ABSTRACT A CULTURAL HISTORICAL STUDY OF DOMINATION. EXPLOITATION. AND CO-OPERATION IN THE CANADIAN ARCTIC By Kenneth Delane Jensen The purpose of this study is to evaluate the economic and social impact of the Arctic co-operative movement on the Eskimo communities of Canada. In 1959, the first two Arctic co-Operatives were incorporated. Within the next decade, twenty-seven more were organized by the Eskimos with the assistance of the Federal and Territorial governments. Their main objectives are to provide a means of encouraging Eskimos to participate directly in the economic development of the Arctic through the promotion of co-operative ownership and enterprise and to provide a method of maximizing economic returns in Arctic communities from local business and enterprise. The above objectives, formulated by the Co-operative Serv- ices Section of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, provide the basis for defining the problem of this study. 15 co-op managed resource development an effective method of (l) maximizing economic benefit in the local communities and (2) of promoting Eskimo self-sufficiency in community organization through a greater decision-making role in Arctic development? Kenneth Delane Jensen The problem of determining the loci of benefit and decision- making is researched at two levels. First, the study focuses on the evolution of the Canadian Arctic as an extraneously dominated region and secondly, on the evolution of a single village-~Pelly Bay in the Central Arctic--where a co-operative was introduced in l966. From the articulation of these two levels, the region and the village, a comprehensive perspective for evaluating the co-op's potential for rational Arctic development is achieved. The study found the progress of the co-operatives, when evaluated against the background of the Eskimos' long history of being excluded from decision-making and economic benefit by private entrepreneurs and government agencies operating in the Arctic, to be significant. Through the village co-ops the Eskimos are becom- ing their own entrepreneurs from the managing and financing of local production to the marketing of finished products. Yet, despite sizable gains, the Eskimos' future is plagued by their uncertain legal status in relation to recent mineral and petroleum discoveries. The Canadian government, in partnership with the large multinational petroleum and mining corporations is moving rapidly to open the Arctic to the world energy market. Meanwhile the Eskimos are excluded from directly participating in the decision- making and economic benefit of the Arctic's new energy industry. The study contends that the Eskimo co-ops are the legitimate economic and planning institutions in the majority of the Arctic communities and are the logical bodies to directly particpate in Kenneth Delane Jensen all phases of resource development. The net effect will be a healthier independent Eskimo population actively participating in the co-operative devel0pment of the Canadian Arctic. A CULTURAL HISTORICAL STUDY OF DOMINATION. EXPLOITATION. AND CO-OPERATION IN THE CANADIAN ARCTIC By Kenneth Delane Jensen A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Geography 1975 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author wishes to express his indebtedness to the many people at Michigan State University and in Canada who made this project possible. Dr. Daniel Jacobson, the Committee Chairman, balanced his careful criticisms with constant moral support and patience during the protracted writing of the dissertation. Dr. Ronald Horvath's many suggestions on the graphics and the organiza- tion of Part I added immeasurably to the final manuscript. In the early stages of formulating the research problem, Dr. Gary Manson provided valuable criticisms and suggestions. Special recognition is paid to Professor Orion Ulrey whose years of participation in the world co-operative movement brought a wealth of experience and vitality to the project. Indirectly, the project benefited from Professors Georg Borgstrom and John M. Hunter who introduced the author to the impor- tant variables of medical ecology and diet in evaluating the dis- ruptive impact of culture contact. Special gratitude is extended to Messrs. Aleksandrs Sprudzs and H. E. Boyle of the Co-operative Services Section, Canadian Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, for their assistance in gathering the data on the Arctic co-operative move- ment. ii A grateful thanks goes to John Ningark, the Koomiut Co-op- erative manager, Fathers Goussaert and Lorson of the Pelly Bay Mission, and to the entire Pelly Bay comnunity for being such gracious hosts. The author is indebted to Dr. Robert Thomas who served as a replacement on the corrmittee and carefully read the final manu- script for grammatical errors. Finally, appreciation is extended to my wife, Shirley, whose moral support and confidence served to sustain my efforts during the long course of this project. TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF TABLES LIST OF FIGURES Chapter I. INTRODUCTION . Statement of the Problem The Research Design . . The Nature of Co-operation Relation to Previous Research The Significance of the Research PART ONE. THE CULTURAL-HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE CANADIAN ARCTIC II. A PRELUDE TO PART ONE . III. THE ESTABLISHMENT OF DEPENDENCY (ca. 1840-1930) Arctic Whalers Arctic Traders Arctic Missionaries . . Royal Canadian Mounted Police . . Summary: The Dependency Generating Process . IV. A CULTURAL SYNTHESIS Consolidation and Accommodation . Domination- Diffusion Centers . The Imperial Landscape as a Visual Manifestation of the Cultural Synthesis V. THE COLLAPSE . The Socioeconomic Indicators . A Case History. King William Island, N. W. T. l925-l938 The Eskimos' Economic Contribution to the Contact Society, 1930- l945 iv Page vii viii —l MOVED-d VI. THE EXOTIC RESPONSE: ABANDONMENT OF LAISSEZ-FAIRE Growth of the Government Sector . . Resistance by the Traditional Exotic Power Structure Conclusion VII. ARCTIC CANADA TODAY. THE EXCLUSION OF ESKIMOS FROM RESOURCE PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT. . . The Multinational Corporations, the Federal Government, and the Eskimo . The Unresolved Question VIII. CONCLUSION: THE SHIFTING LOCUS OF BENEFIT AND DECISION-MAKING IN THE CANADIAN ARCTIC PART TWO. CO-OPERATION IN ARCTIC CANADA IX. THE ARCTIC CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT Establishment and Diffusion The Crucial Role of Government Federation . . The Economic Consequences of Arctic Co- -operation Social and Cultural Consequences of Arctic Co— —operation . The Future: Toward a Co- -operative Society X. PELLY BAY: PROFILE OF A CO-OPERATIVE COMMUNITY The Geographical Components: Location, Natural Habitat, and the Cultural Postiion of the Pelly Bay Region . . An Historical Overview: The Influence of. Geographical and Situational Factors on the Contact History of Pelly Bay . The Modern Co- -operative Based Community New Directions: Problems and Prospects APPENDIX A. INFORMATION ON THE DIFFUSION OF EXOTIC ESTABLISHMENTS . . . . . Page 103 103 106 112 116 117 122 132 141 141 144 . 151 155 159 161 165 165 168 178 187 195 B. THE EVOLUTION OF CENTERS OF DOMINATION AND DIFFUSION IN ARCTIC CANADA C. CANADIAN ARCTIC CO-OPERATIVES BIBLIOGRAPHY vi Page 205 209 212 Table 43-00“) 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. LIST OF TABLES Dutch Davis Strait Whale Fishery, 1719-1779 . Strength of the RCMP Arctic Branch, 1910-1940 The Market Value of White Fox Furs, 1920-1949 White Fox Production in the Canadian Arctic . Major Government Expenditures of the Northern Administration Branch on Health and Education Compared with Revenues from the White Fox Fur Export Tax, N.W.T., 1930-31 to 1943-44 Revenues from the White Fox Fur Tax in Arctic Quebec, 1921-22 to 1943-44 Government Expenditures in the Northwest Territories, 1953-1969 Canadian Arctic Co-operatives: Cumulative Results, 1961-68 . Merchandise Sales of Consumer Co-ops Annual Revenues of the Koomiut Co-operative, 1966-1970 . . Voyages of the American Davis Strait and Hudson Bay Fleet, 1846-1904.. . . . . Voyages of the British Davis Strait and Hudson Bay Fleet, 1865-1904. . . . . . . . Voyages of the American Beaufort Sea Fleet, 1890- 1907 . . . . . . . . . . . . . Trading Post Involved in the Eskimo'Trade Diffusion of Mission Stations, 1894-1950 . Diffusion of RCMP Detachments, 1904-1970 . vii Page 28 81 92 98 99 101 105 155 159 184 196 197 198 199 200 201 Figure wa U'l £0me 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. LIST OF FIGURES Dimension of Imperialism Whaling Stations, 1845-1906 Trading Posts, 1890-1940 Missions, 1890-1940 . Royal Canadian Mounted Police Detachments, 1900-1940 . Location of Exotic Institutions, 1915 and 1928 . The Cultural Synthesis . Domination-Diffusion Centers, 1930 . Mineral Claims Recorded-Northwest Territories, 1961- 1970 . Acreage Held Under Oil and Gas Permit, 1961-1971 Dimensions of Imperialism . Eskimo Co-operatives, 1958-1968 . The Pelly Bay Region Summer Ice Conditions in Arctic Canada Encirclement of Pelly Bay by Trading Posts and RCMP Detachments, 1920-1930. . . The Roman Catholic Mission erected by Father Henry in 1936 . . . . . . . . . . The Present Mission Complex The Federal Day School Offering Grades 1-6 The Pelly Bay Nursing Station The Koomiut Co-operative Retail Store . viii Page 31 42 62 72 77 79 83 118 119 134 145 166 169 171 176 176 180 180 181 Figure Page 21. Construction of the New Co-op Retail Store with Office Building in Background . . . . . . . . 181 22. Co-Op Operated Garbage Disposal Servicing One of the Homes of the Eskimo Rental Housing Project . . 185 23. Construction of the Fish Processing Plant in August of 1971 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185 ix CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Statement of the Problem The development of Arctic Canada's resources has historically been guided by two contrasting administrative approaches: one favor- ing the free play of profit motives in a laissez-faire market economy and the other co-ordinating development through formalized government planning.1 In both approaches, Eurocanadians are the dominant figures, while the Eskimos are depressed and subservient. Under the laissez-faire philosophy, private developers are allowed a free hand in extracting the resources of a region and in dealing with the Eskimo. What all too often results from this phil- osophy is the subordination of Eskimo interests to the quest for quick profits by transient whites. In the planned economy, the Federal Government operates in a paternalistic manner, protecting Eskimos from economic exploitation, but excluding them from resource development decision-making. Against this background, a third approach to development is emerging in the Canadian Arctic--the Arctic co-operative movement. 1See, for further discussion, Jim Lotz, Northern Realities (Toronto: New Press, 1970) and K. J. Rae, The Political Economy of the Canadian North (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), Chapter 12. In 1959, the first two Arctic co-Operatives were incorporated. Within the next decade, twenty-seven more were organized by the Eskimos with the assistance of the Federal and Territorial governments. Their main objectives are to provide a means of encouraging Eskimos to partici- pate directly in the economic development of the Arctic through the promotion of co-operative ownership and enterprise and to provide a method of maximizing economic returns in Arctic communities from local business and enterprise.2 The above objectives, formulated by the Co-operative Services Section of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, provide the basis for defining the problem of this study. Is co-Opera- tive managed resource development an effective alternative to the two traditional approaches in (1) maximizing benefit in the local commu- nities and (2) promoting Eskimo self-sufficiency in community organi- zation through a greater decision-making role in Arctic development? The Research Design The problem of determining the loci of benefit and decision- making will be researched at two levels. First, the study will focus on the evolution of the Canadian Arctic as an externally dominated region and second, on the evolution of a single village--Pelly Bay in the Central Arctic--where a co-operative was introduced in 1966. The village research falls into the category of community studies outlined by Redfield in his seminal works, The Little Community 2Co-operative Services Section, Eskimo and Indian Co-operative Development Programs in Canada (Ottawa: DIAND, 1970), p. 1. and Peasant Society and Culture. In the Little Community, Redfield sug- gests three possible justifications for conducting a community study. First, the investigator ". . . may be interested in understanding the history of that kjgg_of community in that part of the world." The focus here is not on one particular community, but on the community type that is characteristic of a region. Second, he may study a small community to . understand a complex nation or region not so much historically as in its contemporary condition." And third, he may " . make use of a community as a convenient place in which to study a special problem of general scientific interest." The community is studied, ". . . not to find out all about it, but with reference only to a limited problem stated in advance."3 Redfield's second and third justifications support the inte- gration of Pelly Bay into this study. The primary objective is to evaluate the impact of co-operation in the Canadian Arctic. Pelly Bay provides a case study for a more detailed analysis of the themes identified at the regional level. From the articulation of these two scales, the region and the village, a clearer perspective for evalu- ating the co-op's potential for rational Arctic development will hopefully be achieved. To answer the questions posed in the problem, a methodology incorporating a strong historical bias and focusing on the variables of decision-making and benefit must be employed in order to contrast the nature of Eskimo involvement under the three developmental 3Robert Redfield, The Little Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), pp. 154-55. approaches. Such a methodological framework has been developed by Horvath in a series of papers exploring the dimensions of the imperial- ist relationship in culture contact where a power disparity exists between the local and the exotic or external cultural groups.4 Horvath begins by defining imperialism as a two dimensional relationship involving both_the exploitation and the domination of the people in one place (locality) by the people of another (exotic) place.5 Exploitation occurs when one group excessively benefits from the relationship or, more specifically, when the people from the exotic place benefit disproportionately with regard to those residing locally. Domination refers to decision-making and occurs when the decisions governing the activities where the two cultures interact are controlled by the exotic population. Since the loci of both the variables, benefit and decision- making, can vary over time in the relationship between two groups, they are depicted along a local-external continuum. A number of contact situations can then be delimited on a matrix formed by the intersection of points plotted along the benefit-decision-making continuums (Figure l). 4See Ronald J. Horvath, "Imperialism as Domination and Exploi- tation," (Unpublished manuscript); Ronald J. Horvath, "In Search of a Theory of Urbanization: Notes on the Colonial City," The East Lakes Geographer 5 (1969): 69-82; and Ronald J. Horvath, "A Defini- tion of Colonialism,“ Current Anthropology_l3 (1972): 45-57. 51h Horvath's model, the important difference between colon- ialism and imperialism is the presence or absence of significant numbers of permanent settlers in the colony from the colonizing power. Colonialism is not an appropriate description of the Canadian Arctic's contact history, for few Eurocanadians settled there permanently. DIMENSIONS OF IMPERIALISM 11941‘HOH‘HHH“ IICIICOOIOIIIOIDOIIOIOO loo-IIIOCOOOCI. to. lanclolooo 0000......- too-o- :- . loo-cunn- coo-oucnooooocoo can-ooooooOo-coo-uo nun-II condo... - o n a a a u o o a o o c o I u u o c a n a VI... I I o Cin.UO'DQQIQIII‘IAIAAAAA“ VVVVVV‘I' 00.0.0... a. to no so... scoooo-ooocnanu- taunt-nun..- vvvv'v" u a V'I‘III‘IOIIOIIIDI OOYI'O'I'I'O‘O'C'II'IDIIOIII‘Ion-IIOII .- cacao-l- FP’F’PIDDDPPPDP izzuta xxxmtmm EXTERNAL 15m. ial f Imper 1951.4flafivkm7 2296737 1mens1ons O l.--D Figure LOCAL In the matrix, the classic imperialism relationship occupies the upper right-hand cell. Benefits are excessively external to a locality and the locus of decision-making is similarly not locally based. An extreme form of imperialism would involve the enslavement and plundering of the local people by a conquering group. Such a con- dition existed in the early Spainsh-Indian conquest society of Latin America. Labels are assigned to other locations in the matrix as follows. Economic imperialism, the extreme version of which is a puppet government, is depicted by a relationship where the locus of decision-making remains with the locality, but where the benefits are external. Conversely, when the benefits are local, but the locus of decision-making is external, the position is labelled paternalism, with the extreme being altruism. The imperial power cell locates the position of the dominant power(s) within a system of political units, while the cell labelled isolation defines the parameters of a society with only limited sporadic contact with the outside world. Finally, in the center cell labelled equality, an equilibrium is established on the local-external continuum where benefit and decision-making are rationalized to enhance both populations. The co-Operative movement is dedicated to creating the type of relation- ship envisioned in the equality position. The arrangement of the cells in terms of delimitations and labels will no doubt meet with disapproval by many on both theoreti- cal and empirical grounds. Some will not want to distinguish between domination and exploitation, arguing that they go hand in hand, and others will assert that the delimitations need to be changed. For this study, however, the model helped to elucidate the changing rela- tionship between Eskimo culture and the contact agencies infringing upon it during the past century. More specifically, domination and exploitation prove to be analytically separable variables in the chang- ing relationship between the external world and Eskimo culture. The Nature of Co-operation Co-operatives offer a number of economic and social organiza- tional advantages that lend themselves to the type of problems the Eskimos face in achieving an equality relationship in Arctic Canada. From an historical standpoint, the co-op is a proven institution for helping uprooted people adapt to a changing society. The modern co- operative movement emerged in the urban industrial environment of 18th century EurOpe at a time when sweeping social, technical and economic changes left large segments of the laboring class powerless in the face of mill owners, exploitative merchants and unsympathetic governments. The majority of the early co-ops proved unsuccessful until the 5 At the founding of the Rochdale Equitable Pioneer Society in 1844. time, Rochdale was a small depressed mill town near Manchester, England. The Rochdate weavers lived in crowded quarters without adequate water 6The source for the early struggles of the Rochdale Pioneers is Margaret Digby, The World Co-operative Movement (London: Hutch- inson's University Library, 1950). or sanitation. Depressed by low wages, they became plagued with unem- ployment as the transfer to power-driven looms eliminated the need for handloom weavers. The constant unemployment problem created a system of credit which left the workers indebted to the retailers. The Rochdale Pioneers utilized the experiences of earlier failures and effectively organized their society around certain oper- ating procedures that have formed the model for co-ops throughout the world. A true co-op will always practice at least four of these pro- cedures. First, membership is open and voluntary to all who can use the services, provided they are willing to adhere to the co-op's regula- tions. Second, the member-customers own and control the co-0ps on a democratic basis. Each member has one vote to cast in determining the affairs of his society. Voting power is not based on the number of shares a member holds, as is the case with stockholders in a corpora- tion. The one member, one vote practice provides for equal and demo- cratic control of management and risk taking and involves all inter- ested members in decision-making. Third, surplus earnings are distributed to the members on the basis of their patronage. In this way, the co-op rewards the active users of its services, while a fourth practice, that of limiting dividend on member shares, prevents a large shareholder from excessively profiting from the work of the active members. In addition to these four operating procedures, many co-ops observe other practices that co-operative historians credit to the Rochdale Pioneers: allocating funds for educational programs, main- taining political and religious neutrality and conducting trade on a cash only basis. The basic set of procedures practiced by the Rochdale Pioneers serves as a guide for co-ops in countries around the world. They help to give the co-ops their special status as nonprofit business organizations incorporating a distinct social philosophy. Relation to Previous Research The literature on Arctic Canada's contact history is extensive, yet as late as 1964, Fried correctly pointed out its major deficiency: Despite the fact that such agencies as the Hudson's Bay Company or various missionary groups (we might even include the Royal Canadian Mounted Police) were highly disciplined and organized entities, directly and deeply involved in manipulating or con- trolling native peoples, no broad assessments of their impact on native populations is yet available. Though not organized or disciplined or conscious of any special purpose in contact with aboriginal peoples, whalers, miners, white trappers and traders and various sorts of transient white workers had tre- mendous impact on local populations--yet for information on such agents of contact, the task of working over travel liter- ature, diaries, biographies, et., is yet to be properly pro- grammed and carried out. Fried's assessment was followed by Jenness's volume on Canadian Eskimo administration later in 1964 and by Phillip's history 8 of the Canadian North in 1967. Both studies are far-reaching and 7Jacob Fried, "Introduction: Contact Situations and their Consequences in Arctic and Subarctic North America," Arctic Anthro- pology 2 (1964): p. 1. 8Diamond Jenness, Eskimo Administration: 11. Canada (Montreal: Arctic Institute of North America, 1964), and R. A. J. Phillips, Canada's North (Toronto: Macmillian, 1967). 10 provide a wealth of first-hand observations and insights that are invaluable in provoking the types of questions dealt with in Part I. Two recent studies by Smith and Usher, an anthropologist and a geographer respectively, are concerned with the domination of native people in Arctic Canada.9 Smith analyzes superordihate-subordinate relationships between natives and whites within the Mackenzie Delta and concludes that the Delta contact culture displays the following colonial characteristics. 1. Outsiders are present chiefly in order to administer, govern and 'development' the area, its resources, and its native pe0p1e; 2. Outsiders are highly transient--present in the Delta for the duration of the appointment (usually two or three years): 3. Financial and other subsidies are paid to outsiders to encourage their employment in the North; 4. Outsiders form a socially distinct unit, residentially seg- regated in some Mackenzie Delta settlements; 5. The outsider segment is highly organized, especially in the political sphere--in this case around the massive structure of the metropolitan power (basically the federal government created to administer the area; 6. Settlers or 'new northerns' dominate the entrepreneurial sphere (economic, political, and social). 0 90erek G. Smith, "Natives and Outsiders: Pluralism in the Mackenzie River Delta, Northwest Territories, Canada“ (Ph.D. disserta- tion, Cambridge: Department of Anthropology. Harvard University, 1971), and Peter J. Usher, The Bankslanders: Economy_and Ecology of a Frontier Trapping Community, 3 volsT(Ottawa: DIAND, 1970, 1971). 