This history of the northward expansion of Canada from the post-Confederation era to the eve of World War I, including the fur trade, missionary activity, the Klondike gold rush, the Yukon, whaling and transport. Includes maps.
Between 1821 and 1960, industrial economies took root in the North, transgressing political geographies and superseding the historically dominant fur trade. Imported southern scientists and sojourning labourers worked the Northwest, and its industrial history bears these newcomers' imprint. This book reveals the history of human impact upon the North. It provides a baseline, grounded in historical and scientific evidence, for measuring subarctic environmental change. Liza Piper examines the sustainability of industrial economies, the value of resource exploitation in volatile ecosystems, and the human consequences of northern environmental change. She also addresses northern communities' historical resistance to external resource development and their fight for survival in the face of intensifying environmental and economic pressures.
Vilhjalmur Stefansson (1879-1962) was Canada's greatest modern arctic explorer, theorist, writer, and pioneer ethnologist. For the first quarter of the twentieth century his ideas captured the imagination of Canadians and gave them a sense of Canada's nor
Under their various names the Mounted Police have played a vital, colourful, but often controversial role in Canadian history, and nowhere has this been truer than on the northern frontier. The police were the agents through which the central government asserted sovereignty over the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, just as it had done earlier on the Prairies. This book describes to what extent the RCMP shaped the northern frontier -- a frontier which steadily shifted, separating territory under actual government control from that in which it was nominal. The chapters treat each new spurt in this expansion and the period of contact and transition which followed.
This rich portrait of Arctic science, informed by ethnographic fieldwork and Inuit perspective, speaks to the interplay of science and international politics. It looks at episodes of exploration, colonial control, exchanges with indigenous populations, and the process of knowledge gathering on the Arctic s natural and living resources. Andrew Stuhl s compelling narrative weaves together distinct episodes into a backstory for what some have wrongly called the unprecedented transformations in the circumpolar basin today. "Unfreezing the Arctic" is among the first books to undertake a sustained examination of scientific activity in the Arctic across the long twentieth century, and it will be warmly welcomed by anyone interested in the commingled political, economic, and social histories of transboundary regions the world over."
This work draws upon the history of Arctic development and the view of the Arctic in different states to explain how such a discourse has manifested itself in current broader cooperation across eight statistics analysis based on organization developments from the late 1970s to the present, shows that international region discourse has largely been forwarded through the extensive role of North American, particularly Canadian, networks and deriving form their frontier-based conceptualization of the north.
A hard-hitting, timely, and provocative book about the history and future of the Canadian Arctic. With passion and sharp words, Arctic Front confronts Canada’s longstanding neglect of the Far North and outline what needs to be done to protect our national interest. Through a lively and engaging history of the region, Arctic Front reveals how Canadians and their governments have: ignored this region for generations expanded Canadian sovereignty over the past hundred years by reacting to other countries’ challenges become the least effective of all Circumpolar nations in responding to the needs of the Arctic neglected our obligations to the North, including a failure to capitalize on the human and economic resources of this vast land or to establish a presence that would make any foreign claims to offshore resources inconceivable. As global warming continues to melt the ice in the Northwest Passage and the competition for northern resources heats up, Canada, the authors warn, will be forced to defend this area from a position of grave weakness. Our leaders need to take action today, blending defence and development, to complete Canadian nation building in this fragile region. An energetic and engaging collaboration by four of Canada’s leading Northern specialists, Arctic Front is a clarion call to all Canadians about our endangered Arctic region, challenging the country to step away from the symbols and myth making of the past and toward the urgent political, environmental and economic realities of the 21st century.
This book tells about a frontier region in economic transition. Its focus is the successful adoption of new technology to the particular economic and engineering circumstances associated with the newness or frontier nature of Ontario mining to 1890.
The circumpolar north has long been the subject of conflicting national aspirations and border disputes, and with the end of the cold war and the coming era of potential resource scarcity, its importance will only grow over the next several decades. Anticipating that renewed prominence, Globalization and the Circumpolar North brings together an array of scholars to explore the effects of this increased attention, from the new opportunities offered by globalization to the potential damage to long-isolated northern communities and peoples.
The Canadian West and the American Northwest offer a valuable setting for considering issues of borders and borderlands. The regions contain certain similarities, and during the first half of the nineteenth century they were even grouped together as a distinct political and economic unit, called the "Oregon Country" by Americans and the "Columbia Department" of the Hudson's Bay Company by the British. The essays in this volume -- which grew out of a conference commemorating the Oregon Treaty of 1846 -- view the boundary between Canada and the United States as a dividing line and also as a regional backbone, with people on each side of the border having key experiences and attitudes in common. In their eloquence and scope, they illustrate how historical study of Canadian-American relations in the West calls into question the parameters of the nation-state. The border has not had a single constant meaning; rather, its significance has changed over time and varied from group to group. The essays in Part One concern the movement of peoples and capital across a relatively permeable boundary during the nineteenth century. Many people in this era--especially Natives, miners, immigrants, and capitalists--did not regard the international boundary as particularly important. Part Two considers how the United States and Canada took pains to strengthen and enforce the international boundary during the twentieth century. In this era, the nation-state became more assertive about defining and defending the borderline. Part Three offers considerations of the distinctions, both real and imagined, that emerged during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries between Canada and the United States. Its essays examine different schools of history, divergent ideas toward wilderness, and the influence of anti-Americanism on Canadians' view of national development in North America.