Arctic Smoke & Mirrors

Arctic Smoke & Mirrors

Author: Gerard I. Kenney

Publisher: Prescott, Ont. : Voyageur Publishing

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13:

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Living conditions on the east coast of Hudson Bay forty years ago were desperate. In 1953, a number of Inuit families were moved by the Canadian government for that coast in Northern Quebec and Baffin Island to the high Arctic Islands of Ellesmere and Cornwallis. The reason for the moves as stated by the government at the time was to take the Inuit away from destitution in Northern Quebec and to relocate them in an area of better game and fur trapping potential. In the 1970's, Inuit spokepersons began to make representations to the effect that the people had been moved against their will from a place of abundance to a place of harshness and suffering in order to protect Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic. Today, in the 1990's, they are claiming a $10,000,000 settlement to compensate for wrongdoing and suffering -- from Preface.


International Law and the Arctic

International Law and the Arctic

Author: Michael Byers

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-08-01

Total Pages: 341

ISBN-13: 1107435951

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Climate change and rising oil prices have thrust the Arctic to the top of the foreign policy agenda and raised difficult issues of sovereignty, security and environmental protection. Improved access for shipping and resource development is leading to new international rules on safety, pollution prevention and emergency response. Around the Arctic, maritime boundary disputes are being negotiated and resolved, and new international institutions, such as the Arctic Council, are mediating deep-rooted tensions between Russia and NATO and between nation states and indigenous peoples. International Law and the Arctic explains these developments and reveals a strong trend towards international cooperation and law-making. It thus contradicts the widespread misconception that the Arctic is an unregulated zone of potential conflict.


Roots of Entanglement

Roots of Entanglement

Author: Myra Rutherdale

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2018-01-31

Total Pages: 634

ISBN-13: 1487513062

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Roots of Entanglement offers an historical exploration of the relationships between Indigenous peoples and European newcomers in the territory that would become Canada. Various engagements between Indigenous peoples and the state are emphasized and questions are raised about the ways in which the past has been perceived and how those perceptions have shaped identity and, in turn, interaction both past and present. Specific topics such as land, resources, treaties, laws, policies, and cultural politics are explored through a range of perspectives that reflect state-of-the-art research in the field of Indigenous history. Editors Myra Rutherdale, Whitney Lackenbauer, and Kerry Abel have assembled an array of top scholars including luminaries such as Keith Carlson, Bill Waiser, Skip Ray, and Ken Coates. Roots of Entanglement is a direct response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s call for a better appreciation of the complexities of history in the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in Canada.


Dangerous Passage

Dangerous Passage

Author: Gerard Kenney

Publisher: Dundurn

Published: 2006-05-29

Total Pages: 224

ISBN-13: 1554881404

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Over the five hundred or so years that man searched for an elusive sea passage from Europe to Asia through the North American land mass, dozens of ships were lost and hundreds of mariners died. Eventually, a sea route stretching through the waters of the archipelago and along Canada’s mainland Arctic coast was pieced together. But could ships navigate the Northwest Passage to the extent that it could be used as an international shipping route? Two seagoing captains and their ships – a Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, and a Canadian of Norwegian birth, Henry Asbjorn Larsen – answered that question in the first half of the 20th century. The first part of this book recounts their successful efforts. The second part addresses the many unsettling environmental and sovereignty issues concerning the future of the Northwest Passage in this time of melting ice caps, glaciers and sea ice in the Arctic.


The Magnetic North

The Magnetic North

Author: Sara Wheeler

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2011-02-01

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 1429991941

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A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title More than a decade ago, Sara Wheeler traveled to Antarctica to understand a continent nearly lost to myth and lore. In the widely acclaimed, bestselling Terra Incognita, she chronicled her quest to find a hidden history buried in Antarctica's extreme surroundings. Now, Wheeler journeys to the opposite pole to create a definitive picture of life on the fringes. In The Magnetic North, she takes full measure of the Arctic: at once the most pristine place on earth and the locus of global warming. Inspired by the spiraling shape of a reindeer-horn bangle, she travels counterclockwise around the North Pole through the territories belonging to Russia, the United States, Canada, Denmark, Norway, and Finland, marking the transformations of what once seemed an unchangeable landscape. As she witnesses the mounting pollution concentrated at the pole, Wheeler reckons with the illness of the whole organism of the earth. Smashing through the Arctic Ocean with the crew of a Russian icebreaker, shadowing the endless Trans-Alaska Pipeline with a tough Idaho-born outdoorswoman, herding reindeer with the Lapps, and visiting the haunting, deceptively peaceful lands of the Gulag, Wheeler brings the Arctic's many contradictions to life. The Magnetic North is an urgent, beautiful book, rich in dramatic description and vivid reporting. It is a singular, deeply personal portrait of a region growing daily in global importance.