'Ooerek G. Smith, "The Implications of Pluralism for Social Change Programs in a Canadian Arctic Community," in Pilot Not Commander: Essays in Memory of Diamond Jenness, eds: Pat and Jim Lotz (Ottawa: Saint Paul University, 1971), p. 202. 11 The accessibility of the Delta, plus its development as a regional administrative center, produced a larger concentration of Eurocanadians than is typical of other Arctic communities. In con- trast, Usher's study area, Banks Island, is distinguished by its lack of outside administrators and developers who reside locally. Yet, Usher shows a form of "metropolis-hinterland" domination affecting the daily lives of the Bankslanders. Decisions about the development of the island are constantly being made in distant metropoli such as Ottawa and relayed to regional administrative centers ("intermediate metropoli") for implementation. Usher suggests that ". . . less attention has been given to the impact of this dominance on the hinder- 1and itself, and particularly to the question of whether the relation- ship is indeed a symbiotic one between equals or a parasitic one more characteristic of imperialism."]] A number of observers have spoken of the Arctic co-operative movement in glowing terms, but, to date, only two field studies have been conducted with the co-op as the major focus. In part, this is due to the fact that most co-operatives are only a few years old and have not had time to fully establish themselves in the community. During the summer of 1964, Arbess conducted the first study of an Arctic co-Operative.12 He dealt with the Specific sociological problem of accounting for the ease with which the George River Eskimos nUsher, The Bankslanders, 3:18. 12Saul E. Arbess, Social Change and the Eskimo Co-gperative at George River, Quebec (Ottawa: Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, 1966). 12 accepted the co-Operative. From the literature, he identified eight factors tending to favor the successful development of social organi- zations. (The theoretical basis for this study is drawn from the literature on rapid social change without disorganization.) Of the , eight, four were found to be crucial in the case of George River: Factor 1. Where the indigenous people have command over resources and facilities which are regarded as valuable or scarce or both. These may be natural resources, skilled or semi-skilled labour, for example. Factor 5. Where external catalytic agents exist to stimulate organizational response to changes, responses which are task- specific and desired by the native people. Factor 7. Where, on the individual level, favourable personal and ideological attributes exist among the indigenous people to provide leadership under changing conditions. Factor 8. Where the pace of change is controlled by the native population which is motivated to change.1 Thus, the primary focus of the George River study is the introduction of a co-Operative into an Eskimo community and not an evaluation of the co-operative, itself, as an agent of social and economic change. A second and more comprehensive study was made by Vallee of the Povungnetuk Co-operative.14 Vallee's stated objective was to document the impact of the co-operative on the settlement of Povungnetuk. He begins by describing the forms of community organiza- tions, other than the co-operative, in order to trace changes in these different organizational units. From this structural analysis, Vallee discovered factionalism to be a major problem at Povungnetuk. '31bid., pp. 73-74. 14Frank G. Vallee, Povungnetuk and its Cooperative. A Case Study in Community Change_(0ttawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1967). 13 The Eskimos' allegiance is divided between the Anglican and Catholic missions, between the Hudson's Bay Company and the co-0perative. This cross-cutting of village loyalties retards the development of community solidarity behind the co-operative. Both of these studies stress the socio-political problems of co-Operation. Arbess identifies factors favoring the organization of a community co-operative, while Vallee's analysis illuminates the dis- ruptive affect of village factionalism on co-operative functioning. Both writers provide valuable insights in these areas for comparative purposes. Lastly, at the village level, the precontact culture of the Arviligjuarmiut Eskimo, residing in the Pelly Bay vicinity, is well- ‘5 In addition, Balikci's dis- documented by Balikci and Rasmussen. cussion of changes in Arviligjuarmiut socio-economic organization, as a result of exposure to the market economy in the 1930's and 40's, provides an excellent reference for measuring possible co-op related changes at Pelly Bay.16 The Significance of the Research Methodologically, the research is part of an emerging subfield in geography and anthropology attempting to study change in tradi- tional societies within the context of the larger economic and political 15Assen Balikci, Netsilik (Garden City, New York: The Natural History Press, 1971), and Knud Rasmussen, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition, 1921-24 (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1931), vol. 8, No. 1-2. ‘6Assen Balikci, Development of Basic Socio-Economic Units in Two Eskimo Communities Bulletin 202 (Ottawa: National Museum of Canada, 1964)? 14 units of which they are a part. The point of departure for this meth- odological shift is a recognition of the inadequacies of studying social and cultural change within the boundaries of the local societies alone. This theme was stated most recently in anthropology by Kiste and Ogan, the editors of a new social change series. They emphasize the need for a more comprehensive methodology than has guided earlier change studies. Most of the studies focused on change within traditional societies, ignoring or not taking into full account the fact that those societies were inextricably embedded within the framework of large-scale colonial empires or contemporary nation states. Brookfield brought this problem to the attention of geogra- phers in an article calling for an end to "geographical dualism."18 Dualism refers to the scale contrasts in geographical research in the Third World. In research conducted at the local level (community studies), inputs from the outside world are naively given, while research based at the national scale (diffusion studies), reflect only a superficial understanding of the complex processes of change within small communities. What is lacking, writes Brookfield, is that "few attempts have been made to bridge this conceptual gulf by setting a particular study within some wider explanatory framework."19 17Robert C. Kiste and Eugene Ogan, Forward to Itinerant Towns- 092, by David Jacobson (Menlo Park, California: Cummings Publishing Company, 1972). 18H. c. Brookfield, "On One Geography and a Third World," Transactions, Institute of British Geographers, No. 58 (1973). 19 Ibid., p. 14. 15 A second significant aspect of the research is its potential contribution to the study of co-operation. The Arctic co-Operative movement is part of a growing awareness in many areas of the world of the value of co-operative enterprise. In recent years, a distinct change has occurred in general development theory and practice. Increasing attention is focusing on the rural sector of life in developing countries as opposed to earlier strategies devoted to centralized heavy industry in urban areas. The emphasis is now on utilization of local materials, decentralized control, providing employ- ment in rural communities and reversing the population flow to the cities. A development strategy of this kind clearly provides a greater opportunity for the deployment of co-operative ideas. In 1968, the General Assembly of the United Nations passed Resolution 2459 (XXIII) on the role of co-operatives in the Second Development Decade for the Seventies. The International Co-operative Alliance (I.C.A.) responded to the UN resolution by designating the seventies as the Co-operative Development Decade. Plans are being enacted to mobilizeifiuemany co-operative organizations throughout the world to stimulate the development of co-Operative movements in the developing countries. In conjunction with the renewed stress on co-operation, research is being encouraged on all phases of the move- ment. If the co-operative idea is to achieve its promised potential as an effective instrument of development for emerging minorities and classes of peoples, it must be interpreted in its true meaning as 16 both an economic and social institution. This demand for a more com- prehensive methodology is best summarized by Laszlo Valko: . it is evident that we need a more comprehensive scientific analysis and research method in c00peration, relating to all aspects of its operation as an economic, social, educational, community development institution. Such a method would determine the correct position of c00peratives in the modern economy. The significance of the research is inherent in the construc- tion of its design to comply with Valko's demand for a more compre- hensive research methodology. The role of the co-operative in community development is evaluated in a comprehensive cultural- historical framework. First, by focusing historically on the twin variables of decision-making and economic benefit, the investigation does not disassociate the common concern with poverty and its many dimensions--illiteracy, malnutrition, unemployment--from an institu- tional analysis of domination and exploitation in their various forms. Secondly, by focusing on the social and cultural impact of co-operation, the study avoids the danger of measuring the success of the movement by its balance sheets and business turnovers alone. 20Laszlo Valko, Essays on Modern Cooperation (Pullman, Wash- ington: Washington State Uniersity Press, 1964), p. iv. PART I THE CULTURAL-HISTORICAL GEOGRAPHY OF THE CANADIAN ARCTIC 17 CHAPTER II A PRELUDE TO PART ONE The Canadian Arctic, despite its neglect by political histori- ans dealing with the process of EurOpean imperialism, was subjected to many of the same forces that transformed the traditional economies of Africa, Asia, and native South America. Once the voyages of dis- covery, which opened America and the East in the sixteenth and seven- teenth centuries, proved successful, Europe became the center of a global mercantile economy with tentacles extending wherever raw mate- rials could be acquired cheaply and manufactured goods marketed profit- ably.] At first, Arctic Canada escaped this process. The Portugese and Spaniards, who heralded the "age of discovery," concentrated their efforts largely in the southern oceans in the search for prec- ious metals and trade routes. By the close of the sixteenth century, technologically based changes were occurring in Western Europe which shifted the center of power northward and altered the relationship between the emerging industrial nations and the rest of the world. 1The following paragraphs on European imperialism are mainly drawn from J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1902), and R. S. Lambert, Modern Imperialism (London: Longmans, Green & Co., Ltd., 1928). 18 19 During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these changes inten- sified as the British, French, and Dutch applied the new technology of the Industrial Revolution with increasing efficiency in order to transform larger and larger areas of the earth's physical and cultural landscape for the benefit of the powerful few. Larger ships, combined with the increased knowledge of the world's oceans, made voyages more regular and secure. The Industrial Revolution brought about economies of scale with the mass production of textiles, tools, weapons, and cheap luxuries such as alcohol, orna- ments, and tobacco. Once local markets were saturated, these items flowed out of Europe to be exchanged for raw materials to satisfy the appetite created by the exponential industrial growth. Overseas territories were acquired to supply raw materials and provide markets for home industries. Whenever possible, the indi- genous pe0ple were pushed aside and white settlers occupied their land. Where settlement on a large scale was not feasible, due to environ- mental restraints, trading posts were established. Gradually, these trading operations enlarged into territorial dominions over the indi- genous peoples. Canada's indigenous populations were not peripheral to this world-wide trend toward conglomeration. In southern Canada, the Indians became raw material suppliers for the London fur trade economy as early as the 1670's. Later, with fur resources exhausted and the agriculturally skilled European settlers pressing for more open land, the Indians were confined to less productive sites to eke out a miser- able existence under the dole of a neglectful government. 20 In northern Canada, stunted trees give way to the barren lands of tundra and ice, no home for the farmers of EurOpe. Here the masters of mercantilism employed an alternate strategy to harvest the wealth of the Arctic. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, a small number of adventurous Europeans were successful in establishing an integrated network of trading posts. From this base, dominion was extended over the Eskimo, their land, and the wealth they could be enticed to produce. Historically, the process was gradual. The Europeans' uncer- tainty about the commercial value of the land resources combined with the inaccessibility of the ice-locked interior, limited contact with the Eskimo to the coastal areas until the twentieth century. The first contacts were made by the vangards of European mercantilism, the explorers. These men, their voyages sponsored by the commercial interests of Europe, attempted to discover and chart a passage across the top of the Americas to the East. They persisted in this unsuccess- ful quest for 400 years, dating from John Cabot's pioneer journey in 1497 to Newfoundland and, finally, terminating in Amundsen's naviga- tion of the waters of Arctic North America in 1906. Although the early explorers did not achieve their goal of discovering a shorter route to the Orient, they did provide informa- tion about conditions in the waters of Canada's eastern Arctic. Their navigation charts opened up the Atlantic coast of Canada and their reports of the vast untapped marine resources of these waters attracted the fishing and whaling fleets of western Europe. 21 The first Europeans to have a pronounced influence on the Eskimo of Arctic Canada were the whalers and fishermen. Beginning in the 1840's, they discovered a profit could be made from these indi- genous Arctic dwellers--a profit in the trade of furs and ivory that would offset the losses of a poor whaling season. In addition, the whalers quickly capitalized on the labor of the coastal Eskimo, employ- ing them as fresh meat suppliers and in the whale hunt itself. In time, the stimulus of great profits in furs attracted men who specialized solely in trading. While the whalers were transient, the new traders established the first permanent European residences among the Eskimo. From these permanent posts, the Hudson's Bay Com- pany transformed the Canadian Arctic into a virtual vassal of London. In order to maintain year-round trading posts, it was neces- sary to develop a reliable transportation network that assured a yearly supply of trade articles and foodstuffs. The development of this network was instrumental in opening up the Arctic to other exotic agents. The heavy costs of transport were carried by the profitable fur trade. Thus, when the missionaries responded to the call of the North, they were able to travel on Company ships laden with the year's trade supplies, and at the posts they found shelter in Company build- ings. During the early decades of the twentieth century, the Cana- dian Government sent a fledgling military institution, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, to join the missionaries and traders. The police primarily were sent to assure Canadian sovereignty of the 22 Arctic islands. Their secondary functions were to protect the Eskimo from the excesses of the whalers and traders and to teach the Eskimo Canadian law. The establishment of police detachments next to the trading posts and missions completed the exotic take-over. Arctic Canada was now governed by a military administrator, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner, economically exploited by the trader, and educationally and spiritually directed by the missionary. No wars were fought, nor were large armies marshaled to the Arctic. When the exotic institutions arrived, they possessed a back- log of colonial experience to apply to the contact situation. Earlier lessons of their counterparts in Africa, Asia, and in southern Canada among the Indians taught them that creating dependency was far more effective, in the long run, than aggression and destruction. As a result, the process of domination assumed more humane characteristics than earlier conquests in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. They were tolerant in dislodging the shaman and indirect in extending economic and political domination over the inhabitants. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police cautioned a gradual transition based on mutual trust. The killing of a white man by an Eskimo was not avenged by the massa- cre of local villagers, but the outcome was the same as in other dominated regions of the world: the creation of a contact society in which the indigenous pe0ple had no voice in the decision-making struc- ture directing their lives and left them economically imprisoned by the exotic institutions. 23 To be sure, there was dissension between these vanguards of Western Civilization in the Arctic; for it would be imposing too great an order on the nature of human institutions to contend that they pre- sented, in all situations, a united front in their domination of the Eskimo. They openly criticized each other's objectives and methods in their annual reports and diaries, but when the Eur0pean socio- economic system they imposed on the Arctic landscape was threatened, they united to affirm their right of supremacy. The major proposition presented here is that the dynamic process in which Europeans gained control of Eskimo institutions is revealed only when these exotic contact institutions are viewed from the perspective of integrated extensions of European culture rather than as separate entities competing with one another. Admittedly, as separate institutions, the weights of their individual influences varied in different communities due to historical and ecological cir- cumstances. In certain communities the trader was the dominant, in others the missionary or the police officer; but anthropologists have long recognized the supportive functional integration of institutions within a given culture. An ideological foundation permeates all insti- tutions of a culture justifying the social order and sanctifying sta- bility. The type of society built upon a laizez-faire market economy where individualism and accumulation of private property are encouraged requires a different moral justification from a society built upon co-Operation and mutual aid. The major objective of European mercantilism was to change the organization of the aboriginal economy in order to integrate the 24 Eskimo into a worldwide market system. But, what economists define as economic behavior is in reality only a vaguely conceived behavioral component of a larger cultural configuration. To change the economy requires the total configuration of the culture to be altered. In this task, the trader's objectives were given moral justification by a mercantile based religion, and with the arrival of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the mode of Operation of the market economy was codi- fied by the overt authority of the Canadian Government. The result of their collective action was a stable equilibrium that gradually evolved during the first half of the twentieth century, in which the dominant exotic institutions jealously guarded their stewardship of the Eskimo. They attacked the disruptive influences of other Europeans whose excesses were totally distructive to all interests. Overly zealous missionaries or police officers who adhered to rigid enforcement of their duties were criticized for dislodging native traditions too rapidly and interfering with the fur trade. Independent traders, who marketed large quantities of alcohol and who were unscrupulous in their dealings with the Eskimo, threatened the established European institutions because they threatened the survival of the Eskimo. Without the Eskimo, there would be no fur trappers, no souls to save, and no Arctic inhabitants through which the govern- ment could lay claims to contested territories. Thus, the history of domination and exploitation in the Cana- dian Arctic is a process in which a workable equilibrium evolves and is maintained between the disparate populations. The historical 25 record is clear. If an equilibrium is not reached between the partici- pants in a power disparity relationship that guarantees a minimal level of subsistence to the exploited, the system will not survive. A classical example is the depopulation of native Latin America by the Spanish. Workable levels of exploitation were not established and the human component in the resource base was destroyed resulting in the importation of Africans to work the mines and plantations. The following two chapters, III and IV, examine the process whereby the objectives and practices of the exotic institutions over- lapped to impose a socioeconomic structure upon the Arctic in which the Eskimos were dominated and exploited. In Chapter III, domination and exploitation are dealt with as functions of dependency. The establishment of dependency involves a process that will be called the dependency generating process. This process began in the accessible coastal waters of the Eastern Arctic after 1840, expanded into the Western Arctic at the turn of the century, and finally penetrated the isolated Central Arctic after 1910. The problem will be to trace this process to learn how the exotic institutions contributed to it, and how they used the Eskimo's dependency for their own purposes of domi- nation and exploitation. Chapter IV analyzes the product of the dependency generating process by employing the concept of a cultural synthesis. Here, the focus is on the resultant socioeconomic arrangements that emerged in Arctic Canada in the early 1930's. These arrangements represent a synthesis of the forces set in motion during the dependency generating process. 26 The Federal Government officially recognized the collapse of the fur trapping economy in 1952 after a number of years of severely depressed fur prices and published accounts of Eskimo suffering. Chapter V examines the structural weaknesses of this economy, includ- ing the heavy physical and economic burden the Eskimos were carrying to maintain the contact society. The examination goes back to the 1930's to establish the position that the depressed conditions pre- cipitating government action in the 1950's were endemic to Eskimo life two decades earlier. Chapters VI and VII outline the exotic institution's response to the conditions dramatically brought to public attention in the early 1950's. This response has been largely predicated on develOpment models patterned for Reserve Indians, and has systematically excluded Eskimos from the decision-making relating to the development of Arctic resources. In the concluding chapter, VIII, the applicability of apply- ing a model of domination and exploitation to the contact history of the Canadian Arctic is discussed with particular reference to the current problems of Eskimo participation in Arctic development and self-sufficiency in social organization. Chapter VIII also serves to integrate Parts I and II. The significance of the co-operative move- ment must be viewed in the light of the Eskimo's history of subordina- tion to the exotic contact institutions. CHAPTER III THE ESTABLISHMENT OF DEPENDENCY (ca. 1840-1930) Arctic Whalers The primary step in subjecting the Eskimos to the demands of the mercantile economy was to establish dependency. Here, the whalers played an important role; for it was through their efforts that the dependency generating process was initiated. The process was not the result of an overt policy on the part of the whalers. Rather, it was the consequence of technological displacement. The whalers introduced European manufactured goods, particularly weapons and tools, that dis- placed the traditional tool inventory of the Eskimos. Within a genera- tion, the Eskimos began to rely on the annual arrival of ships to bring them their means to secure a livelihood. A Brief History of Arctic Whaling The history of this initial phase of the dependency generating process is difficult to document prior to the 1840's. Accurate sta- tistics on Arctic whaling from the 1700's and early 1800's are wanting. Apparently, by the later 1500's, a small number of Basque and English crews visited the coast of Labrador for whaling and fishing purposes. This operation was immediately overshadowed during the 1600's by the newly discovered Spitzbergen whaling grounds. Exploitation of 27 28 Spitzbergen was so intense that by 1700 the ground was exhausted and interest shifted to distant Davis Strait where whales were reported to be in abundance. The Dutch, who had monopolized the Spitzbergen whaling indus- try, were the first to operate on a large scale in Davis Strait. The English whaler, Scoresby, gives some idea of the magnitude of the Dutch operation in Table 1. TABLE l.