats, our mode of travel was dog team so we had about six or seven dog teams, minimum fourteen smallest dog team to twenty- four largest dog team. So, and in the summer travel was by boat, and what else. Ah we had to come here to resupply and then go back, we had to go back and forth to resupply mainly, mainly to resupply. But prior to that before going to residential school, we were living nomadically. Meaning we had a new sod house every winter. In the summer, spring and summers we were camped somewhere. In the winter we established a camp, built a sod house, and that was for the first six years of my life, we were living nomadic. We never stayed in one sod house in two consecutive years. We were constantly moving. And again, that was how the Inuit were at my childhood. Again, Igloolik was a bit behind than most communities, it was later. Progress came in later, technology came in later. But then once it came in, we sort of took it over, yeah.
215
REFERENCES
Baffinland Iron Mines Corporation. 2012. Mary River Project Final Environmental Impact Statement. http://www.baffinland.com/wp- content/uploads/2012/06/POP_Eng_sm.pdf
———. 2013. Addendum to Mary River Project Final Environmental Impact Statement. http://ftp.nirb.ca/03-monitoring/08MN053- MARY%20RIVER%20IRON%20MINE/01-PROJECT%20CERTIFICATE/04- AMENDMENTS/01-ERP/03-ADDENDUM/Volume%201/130620-08MN053- App%201B-1-Preamble-IT8E.pdf
———. 2013. "Helping Inuit Become ‘Work Ready’ for the Mary River Mine." Baffinland Latest News. http://www.baffinland.com/latest-news/nov-11-13-helping- inuit-become-work-ready-for-the-mary-river-mine/?lang=en.
Qikiqtani Inuit Association and Baffinland Iron Mines Corporation. No date. The Mary River Project Inuit Impact and Benefit Agreement. Entered pursuant to Article 26 of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. https://www.qia.ca/sites/default/files/files/Publications/mary_river_inuit_impact_and _benefit_agreement.pdf
Basso, Keith H. 1996. "Wisdom Sits in Places: Notes on a Western Apache Landscape." In Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, 53-91. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press
Bessire, Lucas. 2012. Radio Fields: Anthropology and Wireless Sound in the 21st Century. New York: New York University Press.
Blaser, Mario. 2004. "Life Projects: Indigenous Peoples’ Agency and Development." In In the Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects and Globalisation, edited by Mario Blaser, Harvey A. Feit and Glenn McRae, 26-46. London: Zed Books Ltd.
Blim, Michael. 2000. "Capitalisms in Late Modernity." Annual Review of Anthropology 29 (1): 25-38.
Bowes-Lyon, Léa-Marie, Jeremy P. Richards, and Tara M. McGee. 2009. "Socio- Economic Impacts of the Nanisivik and Polaris Mines, Nunavut, Canada." In Mining, Society, and a Sustainable World, edited by Jeremy Richards, 371-396. Heidelberg: Springer
Brown, Wendy. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution Cambridge: MIT Press. 216
Brubacher & Associates. 2002. The Nanisivik Legacy in Arctic Bay: A Socio-Economic Impact Study. Prepared for the Department of Sustainable Development, Government of Nunavut. Ottawa: Brubacher & Associates.
Canada. 1972. Northern Canada in the 70's - Report to the Standing Committee on Indian Affairs and Northern Development on the Government's Northern Objectives, Priorities and Strategies For the 70'S.
Canada. Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Katherine A. Graham, Ronald G. McEachern, C. George Miller, and Queen's University Centre for Resource Studies. 1978. The Administration of Mineral Exploration in the Yukon and Northwest Territories. Kingston, ON: Centre for Resource Studies
Canada. Department of Indian and Northern Affairs and Tungavik Federation of Nunavut. 1993. Agreement between the Inuit of the Nunavut Settlement Area and Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada. Ottawa: Published under the joint authority of the Tungavik and the Hon. T. Siddon, Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development.
