“A flash point in Inuit memories”: Endangered Knowledges in the Mountie Sled Dog Massacre Susan McHugh University of New England ogs enjoy the broadest geographic distribution of all four- Dfooted creatures, and among mammals the worldwide range of their popu- lations comes second only to humans. Across the millennia following the last ice age, dogs and humans have expanded their territories virtually across the planet, together moving into the predatory niches formerly occupied by wolves. Thus the dog and the human might be seen to vie for the title of The Global Animal, except that our companionship undercuts any sense of contest: our species have only ever been able to claim these positions together. But a different sense of globalization in recent years has laid bare the vulnerability of our momentous partnership, nowhere perhaps more clearly than in the Canadian Arctic, where the working relationships of people and sled dogs made life possible for both, that is, until recent decades. In Inuktitut, the word qimmiit literally means “many dogs,”1 and, given their historic reliance on their packs working as teams with humans, 1 This is the translation of the term favoured in the film Qimmiit: A Clash of Two Truths, although the term conventionally is interpreted as simply the plural “dogs.” As noted, all other translations of Inuktitut terms are from the Qikiqtani Truth Commission’s qtc Final Report: Achieving Saimaqatigiingniq. ESC 39.1 (March 2013): 149–175 the word builds into everyday Inuit terminology a special sense of multi- plicity that is shared between this kind of canine and the people who have always been so much more to them than mere mushers. The devastation Susan McHugh is of Inuit culture through the rupture of these relations lies at the heart Professor and Chair of of the story of how qimmiit today has come to designate both a site of English at the University highly endangered knowledges about pre-contact life as well as a rallying of New England. All point for collective resistance. Amid what David Harvey diagnoses as “the of her research and phase of neoliberal globalization” (35), Canadian Inuit efforts to record some of her teaching and honour an understanding of the sled dog as a vital link to life before focuses on literary, and beyond market forces are adding an important dimension to a wide- visual, and scientific ranging grassroots movement to reclaim the land and sea before they are stories of species. She plundered for shipping and resource extraction. is the author of Animal Within the past decade, through official investigations and an excep- Stories: Narrating tionally unique truth commission project, the series of events popularly across Species Lines termed “the Mountie Sled Dog Massacre” has become documented, and (2011), published in the more. Revealing the shameful history of the disappearance of these last University of Minnesota remaining indigenous North American dogs from Canada’s Eastern Arctic Press’s Posthumanities region, the independent Qikiqtani Truth Commission (qtc)’s website series, as well as Dog assembles first-hand accounts of how a unique kind of cross-species rela- (2004), a volume in tionship becomes a flash point for the postwar interventions of the state Reaktion Books’ Animal into indigenous life there. One of several recent investigations of allega- series. Along with Garry tions that Canada led a systematic campaign in the mid-twentieth century Marvin, she is co-editor to exterminate Inuit via their sled dogs, the qtc uncovers no smoking gun. of the forthcoming Instead, as one of the few First-Peoples-initiated justice inquiries to date, Routledge Handbook of the qtc innovatively structures collectively Inuit feelings for what it meant Human-Animal Studies. to have and to lose the dogs without whom self-sufficient life on their Her ongoing research lands and waterways became impossible. It thus enables the articulation focuses on stories of of an epistemological difference signaled in the title of the Inuit-produced the intersections of documentary about the proceedings, Qimmiit: A Clash of Two Truths. Yet, biological and cultural irreconcilable differences between the official Canadian and lived Inuit extinction. versions of what caused the disappearance of the dogs are not the end of the story, at least according to the qtc. Considering the myriad of ways that Inuit people have depended on these dogs, the story of qimmiijaqtauniq—meaning “many dogs (or dog teams) being taken away or killed,” and frequently translated now as the Mountie Sled Dog Massacre or, more simply, “the dog slaughter” (qtc 24)—that emerges through the online records and reports of the qtc is exceptional for many reasons. The first Inuit-led and Inuit-sponsored initiative of its kind, the qtc not only makes public an oral history of exter- minationist practice that has been officially denied, but it also accounts for 150 | McHugh how a community’s dogs became explicitly identified and consequently feared as a threat to the colonizers. Including testimony from hundreds of Inuit about