--Dutch Davis Strait Whale Fishery, 1719-1779. Period Number of Vessels Average/Year 1719-1728 748 ' 75 1729-1738 975 97 1739-1748 368 37 1749-1758 340 34 1759-1768 296 29 1769-1778 434 43 Source: William Scoresby, An Account of the Arctic Regions (Edin- burgh: Archibald Constable & Co., 1820), 2:156. The first colonial American whaler is reported to have sailed for David Strait in 1732. Five years later, the Davis Strait fleet from Massachusetts consisted of between 50 and 60 vessels.1 During the last quarter of the eighteenth century, interna- tional instability severely cut back Dutch and American operations. 1Alexander Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery (Boston: By the Author, 1878):Tpp. 168-69. 29 At the close of the century, the entire Dutch fleet numbered less than forty vessels.2 This retreat followed the general decline of Dutch commercial eminence. The Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 played havoc with the American fleet forcing it to abandon the Arctic waters of Canada. British merchants were slow in capitalizing on the whaling industry prior to 1800. However, with the decline of Dutch and Ameri- can activity, the British stepped in and outfitted the dominant Arctic fleet. In 1830, British whaling vessels in the Greenland and Davis Strait grounds totaled ninety-one.3 Eskimo-whaler contacts during the early period of Arctic whal- ing were sporadic. First of all, the intensity and duration of con- tact was limited by the demands of whaling. Vessels entered Davis Strait in April and departed by mid-summer. The whalers' major objec- tive was to capture as many of the prized whales as possible and return to Europe before ice blocked their passage. Secondly, the waters of Davis Strait, bordering Baffin Island, and the icefilled Baffin Bay were insufficiently charted until John Ross's 1819 voyage of exploration. 2Walter Tower, A History of the American Whale Fishery (Phila- delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1907), p. 18. 3Howard Clark, "The Whale Fishery: History and Present Con- dition of the Fishery," in The Fisheries and Fishery_Industries of the United States, ed: George B. Goode, vol. 2, sec. 5 (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries, 1887). 30 Farther south, Colonial whalers hunted in Hudson Bay as early as 1764.4 Also, the Hudson's Bay Company engaged in a limited whaling operation in the Bay during the 1700's. There is evidence to indicate that these whalers were in contact with coastal Eskimos.5 Captain John Ross's voyage to Baffin Bay in 1819 provided the whalers with valuable navigation charts. Ross proved ships could work westward through the ice of Baffin Island where whales abounded in the 6 This discovery, coupled with the declining returns bays and inlets. in the accessible northern Atlantic waters by the mid-1800's, shifted the whaling operation deeper and deeper into the straits and bays of the Eastern Canadian Arctic. Contact between the Eskimos and the whalers became more orderly and routine with the establishment of shore stations to better utilize Eskimo labor and exploit the fur trade (Figure 2). The English whaler, Captain Penny, is credited with establishing the first of these shore- based operations in 1840 at Cumberland Sound. This innovation had a profound influence on the coastal Eskimo for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Following Penny's example, an increasing number of whalers outfitted themselves to winter in the Arctic where they established 4Alfred Lubbock, The Arctic Whalers (Glasgow: Brown, Son & Ferguson, Ltd., 1937), p.—103. 5Lieutenant Chappell, during an 1814 voyage to Hudson Bay, reported the Eskimo of south Baffin Island and Hudson Strait to be well conditioned to the annual arrival of ships and to consider the event as a sort of trading fair. Edward Chappell, Narrative of a Voyage to Hudson's Bay_(London: J. Mawman, 1817). 6 John Ross, Exploring Baffin's Bay (London: Longman, 1819). 31 WHAUIO CTATION. sue-no. // . . :- -.__ .V g ) Loo/odor / .~' V " _ ’\ 3 Sea \ ‘-. 'F- ' '9 In) MTES N ESTAIUSHIEIT on. 1040: o cc 1850: 0 ca 1860: A :1 1890: I 3' .5: r g .63 1.55 1065 1875 10.5 1096 I“ NOTE: 0000 1m 00' on" non Figure 2.--Whaling Stations. Source: See sources for Tables 1, 2 and 3, Appendix A. 32 shore stations in the protected harbors along the east coast of Baffin Island and in Hudson Bay.7 American whalers staked out the Hudson Bay grounds, while whalers from Scotland operated out of the Baffin Island stations. From these stations, the whalers had access to a large popula- tion of Eskimo living on Baffin Island and along the coasts of Hudson Bay, Hudson Strait, Foxe Basin and north to Repulse Bay. During the winter months, the Eskimos were hired to provide fresh meat and cloth- ing for the crews. Their summers were spent manning small boats in search of whales, supplying fresh meat and working the mica mines of Lake Harbour. For their services, the Eskimo received weapons, ammuni- tion, cooking utensils, ornaments, liquor, tobacco, sugar and flour. The area the whalers exploited was increased by the annual migration inland of the coastal groups to hunt caribou and secure a supply of skins for winter clothing for themselves and the whaling crews. Inland, the coastal Eskimo came in contact with isolated 7The first American station was established in Cumberland Sound when the McClennan landed twelve members of its crew to spend the winter of 1850 among the Eskimos for the purpose of trading and capturing whales and seals. By 1853, the entire crew of the McClennan wintered in Cumberland Sound. Beginning in 1860, the McClennan spent two winter seasons in Frobisher Bay living with the Eskimos in their huts. Clark, The Fisheries, pp. 95-96. During the winter of 1863, Cumberland Sound was crowded with four Scottish and two American whalers. All employed Eskimos to supply them with fresh meat and to help in the whaling chase. Lubbock, Arctic Whalers, p. 382. At the peak of Hudson Bay whaling in 1864, fifteen American ships were reported wintering in the Bay. A. P. Low, The Cruise of the Neptune, 1903-04 (Ottawa: Government Printing Bureau, 1906), p. 277. Given an average of thirty-two men per whaler, the American population in Hudson Bay in 1864 approximated 450 to 500 men. 33 nomadic bands eager to exchange their native produce for weapons and tobacco. In this manner European trade goods diffused from the coastal whaling stations. Whaling in Hudson Bay and the surrounding straits and inlets reached its peak in the 1860's and declined soon thereafter until its collapse at the turn of the century. Falling prices, combined with a policy of uncontrolled exploitation by the whaling fleets brought about its ruin. Figure 2 chronicles the decline of whaling in the Eastern Canadian Arctic. In the western Canadian Arctic, whaling was limited both in time and space. Whalers had been active in the Pacific Arctic for over fifty years before they were forced, in the 1890's by declining profits, to venture beyond Point Barrow into the uncharted waters of Beaufort Sea. The first vessel to make this voyage, the Grampus, returned to San Francisco in 1891 with a cargo valued at $250,000.8 Five years after the Grampus, in 1895, fifteen ships wintered in the protected harbors of Herschel and Baillie Islands.9 Figures on the number of whalers operating in the Beaufort Sea after 1896 are incomplete. A peak was apparently reached around the turn of the century 8A. M. Jarvis, "Report of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police," Sessional Paper, no. 28, 1909, Appendix K, p. 140. 9John Cook, Pursuing the Whale (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1926), p. 56. 34 (Figure 2).10 In 1906, the demand for whalebone in women's clothing ceased as fashions changed and the price dropped from an average of $4 per pound, during the 1890's, to a low of 40 cents in 1906. Only a couple of ships, primarily outfitted for the Eskimo trade, visited Beaufort Sea after that date. Beaufort Sea whaling was similar to that of Hudson Bay. The short open water period, combined with the 5,000 mile return voyage to San Francisco made wintering in the ice a prerequisite for a profit- able outfit. The Mackenzie Delta Eskimos concentrated on Herschel and Baillie Islands where they were employed supplying food for the whaling crews. The whaling captains utilized Eskimo labor to harvest the fur resources of the Delta by providing steel traps to those who would alter their annual migrations to include trapping. Eskimo-Whaler Socioeconomic Relations As an economic enterprise, whaling was exploitative of all con- cerned except the whaling merchants and senior officers. The regular crewmen often received little more in reward at the end of the whaling cruise than the Eskimo. American crewmen were not paid a standard wage. Rather, they were given a share of the total profits through 10Finnie reports that during one winter (no date given), 23 ships were locked in the ice. Richard Finnie, Lure of the North, (Philadelphia: Mckay, 1940), p. 15. Inspector Howard's 1906 report places the number of ships comprising the Beaufort Sea whaling fleet at twenty-one. Not all of these vessels operated in the Arctic at the same time. For example, ten ships wintered at Herschel and Baillie Islands in 1906. D. M. Howard, "Report of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police," Sessional Paper, no. 28, 1906, Appendix D, p. 20. 35 a method of payment known as the lay system. This system assured the 1] The merchants whaling merchant seventy percent of the net profit. were also able to profit on the remaining thirty percent allotted to the officers and crewmen as most of the men who signed on lacked the financial resources to outfit themselves with clothing and necessities for the long voyage. They were allowed credit for supplies from the ship's store or "slop-chest"--these purchases being deducted from their lay. The "slop-chest" was calculated by the whaling merchants to yield at a minimum 100 percent profit per voyage.12 The result was that many a whaler returned to find himself in debt to the ship's owner. The economist, Hohman, summarized the negative nature of the lay system in terms of the allocation of risks: Obviously, then, this lay system partially shifted the most distinctive and onerous entrepreneurial function, the bearing of industrial risks, from the entrepreneur to the worker. Instead of the usual situation in which the entrepreneur con- tracted to pay a definite rate of wages to his workmen and assumed the risks of an industry, a special condition was created under which the whaling merchant materially lightened his financial burden by proportioning his wages bill to the amount of his profits. And obviously the more his risks were decreased in this manner, the more were those of his workers increased.13 If the whaling merchants exploited the regular crewmen to inflate their profits, the Eskimos were subjected to an even heavier hand. Some concrete examples illustrate this fact. nElma Hohman, The American Whaleman (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1928), p. 285. 12 Ibid., p. 250. 131bid., p. 222. 36 Entire villages of Eskimos were employed during the winter months to provide fresh meat and clothing for the whaling crews.14 Their summers were spent manning small boats in search of whales and supplying fresh meat. The Eskimos not fully involved in the whaling activity were equipped with traps and encouraged to bring their furs to the whaling station. In addition, several families of Baffin Islanders were employed in the mica mining Operation on Lake Harbour. Families employed on the whaling ships were issued a weekly maintainance ration of 4 pounds ship biscuits, 1/4 pound coffee, ‘5 Eskimos at the 2 1/2 pounds molasses and 4 plugs of tobacco. whaling stations fortunate enough to capture a whale were given extra trade goods. A standard procedure, recorded by Superintendent Moodie of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police, was to award the Eskimo a whale boat (valued at $120 in the United States) after a catch. The profit of this transaction can be estimated "When it is remembered that whale- bone is worth $10,000 per ton, and that a good whale yields from 1,500 1116 to sometimes 3,000 pounds of bone . . . Should the Eskimos have an unsuccessful whaling season, they could acquire a whale boat in 14During the winter of 1894-95, Captain Cook reported 200 Eskimo living on Herschel Island. "Those old enough hunted for the crews consumption." Cook, Pursuing the Whale, p. 56. Even as late as 1903, Low reported that 500 Eskimos were dependent on the whaling stations of Blacklead, Kakerten, and Cape Haven in Cumberlund Sound. Low, Cruise, p. 9. 15 Jenness, Eskimo Administration, p. 11. 16J. D. Moodie, "Royal Northwest Mounted Police Report," Sessional nger, no. 28, 1905, p. 11. 37 exchange for seventy-five to one hundred musk ox skins, valued at $50 17 each. Trade was an extremely profitable enterprise for the whalers. In 1885, Lieutenant Gordon, Commander of the Canadian Hudson's Bay Expedition, observed ". . . the value of trade in musk-ox robes, caribou robes, seal skins, and ivory forms no unimportant part of the 18 profit of the whaling voyage." This fact was seconded in the western Arctic by Captain Bodfish. "Arctic whalers were trading ships as well as whalers, and it was quite on the cards that a good profit might be made in trade even if very few whales were taken."19 Just how good this profit could be is evident from a variety of sources. Captain Hadley, a veteran whaler in the Pacific Arctic, 20 In states that the stations made from 500 to 1,000 percent profit. the eastern Arctic, Superintendent Moodie is more specific. From information compiled through his own observations and from conversa- tions with whaling captains he reports: Everything owned by the trader is valued at twenty times its price, and everything owned by the native is cut down in value a hundred fold . . . As an example I may quote that 100 primers for '38 or '44 calibre Winchester rifles are considered fair ”Ibid. 18A. R. Gordon, “Report on the Hudson's Bay Expedition, in Our Northland, ed: Charles R. Tuttle (Toronto: C. Blackett Robinson, 1885) Appendix, p. 587. 19Harston Bodfish, Chasingythe Bowhead (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), p. 191. 20John R. Hadley, "Whaling off the Alaskan Coast," American Geographical Society_Bulletin, 1915, 47:917. 38 exchange for a musk ox robe. The primers cost $1.08 per 1,000 in the United States . . . . I may also quote that a 38 cal. single shot rifle and set of reloading tools, worth at the out- side $10, is given for fifteen prime musk ox robes. With the robes the hunter is expected, if possible to bring in the head, and a good Specimen will realize $50. During the declining years of whaling, the few remaining ships relied more and more on the Eskimo's labor and produce to supple- ment their meager catch. For example, in 1904 the whaler Active arrived at its home port in Scotland with 15 tons of mica, 3O musk ox hides, 157 fox pelts and 32 bear skins in addition to its catch of whales.22 All of these products were the direct result of Eskimo labor. The value of European and American merchants of whaling and the supplementary Eskimo trade can only be partially indicated.' Lieutenant Gordon estimated Hudson Bay yielded $2,193,300 to New England whalers between 1862-1885, for an average of $27,500 per voyage. No mention is made of the contribution of Eskimo trade.23 Western Canadian Arctic figures are more complete. Inspector Jarvis enlisted the services of several veteran whaling captains to compute the value of whales and furs taken from Beaufort Sea and the Mackenzie Delta. During the period of intense whaling, 1890-T906, $13,450,000 21Moodie, "Mounted Police Report," p. 11. Also as an example of the lucrative musk ox trade, Moodie reported that two ships, the Egg and Active, were in possession of 550 skins. 22Lubbock, Arctic Whalers, p. 447. 23Gordon, Hudson's Banyxpedition, p. 586. 39 in whale products and $1,400,000 in furs were landed in San Francisco for an average of nearly $1,000,000 per year.24 The whalers were in the Arctic to maximize profits from whal- ing and from the Eskimo trade in the shortest possible time. They were not interested in altering the socio-religious foundations of Eskimo society. As a result, they were seldom in a position where it was necessary to challenge the decision-making powers of the presti- geous hunters and shamen in matters relating to social control within the band. Nevertheless, in their economic relations with the Eskimo the whaling captains established a model of superordinate-subordinate behavior that set the pattern for later exotic agents to follow. The whaling captains controlled the manner in which exchanges were insti- tuted by arbitrarily establishing the value of goods and services supplied by the Eskimo. Captain Cook related how the hunters who supplied the crews with fresh meat were paid. The game they brought in was credited to them and when the season was over they were told by the captain how much they would receive in trade goods.25 The missionary, Bishop Fleming, offers an even more illustra- tive example of the arbitrary manner in which the captains dealt with the Eskimo. The following example was drawn from his relationship with Captain Murray of the Active. 24Jarvis, "Report of the Mounted Police," p. 140. 25Cook, Pursuing the Whale, p. 222. 40 He was the old-time whaling captain at his best . . . . He looked upon himself as the father of all the Eskimo with whom he came into contact and they accepted him as such. When the ship arrived the natives came swarming on board, bringing their furs, ivory and blubber and, with the innocence of children, handed these to Murray . . . . He gave each family such things as he felt they required, and not necessarily in proportion to 26 the quantity of fur which any individual hunter had brought in. The Role of the Whalers in the Degendency Generating Process Although the whalers were not directly interested in changing the Eskimo's sociocultural life, they clearly initiated the process. They supplied the Eskimos with tools and weapons he could neither repair nor replace without benefiting the whaling operation. Close contact with whalers in the Eastern Arctic for nearly three quarters of a century eroded the Eskimo's traditional independence. As Arctic whaling drew to a close, Low, in a 1906 report, left little doubt that this was the case when he warned the Federal Government of their reliance: The natives have for years looked for assistance to the whalers both on Baffin island and Hudson bay. They have quite given up the use of their primitive weapons, and there is no doubt that a withdrawal of whalers would lead to great hardship and many deaths among these peOple if the Government did not . . . take their place 9nd supply the Eskimo with the necessary guns and ammunition.2 And three years later, Sergeant Fitzgerald, commander of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police post on Herschel Island, filed the following report for the western Arctic: 26Archibald Fleming, Archibald the Arctic (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1957), p. 164. 27Low, Cruise of the Neptune, p. 271. 41 This has been the hardest year the natives have felt for a long time owing to the ships not getting in . . . . I issued some of them flour and bacon and tried to give them a square meal about once a week. There were 47 natives on the island, and it was impossible to feed them from our supplies, they would not last two weeks, but we filled their stomachs now and then . . . . This winter they had to eat a number of their seal skins, boiled . . . . It was very harg on the children, they could not go the seal skin and seal oil.2 The policy of laissez-faire was firmly implanted during this initial stage of Arctic development which occurred approximately between 1840 and 1900. Government controls of the whaling operation were non-existent, leaving the whalers free to extract millions of dollars in resource annually while the Eskimos became destitute and dependent. The stage was thus set for the next phase of the dependency generating process when new exotic institutions, especially the trader, the missionary and the Royal Mounted Police, entered the Canadian Arctic between 1890 and 1930 to make greater demands upon the biotic and cultural foundations of Eskimo society. Arctic Traders The vacuum left by the collapse of whaling was soon filled by a number of trading posts, first in the Hudson Bay region and along the Western Arctic coast between 1890 and 1915, and then into the ice- clogged passages of the Central Arctic during the 1920's. The London based Hudson's Bay Company was the dominant single trading concern throughout the Canadian Arctic during this phase of expansion, but it was by no means without competitors. Ex-whalers and 28F. J. Fitzgerald, "Report of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police," Sessional Pager, no. 28, 1910, Appendix K, p. 103. 42 "C TRADING POSTS 1890—10‘0 ‘ga in ‘\ \ 1 t 1 Panama nuts \ i‘ A moo-m '20 o Tilt-I’m o in» / Ctosto Orion 1m ’y/éy/p / 1,, // , , % / / ,»:/ 7' /? \ ..... acumen mm » 3‘ ESKIMOS \\ \\s . we a m :2. :3 Mo moo M: an m m In“ WVEJ 0"” M's “05's “YUALLY MIAYWG ‘7 (LCD! DATE Figure 3.--Trading Posts, 1890-1940. Source: See sources for Table 4, Appendix A. 43 independent traders swarmed into the Western and Central Arctic, and on both the east and west coasts, small, but well-financed fur trading companies vied with the "Bay" for the Eskimos' patronage. Early Eskimo Resistance to the Market Economy At this point it is necessary to break the continuity between the collapse of whaling and the rise of the traders and trace the dif- fusion of Arctic trading posts back to their unsuccessful beginnings. As early as 1718, the Hudson's Bay Company outfitted expeditions in northern Hudson Bay to promote trade.29 Most of these attempts proved unsuccessful until the 1900's, owing first to the traders' failure to dislodge the Eskimo from his traditional economy, and secondly, to the problem of communication in the vast uncharted expanses of the Arctic. The failures of these early trading ventures underscore the basic differences between the traders' and the whalers' relationships with the Eskimos. For the whalers, the Eskimo trade was a profitable supplement that was gradually fostered over many years. The main trade items of the whaling stations were weapons, ammunition, and tools. They avoided developing a market for European clothing and food and 29David Vaughan sailed the Hudson's Bay Company supply ship Success north of Churchill River in 1718 to trade with the Eskimos. Kenneth Davies, ed., Letters from Hudson Bay, 1703-40 (London: The Hudson's Bay Record Society, 1965), p. 64. Henry Kelsey sailed the Success as far north as Marble Island in 1719. he exchanged two Indian slave boys for two Eskimo boys with the intent of teaching them English. Ibid., p. 392. In a 1738 letter, Richard Staunton, of the company's post at Moose River, refers to an Eskimo slave used as an interpreter on the trading ships in Hudson Bay. Ibid., p. 273. 