Canada. Standing Committee on Indian Affairs and Northern Development. 1972. Canada's North, 1970-1980. Le Nord Canadien. Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development.
Canada. Minister of Justice. 1993. Nunavut Land Claims Agreement Act / Loi Concernant l'Accord Sur Les Revendications Territoriales Du Nunavut. S.C. 1993, c. 29. Ottawa. Last amended May 21, 2004. http://lois-laws.justice.gc.ca/PDF/N-28.7.pdf
Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum. 2016. "CIM Conference & Exhibition 2016." Vancouver Convention Center. Accessed April 1 2016. http://www.vancouverconventioncentre.com/events/canadian-institute-of-mining- metallurgy-and-petroleum
Casey, Edward S. 1996. "How to Get from Space to Place in a Fairly Short Stretch of Time: Phenomenological Prolegomena." In Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso, 13-52. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press.
Collings, Peter. 2014. "Becoming Inummarik: Men's Lives in an Inuit Community." Montreal: McGill Queens University Press.
Comaroff, Jean. 1985. Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Coon Come, Matthew. 2004. "First Nations of Canada." In In the Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects and Globalisation, edited by Mario Blaser, Harvey A. Feit and Glenn McRae, 153 - 166. London: Zed Books Ltd. 217
Cornell, Stephen and Joseph P. Kalt. 1998. "Sovereignty and Nation-Building: The Development Challenge in Indian Country Today." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 22 (3): 187-214.
Cotoi, Călin. 2011. "Neoliberalism: A Foucauldian Perspective." International Review of Social Research 1 (2): 109-124.
Czyzewski, Karina, Frank Tester, Naria Aaruaq and Sylvie Blangy. 2014. The Impact of Resource Extraction on Inuit Women and Families in Qamani'Tuaq, Nunavut Territory: A qualitative assessment. Vancouver: Pauktuutit, Inuit Women of Canada
Digital Indigenous Democracy - Linking Media Networks. IsumaTV. http://www.isuma.tv/DID.
Donald, Dwayne Trevor. 2004. "Edmonton Pentimento: Re-Reading History in the Case of the Papaschase Cree." Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies 2 (1): 21-54.
Dubnie, Amil. 1959. Some Economic Factors Affecting Northern Mineral Development in Canada. Mineral Resources Division Information Bulletin MR-38, Ottawa, Department of Mines and Technical Services.
Duménil, Gérard and Dominique Lévy. 2011. The Crisis of Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Eade, Deborah. 1997. Capacity-Building: An Approach to People-Centred Development. Oxford: Oxfam.
Escobar, Arturo. 2008. Territories of Difference: Place, Movements, Life, Redes. Durham: Duke University Press.
Evans-Pritchard, Edward E. 1940. The Nuer. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Feld, Steven and Keith H. Basso. 1996. "Introduction." In Senses of Place, edited by Steven Feld and Keith H. Basso. Santa Fe: School of American Research Press
Ferguson, James. 1999. Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ferguson, James and Akhil Gupta. 2002. "Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality." American Ethnologist 29 (4): 981-1002.
Foster, Robert J. 2014. "Corporations as Partners: ‘Connected Capitalism’ and the Coca‐ Cola Company." PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 37 (2): 246-258. 218
Foucault, Michel. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978-1979. Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Friedman, Milton. 1970. “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase its Profits.” The New York Times Magazine, September 13. http://www.colorado.edu/studentgroups/libertarians/issues/friedman-soc-resp- business.html
Gibson, Ginger and Jason Klinck. 2005. "Canada’s Resilient North: The Impact of Mining on Aboriginal Communities." Pimatisiwin 3 (1): 116-139.
Gibson, Murray. 1978. Methods of Pipeline Construction in Arctic and Subarctic Regions.