events concerning dogs that they describe as discrete packs intimately identified with particular people, the project prompts broader concerns about how abstracting notions like “the global animal”—not to mention the “breed” of the dogs in question, whose uniqueness long predates the science of animal husbandry—close down ways of seeing animal and human lives together as sources of political power and, more importantly, as limits to neoliberal globalization. During the same period that philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari first touted the potentials for people becoming-animal with a pack or a “demonic multiplicity” to topple the psychic subject of capital- ism (241), Inuit people living along with their packs of sled dogs appear to have been similarly identified with danger by the agents of expanding market forces, only in their case such associations largely led to separa- tion and consequent victimization by the state, respectively in the name of becoming enfranchised voters or immunized animals.2 Contempo- rary poststructuralist philosophy’s ongoing celebrations of multispecies multiplicities as radically cosmopolitan agency forms may attempt to unsettle the dominion of the humanist subject, but the Inuit perspectives coordinated by the qtc articulate instead an inverse trajectory in which having become who they were through working partnerships with qim- miit actually set them up for exploitation as cheap labour once those ties were severed in settlements. Recovering the details of why and how great quantities of these dogs died therefore entails telling a more complex story of Canadian nationalism, capitalism, and globalization and along with it more theoretically nuanced and vibrantly mobile potentials for species life. In such narratives is embedded the hope of some of us in animal studies that the representation of human-animal relationships can be generative (Marvin and McHugh, forthcoming) and, in this case in particular, that stories impress visions that move beyond the forms of capitalist society. Lamenting the ghost dog is not the qtc’s point. Just as Inuit testators resist straightforward celebrations of qimmiit as demonic or menacing 2 This is not to say that their model is thus proven wrong. As I argue in Animal Stories, Deleuze and Guattari reject from the start the animal’s exclusion from language and representation, for such positions ultimately submit to the prob- lem of being a human animal as it is posited by language. Many misinterpret becoming-animal as a defining property internalized by the human, but taken at its word their formulation of animality instead pervades all forms of agency, permeating language, literature, and every living thing potentially engaged with processes of becoming. “A flash point in Inuit memories” | 151 figures of multiplicity, they describe specific dog teams as present in their memories, as collective figures evoking specific emotions for people whose everyday lives with them are likewise gone. As such, the stories of their deaths cannot be reconciled to the model of “the animal specter” that Nicole Shukin identifies as lending deconstructive formulations an air of “compulsive inevitability” only to “drain animals of their historical speci- ficity and substance” (138).3 In reviewing how this situation has come to enable a particular kind of dog along with the culture defined by it to be perceived as heading for extinction by outsiders, it is important to note how, in glaring contrast, potentials for life, mobility, and action appear to grow through the stories shared within the community, with direct impli- cations for the fates of Inuit people and sled dogs across Canadian prov- inces and in other countries like Greenland. Mapping the special features of this community narrative in what follows, I want to suggest further that there are much wider-reaching implications for human-animal storytelling as a means of resistance to exterminationist and other rhetorics of erasure. For the qtc’s singular resistance to reduce the dogs to destroyed property requiring compensation lofts an interspecies version of Shukin’s vision of “a heterogeneity of protesting subjects struggling to articulate alternatives to the present” (232), one that integrates humans, animals, and especially human-animal relationships as enabling movement beyond the killing fields of a haunted past. Unsettling Histories The Federal government operated [in the mid-twentieth cen- tury] under the belief that traditional Inuit culture was doomed to extinction and that the best solution for all concerned would be to integrate them as quickly as possible into the Canadian “mainstream” by creating a healthier, better educated work force for future economic development. (emphasis added) Marc Stevenson Inuit, Whalers, and Cultural Persistence The difficulty for Qallunaat (non-Inuit) settlers to grasp the nature of the atrocity known as qimmiijaqtauniq begins to explain why it has taken so long for these events to gain national attention in Canada and why it remains little known abroad.