44 encouraged the Eskimos to remain dependent on their local food resources. This was also in the interests of the whaling merchants as they relied on the Eskimos to supply warm winter clothing and fresh meat for their crews. The traders, on the other hand, were wholly dependent upon the fur trade to support their Operation. Their profits depended on an intensive fur trade that required the Eskimos to alter the seasonal schedule of their food quest to include prolonged periods of trapping. In return, the trader provided imported food (flour, lard, sugar, and tea) to sustain the Eskimos through the long trapping season when they were unable to devote time to hunting. Of course, the imported food was exchanged for furs and this in turn stimulated more trapping. The chronicles of the early traders leave little doubt that the Eskimos frustrated their efforts to impose a market economy. For example, in the 1830's, the Hudson's Bay Company established a trading post on the Ungave Penninsula. The two Europeans manning the post, Finlayson and McLean, employed every means at their disposal to entice the Eskimos to become fur trappers. Finlayson notes how "Every useful article in the store was displayed to their view and every encourage- ment was made to induce them to hunt fur animals, seals and whales."30 But, Finlayson found the Eskimos to be preoccupied with securing food. When he approached them about trading some of their large quantities of seal oil, they postoned their decision until the fall caribou hunt 30Nico1 Finlayson, "Journal of Nicol Finlayson, 1830-1833," in Northern Quebec and Labrador Journals and Correspondence, 1819-35, ed: Kenneth Davies (London: The Hudson's Bay Record Society, 1963), p. 123. 45 31 proved successful. McLean, who managed the Ungave post in the early 1840's, until it was finally abandoned, reported similar obstacles: The extreme poverty and barrenness of their country, and the pertinacious adherence to their sealskin dress, which no argu- ment of ours could induce them to exchange for the less com- fortable arEicles of European clothing, were insurmountable obstacles.3 In 1885, Lieutenant Gordon learned, while in Hudson Bay, that the Hudson's Bay Company rated some of their better Indian hunters to be worth $1,000 per year to a trader, and a good Eskimo hunter to be worth $500.33 Later observations from Hudson Bay by the Leiths in 1909 offer an explanation for this differential. The Leiths found that the Indian: . is dependent on the white man for supplies and goes to the post often for them, while the Eskimo loves his independence and has the ability to live away from civilization, many coming to a post only at intervals of finn~or five years. Many Eskimo women and children never visit a post.34 As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the majority of Eskimos were secure in their Arctic habitat with only occasional journeys to the trading posts and whaling stations for weapons, ammu- nition, and tools. Their degree of independence from the trader was based on an ability to secure their food and clothing needs from the local environment. In contrast, the Indians of the plains and northen forests were no longer self-sufficient in animal resources. Their 3'Ibid., p. 154. 32John McLean, Notes of a Twenty-five Years' Service in the gudson's Banyerrito:y_(Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1932), p. 39. 33Gordon, Hudson's Bay_Expedition, p. 587. 34C. K. Leith and A. T. Leith, Summer and Winter on Hudson Bay (Machson, Wisconsin: Cartwell Printing Co., 1912), p. 46. 46 long and disruptive association with the trading companies, coupled with the destruction of the great buffalo herds reduced the Indians to dependency. The Europeans in North American learned early that the pro- ductivity of the native populations increased in proportion to their dependence on trade. George Simpson, Governor-in-Chief of the Hud- son's Bay Company from 1826 to 1860, expressed his concern regarding the problem of keeping the Indians dependent and "productive" when he wrote: I have made it my study to examine the nature and character of the Indians and . . . I am convinced they must be ruled with a rod of Iron, to bring, and keep them in a proper state of sub- ordination, and the most certain way to effect this is by letting them feel their dependence upon us. In the Woods and Northern barren grounds this measure ought to be pursued rigidly next year if they do not improve, and no credit, not so much as a load of ammunition given them until they exhibit an inclination to renew their habits of industry. In the plains however, this system will not do, as they can live independent of us, and by withholding ammunition, tobacco and spirits, the Staple Articles of Trade, for one year they will recover the use of their Bows and Spears and lose sight of their smoking and drinking habits; it will therefore be necessary to bring those tribes rgund by mild and cautious measures which may soon be effected. 5 The Undermining_of the Ecological Basis of Eskimo Independence The difficult task of converting the Eskimos into arduous fur trappers was accomplished in a remarkably few years in two ways. First, the process was initiated by a trader-promoted transformation of the traditional Eskimo ecological relationship, and secondly, it 35George Simpson, "Governor Simpson to A. Colvile, Ft. Garry, 20 May 1822," in Fur Trade and Empire, ed: Frederick Meek (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 179. 47 was carried to its climax by a series of management techniques designed to assure a constant flow of furs to the trading posts. Between 1915 and 1930, the traders mounted a major campaign to dislodge the Eskmos from their traditional ecological niche. This was achieved by the massive introduction of rifles and ammunition through a liberal credit system. The Eskimos were given weapons by the traders‘ in return for pledging to bring in a specified number of fox pelts in the Spring. At first, the trade relationship seems to have been satisfac- tory for the Eskimos and was similar to the earlier arrangements made with the whalers. They interrupted their annual cycle only for short periods to secure enough pelts to supply their minimal needs. For the traders, this was only a preliminary stage. To profit, they needed more productivity from the Eskimos, and they achieved this goal by offering them a price for the abundant caribou that served as a basic clothing and food staple along with the seal. Numerous accounts by police officers, traders, and members of government scientific expeditions provide glimpses of this process as it Spread eastward from the Mackenzie Delta into the isolated Central Arctic. During the winter of 1915, Inspector Phillips reported the Mackenzie Eskimos to be occupied hunting caribou and not attempting to secure any quantity of furs.36 According to Phillips, this situa- tion occurred due to the extremely low price being paid for pelts. The Eskimos still had access to their stable food and clothing base 36J. W. Phillips, "Royal Northwest Mounted Police Report," Sessional nger, no. 28, 1916, Appendix M, p. 189. 48 allowing them a degree of freedom from the white traders and from the fluctuating nature of the world fur market. One year later, Inspector LaNauze made several references in his 1916 report about the large herds of caribou and the self-suffi- cient Eskimos on Victoria Island. The Eskimos supplied their food and clothing needs by hunting the caribou only along the coast, leav- ing the interior of the island to serve as a vast game sactuary. Unfortunately, when LaNauze concluded his report, he underestimated the power of the indiscriminate use of technology and a market economy to destroy an ecological balance: . the Barren Land caribou does not yet stand in any great danger of extermination; and as the Eskimo are not at all wasteful in their habits, the importation of rifles will not greatly tend to diminish the numbers of deer.37 Even while Inspector LaNauze was writing his journal, the seeds of destruction that would discredit his prediction were being planted by the traders. Rifles and ammunition were distributed among the 38 Eskimos on a massive scale and a bounty was placed on the caribou. Within a few short years, the rifle began to make its impact. 37C. D. LaNauze, "Report of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police," Sessional nger, no. 28, 1917, Appendix 0, p. 239. 38The veteran Hudson's Bay Company trader, Philip Godsell, leaves little doubt that the seventy-five cents per skin value placed on the caribou was indeed levied by some traders as a bounty designed to destroy the herds and the Eskimo's independence. "The traders wanted furs. But just as long as there were lots of caribou around, the Eskimo was independent of the trader's hard- tack, flour, tea, and sowbelly, and he merely trapped white foxes when he felt so disposed. So, just as the United States Army officer defeated the warlike Plains Indians by encouraging the massacre of the buffalo, so did certain traders . . . deliberately encourage the wholesale slaughter of the caribou herds, the Eskimo's standby . . . to convert him into a trapper, dependent upon the trader and his 49 On a patrol from Herschel Island to Coronation Gulf, in 1920, Corporal Cornelius witnessed the beginning of an ecological disaster-- the wanton slaughter of caribou. Cornelius was surprised to find the great number of rifles distributed among the Eskimos during the short period the traders had been in the area. "Practically every native on the mainland is the owner of a rifle now, and even on the southwest coast of Victoria Island there are but few bows and arrows still in use."39 Cornelius observed how the traders encouraged the Eskimos to hunt the caribou fOr their Skins and Sinews and he warned his superi- ors in Ottawa: . . . if this wasteful slaughter is allowed to continue, it won't be long before the deer are driven from the country and the natives left unable to get warm clothing for the cold winter months.40 In 1922, Philip Godsell, Inspecting Officer for the Hudson's Bay Company, visited trading posts between the Mackenzie Delta and Coronation Gulf during the height of the caribou slaughter. At one post, which supplied a small number of hunters, he learned that 160,000 rounds of ammunition were shipped in for a single season.41 At another post, Tree River on Coronation Gulf, Godsell found eighteen bales of caribou skins (one hundred Skins per bale) all traded in store. Philip Godsell, "Is There Time to SaVe the Eskimo?" Natural History 61 (February, 1952): 58-59. 39C. Cornelius, "Report of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police," Sessional Paper, no. 28, 1921, p. 27. 40C. Cornelius, "Report of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police," Sessional Paper, no. 28, 1922, p. 45. 41Philip Godsell, "Tragedy in the Land of Snows," Forest and Outdoors 34 (October, 1938): 304. 50 a single season. Most of the skins were fly-blown and practically 4 useless. By 1924, the destruction of the caribou was well underway in Bathurst Inlet. Inspector Hoare of the Department of Interior visited Bathurst and recorded his conversation with a Hudson's Bay Company trader. The conversation revealed the difficulty of controlling the excesses of the traders. Mr. Pardy . . . agreed not to buy any Spring killed caribou. I also discussed with Mr. Pardy the advisability of not selling the natives cartridges until the middle of July. He thought that his loyalty to his company would be questioned if he refused to sell cartridges to natives in good standing. Also that it might seriously affect his trade returns as his rivals might use it in an effort to gain his customers.43 Later in the report, Hoare provided an important insight into the conflict being waged throughout the Arctic between ecological prin- ciples steeped in tradition and the impact of an exploitive economy: In the former years the Central or Copper Eskimos used to remain on the sea coast in the Spring hunting seals until the ice got rotten, it being a taboo for them to go inland for caribou before all their seal skin summer boots were made, and a good quantity of seal blubber put up for the fall fuel supply. On the coming of the white man with their contempt of customs based on super- stition, whether good or evil, the natives were encouraged to break the taboo. Armed with modern high power rifles, they began to go inland a little earlier each year to meet the cari- bou. At the present time the majority of natives leave off sealing the middle of March, proceed to the Arctic mountains and there take up their stand in the passes.44 42Ibid. 43W. Hoare, Report of Investigations Affecting Eskimos and Wildlife (Ottawa: Department of Interior, 1927), pp. 29-30. 44Ibid., p. 37. 51 By the 1930's, the caribou herds were depleted to such a degree that they no longer migrated to the Arctic Islands and many Eskimo communities would have faced starvation had not the traders provided imported food in exchange for fox pelts. According to avail- able estimates of the caribou population, their numbers were reduced to approximately one quarter of a million in 1970 from an estimated two and a half million in 1900 (Figure 7).45 Perhaps no other single indicator better measures the transformation of the ecological rela- tionship of Eskimo culture than the decline of the caribou population. The Technigues of the Market Economy The arrival of the traders in large numbers after 1915, par- ticularly those of the Hudson's Bay Company, marked a new era in Arctic commerce. Company officials were not content to depend on the traditional economic organization of the Eskimos to provide occasional surpluses. They re-organized the economy to provide large-scale out- put for the expanding European and North American market brought on by the post World War I prosperity. The Reverend Fleming summarizes the transition in the Eastern Arctic: Now that the powerful Hudson's Bay Company had come, there was an immediate change in the entire method of trading. The whole effort of the H.B.C. was to re-direct the thinking of the native. They were not interested in securing whalebone . . . . Instead they began at once to train the Eskimo to think in terms of fox skins and instituted a carefully worked out system to encourage 45By the 1930's, it is estimated the caribou population had been reduced by 22 percent. J. P. Kelsal, The Caribou (Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1968), p. 146. 52 this. Among other things they substantially advanced the price of fur, carefully explaining to each native that they were now working on a definite business basis, i.e., so many fox skins would brigg so much returns and no fox skins would bring no returns. Several techniques were used to exploit the trade and establish a market economy. Some the Hudson's Bay Company developed earlier among the Indians, others the ex-whaling captains (turned independent traders) developed especially for the Eskimo trade; all were designed to derive maximum profit. The following statement by John McLean, a veteran tyf the Hudson's Bay Company, applied to all the trading operations: The history of commercial rule is well known to the world: the object of that rule, wherever established, or by whomsoever exercised, is gain. In our intercourse with the natives of America no other object is discernible, no other object is thought of, no other object is allowed.47 The basis of the trader-trapper relationship was the debt system. The Eskimo was allowed his outfit--his debt--of supplies for the season. The size of the debt the trader would allow depended on the ability of the trapper. When he returned with his furs, he turned them over to the trader who credited them to this debt. As with sys- tems of bondage everywhere, the trapper was seldom able to free him- self completely of his debt. Yearly fluctuations in both the fox populations and in the price of furs on the London fur market contributed to the Eskimo's inden- tured status. An equally important factor was the system of exchange 46Fleming, Archibald the Arctic, pp. 164-65. 47McLean, Twenty-five Year's Service, pp. 327-28. 53 develOped by the Hudson's Bay Company. The monetary unit was a wooden token valued at fifty cents. As the veteran Danish ethnologist, Birket- Smith, points out ". . . such an extremely high minimum unit does not "48 The tokens never left the exactly help to make the goods cheap. trading post. They were given to the Eskimo after his furs were eval- uated by the trader and collected immediately thereafter for his pur- chases. "In this manner," writes Birket-Smith, "the Eskimos are invited indirectly of course, to spend all their money at once, and sometimes they stand cudgelling their brains in order to think of some- thing to buy."49 The traders made every attempt to introduce new products into the trade and thus create new demands among the Eskimos. Godsell, while touring the Hudson's Bay Company posts in 1922, noted: Nearly all the posts appeared to be overloaded with trading goods, much of them very unsuited to the primitive trade of the Arctic. There were powder and rouge compacts, wristwatches, expensive jewellery, silk underwear and coloured silk bloomers galore: hundreds of pairs of house-shoes, or romeos, all for the Eskimo trade, and enough ammunition on the Ladnyinderslev to start a fair-sized war. 0 The post managers relied on Eskimo "fur runners" to promote and extend their range of influence thus enabling the traders to utilize the services of the Eskimos too distant from the post to make 48Kaj Birket-Smith, The Caribou Eskimos. Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24 (Copenhagen: Gyldeddalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), p. 169. 491bid. 50Philip Godsel, Arctic Trader (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1934), p. 256. 54 regular visits. This arrangement was particularly effective in the Western Canadian Arctic where the more acculturated Alaskan Eskimos were imported to assist the trader. The "fur runners" were outfitted with a supply of trade goods by the post manager and sent out to distant camps to bring in the season's catch.51 The trader shared the whaling captain's disinterest in the Eskimo's community life. When he did interfere in the community, it was to insure greater control of the trade. One particularly effi- cient strategy used to achieve this end was for the trader to single out band leaders and endow them with presents and special titles such as "camp boss."52 The traders promoted the institution of "camp boss" as a means of dealing with the entire band. The power and prestige of the "camp boss" was enhanced by his position as an intermediary between his people and the white trader and by the special gifts and equipment he 53 received from the trader. For example, in the Port Harrison area, S‘The traders used "fur runners" for such isolated areas as Victoria Island. Corporal Cornelius ("Report of the Mounted Police," p. 304) met a number of Eskimo "fur runners" there who were employed by traders on the main land. 52This method was commonly used throughout the colonial world. In Canada, the Hudson's Bay Company first employed it to increase their control over the Indians. Outstanding hunters were given the title of captain of a certain river and endowed with presents and Special clothing to signify their rank. Harold A. Innis, The Fur Trade in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), p. 138. 53During this time, alcohol entered the trade. Superintendent Constantine discovered: "Liquor was to a certain extent not a straight trade, but in the way of a bonus to chief and influential men on the coast as inducements to bring in their ivory and fur." C. Constantine, "Report of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police," Sessional Paper, no. 28, 1904, Appendix D, p. 49. 55 Willmott found that the traders presented the "camp boss" with peter- head boats and whaleboats which first of all guaranteed his loyalty and secondly “Since these boats then became the primary means of sum- mer transportation and hunting, the owner controlled the movements of the camp and assumed a position of considerable power.54 The Decline of Co-gperative Activities The establishment of the market economy and its supportive technology produced an Eskimo society with markedly altered ecological relationships both to its physical environment and among its members. Social organization during the pre-contact period consisted of a group of related families joined together in a loosely structured band. The size of the band at any given time depended upon which stage the Eski- mos were in as they followed their annual food quest. The general pattern was for twenty to twenty-five families to combine for the winter seal hunt at a favorable site on the sea ice, and then disperse into smaller groups of four to five families for the inland summer caribou hunt. In addition to their kinship bonds, band members shared volun- tary partnerships for the purposes of co-Operative hunting ventures and to share larger game. The distribution system combined principles of both reciprocity and redistribution. In the large seal camps, the hunter divided his kill with his sharing partners knowing they would reciprocate when they were successful and his family was in need of 54w. E. Willmott, "The Flexibility of Eskimo Social Organiza- tion," Anthropologica 2 (1960): p. 53. 56 food. For the outstanding hunter, who consistently contributed more to the community than he received, reciprocity was bestowed upon him in the form of prestige through the admiration of his fellow band members. Redistribution was also practiced in the smaller camps. Here, game was brought to the isumatak, the recognized leader of the camp, and he oversaw the butchering of the animal and suggested who was in need and who should receive the different cuts of meat.55 Interwoven throughout the fabric of aboriginal Eskimo social organization was the understanding that survival was based on one's ability to contribute unselfishly to the co-operative activities of the community. This basic survival principle, like the taboos regu- lating the Slaughter of game, was imcompatible with the market economy and the new technology. Armed with the rifle and well supplied with fox traps, the hunter no longer needed to depend on his sharing part- ners and the extended kin group for his livelihood. The new tech- nology expanded the ecological parameters the individual Eskimo was able to exploit at the expense of the aboriginal cooperative network. In the trapping communities, the basic production and con- sumption unit consisted of the individual and his nuclear family. The rifle greatly simplified and individualized hunting. The elab- orate techniques employed by all able-bodied members of a band to direct the caribou to selected river crossings where hunters waited in ambush were no longer necessary. The high-powered rifle enabled 55N. H. H. Graburn, Eskimos Without Igloos (Boston: Little, Brown 8. Co., 1969), p. 68. 57 a solitary Eskimo to kill several caribou from a distance on the open barren ground. The collaborative effort in sealing, likewise disappeared. In the aboriginal winter sealing camp, groups of hunters co-operated in watching a number of seal holes in the ice and in sharing the kill. But with the rifle, it was possible for a hunter to kill a seal at a distance in Open water near the ice's edge. The individual's capacity to secure a supply of food without the assistance of cross-community ties rendered obsolete the necessity to maintain the complex sharing network. Eskimo-Trader Socio- economic Relations The monopoly status of the Hudson's Bay Company trader carried with it considerable power, both social and economic, in the isolated Arctic communities. Eskimos dependent on the trader for credit and employment were in no position to challenge his decisions or disregard his advice. Through the allocation of credit, the trader rewarded those who submitted to his authority and accepted his work ethic, while Eskimos who attempted to remain independent, by clinging closely to their traditional livelihood, were publicly ridiculed by the trader for their "laziness."56 The trader's monopoly placed him in a stronger bargaining position than the dependent Eskimos. He dominated the system of pro- duction by defining the resources the Eskimos could use for trade and 56John J. Honigmann, "Intercultural Relations at Great Whale River," American Anthropologist 54 (1952): 514-15. 58 by unilaterally setting the value of the resources. He further increased his dominant position by maintaining the superordinate- subordinate relationship with the Eskimos promoted by the whaling captains. This cultivation of superior status was especially true of the Hudson's Bay Company. According to Godsell, the company ". . made it a practice to keep the natives at a distance in order to enhance their prestige . . . and never were they permitted to sit at the table with the whites."57 The benefit derived by the Eskimo from trade was tenuous. The "outfit“ of the trader was not sufficient to ward off the always ominous threat of starvation. In fact, in many instances, it con- tributed to it. While trapping, the Eskimo's diet consisted largely of a flour, baking powder, lard and water concoction called "bannock" and tea. Birket-Smith warned: Intensive fox trapping, without simultaneous production of meat and Skins for clothing, would be a curse to the Eskimos, and the sooner the Hudson's Bay Company realise that by encouraging such an artificial state of affairs they are in reality des- troying ggeir own prospects, the better it will be for all partTeS. Birket-Smith's warnings were not unfounded. Superintendent Demers reported eight deaths in a band transported by the Hudson's Bay Company boat from Churchill to Cape Eskimo for the purpose of trapping during the winter of 1911-12. Apparently, these peOple were not supplied with enough food in the trade outfit for, reported Demers, ". . . they had a hard time for food, but were very successful 57Godsell, Arctic Trader, p. 258. 