Borders and Borderlands in the Canadian Arctic Region Edited by Heather Nicol and P. Whitney Lackenbauer THE NETWORKED NORTH Borders and Borderlands in the Canadian Arctic Region Edited by Heather Nicol and P. Whitney Lackenbauer © The authors, 2017 CENTRE ON FOREIGN POLICY AND BORDERS IN GLOBALIZATION FEDERALISM University of Victoria St. Jerome’s University Centre for Global Studies 290 Westmount Road N. PO Box 1700 STN CSC Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3G3 Victoria BC, V8W 2Y2 www.sju.ca/cfpf http://www.biglobalization.org/ All rights reserved. This e-book may not be reproduced without prior written consent of the copyright holder, except for personal research and academic purposes. Nicol, Heather and P. Whitney Lackenbauer, editors The Networked North: Borders and Borderlands in the Canadian Arctic Region Issued in electronic format. ISBN: 978-0-9684896-5-9 (pdf) Page design and typesetting by P. Whitney Lackenbauer Cover design by P. Whitney Lackenbauer Cover photos by P. Whitney Lackenbauer Distributed by Borders in Globalization and the Centre on Foreign Policy and Federalism Please consider the environment before printing this e-book THE NETWORKED NORTH Borders and Borderlands in the Canadian Arctic Region Edited by Heather Nicol and P. Whitney Lackenbauer The Networked North TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION Regionalization, Globalization and Arctic Borders: An Interpretive Framework by Heather Nicol and P. Whitney Lackenbauer iii PART ONE: CULTURE, HISTORY, IDENTITY Chapter One: Layered Landscapes, Layered Identities. Historic Narratives, Arctic Aesthetics, and Indigenous Agency in Canada’s 2 Anthropocene by Victoria Herrmann Chapter Two: Re-Bordering the North: Governance, Northern 24 Alliances and the Evolution of the Circumpolar World by Ken Coates and Carin Holroyd PART TWO: GOVERNANCE AND POLICY Chapter Three: Crossborder Indigenous Collaboration and the 34 Western Arctic Borderland by Barry Scott Zellen Chapter Four: Arctic Thaw and the Future of the Arctic Council: An 49 Ecosystem-Based Analysis of the Region’s Governance Prospects by Jennifer Spence Chapter Five: Identifying Changing Arctic Policy Preferences— 64 Canada and the United States Compared by Douglas C. Nord PART THREE: SECURITY, SOVEREIGNTY, AND BORDER MANAGEMENT Chapter Six: Challenges of Sea Ice Prediction for Arctic Marine Policy 77 and Planning by Scott R. Stephenson and Rebecca Pincus i Table of Contents Chapter Seven: The Territorial North and Canada’s International 95 Arctic Security by P. Whitney Lackenbauer and Suzanne Lalonde Chapter Eight: Managing Flows: Profile of Regional Border Security 114 Management in the Territorial North by Heather Nicol, Adam Lajeunesse, and Karen Everett PART IV: BORDERLANDS, ECONOMIES, AND SUSTAINABILITY Chapter Nine: National Border Management Polices and Their Effect 132 on Regional Trade: A Study of the Yukon Exporting Industry by Karen Everett Chapter Ten: Protocol: Soft Technologies of Neoliberal Geographies 146 by Liam Kennedy-Slaney Chapter Eleven: The Yukon River Inter-Tribal Watershed Council: 159 Management Across Borders by Leslie Collins PART FIVE: CONCLUSIONS Chapter Twelve: Conclusions by Heather Nicol 177 Bibliography 186 Contributors 211 ii Nicol and Lackenbauer - Introduction Introduction Heather Nicol and Whitney Lackenbauer This book identifies and addresses what we consider to be key lenses for understanding cross-border cooperation in the North American Arctic under conditions of globalization, climate change and changing international relations, building upon theoretical perspectives used by Brunet-Jailly (2007) and Konrad and Nicol (2008). Each chapter focuses upon a particular theme influencing cross border relationships, such as historical legacies, cultural relationships, cross-border flows of people and goods, security arrangements, governance practices and sustainability challenges. The authors recognize how the resulting borderlands can be understood in North American and international or global contexts. Divided into five parts (culture and history are treated together in part one) and fourteen short chapters, this book systematically defines the way in which Arctic and sub-Arctic borderlands are uniquely situated within processes of climate change, devolution, globalization, resurgent indigeneity and neo-realist geopolitical processes. All authors acknowledge how the North has been reterritorialized by each of these processes in ways that encourage the networked nature of sovereignty and territoriality. The book begins with a discussion of history and governance (Parts One and Two). Victoria Hermann (Chapter One) traces how historical legacies are reproduced or contribute to our understandings of the Arctic in contemporary discourse. She suggests