Gibson, Robert B. 1978. The Strathcona Sound Mining Project: A Case Study of Decision Making. Ottawa: Canada Institute for STI http://artsites.uottawa.ca/sca/doc/Background-Study-No.-42-The-Strathcona-Sound- Mining-Project-A-Case-Study....pdf
Golub, Alex. 2014. Leviathans at the Gold Mine: Creating Indigenous and Corporate Actors in Papua New Guinea. Durham: Duke University Press.
Gordon, A.G. and Syncrude Canada Ltd. 1980. “Integration of Native Northerners into the Industrial Workforce.” In Northern Mining in the 80s: Proceedings for the Northwest Territories Chamber of Mines ‘Mining Days 1980’, Yellowknife, May 7-8. Edited by Margot J. Wojciechowski. Kingston, ON: Queen’s University
Government of Nunavut. 2012. Government of Nunavut Uranium Policy Statement. Iqaluit, NU: Government of Nunavut. http://gov.nu.ca/sites/default/files/Government_of_Nunavut_Uranium_Policy_State ment.pdf
———. 2013. Incorporating Inuit Societal Values. Iqaluit, NU: Government of Nunavut. http://www.ch.gov.nu.ca/en/Incorporating%20Inuit%20Societal%20Values%20Rep ort.pdf
Grace, Sherrill E. 2002. Canada and the Idea of North. Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press.
Grace, J., F. Berninger, and L. Nagy. 2002. "Impacts of Climate Change on the Tree Line." Annals of Botany 90 (4): 537-544.
Gregoire, Lisa. 2015. “Nunavut premier’s leaked letter to Ottawa disappoints board chair.” Nunatsiaq Online, June 1. 219
http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/stories/article/65674mining_and_construction_drivin g_nunavuts_economy_economic_report/
Griffiths, Franklyn, Robert Huebert, and P.Whitney Lackenbauer. 2011. "Canada and the Changing Arctic: Sovereignty, Security, and Stewardship." Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Hage, Ghassan. 1997. "At Home in the Entrails of the West: Multiculturalism, Ethnic Food and Migrant Home-Building." In Home/world: Space, Community and Marginality in Sydney’s West, edited by Helen Grace, Ghassan Hage, Lesley Johnson, Julie Langsworth and Michael Symonds, 99-153. Annandale: Pluto Press.
Harris, Julie, Philip Goldring, Madeleine Redfern, Natascha Morrison, Alice Glaze, Teresa Iacobelli, Francis Levésque, Bernadette Johnson, Joan Bard Miller, and Brian Cameron. 2013. Qikiqtani Truth Commission: Thematic Reports and Special Studies 1950-1975. Iqaluit: Inhabit Media Inc.
Harvey, David. 2009. Cosmopolitanism and the Geographies of Freedom. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 1982. "The Limits to Capital." Oxford: Blackwell
Hirschman, Albert O. 1970. Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Vol. 25 Cambridge: Harvard university press.
Hitch, Michael. 2006. "Impact and Benefit Agreements and the Political Ecology of Mineral Development in Nunavut." PhD Diss., University of Waterloo.
Hobart, Charles. 1982. "Industrial Employment of Rural Indigenes: The Case of Canada." Human Organization Human Organization 41 (1): 54-63.
Huebert, Robert N. 2009. “Canadian Arctic Sovereignty and Security in a Transforming Circumpolar World.” Foreign Policy for Canada’s Tomorrow. No. 4. Toronto: Canadian International Council. http://dspace.africaportal.org/jspui/bitstream/123456789/23862/1/Canadian%20Arcti c%20sovereignty.pdf?1
Huebert, D. 2012. "Rebuttal to the Response of Bosker Et Al. (2012) to Canada's Environmental Effects Monitoring Program: Areas for Improvement (Huebert Et Al. 2011)." Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management 8 (2): 382-383.