58 Birket-Smith, Caribou Eskimos, p. 102. 59 59 trapping." The Hudson's Bay Company post at Chesterfield received 3,000 fox furs during the winter of 1912-13. Yet, even in this abun- dant-harvest season, an Eskimo woman and two children died from 60 stravation. The Rasmussen expedition of 1921-23 reported cases of finding lonely Eskimo trappers dead from starvation while their tents 6] Obviously, a profitable trapping season was overflowed with furs. no guarantee against hunger. The price established for the Eskimos' products varied consid- erably across the Arctic. The economic historian, Innis, concluded: "The company has charged what the traffic would bear . . . and the 62 prices of the posts vary with the amount of competition." Limited competition enabled the traders to charge exorbitant prices. The real profits were made in trading rifles and ammunition.63 Godsell cited the following examples from the Central Arctic in 1923. A thirty-dollar Winchester sold for twenty white fox pelts (worth 59F. J. A. Demers, "Report of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police," Sessional Paper, no. 28, 1914, Appendix A, p. 315. 60W. C. Edgenton, "Report of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police," Sessional Paper, no. 28, 1914, Appendix B, p. 324. 6lJenness, Eskimo Administration, p. 38. 62Innis, Fur Trade in Canada, p. 373. 63Corporal Doak, of the RCMP, related to Godsell how an inde- pendent trader stimulated the rifle trade after it reached the satura- tion point. Captain Klengenberg, an ex-whaler, inported hard steel ramrods from San Francisco and gave one to each Eskimo in his trade area. The hard steel destroyed the rifling and the demand for new rifles began anew. Godsell, "Tragedy,“ p. 304. 60 from forty to sixty dollars per pelt in London), while a two dollar box of ammunition sold for one white fox pelt.64 For a brief period in the 1920's, competition was intense in the Mackenzie Delta and in Arctic Quebec between the independent trad- ers and the larger trading companies. The Eskimos, in turn, benefited from higher returns from their furs. However, it was a very Short- term gain, for the traders soon appropriated their surplus profits through the sale of "useless luxuries and playthings."65 The Role of the Trader in the Dependency Generating Process The trader was clearly the dominant figure when his activities are viewed in terms of his contribution to the dependency generating process. The market type economy he encouraged destroyed the Eskimos' ecological relationships. Eskimo taboos regulating the Slaughter of caribou were undermined by the trader created market demand for hides. The resultant overkill eliminated a major food and clothing source and promoted the Eskimos' dependency on the exotic outposts. Participation in the market economy destroyed the basic Eskimo social relationships regulating co-operative production and distribution. As a result, the focus of commitment changed from the community to the nuclear family. But, the trader, despite his domi- nant position, largely disregarded the society he disrupted. He left to the missionaries and Royal Canadian Mounted Police the task of 64Ihio. 65Jenness, Eskimo Administration, p. 36. 61 directing the Eskimos' adjustment to the new ecological arrangements with all their cultural implications. Arctic Missionaries The Penetration of Arctic Canada by the Missionaries Prior to the post World War 11 period, only two denominations operated in Arctic Canada: the Anglicans and the Roman Catholics. The majority of these missionaries were non-Canadian. The Anglicans were recruited in Great Britain and the Catholics in France and Belgium. The trail they followed was generally one pioneered by the traders; for the traders maintained the only transportation network in Artic Canada. (Compare Figure 4, the diffusion of missions with Figure 3, the diffusion of trading posts.) A difference of opinion exists between individual clergymen of the two denominations concerning the support the trading companies Offered, particularly the Hudson's Bay Company. Early Catholic mis- sionaries found the Protestant dominated Hudson's Bay Company not always responsive to their travel schedules, especially when an Anglican was opening up a new area. Father Lacombe felt "The chief officers [Hudson's Bay Company], few of whom were Catholic, sometimes looked on our arrival and our work with a jealous eye."66 66Katherine Hughes, Father Lacombe The Black-Robe Voyageur (New York: Moffat, Yard & Co., 1911), p. 57. 62 \J $5 Eussmus , ~. 1000-1.“ [SVIIAYED 1/: Fouwoluc out! 3 3 O '.90<1.” L/E 1900-1919 87; o uno-Iuo SOUVNENO LIUIV or a / uosco won mo 4: no no now; In" —— " ' o i ‘ 0'9 (:7 O . mow" \ ‘ , 3, In} 0 Hudson ‘- I 50] Hum II linuul Figure 4.--Missions, 1890-1940. Source: See sources for Table 5, Appendix A. 63 The Anglicans, on the other hand, were very appreciative of 67 the Hudson's Bay Company's support. The Anglican Reverend Cody praised the fur companies for ". . . opening the frontier for mis- sionary work . . . for ruling the savage tribes with a firm hand and 68 Reverend Fleming, . for preserving Canada as a British colony. later Anglican ArchbishOp of the Arctic, credited the "Bay" for pro- viding a stipend of $5,000 per year to get his ministry started among the Eskimos.69 The Basis of Missionary Domination The missionary's power to displace the traditional decision- making process in Eskimo institutions was based on his association with the technologically superior society imposed by the trader and police officer and on the duties he assumed within the exotic super- structure--education and medical care. 67Early Hudson's Bay Company officials were not so favorable to the idea of having missionaries around as is evident in one of George Simpson's letters protesting the presence of a parson: . . . the Parson will be the only idle man about the place, and he will have an opportunity of seeing the whole routine of our business which may be converted to an improper use at some future period, or he may feel it a point of Duty to give infor- mation of our immoral conduct (according to his doctrine) to people who might afterwards make a handle of it to the injury of the concern. Simpson, "Governor Simpson to,“ p. 182. 68H. A. Cody, Ed., An Apostle of the North: Memiors of Bishop W. C. Bompas (London: Seeley & Co., Ltd., 1908), p. 42. 69Archibald Fleming, Dwellers in Arctic Night (London: Sheldon Press, 1928), p. 77. 64 The missionary's major contestant in the struggle for souls (other than a missionary from a rival denomination) was the Eskimo shaman, the angakok. In his many roles, the angakok served his people as visionary, physician, philosopher and priest. The angakoks were the guardians of the traditional beliefs and taboos which assured the survival of the society, but their power soon dissipated in the new environment imposed by the whites. The missionary attacked them as people possessed by Satan and used his superior medical knowledge as a tool to combat their influ- ence. The trader, by encouraging the slaughter of caribou, indirectly undermined the angakok's position and aided the missionary in suppres- sing them. The following statement by an Eskimo interviewed by Rassmussen in 1923 at Back River is particularly revealing regarding this point: From those who live further inland than we do (Quernermiut and others) we have heard the rumour that all the beasts we live on are becoming fewer and fewer every year. They are dying out, they are being used up . . . of course the shamans ought to help us with all this. They could do so in the old days, for then they used to go down and see her (Nuliajuk) at the place where she lived under the sea . . . . Only the really great shamans in olden times could do that. Nowadays one lives merely in the memories of all that once was possible! In those times there were only few shamans, but they were very skillful. Now we have numbers of them, but their art is of a small order and only few sensible people believe in their power.70 Throughout the Canadian North, the Federal Government continued the policy it inherited from the British Colonial Office of leaving administrative functions in the hands of the fur trade companies. In no two areas was this "do-nothing policy" more evident than in 70Rassmussen, "Netsilik Eskimos," p. 500. 65 education and health. From the very beginning of colonial rule in Canada, these services were passed off to the Hudson's Bay Company which in turn relegated them to the missionaries. In the hands of the missionaries, these services became avenues for conversion. Bishop Fleming wrote about the value of his medical work: Medical work helped a great deal in building up an influence which afterwards became a dominant factor in turning people to Christ. They readily saw the value of prOper treatment for disease, and even their conjurers came to the missionaries when suffering. Afterwards many of them reasoned that since the teachers were there to do good, their religion must be good too.71 Education remained solely in the hands of the missionaries until the 1950's. Both the Anglicans and Catholics built schools and the Federal Government subsidized them. The content of the subject matter was the domain of the missionary and, as would be expected, religious subjects predominated. In time, control of the educational system became the major means of prOpagating the faith. The Role of the Missionary in the Dependengy Generating Process The Christian missionary's role in the expansion of western culture and social institutions is the subject of endless discourse. To some observers, the missionary was a blight on the stability of traditional social organization, to others he provided new meaning and purpose for peOples who experienced the destruction of their 71Archibald Fleming, Perils of the Polar Pack (London: Sheldon Press, 1932), p. 78. Father Coccola describes the important role played by medical science in his struggle with an angakok at Bathurst Inlet. Raymond de Coccola and Paul King, Ayorama (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1955). 66 societies by economic and military domination. No doubt both assess- ments are correct. The early missionaries were dedicated to the cause of improv- ing the Eskimo's chances of survival, not only in the world hereafter, but in this world as well. They introduced medicine and hygienic principles to help ward off the menace of new diseases which contact brought. By learning the Eskimo's language and gaining his confidence, the missionaries helped him interpret the bewildering new environment. Prior to the arrival of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, mission- aries fought a lone battle to protect the Eskimos from the abuses of exploitative whalers and traders. At the same time, rival missionaries dealt Eskimo social solidarity a severe blow through their competition for converts from the same corrmunity. The Anglican-Catholic rivalry caused spatial and social segregation among the Eskimos. For example, Gillingham reports the beginnings of such a contest at Coppermine in 1930: Where there had been one large family of natives, there were now two cliques, who patronized the church of whichever mission- ary they liked best. Yet when a native died the bereaved rela- tives often asked both missionaries to attend and the patient gxglggitgggffig?gnoggy one could do this, that they must choose, By 1938, the competition at Coppermine was such that the rival mission- aries were haggling over the dead and near dead to determine in whose cemetary, the Catholic's or the Anglican's, the dead would be buried.73 72 p. 185. D. W. Gillingham, Umiak (London: Museum Press Ltd., 1955), 73Finnie, Lure, p. 97. 67 At Eskimo Point, population 200, VanStone reported the compe- tition between the two denominations had led to hard feelings on the part of the rival missionaries and was reflected in the behavior of 74 Families the Eskimos toward community members of the opposing faith. spatially segregated themselves in the community based on their relig- ious affiliation. Interaction between the two sectors was limited as both groups maintained separate social halls and prohibited inter- marriage, even going to the extreme of maintaining separate ceme- teries. Far more significant than these cases of mission rivalry was their united opposition to the belief system of the Eskimos. They actively contributed to the process that overwhelmed the Eskimos and instilled in their mind the inferiority of their traditional beliefs. The early missionaries, spurred on by the moralistic tenets of their religious training and assured of the truths they possessed by the technological superiority of the civilization they represented, saw little of value in the Eskimos' culture. All agreed that the Eskimos' morals were deplorable, but some went even further. The pioneer Catholic missionary, Father Duchaussois, found the Eskimos to be “great liars" and "thieves also."75 Duchaussoi's Anglican contemporary, Bishop Bompas, provides a more graphic descrip- tion for the parishioners back in London. He compared Eskimo exist- ence to life in a pigsty: 74James VanStone and W. H. Oswalt, "Three Eskimo Communities," Anthropological ngers of the University of Alaska 9 (1960: 43-44). 75Pierre Duchaussois, Mid Snow and Ice (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1937), p. 351. 68 . go to the nearest well- to- do farmer, and spend a night in his pigsty (with the pigs of course), and this is exactly life with the Esquimaux . . . . As to the habits of your companions. the advantage would be probably on the side of the pigs . . . . Bompas is also in agreement with Duchaussois when he notes the 77 Bompas, however, does Eskimos are "great thieves and soon angry." give some credit to these people who survived for over four thousand years in the harshest environment on earth without missionary enlight- enment. He found them ". . . capable of attachment and gratitude; and 78 Father Bulliard, who spent fifteen . quite free of ill-will." years among the Eskimos, discovered that the more one lives with them the more one is ". . . apt to overlook their charm and simply write them off as thieves, liars and murderers."79 Volumes of material written by explorers, enthnographers, police officers and traders can be cited to contradict these Opinions. The important point, however, is that these are the written attitudes of some of the leaders of the exotic religious institutions Eskimo culture faced when the missions were being established. They viewed the Eskimos as "degraded pagans" to be remade in the white man's image. In the economic realm, the missionaries expounded the princi- ples of the market economy that destroyed Eskimo independence. The evidence indicates the Anglicans were more partial to Eskimo partici- pation in the market economy than the Catholic missionaries. The 76Cody, An Apostle, p. 117. 77Ibid., p. 105. 781bid. 79 Roger Buliard, Inuk (New York: Farrar, Straus & Young, Inc., 1951), p. 66. 69 Anglican Bishop Fleming credits mission instruction with promoting good work habits and honesty in the Eskimo.80 The converts, it seems, made the best employees and were trusted by the post managers. How much these differences are rooted in national and religious chauvanism rather than economic philOSOphy is problematical. Bishop Fleming clearly leaves little doubt of his support for the market econ- omy and his native England when he praises the Hudson's Bay Company and the Eskimos for bringing in one million dollars in furs annually 81 to the London market. On the other hand, Godsell complained that Catholic missionaries encouraged their converts to trade with the Hud- son's Bay Company's French owned competitor, Revillon Freres.82 Obviously the differences between the two denominations can be exaggerated. No doubt the situation in the Arctic is similar to the debate centering around Weber's controversial thesis on the role of certain Protestant sects in the rise of the spirit of capitalism in Europe.83 In conclusion, the missionaries played a different, though in many respects complementary role in the dependency generating proc- ess, than the trader. They reinforced the position of the trader in 80Fleming, Archibald the Arctic, P- 128- 8lFleming, Dwellers, p. 74. 82Philop Godsell, Red Hunters of the Snows (London: Robert Hale Ltd., 1938). 83M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Scribner, 1958). R. W. Green, ed., Protestantism and Capitalism: The Weber Thesis and the Critics (Boston: Heath, 1959)} 70 the economic realm and promoted their own supremacy in religion, edu- cation, and medical care. They attacked the world view, i.e., the ideological foundations of Eskimo culture. In one missionary's own words on the role of the missions, Reverend Whittaker observed: Precept and example, through the power of the Holy Spirit had transformed a one- -time ignorant, unmoral, violent, fear haunted people into an industrious, peaceful, clean- -1ixing community, of which our government is and will be proud.8 Royal Canadian Mounted Police Traditional Methods of Conflict Resolution . . I informed them and all other Eskimo we met on our patrol that we had been sent to visit them by "The Big White Chief. " That we were the men who looked after the peOple, and told them what was right and wrong . . .85 So wrote Inspector LaNauze of his first encounter with the Eskimos of the Central Arctic. But, Eskimo society was not without concepts of "right" and "wrong." Like all societies, the Eskimos had established methods of maintaining social order and of rewarding approved behavior and discouraging disruptive behavior. Unlike popu- lous societies, there was less need for their methods to be highly structured and formalized but, nevertheless, they assured the stability of Eskimo culture for centuries before the arrival of the police. Within the band, the people looked to the oldest active hunters for leadership and advice. Decisions were made only after careful 845' E- Whittaker, "Recollections of an Arctic Parson," (Ottawa: DIAND, Library, n.d.), p. 13. 85LaNauze, "Report of the Mounted Police," p. 198. 71 consultation produced a community consensus. For this reason, the Eskimos called their leader isumatak, "the thinker." The most power- ful force for social control was public Opinion and avoidance. In extreme cases the offender, threatening the survival of the community, faced death through communal action or expulsion for a period of time from the community. The Imposition of Canadian Law in the Arctic The dependency generating process was well underway before the RCMP arrived in great enough numbers to effect their own changes in Eskimo society. The first two police detachments were established in 1903, and by 1920, only two more had been added to serve all Arctic Canada (Figure 5). Initially, the RCMP'S major functions in the Arctic were to assure Canadian sovereignty and to protect the Eskimos, especially in Beaufort Sea, from the whalers and traders. However, they immediately became the sole government administrators in Arctic Canada performing a variety of duties ranging from census taker to welfare officer.86 Criminal investigations were the least of their duties, but in the course of these activities they made their first impact on the lives of the Eskimos. To their credit, the early RCMP officers showed a great deal of discretion in their dealings with the Eskimos. If possible, they avoided interfering in community disputes when homocide was not an 86The Northwest Territories Amendment Act of 1905 provided for a connfissioner to administer the territory under instructions from the Minister of Interior in Ottawa. Until 1920, the Commissioner was Lieutenant-Colonel White of the RCMP. " ~39. ROYAL CANADIAN MOUNTED POLICE ‘ DETACHMENTS ”uncommon cum --~~ mu out or mum PM MKS 1”) 1019.092. 0 09304.00 ”0' 11mm Figure 5.--Royal Canadian Mounted Police Detachments, 1900-1940. Source: See sources for Table 6, Appendix A. 73 issue. Superintendent Moodie expressed the concerns of the majority of officers in the following statement: All superstitions have to be handled gently, and it is worse than useless to attempt to upset old customs in a day. It is a matter of time to change these, and it can only be done by87 first obtaining the good will and confidence of the natives. However, the RCMP were in the Arctic to impose a totally alien legal system on the Eskimos and, in the course of their duties, they became figures of absolute authority in the small communities. In the words of VanStone, this authority, at times, could be quite arbitrary: Direct control over individual affairs varied with the particular constable stationed in the community. Some appear to have limited their interaction in village affairs to instances where intervention was clearly necessary, while others became minor dictators disrupting family life and making arbitrary decisions that took little or no account of the feelings or thoughts of the individual Eskimos invoived.88 At first, the police interceded in the Eskimo legal process only in cases of alleged murder. Misunderstandings occurred fre- quently when traders and missionaries entered Eskimo camps during the first quarter of the twentieth century; the result was the loss of several white lives at the hands of the Eskimos. The RCMP sent expeditions to investigate the circumstances surrounding these deaths and to take into custody the individuals clearly in violation of Canadian law. When evidence revealed provoca- tion on the part of the whites, the investigations either terminated or light sentences were recommended. When Eskimos were brought to 87Moodie, "Mounted Police Report," p. 8. 88VanStone & Oswalt, Communities, pp. 43-44. 74 trial, the Canadian Government sent not only judges, but juries as well to the Arctic--at a considerable expense--to assure the Eskimos 89 This system deprived the Eskimos of the right to a trial by jury. judgement by their own peers since the jurymen were selected in south- ern Canada and not in the Eskimo camps. The objectives of holding trials in the Arctic were twofold: first, to assure the Eskimos of the fairness of the law and, second, to impress upon them that they were now living under Canadian law and must abide by the decisions of the police. This latter objective was dramatically illustrated in the 1922 hanging of two Eskimo youths involved in a wife stealing raid resulting in the deaths of several Eskimos and, later, those of a police officer and a trader. Word of this display of Canadian authority repidly spread among the Eskimos and eliminated any question of where the locus of power rested in Arctic Canada. After the hanging, Inspector LaNauze reported from the remote Central Arctic that the Eskimos spread the word throughout the North that the police would come to the villages and take away those guilty of crimes.90 Summary: The Dppendency_Generating Process The first group to have a pronounced influence on the Eskimos of Arctic Canada were the whalers, beginning primarily in the 1840's and continuing into the first decade of the twentieth century. The 89A trial at Herschel Island in 1922 of two Eskimos convicted of murder cost the Federal Government $100,000. Knud Rasmussen, Across Arctic America (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968), p. 280. 90C. D. LaNauze, "The Bathurst Inlet Patrol," RCMP Quarterly, 5 (1937): 26. 