that while there has been much written about the connections between art, identity, and the nation, these analyses more often than not focus on the use and recycling of historical visual compositions in the context of war, violence, triumph, or revolution. Hermann identifies a dearth in the scholarship concerning how political actors “connect contemporary visual narratives with those of the past in an effort to gain political agency and legitimize sovereignty claims in the 21st century.” Her research explores how “historic visual themes and aesthetic codes of the Arctic have been mobilized to construct values for and ideas of identity in Canada today on two levels: the nation-state and sub-nationally in Arctic civil society.” iii The Networked North At another scale, however, devolution and new developments in governance have supported new styles of fluidity and innovation (Chapter Two). Borders are inimical to this process, Ken Coates and Carin Holroyd remind us. The result has been that “borders that meant next to nothing to northerners in the early 20th century had become formidable barriers to interaction by the 1950s, dividing people acceding to national boundaries and limiting intra-northern interaction.” Today, the resulting extensive collaboration is based more on a northern problem-solving approach than a preoccupation with the integrity of territorial boundaries, reflecting the policy potential of structured interaction between national governments, international organizations, Indigenous governments and agencies, sub-national organizations and various bilateral structures. Building upon the idea of indigeneity, innovation and flexible territorialization, Barry Zellen reminds us (Chapter Three) that one important result has been the development of a nexus of borderlands which continue to translate cross-border governance innovation. Still, as Jennifer Spence and Doug Nord discuss in Chapters Four and Five, the territorial boundaries created by Arctic policy and international relations remain ambiguous. Spence suggests that the Arctic Council was established “as a high level forum to provide a means for promoting cooperation, coordination and interaction among the Arctic States, with the involvement of Arctic indigenous communities and other Arctic inhabitants on common Arctic issues, in particular issues of sustainable development and environmental protection in the Arctic.” But it would be wrong to assume that state agency has been replaced by seamless borderlands. Indeed, Nord explains in Chapter Five that most policy discussions related to “the Arctic” tend to reflect countries’ own distinctive sector of it and not a comprehensive portrayal of the region that recognizes the differing circumstances and concerns across Arctic communities. Innovation in cross-border governance continues to be embedded in Indigenous communities and in their accommodation of borderlands processes. Accommodation is one way to understand processes of change in Northern borderlands. In Part Three, the contributors explore the related notions of sovereignty, security, and border management, beginning with the concept that the template upon which assumptions about state control of maritime spaces and processes is changing. Scott Stephenson and Rebecca Pincus (Chapter Six) summarize the data surrounding climate change, melting ice and potential shipping lanes in the circumpolar North, examining the potential of sea ice prediction as a tool to support iv Nicol and Lackenbauer - Introduction strategic planning in the trans-border marine space of the U.S. and Canadian Arctic. While detailed findings have been published in major American scientific journals, this version is much more focused on policy implications for borders and transborder mobility. At the same time, while acknowledging that degree of flexibility in the development of new transnational maritime spaces, contributors to this volume also acknowledge that resurgent nationalism and geopolitical interest have created new political responses to boundaries – both in terms of their delimitation and their management. As Whitney Lackenbauer/Suzanne Lalonde and Heather Nicol demonstrate (Chapters Seven and Eight), the perception, operationalization, and management of security in Northern borderlands is complex (both on land and on sea) and cannot ignore both national and international interests. Geopolitics reflecting the interest of state sovereignty remain important – much as Nord suggests earlier in this volume. For Lackenbauer and Lalonde (Chapter Seven), however, the long-term goal of a stable and secure circumpolar world, where each Arctic littoral state enjoys sovereignty and sovereign rights, is compatible with Canada’s ongoing management of land and maritime boundary disputes, its determination