IsumaTV. No date. QIA and NTI Baffinland hearing -6. http://www.isuma.tv/node/78995
Jansen, Stef. 2009. "Hope and the State in the Anthropology of Home: Preliminary Notes." Ethnologia Europaea 39 (1): 54-60. 220
Jorgensen, Dan. 2006. "Hinterland History: The Ok Tedi Mine and its Cultural Consequences in Telefolmin." The Contemporary Pacific 18 (2): 233-263.
Kellog Ernst and Whinney Management Consultants. 1987. Strategies to Improve Northwest Territories Business Opportunities Related to Mining and Exploration. Yellowknife, NWT: Northwest Territories Energy, Mines, and Resources Secretariat and the Department of Economic Development and Tourism, Government of the Northwest Territories.
King, Jonathan C.H. and Henrietta Lidchi. 1998. Imaging the Arctic Vancouver: UBC Press.
Kirsch, Stuart. 2014. Mining Capitalism: The Relationship between Corporations and their Critics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
LeBlanc, Sylvie. 2011. "Review of Mary River EIS - Cultural and Archaeological Component." Professional Opinion on Baffinland Mary River Project Environmental Impact Statement. Vol. 4 Appendix 4D. http://ftp.nirb.ca/02- REVIEWS/COMPLETED%20REVIEWS/08MN053- BAFFINLAND%20MARY%20RIVER/2-REVIEW/06- CONFORMITY%20%26%20TECH%20REVIEW/05- TECH%20REVIEW%20COMMENTS/
Li, Tania Murray. 2007. The Will to Improve: Governmentality, Development, and the Practice of Politics Durham: Duke University Press.
Marshall, J.E. and Strathcona Mineral Services Limited 1980. “Alternatives to Northern Resident Staffing of Far Northern Mineral Developments.” In Northern Mining in the 80s: Proceedings for the Northwest Territories Chamber of Mines ‘Mining Days 1980’, Yellowknife, May 7-8. Edited by Margot J. Wojciechowski. Kingston, ON: Queen’s University
Mayo, Andrew. 2016. Human Resources Or Human Capital?: Managing People as Assets. Abingdon: Routledge.
McGhee, Robert. 2005. The Last Imaginary Place: A Human History of the Arctic World. New York: Oxford University Press.
McPherson, Robert. 2003. New Owners in their Own Land: Minerals and Inuit Land Claims. Calgary: University of Calgary Press.
Meskimmon, Marsha. 2016. "As a Woman, My Country is...: On Imag(in)ed Communities and the Heresy of Becoming-Denizen." In Home/Land: Women, Citizenship, Photographies, edited by Marion Arnold and Marsha Meskimmon, 253- 268. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. 221
Mining Management and Infrastructure Directorate, Natural Resources and Economic Development Branch. 1986. The Northern Mineral policy/Politique Miniere Pour Le Nord. Ottawa, On: Indian and Northern Affairs Canada
Murphy, David and Lisa Gregoire. 2015. “Mining and construction driving Nunavut’s economy: economic report.” Nunatsiaq Online, July 22. http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/stories/article/65674mining_and_construction_drivin g_nunavuts_economy_economic_report/
Nadasdy, Paul. 2003. Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and the Restructuring of Aboriginal-State Relations in the Southwest Yukon, Canada UMI Dissertation Services.
Nassichuk, W. W. 1987. "Forty Years of Northern Non-Renewable Natural Resource Development." Arctic 40 (4): 274.
Niezen, Ronald. 2003. The Origins of Indigenism: Human Rights and the Politics of Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nunatsiaq News. 2012. “Duncan Says Yes to Nunavut’s Mary River Iron Mine.” December 3. Last accessed February 3, 2016. http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/stories/article/65674duncan_says_yes_to_nunavuts_ mary_river_iron_mine/
Nunatsiaq News. 2016. “Judge says no to Nunavut mining company’s request for tax rebate.” Nunatsiaq Online, May 3. http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/stories/article/65674judge_says_no_to_nunavut_mini ng_companys_request_for_tax_rebate/
Nuttall, Mark. 2006. “The MacKenzie Gas Project.” Indigenous Affairs, edited by Mark Nuttall and Kathrin Wessendorf. (2-3): 20-29. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. http://www.iwgia.org/iwgia_files_publications_files/IA_2-3-06.pdf.