75 whalers initiated the dependency generating process as a result of the technological displacement of traditional tools for those manu- factured in Europe and America. Although not an overt policy of the whalers, the dependency generating process was initiated as the Eski- mos began to rely on the annual arrival of ships to bring the means required to secure a livelihood. These tools and weapons could neither be replaced nor repaired locally. Simultaneously, as whaling collapsed in the early 1900's, there emerged a new phase in the dependency generating process with the formation of an exotic subcultural system in Canada's Arctic based primarily upon the trader, the missionary, and the RCMP. Into the vacuum left by the whalers, these three institutions, as shown by the number of trading posts, mission stations, and RCMP detachments, grew rapidly between 1915 and 1928 (Figure 6). Before 1915, these insti- tutions generally were concentrated on many of the same sites where whaling stations were located: Baffin Island and the Hudson Bay- Foxe Basin regions of the Eastern Arctic, and in the Beaufort Sea region of the Western Arctic (compare Figure 2 and Figure 6a). The rapid diffusion of the exotic institutions between 1915 and 1928 overpowered traditional Eskimo culture. During this period the market economy was firmly implanted and the Eskimos became a dependent people--dependent on the exotic agents to manage their economy, administer their communities, and direct their religious experience. In the altered environment imposed by forces beyond their con- trol, the Eskimos were no longer self-sufficient in food, clothing, 76 weapons, tools, and social organization. Their angakoks' and isumataks' positions of influence were undermined and the caribou herds destroyed. Their material survival depended on the market exchange of furs they brought to the trader. The conditions of this exchange were arbitrarily set by the trade interests in Montreal and London. The missionary defined the new system of socioreligious behavior and replaced the angokok as their spiritual leader. The authority of the RCMP officer replaced community decision-making in matters of social control and eroded the institution of the isumatak. 77 7" WM/ 0 01)) FE; ,4 {f y LB @xo‘nc lNSTITUTIjOg: E:\3% ofing fi:::::? \\L\\ ,fl [1‘0 ”.1150” 50/ (\1928 0M W W r31 ‘ @315???“ EXOTIC msmunows «- is N Figure 6.--The Diffusion of Exotic Institutions into the Canadian Arctic Shown by the Institutions Actually Operating During the Times Indicated by the Graphs and Maps. Source: See sources for Figures 3, 4 and 5. CHAPTER IV A CULTURAL SYNTHESIS Figures 6b and 7 show the initial diffusion of the exotic insti- tutions was complete by the 1930's: the traders reached remote Oscar Bay on Bothnia Peninsula in 1928, the RCMP manned a network of cen- trally located detachments by 1930, and the missionaries were well established in the Central Arctic by 1935. A relatively stable Arctic contact society, revolving around the trapping and trading of furs, crystallized at this time. The economic and social organization of this new order represented a cultural synthesis of the forces set in motion during the dependency generating period. The exotic agents consolidated the power they gained through the dependency generating period and worked out accomno- dations among themselves to assure the stability of the new order. The great majority of the Eskimos, relegated to a subordinate position, eked out a marginal existence following their traplines. Those who worked directly for the exotic agents performed menial non-decision- making tasks as traders' helpers, catechists, and special constables. Consolidation and Accommodation A review of Figures 3, 4, and 5 illustrates the spatial changes that occurred in Arctic Canada by 1940 as the exotic institutions 78 Estimated Caribou Population (In millions) 130 T\ [:1 TRADING POSTS A ‘1 m MISSIONS I \ —- RCMP. DETACHMENTS f ‘ I20 - CO-OPERATIVES I /\ I . \ ' \ I \ ’ g \L / \‘ HO 1 \ " \ ll 1 \ I ”It \ ’ c I / 3 i r 100 _‘ \ 1’ 3| \ l’ :1 V 2' , .- . 90 so 0 c .2 E m E s - o L 60 .3 E 3 z Caribou Population 8 N O k\\\\. \\ 20 'u O bu I890 \ 1900 1910 1920 1930 1940 1950 1960 1970 0 Figure 7.--The Cultural Synthesis. Source: For estimates of caribou population, see footnote 47; for trading posts, mission stations, RCMP detachments, and co-operatives, see Figures 3, 4, 5 and 9 8O closed or relocated operations in order to consolidate their control. In the Western Arctic, the RCMP reduced the Herschel Island detach- ment to a summer outpost and completely closed their operation at Baillie Island. They directed the administration of the Mackenzie Delta-Beaufort Sea region from Aklavik, with a small outpost at Maitland. The detachments at Bernard Harbour and Tree River were closed in favor of the more centrally located Coppermine. The addi- tion of the schooner St. Roch, in 1928, provided the RCMP with a floating detachment between Herschel Island and King William Island. In Hudson Bay, detachments were opened at Baker Lake and Eskimo Point to effectively administer the Keewatin region. A new detachment was Opened on northern Baffin Island, at Pond Inlet, to complement those at Pangnirtung and Lake Harbour. The Port Burwell detachment was limited to a summer Operation and its functions moved to Port Harrison to better serve Arctic Quebec. The period of rapid expansion followed by consolidation is reflected in the changing strength of the force evident in Table 2. The missionaries consolidated their position by filling in the remaining gaps in their arctic Diocesses. Missions at Coppermine, Burnside, Cambridge Bay, and Pelly Bay completed the network in the Central Arctic. In Foxe Basin and on northern Baffin Island, missions were opened at Coral Harbour, Repulse Bay, Igloolik, Arctic Bay, and Pond Inlet. The consolidation of the trading operation is evident from Figures 3 and 7. Federal regulations on trading, combined with the .I l1 I I'll. lull To Ill 81 TABLE 2.--Strength of the RCMP Arctic Branch--l9lO-l940. No. of Date Detachments Men 1910 2 6 1915 2 8 1920 4 10 1925 10 34 1930 15 44 1935 13 37 1940 11 31 Source: Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Annual Reports (Ottawa: King's Printer), 1910-1940. Great Depression took their toll Of the independent traders and small trading companies, leaving the Hudson's Bay Company to monopolize the trade:l Socioeconomic relations between the Eskimos and the exotic agents, and between the exotic agents, themselves, stabilized. The missionaries and police brought stability and continuity to the con- tact situation. They viewed themselves as the protectors of the Eskimos and actively co-Operated to curb the distribution of alcohol 1The first major setback for the independent traders came in 1929 with the passage of a law requiring trading posts to be permanent and operate at least eight months per year. This law put an end to the "floating posts" operated by the independent traders. The "float- ing post" was a sled or schooner loaded with trade goods which the independent trader used as he moved from one Eskimo camp to another intercepting furs before they reached the stationary posts of the larger established fur companies. The remaining companies, large enough to compete with the Hudson's Bay Company, were unable to sur- vive the Great Depression and the corresponding drop in fur prices. 82 and the abuses of unscrupulous traders. The elimination of competing traders reduced many of these problems. The missionary and police officer, as well as the established trader, no longer had to contend with the numerous operators of the "floating post," who were transient, difficult to control and unpredictable in their behavior with the Eskimos. For the Hudson's Bay Company, the decline of competitors strengthened their position to impose monopolistic uniformity on the trapping economy. They co-operated with the missionaries and police to maintain order in the trapping camps and provided limited relief to destitute Eskimos. Relief was incorporated into the Company's credit system and was more in the form of a loan than an outright gift. The elimination of competing traders assured the Company that credit extended would be repaid when trapping conditions improved. Competition among the exotic agents thus became limited mainly to cases where rival missionaries from the same community competed for converts. Domination-Diffusion Centers The focal points of the new order were a series of culture contact communities that were well estabished by 1930. They are identified on Figure 8 in terms of their Spheres of influence. The dates mark the establishment of the exotic institutions, either in o 0 o o D o o 2 0 D the commun1t1es, or 1n the1r 1mmed1ate env1rons. These commun1t1es 2The evolution of Pongnirtung is outlined below to clarify the dating procedure. Pongnirtung is located on the north side of 83 O m flffiJo a ggkj $232bx$fi$fi$fi$fi$fi$fik .c .:i;2:3;I;1:2zI;I;I;I;2;2°3;I;I;1:3;2:2;2;2;Z;1;2;1;2;3;Z; 1- .'E:5‘5‘5555553555552555555535:=:=E=E=E=S=E=E=: :2: 20 ...... Figure 9.--Mineral Claims Recorded-Northwest Territories, 1961-1970. Source: Canada. Northern Economic and Development Branch, Mines and Minerals North of 60 (Ottawa: DIAND, 1970), p. 40. 119 .aF .a .Aoump .czoo upsocoum cgmzucoz .mumcmu "mucaom .F~m_-Pmmp .apeeoe new nee Pao save: aFoz omaaso<--.o_ «tempo swv uomiw Km. Ohm. a8. $0. #00. 000. n8. '8. n00. N8. .00. 08. - 1 1 i O t\||||||\\\. mmmmwhmmfllmmmmwlJHHHHHHHHHH2IIIIIHH1I\\ .\ \\ C‘ \\\ LrttobrakmuflJ'amz'XJ-gzo. o... .o....... .o.. .. ............... ololon . 0°- OON ........................................................... 0°” 00% «mick-gun. 532.532 024 >¢Ot¢¢uk 2023* hammm m<¢ 02¢ 1:0 mmoz: DAM: madmmo< 00a 120 Today, the position of the multinational corporations is unchallenged. Seven of the eleven northern mines are foreign-con- trolled, accounting for 64 percent of the revenues. And 69.1 percent of the 440 million acres in the Yukon and N.W.T. leased for oil and gas exploration are held by international petroleum corporations.3 Canadian equity in Arctic petroleum develOpment is concen- trated in Panarctic Oils Ltd., a consortium of twenty private com- panies, and the Federal Government. Panarctic is 70 percent Canadian owned with the government holding 45 percent of the shares. Its total leased acreage numbers 55 million.4 According to the government's 1970 oil and gas report, the potentially productive land is now under lease.5 This fact accounts for the levelling-off of new claims in 1970-71 (Figure 9). The rapid- ity with which the government released these claims to outside inter— ests is disconcerting in view of its position that the Eskimos have no land or mineral rights. Their constitutional position--defined by the Federal Government--exc1udes them from ownership of the hunting and trapping grounds they occupied for centuries. The concept of of Canada. The potential raw gas reserves for the Arctic Islands is computed to be 260.7 trillion cubic feet or nearly 36 percent of Canada's total. DIAND, Oil and Gas North of 60 (Ottawa: Queen's Printer, 1970), p. 11. 3Courtney Tower, "What's Happened to Our Northern Dream?" Maclean's 83 (May, 1970): 2. 4DIAND, "Government Invests Additional $13.5 million in Pan- arctic Oils," Press Release, Ottawa, 4 February 1970. SDIAND, Oil and Gas North of 60, p. l. 121 Indian treaty land does not apply to the Eskimos either; they have no reserves, nor are lands held in trust for them.6 Thus, when conflict arises, as it often does, between the two forms of Arctic land-use--exploration and trapping--the trapper must yield to the powerful multinational petroleum and mining cor- porations. Usher, in a highly publicized report, recently exposed such a confrontation between the Banks Island trappers and two petroleum companies, ELF Oil (French) and Deminex (West German).7 The Bankslanders' attempt to protect their trapping grounds from seismic exploration was motivated by a fundamental principle of rational resource development: ". . . if the consequences of develop— ment are unknown, they should be determined as far as possible bgjggg 8 deciding whether to proceed with the development." But the Eskimos quickly discovered that both the oil companies and the Federal Govern- ment were motivated by a desire for quick development. In his analysis, Usher relates the oil companies' victory to the isolation of Eskimos from the centers of decision-making: The companies, armed with legal and technical experts and vast amounts of money, are well versed in the arts of lobbying and persuasion. They are, moreover, well represented in govern- ment, by people who have worked in industry, who understand its interests, who move in the same world and share the same basic purposes in life as executives, lawyers, engineers and techni- cians. The commonality of experience, values and aspirations 6Canada, "The Indian and the Eskimo in the Northwest Terri- tories and Arctic Quebec," Proceedings of the Special Senate Committee on Poverty, 2nd session, 28th Parliament, no. 14, Part II, 1970, p. 51. 7Peter Usher, The Bankslanders: Economy and Ecology of a Frontier Trapping Community, The Community. vol. 3 (Ottawa: DIAND, 1971). 81bid., p. 49. 122 between government and industry personnel is great. The fact that the government is nominally regulating the activities of the oil companies creates a gulf, to be sure, but in no way as vast as that between the government and the trappers. For the trappers are quite unrepresented in government. Their way of life is considered alien and primitive, and even though govern- ment personnel responsible for their welfare may be sincere and competent, most have little understanding or empathy with their needs and problems. Real communication between the two parties is almost impossible. Usher's explanation for the isolation is penetrating. It incorporates the obvious disadvantages occurring from a lack of legal expertise and capital with the obdurate cultural patterns separating the Eskimos from their government and the centers of decision-making. The Unresolved Question The Federal Government is sacrificing both Canadian autonomy and the rights of its native citizens for the sake of rapid resource development. This conclusion is a reasonable one to draw from the foregoing discussion on the multinational corporations in the northern economy. The bargaining away of Canadian autonomy is conditioned by hard economic realities. Canada is an underdeveloped region when measured in terms of its favorable population/resource balance. The small population of 22 million can neither generate the capital to sustain large—scale resource exploration and development nor absorb ‘0 Thus, the the resultant production through its internal markets. government's only recourse, given the high priority it places on rapid and extensive development, is to favorably accommodate the 91bid., p. 59. 10Oil and gas exploration expenditures have skyrocketed from $11 million in 1960 to approximately $150 million at present. The figure is expected to reach $200 million by 1975. DIAND, Oil and Gas North of 60, pp. 15 & 25. 123 multinational corporations in return for capital and technology and for access to world markets. However, is there a positive rationale for the subjugation of native people's rights to the demands of resource development? The Federal Government, through its actions, implies that the answer is yes. Resource administration is guided in part by the premise that northern development will benefit the Eskimos and northern Indians. The goal is to provide a higher standard of living for the northern residents in the form of education, housing, and health improvements. In the words of the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Develop- ment, "One of the best ways of doing this is to encourage oil and mineral exploration and development, so that these opportunities will be available to our northern peoples on their own grounds."n Whether the resource development envisioned by the government will result in substantial improvement in the standard of living is the unresolved question in the North today, particularly in light of the present level of involvement by native people in the economy. To begin with, statistics on Eskimo and Indian participation in northern commercial activities are not encouraging. Only a few fig- ures on the income differential in the N.W.T. are needed to make this point. Northern whites averaged $2,922 per capita in 1963 compared 12 to $510 for Indians and $426 for Eskimos. In 1968, the Eskimos of 11Speech by the Hon. Jean Cretien, Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, to the 1971 Symposium on Petroleum Eco- nomhxsand Evaluation (Dallas, Texas), 9 March 1971, Press Release, DIAND. 12DIAND, The Northwest Territories Todgy_(0ttawa: Queen's Printer, 1965), p. 53. 124 '3 0f the Keewatin Region subsisted on a per capita income of $610. this total, $498 is itemized as earned and $112 as unearned in the form of government assistance. The income differential reflects the absence of opportunities for native pe0ple in the economic life of the North, specifically in wage employment and in private business ventures. First, their participation in the wage labor force is limited to unskilled tran- sient positions. In the mining industry, for example, 63 (5.3 percent) 14 Yet, Eskimos, Indians, of the 1,182 men employed in 1968 were native. and Metis make up 63.5 percent of the population in the N.W.T. A similar situation exists in the government services. The Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Developmnet listed 8,376 full-time employees in 1968--on1y 764 were Eskimos and Indians.15 The Federal Government contends current develOpments in petro- leum will remedy the unemployment situation. According to the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 10,000 workers will be 16 employed if major oil fields are Opened up. The Minister predicts approximately 4,000 jobs will go to Eskimos and Indians. 13 14 Canada, "The Indian and the Eskimo, " p. 110. Ibid. 15Canada, "Standing Committee on Indian Affairs and Northern DevelOpment," Proceedings of the House of Commons, no. 7, 29 November 1968, p. 132. 16Speech by the Hon. Jean Chretien, Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, to the Pacific Northwest Trade Association (Portland, Oregon), 20 April 1970, Press Release, DIAND. 125 If indeed these jobs do materialize, they will represent at best a very short term gain. The labor demands of oil fields are minimal once the construction requirements are satisfied. In fact, permanent employment will probably level off at 400 once the oil fields are in production.17 Meanwhile, the native pOpulation in the N.W.T. will certainly continue to increase at the current 4 percent per annum rate. Secondly, native people are unable to share in the management and ownership of the lucrative service industries that have prolif- erated in the last fifteen years to supply government, military, and resource exploration needs. What's more, with the exception of scattered co-operative successes, the Eskimos' future in this area parallels the dismal wage employment projection outlined above. Individual Eskimos and northern Indians lack the capital and entrepreneurial skills necessary for establishing businesses to exploit opportunities in the altered northern environment. On the other hand, southern Canadians plus a number of Americans are rapidly filling the void and cashing in on the boom. The Indian Brotherhood brought this problem to the attention of their readers in the case '8 Three of the four main of the flourishing N.W.T. tourist industry. lodges in the Great Slave Lake area are owned by Americans, while the fourth is owned by a southern Canadian. The Brotherhood singled out 17Ralph Hedlin and John 0. Hamilton, "The Mackenzie Valley Alternative," Maclean's 85 (July, 1972): 46. 18"Frontier Lodge: Tourists Pay $65 a Day, Native Staff Get 50¢ an Hr.," Native Press, 7 August 1971. 126 the Canadian owned operation for its grossly low salaries. Tourists paid $65 a day at the lodge while the native staff received 50¢ per hour. At Pangnirtung, on Baffin Island, a former Hudson's Bay Com- pany manager established a lodge and fishing camp in 1970. Guests paid $45 per day and have included such individuals as the presidents of General Motors, U. S. Steel, and Rockwell. The local Eskimos serve as guides and kitchen help.19 The tourist industry depends on the cultural, biotic, and physical attributes of the Eskimos' and northern Indians' native land. Yet, only in communities with active co-operative societies have these exotically controlled operations been challenged and the native peOple allowed to derive the total economic benefit from tourism. A profile of the backgrounds and skills of six of the new northern entrepreneurs is the subject of an article by Carney.20 These men, through their technical skills and knowledge of the econ- omy have the potential of becoming extremely wealthy from tranSporta- tion, construction, and resource exploration related contracts. Carney appropriately calls these men the "New Sourdoughs." Their Eurocanadian backgrounds dramatize how little conditions have changed, in terms of access to Opportunities in the North, since the first whalers and traders appeared on the scene. 19"Pangnirtung, N.W.T.," Edmonton Journal, 20 October 1972. 20 46-50. Pat Carney, "The New Sourdoughs." Maclean's 84 (May, 1971): 127 When the Eskimos and northern Indians acquire the necessary technical and financial prerequisites to compete with the "New Sourdoughs." they will face a well established commercial structure. Is it realistic to expect future native entrepreneurs to have any better success in entering the established conmercial structure in the North than their brethren have had in the white dominated commu- nities bordering the reserves in southern Canada? So far, the discussion has relied entirely on current economic factors such as income levels, employment rates, and ownership in new industries for an indication of the future role of native people in the northern economy. The scrutiny of these economic indicators offers little assurance that the disparity in access to northern opportunities between native pe0p1e and whites will change despite continued and even expanded resource development. There is additional support for this contention that is per- haps even more convincing and indicative of the future prospects for native involvement than the economic measures. From the 1952 Eskimo Affairs Conference to the present, native pe0ple have been excluded from major policy planning meetings on northern development. The formats from a number of these conferences give the impression the North is an uninhabited region to be developed by whites for the benefit of southern Canadians. The National Northern Development conferences held in Edmonton since the early 1960's are a prime example. The advisory board directing the sessions is composed of officials from powerful inter- national and southern Canadian institutions: the presidents of 128 petroleum, mining, transportation, and banking corporations, plus a number of senior govenment and university personnel. The registered delegate rosters from the conferences represent the same interests. Despite the fact that the agendas have ranged from man in the North to petroleum in northern development, native people were excluded until Chief John Tetlichi addressed the group in 1970. The Chief's message was brief and to the point. The native people need technical education to participate in northern development, but more importantly, education is needed by those who make the decisions that ignore native desires for their land and culture. . we feel that you in the rest of Canada could also use an education in human relationship. You must also learn that there are Indians, Eskimos and Metis, and they are men just like you and does in: not deserve the same break you would give your own brother and the same tolerance you would show any other person?21 Chief Tetlichi's appeal for co-operation and understanding in resource development apparently fell on an unresponsive audience. Two years later, in 1972, over seventy leaders of industry, govern- ment and academia convened at a ski resort on Mt. Gabriel, Quebec. The Federal Government sponsored the conference to establish guide- lines for northern development and the needs of northern people. The rationale offered by the conference planners for the absence of native people was true to their technological credo. They felt 2lJohn Tetlichi, "What Northern Development Means to Northern Pe0p1e," Proceedings of the 5th National Northern Development Conference: Oil and Northern Development (Edmonton, 1970):'pp. 68-69. 