Canada and the Idea of North

Canada and the Idea of North

Author: Sherrill E Grace

Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP

Published: 2002-04-15

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0773569537

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Canada and the Idea of North examines the ways in which Canadians have defined themselves as a northern people in their literature, art, music, drama, history, geography, politics, and popular culture. From the Franklin Mystery to the comic book superheroine Nelvana, Glenn Gould's documentaries, the paintings of Lawren Harris, and Molson beer ads, the idea of the north has been central to the Canadian imagination. Sherrill Grace argues that Canadians have always used ideas of Canada-as-North to promote a distinct national identity and national unity. In a penultimate chapter - "The North Writes Back" - Grace presents newly emerging northern voices and shows how they view the long tradition of representing the North by southern activists, artists, and scholars. With the recent creation of Nunavut, increasing concern about northern ecosystems and social challenges, and renewed attention to Canada's role as a circumpolar nation, Canada and the Idea of North shows that nordicity still plays an urgent and central role in Canada at the start of the twenty-first century.


Echoing Silence

Echoing Silence

Author: John Moss

Publisher: University of Ottawa Press

Published: 1997-10-17

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0776615831

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The North has always had, and still has, an irresistible attraction. This fascination is made up of a mixture of perspectives, among these, the various explorations of the Arctic itself and the Inuk cultural heritage found in the elders' and contemporary stories. This book discusses the different generations of explorers and writers and illustrates how the sounds of a landscape are inseparable from the stories of its inhabitants.


Aritha Van Herk

Aritha Van Herk

Author: Christl Verduyn

Publisher: Guernica Editions

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 132

ISBN-13: 9781550711332

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In 1978, a young Canadian writer named Aritha van Herk captured international attention by winning the first Seal Books (Canada) First Novel Award for her story about a pig farmer called Judith. She was twenty-four years old then and she has been writing steadily ever since. This book presents five essays on her work.


Figured Worlds

Figured Worlds

Author: Professor John Clammer

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2004-01-01

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 9780802087492

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"World Visions can conceive of everything except alternative world visions." If this pronouncement by Umberto Eco is right, how can any ethnic group conceive of living with another group on the same territory - in Canada or elsewhere - if their world visions are incompatible? Can we sidestep incompatible world visions or should we try to understand them? Figured Worlds explores the possibilities of equilibrium between commitments to mutual understanding and the framing of strategies of negotiation. This collection begins its rich analytical investigation by describing how people - Australian Aborigines, New Zealand Maori, Japanese, and Africans - first learn the figured worlds of their own culture, made up of sensations, affirmations and will, prophecy, revelation, myth, dream, and metamorphoses. It then sets out how diverse figured worlds within a given social system are related, and concludes by offering insightful mappings of the dynamics of these relations, perceived in both their existential-ontological aspects, as well as their material-practical means. Comprising scholarship that is half Canadian and half British, this work offers important foundational perspectives into the thought worlds of cultures found within other cultures.


Lake of the Old Uncles

Lake of the Old Uncles

Author: Gerard Kenney

Publisher: Dundurn

Published: 2008-06-09

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1459714466

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Lake of the Old Uncles recounts a trip that began three-quarters of a century ago in a small village inn nestled in the Laurentian hills of French-speaking Quebec. One day, the trip will end at the village cemetery, just one kilometre from the inn. The traveller is the author. The trip is not long, but is rich in rural and natural experiences along the way. Gerard Kenney takes us along the route that led him to build the lone log cabin on the small and inaccessible Lake of the Old Uncles. No roads reach the pond, only a footpath. The hours spent in the quietude of the forest cabin have had an effect on the author that has resulted in a personal philosophy, both rural and natural, inspired by his hero, Henry David Thoreau. Gerard Kenney shares with his readers the evolution of his philosophy through his personal experiences with people and with the wilderness flora and fauna he has encountered on his life’s journey.