Nuttall, Mark and Kathrin Wessendorf. 2006. “Editorial.” Indigenous Affairs, edited by Mark Nuttall and Kathrin Wessendorf. (2-3): 4-6. Copenhagen: International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs. http://www.iwgia.org/iwgia_files_publications_files/IA_2-3-06.pdf.
———. 2010. Pipeline dreams: People, environment, and the Arctic energy frontier. http://www.iwgia.org/iwgia_files_publications_files/0451_Pipeline_dreams.pdf Copenhagen: IWGIA.
Robert Paine. 1977. “Introduction.” In The White Arctic: Anthropological Essays on Tutelage and Ethnicity, edited by Robert Paine, 3-6. St. John's: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland. 222
———. 1977. “The Path to Welfare Colonialism.” In The White Arctic: Anthropological Essays on Tutelage and Ethnicity, edited by Robert Paine, 7-29. St. John's: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
———. 1977. “An Appraisal of the Last Decade.” In The White Arctic: Anthropological Essays on Tutelage and Ethnicity, edited by Robert Paine, 29-52. St. John's: Institute of Social and Economic Research, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Peterson, Nicolas and Fred Myers, ed. 2016. Experiments in Self-Determination: Histories of the Outstation Movement in Australia. Canberra: ANU Press.
Pinch, Trevor. 2010. "The Invisible Technologies of Goffman's Sociology from the Merry-Go-Round to the Internet." Technology and Culture 51 (2): 409-424.
Polanyi, Karl. 1957. The Great Transformation. Boston: Beacon Press.
Price Waterhouse Associates. 1983. The Northwest Territories Mining Industry 1981- 1982. Yellowknife, NT: NWT Chamber of Mines
MacIver, Robert M. 1957. Foreword to The Great Transformation, by Karl Polanyi, ix – 1. Boston: Beacon Press
Povinelli, Elizabeth A. 2006. The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality. Durham: Duke University Press.
Qayum, Seemin and Raka Ray. 2003. "Grappling with Modernity: India’s Respectable Classes and the Culture of Domestic Servitude." Ethnography 4 (4): 520-555.
Qikiqtani Inuit Association. 2016. “What is QIA’s role in the Mary River Project?” Major Projects. Accessed September 16, 2016.
Raghuram, Parvati. 2001. "Caste and Gender in the Organisation of Paid Domestic Work in India." Work, Employment and Society 15 (3): 607-617.
Rajak, Dinah. 2014. "Corporate Memory: Historical Revisionism, Legitimation and the Invention of Tradition in a Multinational Mining Company." PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 37 (2): 259-280.
Rigillo, Nicole. 2015. "Doing Well by Doing Good: Logics of Corporate Responsibility in Bangalore, India." PhD diss., McGill University.
Rolston, Jessica Smith. 2014. Mining Coal and Undermining Gender: Rhythms of Work and Family in the American West. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Sahlins, Marshall. 1999. "What is Anthropological Enlightenment? Some Lessons of the Twentieth Century." Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1): i-xxiii. 223
Schneider, David Murray.1984. A Critique of the Study of Kinship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Scott, Colin. 2004. "Conflicting Discourses of Property, Governance and Development in the Indigenous North." In In the Way of Development: Indigenous Peoples, Life Projects and Globalisation, edited by Mario Blaser, Harvey A. Feit and Glenn McRae, 299-313. London: Zed Books Ltd.
Scott, James C. 1990 Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.
———. 2008. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Sharma, Aradhana. 2008. Logics of Empowerment: Development, Gender, and Governance in Neoliberal India. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Simpson, Audra. 2007. "On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship." Junctures 9 (1): 67.