129 native people lacked the kind of scientific and technological educa- tion necessary to participate in the sessions.22 After three days of meetings, the conferees agreed they lacked a sufficient fund of knowledge about the North. This conclusion must have satisfied all interests. One can argue that it provided the representatives from academia with strong arguments for continued research funding, the Federal Government was not pressured to change its vague noncommittal approach to native resource rights, and the multinational corporations were able to continue their resource extrac- tion policies unhindered by specific guidelines recommended at the conference. The conferees are correct in concluding that more knowledge is needed about the North, but it is not the type of knowledge the Mt. Gabriel group is especially interested in. It is knowledge about how to phase out an exotic power structure with all its modern-day components--industria1, governmental, and academic--and replace it with truly representative indigenous leadership. There is at the present time, and has been for several years, the native personnel to plan and direct a conference. And one can rest assured their concluding statement would be more constructive and specific than the general one of needing additional exotically controlled and interpreted studies to identify the problems of native people in northern development. 22Edmonton Journal, 17 October 1972. 130 The hypocrisy of the government sponsored Mt. Gabriel Confer- ence is underscored by the following statement of the Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development to the Special Senate Com- mittee on Poverty in 1970: . we have violated one of the central tenets of democratic society: that each individual has the right to the necessary degree of freedom to develop his potential as a human being, in his own way--and this implies the right to make his own de- cisions . . . . A group brought up in tutelage . . . is denied the Opportunity for such growth, and we have impeded such growth among Indian and Eskimo people. Finally, it is difficult to avoid the racial overtones in the logic of excluding native people because they are not "scientifi- cally" qualified. This logic was challenged by Carpenter twenty years ago, shortly after the 1952 Eskimo Affairs Conference. Here we perceive the grossest deception which results from a belief in the so-called "natural inferiority" of certain peo- ples. By this belief we make ourselves unable to learn from ' them since we consider that they have nothing to teach. Instead ofjoining with these people in a reciprocal arrangement for a long-range develOpment of the north, we offer them two alterna- tives: either acceptance into the Canadian community on a level of inferiority, or acceptance on a level of equality after first rejecting all native traditions.24 The 1952 Eskimo Affairs conferees apparently made the same decision. But, subsequent events raise serious questions about their judgments and qualifications. They advocated policies based on their own particular prejudices and without adequate information. The people who were most effected by these policies, the Eskimos, were excluded from making an input into the decision-making process. In 23Canada, "The Indian and the Eskimo," p. 10. 24Edmund S. Carpenter, "The Future of the Eskimos," Canadian Forum 32 (June, 1952): 55. (author's underlining) 131 short, Eskimos were dependent on the members of the traditional exotic power structure to interpret conditions in their communities and to establish the guidelines for their future role in the northern economy. In 1972, a new group of southern Canadians accepted a similar Operating procedure while attempting to establish guidelines for future policies. What assurances do the native people have that these con- ferees are any better qualified than their 1952 counterparts, or that the guidelines they propose will not continue to serve the interests of the multinational corporations and white Canadians operating in the North? CHAPTER VIII CONCLUSION: THE SHIFTING LOCUS OF BENEFIT AND DECISION-MAKING IN THE CANADIAN ARCTIC The empirical evidence introduced and the conclusions and questions posed in the preceding chapters are organized to direct attention to the underlying cultural-historical processes that create and sustain the relationships of dependence,domination, and exploita— tion. In this concluding chapter of Part I, these relationships are made explicit in the culture contact model presented in the intro- ductory pages. The Objective is to provide an historical basis for the subsequent evaluation of the Arctic co-Operative movement. The evidence presented suggests that domination (decision- making) and exploitation (benefit) are analytically separable dimen- sions. Particular activities of the exotic contact institutions and different historic phases vary with respect to these dimensions. Re-examining the activities first, it was shown that whaling and fur trading were primarily concerned with the exploitation of Arctic resources involving the utilization of Eskimo labor and also with the domination of production and distribution decision-making. Domination of the Eskimos by the traders was more intense because of the central role the Eskimos played inifln-trapping. The traders 132 133 were not content, as the whalers had been, to depend on the tradi- tional economic organization of the Eskimos to provide surpluses. They replaced the largely subsistence native organization with a highly organized market economy by disrupting aboriginal ecological relationships, substituting European post managers for native leader- ship, and establishing market control. These activities required the trader to have absolute control over production and distribution decision-making. Yet the traders, like their predecessOrs the whalers, gave low priority to the reordering of aspects of native culture not in conflict with resource exploitation. The missionaries and RCMP, by contrast, were concerned with the transformation of aspects of the institutional and world view or ideological levels of the Eskimo culture. As such they directly focused their attention on those components of the culture which contained the locus of decision-making and, therefore, their activi- ties relate primarily to the domination dimension. However, some evidence on the flow of tax monies collected from white fox furs suggests an exploitative redistribution existed, even among these institutions, up until approximately 1945. When the activities of the exotic contact institutions are viewed historically in relation to the domination-exploitation dimen- sions, the following pattern emerges. Prior to the coming of the whalers, the Eskimos did not exist in a subject relationship to any outside group. In terms of the contact model, the Eskimos were isolated and in the position labelled ppg (Figure 11). Benefit and decision-making were localized in the Eskimo bands. EXTERNAL 134 DIMENSIONS OF IMPERIALISM EQUALITY OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO on ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO ISOLATION LOCAL EXTERNAL Decision Making Figure ll.--Dimensions of Imperialism. 135 Eskimo independence continued during the period of initial European penetration. Contacts with the explorers and early whalers were sporadic and confined largely to the east coast Of Baffin Island and Hudson Strait. The method Of exchange at these chance meetings was simple bartering of personal belongings between the Eskimos and indi- vidual crew members. In practice, neither side had an advantage over the other. The whalers provided the independent Eskimos an opportu- nity to acquire luxury items such as ornaments, tobacco, and occasion- ally a useful tool. But, in no way was this trade essential to the Eskimos' survival. Eskimo independence began to deteriorate after 1840 with the expansion of whaling into Hudson Bay and the widespread adoption of shore stations. Whalers primarily established an economic relation- ship with the Eskimos, leaving the decision-making apparatus of the Eskimo culture intact. After the collapse of whaling, around 1900, the early traders continued this relationship during the first two decades of the twentieth century. Since this economic relationship overwhelmingly benefited the whaling captains, their financiers, and the traders, the relationship with the Eskimos moved roughly to the position marked Egg. The locus of decision-making remained largely in the local bands, but benefit tipped heavily in favor of the whalers. The 1920's marked a critical juncture in the contact history. Simultaneously, as the caribou population declined, the number of missionaries and police rapidly increased, and the Hudson's Bay Company 136 emerged as the dominant trading concern. The missionaries and police actively undermined local decision-making by imposing changes in the Eskimo social organization and ideology, while the Hudson's Bay Com- pany applied monopolistic regulations to the fur trade thus controlling resource exploitation decisions. As the 1920's drew to a close, the dependency generating processes climaxed in the cultural synthesis and relationships in the contact society moved into position thggg, The Eskimos were synchron- ized to the vagaries of the market economy and to the decisions of the traders, missionareis, and police. Eskimo communities, dependent on the exotic agents to administer their livelihood and guide them in the new socioeconomic environment, had little choice but to accept as absolute the trader's standard of value for furs and trade goods and the missionary's and police Officer's models of behavior. Within this structure, domination was complete. Eskimo communi- ties were fragmented and became devoid of institutions for promoting native leadership and local decision-making which could have enabled them to respond to the increasing demands of the exotic institutions. This develOpment ran counter to the organizational structure of the traditional Eskimo conmunity integrated, as it was, by cross-conmunity rules of cO-Operation, and governed by equalitarian principles loosely defined by common consent and enforced by communal decision-making. The heavy economic and physical burden the Eskimos paid to support the contact society attests to the exotic locus of benefit. The central argument to support this contention revolves around the 137 malallocation of resources and the unequal distribution of misfortune. First, the taxes levied on white fox pelts were not returned to pro- mote Eskimo welfare in the same prOportion they were paid, especially during periods of disaster. Secondly, the monopolistic profits of the Hudson's Bay Company during abundant years were redistributed to corporate stockholders in England and not returned to the Eskimo communities. It is true, the Company sustained the trappers during famine years through the "debt" system, but this outlay, like the Federal Government's welfare appropriations, did little to arrest the physical deterioration of the population brought about by malnutri- tion and inadequate medical care. With the recognition of the collapse Of the fur trading econ- omy in the late 1940's and the abject poverty of the Eskimos, the Canadian government began to modify the flow of benefits through health, education, housing, and welfare programs. These appear to have moved the Eskimos into the cell labelled paternalism. Because of the short duration of this phase and an uncertainty about the pre- cise nature of the money flows, this phase, labelled fppp, is shown with a dashed line. The Eskimos are presently benefiting from the large federal expenditures on education, health, housing, and welfare. The cost of these services is well beyond the present meager productive capacity of the Arctic economy. But, at the same time, the Eskimos have limited influence on the decision-makers who direct these pro- grams, and more importantly, on the decision-makers in management 138 and government who are charting the course of Arctic resource develop- ment. The large bureaucratic structure transported north to admin- ister the numerous government service programs has created a very visible dominance hierarchy in the larger Arctic contact communities. The cultural chasm is especially noticeable in the settlement patterns of communities like Inuvik, Cambridge Bay, and Baker Lake. Government civil servants are set-off from the native population in enclaves of high standard housing. For example, in Inuvik the whites live on the east side in homes and apartments serviced by heat, water, and running sewage. These utilities are not extended to the substandard native dwellings on the west side of town. It is significant that the Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development recently singled out paternalism (qualified with "benevolent") as one of the major weaknesses of the government's 1 However, paternalism must not be allowed to stand as the approach. rationale for a far more complex and dibilitating historical process. Paternalism occupies a small time period-~post World War II--in a long contact history which includes imperialism. And the present problems Of Eskimo adaptation are more the result of their exclusion from both the benefits of Arctic resource exploitation and decision-making than from the paternalism relationship accompanying the government's tardy arrival after 1945. Certainly, the inadequate services the government grudgingly provided the Eskimos prior to 1945 cannot be accredited to "benevolent" paternalism. 1Canada, "The Indian and the Eskimo," p. 9. 139 Today, the Arctic contact society stands at a threshold. The future form it will take is clouded by the policies of paternalism and the uncertain role of the Eskimos in resource development. On the one hand, the resource policies of the Federal Government lead to a return of the imperialism relationship of position three, with the Eskimos serving as an unskilled part-time labor force at the conven- ience of the multinational corporations and southern Canadian entre- preneurs. Yet, against this somber possibility a vitally important break- through has been scored on the co-Operative front. The co-Op's potential as an institution for involving local people in economic and social development is well documented throughout the world. How it is faring in the Canadian Arctic is the subject Of Part II. PART II CO-OPERATION IN ARCTIC CANADA 140 CHAPTER IX THE ARCTIC CO-OPERATIVE MOVEMENT Establishment and Diffusion The beginnings of the Arctic co-Operative movement are sub- merged in the rush of the Federal health and educational activities of the 1950's. These programs rightfully dominated the government's initial attention. The restoring of personal health and vigor to the Eskimos, coupled with a provision for expanded educational Oppor- tunities, are the cornerstones of any long-range development program. Yet, despite gains in health and education, the Arctic economy remained depressed and the Eskimos dispirited. In fact, area economic surveys in the 1950's suggested conditions were deteriorating. One such study of Ungave Bay in 19581 by Evans was crucial in convincing 2 Evans' government planners to experiment with a community co-Op. report extended beyond the limits of the standard resource inventory to include ways to improve the economic situation. He emphasized Eskimo ownership of new industries and singled out the co-Operative as the organization to restore Eskimo control. 1It will be recalled that 1958 is also the year the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources Officially acknowledged traditional hunting and trapping activities could no longer support the Eskimo pOpulation. See p. 109. 2Jon Evans, Ungave Bay: A Resource Survey, 1958 (Ottawa: Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources, 1964). 141 142 The following year, 1959, representatives of the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources introduced the community co-Operative concept to the Ungave Bay Eskimos at George River and Port Burwell.3 They encouraged the Eskimos to organize fishermen's producer co-operatives to harvest the Arctic char reported in Evans' resource inventory. During this same period, Father Andre Steinmann independently initiated a co-Operative based producers organization among the Eskimo carvers at Povungnetuk.4 The overall accomplishments of these pioneer Arctic co-ops encouraged the Federal Government to intensify its financial and technical commitment to the movement, while, at the local level, enthusiastic Eskimo co-Operative leaders advanced the movement in neighboring villages. Povungetuk, in particular, became the center of the co-operative movement in Arctic Quebec and sent its leaders to a number of villages promoting the advantages of co-operation.5 The cause Of Arctic co-Operation received a major stimulus in the middle 1960's when the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern DevelOpment organized two conferences for the Arctic co-op leaders. 3Saul E. Arbess, Social Change and The Eskimo Co-operative at George River Quebec (Ottawa: DIAND, 1966) and Aleksandrs Sprudz, "Die Kikitaoyak-Genossenschaft in Kanada," Genossenschaft (Switzer- land), 10 February 1972 (Port Burwell Co-op). 4Frank G. Vallee, Povungnetuk and its Co-operative. A Case Study in Community Changg_(0ttawa: DIAND,71967). 5Ibid. 143 The first meeting was held at Frobisher Bay in 1963 and the second at Povungetuk in 1966.6 It is impossible to fully evaluate the positive stimulus these two conferences had on the rapid diffusion of Eskimo CO-OpS in the middle and late 1960's (Figure 12). They Obviously helped focus atten- tion on the struggling movement by bringing together Eskimo village leaders from the far reaches of the Canadian Arctic for the first time. The enthusiasm and goodwill generated by the Eskimo partici- pants was carried back to their home villages and to neighboring villages not served by co-Ops. Certainly, the fact that the conferences were held on such a grand scale accomplished a great deal in unifying the movement's goals and in reducing the Eskimos' suspicions about the sincerity of the government's commitment to help; prior to 1963, the movement lacked any structural or ideological unity among the Eskimos. CO-Operative information flowed vertically downward from government to isolated village and not laterally from village to village. In southern Canada, the conferences attracted the attention of the major national co-operatives and the credit unions. Since the 1963 meeting, both the co-operative Union of Canada and the Quebec- based Conseil du la Cooperation du Quebec have provided technical assistance to improve the efficiency of existing co-ops and to help establish new ones. This assitance is coordinated with an extensive government program designed to stimulate viable co-ops. 144 The Crucial Role of Government It is necessary to discuss, in a general way, the relationship between governments and co-Operative societies before attempting to evaluate the role Of the Canadian Government in promoting Arctic co- Operation. National governments, regardless of their political struc- ture and level of development, have certain minimal responsibilities to co-operatives. Generally, these duties begin with the passage of a law embodying the principles to be observed by the co-Operative societies. The law is given weight by the appointment of a government co-operative officer who registers the societies and has the authority to oversee their regular audits. Many governments in the developing world extend much more support and actively foster an environment for the growth of healthy co-Ops. They assure the co-Ops sufficient operating capital and pro- vide the following supportive services: training for local managers, the loan of government officials to serve as managers until local personnel are adequately trained; loans for the establishment and expansion of co-ops; the preparation of educational materials on co-op principles and procedures; funds for audits and legal services; research to stimulate new economic activities, and the establishment of trading bodies to expand co-Operative marketing.7 Critics may Object that the development of the movement under the sponsorship of the government is inconsistent with the principle 7Central Treaty Organization, Managingpand Financing,the Marketing Cooperatives (Ankara: Office of the United States Econ- omic Coordinator for CENTO Affairs, 1971), p. 8. 145 30%“ ESKIMO CO-OPERATIVES Q E I... -1OOI O [Sill-O COM-ATM! we. vtu (S'IGL‘SNED SOu'I'C‘N LI." 3» 1’! nos \mbov ol C.) midi. Figure 12.--Eskimo Co-operatives, 1958-1968. Source: Information compiled by Aleksandrs Sprudzs, Head of the Co-operative Development Section, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Owwawa, 1972. 146 that a co-Operative movement should be voluntary and spontaneous. However, while the ultimate aim should be to develop a movement com- pletely free from Official assistance and supervision, there is a strong case to be made for the government to actively assist in the initial stages of development. Indeed, government supported measures are prerequisites to successful co-Operation in the areas of the world recently emerging from colonial status, areas where the local population was denied an adequate education and participation in the management of their economy. The Canadian Government channels its direct support of Arctic co-Operation through a special Co-Operative Services Section of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Government co-Operative departments have proven to be indispensible during the critical inaugural period when new societies are forming among peoples who have historically been politically and economically dominated.8 In addition to the basic functions of auditing, inspect- ing and supervising co-ops in the field, the co-operative department is in a position to coordinate government assistance programs and to provide valuable feedback on the acceptance and desirability of such aid. It is widely recognized that the success of a co-operative department rests primarily on the shoulders of its staff which should be adequate both in caliber and number. In the selection of staff, the Canadian Government fortunately recruited a nucleus of men 8Sheila Gorst, Co-Operative Organization in Tropical Countries (Oxford: Basil Blackwell & Mott, Ltd., 1959), pp. 312-319. 147 deeply committed to the movement's ideals and with ample cooperative management experience in both EurOpe and Canada. Had these men not been so well prepared for their task, the diffusion of co-ops in the Arctic would have been considerably retarded, for, throughout its existence, the Co-operative Services Section has been understaffed. The reasons for this personnel shortage stem from a combina- tion of government economy and the difficulty in recruiting and retaining qualified people. During the 1960's, the problems of the co-opeartive advisors in supplying adequate assistance to the move- ment were further aggravated by the need to provide time consuming accounting services to most of the co-operatives. In part, the problem Of limited personnel was offset by the enlistment of outside help. Missionaries, RCMP Officers, school teachers, and Resource Development Officers contributed valuable service beyond their assigned duties to assure the survival of co-Ops in the villages they served. The CO-Operative Services Sec- tion successfully enlisted the assistance of the national co-opera- tive unions in southern Canada to prepare educational materials and to provide training workshops. However, throughout the uncertain formative period, the most important ingredient contributing to initial success was the enthusiasm of the Eskimos, themselves. With- out their ready involvement, the cO-operative movement would have stalled regardless of how large a staff the government supporting agency maintained. Adequate financial support is needed to back the existing organizational and supervisory services, if the movement is ever 148 to make further progress. Societies, particularly during the forma- tive years, need access to seasonal credit to finance their marketing operations and to grant credit to members. Larger sums of money are required for the acquisition of processing plants, transportation and construction equipment, and for building expansion. The Canadian Government does provide equipment and loans to help individual co-ops get established or expand their range of activities. The main source of financial aid is available through the Eskimo Loan Fund. A co-Op can borrow up to $50,000 for a ten- year term at five percent interest. This amount is sufficient for such small scale ventures as building and stocking a co-operative store or for initiating a handicraft industry. But, it is hardly adequate to meet the capital intensive requirements for establishing an integrated fishing industry, for building tourist facilities of a quality to compete with white-controlled northern resorts, or for the equipment purchases needed to exploit local resources, and to provide adequate co-operative owned transportation facilities. Accord- ing to a Co-Operative Services Section report: The lack of adequate financing services had a detrimental effect on certain co-operative operations. For example, the limit on credit available from the Eskimo Loan Fund caused some difficulty in carrying out ongoing activities and in some instances restricted expansion of feasbile and legiti- mate plans.9 The federal financial assistance to co-ops stands in sharp contrast to the subsidies Offered private ventures. The Canadian 9Co-operative Services Section, "Eskimo and Indian Co-opera- tive Development Programs in Canada," (Ottawa: Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, 1970), p. 4. 