Sinclair, Katherine. 2016. "Untouched and Uninhabited: Conflicting Canadian Rhetoric on the Protection of the Environment and Advancing Northern Economies." In Indigenous Peoples' Governance of Land and Protected Territories in the Arctic, edited by Thora Martina Herrmann and Thibault Martin, 243-253. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.
Sinclair, Katherine, Zach Kunuk, Jon Frantz, Norman Cohn, Gabriela Gamez, and Lloyd Lipsett. Forthcoming 2017. "Engaging Mining Companies and Inuit using Inform and Consent Online Resources." In Indigenous Stewardship of the Environment and Alternative Development, edited by Colin Scott, Evodia Silva and Katherine Sinclair.
Smith, Neil. 1984. "Uneven Development: Nature." Capital, and the Production of Space. New York: Blackwell
Stevenson, Lisa. 2014. Life Beside itself: Imagining Care in the Canadian Arctic. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Storey, Keith. 2010. "Fly-in/fly-Out: Implications for Community Sustainability." Sustainability 2 (5): 1161-1181.
Storey, Keith and Lawrence C. Hamilton. 2003. "Planning for the Impacts of Megaprojects." In Social and Environmental Impacts in the North: Methods in Evaluation of Socio-Economic and Environmental Consequences of Mining and Energy Production in the Arctic and Sub-Arctic, edited by Rasmus Ole Rasmussen and Natalia E. Koroleva, 281-302. Dordrecht: Springer Science+Business Media 224
Strang, Veronica. 1997. Uncommon Ground: Cultural Landscapes and Environmental Values. Berg Publisher Ltd.
Strathern, Marilyn. 1992. After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2005. "Kinship, Law and the Unexpected: Relatives are often a Surprise." Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tagalik, Shirley. 2010. Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit: The Role of Indigenous Knowledge in Supporting Wellness in Inuit Communities in Nunavut. Prince George: University of Northern British Colombia, National Collaborating Centre for Aboriginal Health. http://www.nccah- ccnsa.ca/docs/fact%20sheets/child%20and%20youth/Inuit%20IQ%20EN%20web.p df
Tester, Frank James, Drummon E. J. Lambert, Tee Wern Lim, Theirry Rodon, Murielle Nagy and, Sylvie Blangy. 2013. "Wistful Thinking: Making Inuit Labour and the Nanisivik Mine Near Ikpiarjuk (Arctic Bay), Northern Baffin Island." Études/inuit/studies 37 (2): 15-36.
Tsing, A. 2005. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection Princeton: Princeton University Press
Tuan, Yi-Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Vaid, Divya. 2014. "Caste in Contemporary India: Flexibility and Persistence." Annual Review of Sociology 40: 391-410.
Varga, Peter. 2014. “Future oil royalties could pay for infrastructure, Nunavut premier says.” Nunatsiaq Online, December 2. http://www.nunatsiaqonline.ca/stories/article/65674future_oil_royalties_could_pay_f or_infrastructure_nunavut_premier_says/
Walsh, Andrew. 2010. "The Commodification of Fetishes: Telling the Difference between Natural and Synthetic Sapphires." American Ethnologist 37 (1): 98-114.
Wenzel, George. 2000. "Inuit Subsistence and Hunter Support in Nunavut." IWGIA Document (102): 180-193.
Wenzel, George W. 1991. Animal Rights, Human Rights: Ecology, Economy, and Ideology in the Canadian Arctic. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
———. 2004. "From TEK to IQ: Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit and Inuit Cultural Ecology." Arctic Anthropology 41 (2): 238-250. 225
———. 1983. "The Integration of ‘Remote’ Site Labor into the Inuit Economy of Clyde River, NWT." Arctic Anthropology: 79-92.
Williamson, Robert G. 1974. "Eskimo Underground: Socio-Cultural Change in the Canadian Central Arctic." Uppsala: Institutionen för allmän och jämförande etnografi vid