149 Pacific Railroad received a subsidy of $86 million to build the Great Slave Railroad to the Pine Point mine. Pine Point is owned by Cominco, a Canadian Pacific subsidiary. During the first three years of operation, Cominco made more than $100 million Of tax-free profit.10 Lotz recently made a meaningful comparison between mining subsidies on Baffin Island and the lack of government support of two struggling Northwest Territories Indian co-Ops: Despite the world glut of iron ore, the Department stood ready in 1967-68 to help Baffinland Iron Mines come into production with a subsidy of $25 million. At the same time that talk of subsidizing this mine was going on, two Indian co-Operatives in the Northwest Territories, at Fort Resolution and Rae, were refused further financial assistance from the government on the grounds that they were costing too much money. Government equipment loans helped to alleviate the co-op's problem of insufficient capital. The most requested item is the fish freezing plant, costing about $50,000 when installed in an Eskimo community. These plants are in short supply, however, and communities have had to wait several years, after their initial requests, for delivery. The Arctic co-ops receive additional financial support from government funds that are not reserved Specifically for the purpose of advancing the co-operative movement, but rather are appropriated for the general welfare of the entire Eskimo population. For example, 10Graham J. Beakhust, "A Plan to Exploit Canada's North and its Residents," Canadian Dimension 8 (November 1971): 57-59. 11 Jim Lotz, Northern Realities (Toronto: New Press, 1970), p. 136. 150 the Federal Government provides a number Of municipal services to the Arctic communities. Well organized co-Ops have been able to contract these services, mainly water delivery and garbage and sewage pick-up, and thus boost their annual cash incomes. One Of the most successful services initiated in 1965 by the government to advance the co-Operatives is the marketing agency, Canadian Arctic Producers Limited (C.A.P.). Prior to this time, the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern DevelOpment marketed handi- crafts and stone carvings for the co-ops. This arrangement worked well for a while, but the volume gradually outstripped the Depart- ment's limited facilities, encouraging the Federal Government to seek other means of marketing. Consequently, it requested the Co-opera- tive Union of Canada to establish C.A.P.; the new agency agreeing to charge the co-Ops a commission of 10 percent. In return, the govern- ment provided C.A.P. with sufficient funds each year to make up the difference between its Operating expenses and the revenues from commissions. Problems immediately arose in the financial structure of the agency. C.A.P. operated with limited working capital and was unable to pay the co-ops for their products until it received payment from the retailers. A year often lapsed before the co-Ops were reimbursed, thus creating a hardship for the Eskimo producers. The Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development remedied the problem of inadequate working capital in 1970 by granting the agency $400,000 for 400,000 preferred shares. The 151 objectives behind the government take-over of the marketing agency are twofold: to provide funds for faster payment and to restructure C.A.P., so that ownership and control can be progressively turned over to the Eskimos by returning shares based on co-op patronage.12 The relationship between the Arctic co-Ops and government has changed since 1967. The Federal Government initiated these changes based on the belief that the movement's goals would be better served by a direct relationship between the co-ops and local governments. Therefore, Ottawa has increasingly turned the responsibilities of the CO-op Services Section over to the Northwest Territories and Quebec governments. The result has been to produce two Arctic co-operative movements, separated by white-imposed political boundaries. The effects of this politicalization of the movement is most apparent in the difficulties of federation. Federation Successful co-operative movements evolve in the direction of economic self-sufficiency and increasing independence from state aid. These goals are achieved by the organization of regional societies into a federation so the members can retain their local autonomy, but, at the same time, can enjoy the advantages of economies of scale. The pooling of resources and the sharing of services allows the co-Ops to take the initiative in important management decisions IZDIAND, Canadian Arctic Producers, a new framework (Ottawa: Mortimer, 1971), p. 7. 152 and to retain a greater proportion of the economic gains from their productivity for redistribution to the membership. Economic benefits derive from the bulk purchasing procedures of the federation which enable the member co-ops to considerably reduce the cost of raw materials and finished goods. Thus, through a Fed- eration-controlled marketing agency, the member co-ops improve their marketing position and, correspondingly, the returns from their products. Purchasing and marketing are two examples showing how the advantages of scale directly bear on the viability of individual co-Ops; but, they by no means, exhaust the potential of federation. A federation can maintain its own auditing, legal, and planning services, thereby, freeing itself of reliance on government super- vision. Federation-wide planning and coordination, initiated at the local level, is important if the Arctic co-ops are to become independent decision-making bodies for promoting Eskimo welfare. Despite the eventual necessity Of federation, the Eskimos have had mixed success in their drive for union. The concept was first advanced at the 1963 Frobisher Bay Conference of Arctic co-ops. Following the conference, the Co-Operative Union of Canada prepared a discussion paper on federation and distributed it to the co-Ops prior to the Second Co-Operative Conference held at Povungnituk in 1966. The Eskimo conferees at Povungnituk approved a plan for federa- tion with three subdivisions: Mackenzie, Eastern Arctic, and Arctic Quebec and recommended formation at the earliest possible date. 153 Shortly after the conference, the Eskmos encountered legal obstacles that tended to divide the Arctic co-operative movement along political boundaries imposed on them from the south. The Co-Operative Association Ordinance of the Northwest Territories, enacted in 1959, made no provision for federation. Thus, the co-ops in the Northwest Territories, the proposed Mackenzie and Eastern Arctic regions, could not incorporate until the Northwest Terri- tories Council approved the necessary amendment to the ordinance. Whereas, in Quebec, provincial law permitted co—ops to federate and this privilege was interpreted to include the Eskimos. The Arctic Quebec co-ops, anxious to capitalize on the advan- tages of federation, struck an independent course in May, 1967, and formed La Fédération des Coopératives due Nouveau Quebec. Since its founding, the Fédération has been an extremely active organiza- tion providing an expanding range of services for the member co-Ops.13 The Federation has its headquarters at Levis, Quebec, where it maintains a warehouse-showroom and coordinates the transportation network linking the member co-ops with the outside world. Once a year, the Federation charters cargo ships to transport the year's supply of goods to the co-Op stores; on the return trip, the ships carry the Eskimos' products. In addition, the Federation serves as a purchasing and market- ing agent for the member co-ops, provides auditing services and organ- izes educational programs for co-op managers. It is currently 13Marybelle Myers, "La Federation des Cooperatives du Nouveau Quebec," We Co-pperate 6 (Spring, 1970), p. 5. 154 promoting a tourist development program and expanding the scope of its educational offerings. Meanwhile, the Northwest Territories co-ops did not allow the temporary political setback in 1966 to dim their enthusiasm for fed- eration. Co-operative leaders from the Mackenzie and Eastern Arctic subdividions attended regional meetings to work out the details of federation and to pressure the Northwest Territories Council for a change in the Co-Operative Association Ordinance. Committees were formed at these meetings to visit Eskimo communities in order to generate understanding and support for federation among the rank-and- file membership. The Eskimo co-Operators were rewarded for their persistent effort on February 11, 1972, when co-Operative representatives from the Northwest Territories, meeting at Churchill, Manitoba, signed a memorandum agreeing upon the operating procedures for federation. Once the structure Of federation was agreed upon, the Eskimos chose, as their first objective, to provide auditing and business manage- ment services to the member co-Ops. Future programs include special- ized services for bulk purchasing and marketing, tourism, training programs, and assistance in bidding on contracts and in securing the necessary equipment. This final provision would allow individual co-ops to compete with southern Canadian contractors for building projects in their communities. 155 The Economic Consequences of Arctic Co-pperation Although the majority of the Arctic co-operatives have been in Operation less than a decade, their economic impact is already evident. Table 8 serves as a starting point for a discussion of these economic accomplishments. TABLE 8.--Canadian Arctic CO-Operatives: Cumulative Results, 1961-68 (in thousands of dollars). . Local Income Year Sales SaVT: s Purchases from Wages and Total Local 9 Members Salaries Income (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) 1961 $ 209 $ 71 $ 15 $ 19 $ 34 1962 416 119 49 54 103 1963 411 47 59 72 131 1964 990 136 168 97 265 1965 1,189 86 469 132 601 1966 1,544 123 529 186 715 1967 2,096 29 665 283 948 1968 2,395 125 707 361 1.068 1969 3,084 341 (not itemized) 1,191 TOTALS $12,379 $1,077 $5,056 Source: Compiled from information provided by the Co-Operative Services Section, DIAND, Ottawa, Canada. Total sales volume increased from $209,000 in 1961 to nearly $3.1 million in 1969. Net savings during the nine year period totalled a million dollars. Column five records the important gains made by the co-ops in increasing local incomes through wage employment and by purchasing members' products. In addition to direct income, the mem- bers have accumulated equity in their co—ops totalling $900,000. 156 The gains recorded in Table 8 reflect the multipurpose nature of the Arctic co-ops. They perform both producer and consumer func- tions, incorporating a wide variety of activities (see Appendix 8; Canadian Arctic Co-operatives, activities). Impressive as the economic indicators are, they only suggest to the real changes that have occurred in the organization of the Eskimo village economy and in its relationship to the outside world. These important changes can be pointed out by comparing how the village cO-operative economy is organized to solve the economic problems of production, distribution, and consumption with the pre-co-operative arrangements summarized in Part I. The central question revolves around the determination of the locus of benefit and decision-making over these basic economic processes. During the contact period of intensive fur trapping, the trad- ing monopoly organized the Arctic economy and administered it through their field representatives, the post managers. Administration at the local level was relatively simple; the Eskimos participated only at the primary production stage of supplying raw materials, while the post managers determined the value of the Eskimos' productivity and controlled the distribution of trade goods in the villages. There- fore, through its post managers, the trade monopoly dominated all transactions relating to production, distribution, and consumption between the Eskimos and the outside world. The weak position of the Eskimo fur trappers in the market economy was reflected in their exclusion from the major profit-making 157 transactions in the economic process. The larger share of the econ- omic benefits in the market system stem, not from the production of raw materials, but, from transportation, processing, marketing, financ- ing, and management; activities closed 11) Eskimo participation. The trade monopoly dominated and benefited from these transactions as well as from the marketing of European and Canadian manufactured goods in the Eskimo villages. The co-Operative economy, in contrast, revitalizes local con- trol Of economic decision-making and, at the same time, provides avenues for a larger prOportion Of the economic gains, from the Eski- mos' human and material resources, to remain in the Arctic communi- ties. The co-Operative organization provides a scope of vertical integration of successive functions under the one management enjoyed earlier by the trade monopoly. First, the producer's sector Of the co-operative provides a locally controlled purchasing body for Eskimo raw material suppliers, primarily fish and furs. Next, a number of co-ops established process- ing plants for the raw materials, fish packing, and fur garment indus- tries. These plants provide local employment for Eskimo women and for men not engaged in extractive activities. Handicrafts and carv- ing are also part Of the processing level of production. The artists produce on an individual basis, securing their raw materials from the co-Ops, then selling the finished products back to the co-ops. In turn, the processed products, plus the raw furs are then shipped outside for marketing. At the present time, the Eskimos 158 remain dependent on non-co-operative owned transportation facilities to get their products to market. However, this situation may be remedied if the current operation of a commercial cargo plane by the Pelly Bay CO-op proves feasible. At any rate, the economy of scale, represented by the federation, improves the co-Op's bargaining position with the transportation companies. Lastly, the marketing of co-op products is increasingly being handled by the Eskimo-controlled federations; thus, giving the Eski- mos direct connections with retailers throughout the world, and, in effect, eliminating unnecessary middlemen. The arts and crafts market- ing agency, Canadian Arcitc Producers, has a network of some 700 deal- ers in eleven countries. Annual sales increased from $60,000 in 1965, when C.A.P. was established to $1.3 million in 1971.14 If the above co-operative trends continue, the Eskimos will become their own entrepreneurs, managing and financing the whole undertaking from production of raw materials through the sale of the finished product. The consumer co-ops serving as retail stores in the Eskimo villages, show equally impressive gains. Like the producer co-ops, these consumer Operations take over a function previously restricted to the trade monopoly. The positive trend in merchandise sales between 1965 and 1968 is recorded in Table 9. Economically, the co-ops are successful, both in the growing volume of their transactions and in the degree they enable the Eskimos 14DIAND, Canadian Arctic Producers, a new framework, p. 8. 159 TABLE 9. --Merchandise Sales of Consumer Co- -Ops (in thousands of dollars). Year Sales 1965 $ 578 1966 688 1967 931 1968 1,326 Source: Compiled from information provided by the CO-operative Serv- ices Section, DIAND, Ottawa. to take advantage Of opportunities in their environment, formally con- trolled by outsiders. They operate in stark contrast to the economic arrangements of the intensive fur trapping period when profits from the trade flowed to stockholders in England. Today, the profits return to the members in the form of cash rebates and in greater equity shares in the co-Ops themselves. Social and Cultural Consequences of Arctic Co-Operation Significant as the economic gains are, they do not overshadow the less quantifiable, but nevertheless, important social and cultural consequences of the co-operative movement. In fact, it is the move- ment's non-economic potential that inspired Vallee to conclude his review of Arctic co-Operation with the following endorsement: I am an enthusiastic supporter of the co-operative movement in the arctic and subarctic regions of Canada, not so much because of the economic value of the co-operative, although this is considerable, but more because of its social and psycho- logical value in helping people work away from the disheartening, 160 demoralizing status they had in the past, when they looked for their signals Erom government officials, traders, police and missionaries.1 At the local level, the co-Ops are the focal points of community-wide decision-making, providing both forums for the dis- cussion Of local problems and training grounds for the development of native leaders.16 These developments, in the direction of greater village integration, suggest that co-Operative involvement is offer- ing an alternate form of social organization to the market economy's weakening effect on extended kin structure. Successful multipurpose co-ops are effectively cutting across generational and sexual lines in their utilization of human resources. In the organization of the Igloolik CO-operative, Crowe found: Older peOple have been able to contribute knowledge and skills to field and handicraft work. The adult management group have learned to handle the mechanical equipmept, and young adults with formal training have kept accounts. Baird and, more recently, Chance have expressed concern about the postiion of the Eskimo woman in the changing Arctic economy.18 15Frank Vallee, "The Co-operative Movement in the North," in People of Light and Dark, ed: Maja van Steensel (Ottawa: DIAND, 1966(, p. 48. 16Saul E. Arbess, Social Change and the Eskimo CO-pperative at George River,_Quebec (Ottawa: DIAND, 1966), pp. 46-60: Keith J. Crowe, A Cultural Geography of Northern Foxe Basin, N.W.T. (Ottawa: DIAND, 1969), pp. 102, 108; Graburn, Eskimos Without Igloos, pp. 111- 114, and Frank Vallee, Povungnetuk and its Co-Operative. A Case Study in Community Change (Ottawa: DIAND, 1967), pp. 54-55. 17 18Irene Baird, "The Eskimo Woman: Her Changing World," Beaver, Outfit 2 (Spring, 1959), pp. 48-55, and Norman A. Chance, The Eskimo of North Alaska (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966), pp. 97098. Crowe, A Cultural Geography,of Northern Foxe Basin, p. 105. 161 Many of her Old skills no longer are in demand and, in the majority of the villages, she has not had the opportunity to learn new ones. Co-operative organizations are helping women discover new skills and outlets for their creative talents. For example, the successful Aklavik Fur Garment Co-Operative is made up exclusively of women. At the regional level, the movement is fostering a form of pan-Eskimo solidarity unprecedented in the Canadian Arctic. This solidarity is largely the outgrowth of the two Arctic co-Operative conferences held at Frobisher Bay in 1963 and Povungnituk in 1967, plus the numerous district meetings of co-op leaders. No doubt, the recent successes in federation will further enhance this important trend. The Future: Toward a Co-operative Society During the initial period of expansion, in the early 1960's, Vallee identified two features common to a majority of the Arctic co-ops which are central to a discussion of the future of the move- ment.19 First, whites initiated the ventures and provide sustained impetus and, second, the co-ops are ultimately dependent on government financing and specialized technical services. The first qualification relates to the process of decision- making. Vallee emphasizes that white guidance is present in the tech- nical aspects of the operations such as accounting, pricing, and in matters whose significance transcends the local community or whose 19Frank G. Vallee, "Notes on the Cooperative Movement and Community Organziation in the Canadian Arctic," Arctic Anthropology, 2 (1964): 45-49. 162 significance is long-term. However, in the day-to-day local operation, the Eskimos manage their co-ops. Georgia, a resident of Repulse Bay, recently voiced a strong protest on the issue of Eskimo involvement in co-operative administra— tion. Her main arguments are summarized as follows: 1. Co-Ops in the North, for the most part, seem to be govern- ment or mission projects trying to show a good set of figures. 2. Most of them are run by professional businessmen from the South. 3. The process of training local people to assume responsi- bility for their co-op deteriorates into merely hiring local people as casual labor. 4. They are bringing material benefits to the people, but in the process they are blurring, if not destroying, the principle of co-Operatives.2 At this point in the development of Arctic co-operation, Georgia's criticism must be viewed more as a warning for the future than as an indictment of the movement's progress. The running of viable co-ops requires considerable technical and management train- ing, not available to the Eskimos until the 1960's. The crucial test will come in the late 1970's when a generation of educated Eskimo can be expected to assume full responsibility for the management of the economic and political institutions in their communities. In the meantime, the co-ops serve as significant training grounds in commu- nity decision—making for the eventual realization of self-sufficiency in social organization. 20Georgia, "A Critical View of Northern Co-Ops and Some Tips on How to Improve Them," News of the North, 10 Feburary 1972, p. 7. 163 Regardless of whether the co-Op managers are Eskimo or white, the most important obstacle to an independent co-Operative movement in the future is the matter of economic self-sufficiency. During the 1960's, the co-op made spectacular gains in physical expansion and in member earnings. These gains, however, were buttressed in large part by substantial government expenditures in projects designed to stimulate local economies. The Federal Government is committed to a long-term program of creating jobs in Arctic communities. Yet, when the saturable carving and handicraft market and the ecological limits on Arctic biotic resource exploitation are evaluated against the rapid rate of Eskimo population growth, it appears unlikely that present projects can be expanded indefinitely to provide employment, nor that self-sufficiency can be achieved without a constant migration of Eskimos to southern Canada. The limitations of the present productive base clearly puts the economic self-sufficiency issue back to the resource control ques- tion outlined in Chapter VII. Presently, it is estimated (before the "Energy Crisis") the Federal Government will eventually receive over 2] Here the $100 million annually from Arctic oil and gas royalties. government has the opportunity to enter into a symbiotic relationship with the Eskimos in the allocation of these royalties based on equal- ity and conceptualized by the center cell in the contact model (Fig. 11). 21A. B. Yates, "Energy and Canada's North: Oil and Gas Regu- lations," Arctic Digest 5 (June, 1973): 26. 164 But, the Eskimos' right to directly share in the royalties must first be recognized by Ottawa. This recognition involves the denial of the present policy Of paternalism in the federal distribu- tion system. The government must limit its role as a redistributive authority mediating between the Eskimos and the wealth produced by multinational corporations. The Eskimo co-Ops are the legitimate economic and planning institutions in the majority of the Arctic communities and are the logical bodies to directly share in the royalties from future resource extraction. Through consultation with government and private special- ists, the co-ops can manage the allocation of resource royalties for the betterment of their communities. The net effect will be a health- ier independent Eskimo population actively participating in the co-operative development of the Canadian Arctic. CHAPTER X PELLY BAY: PROFILE OF A CO-OPERATIVE COMMUNITY The Geographical Components: Location, Natural Habitat, and the Cultural Position of the Pelly Bay Region Pelly Bay, the southwestern arm of the Gulf of Boothia, is located east of Simpson Peninsula in the Northwest Territories (Figure 13). The Bay is 17 miles wide at the entrance and extends southward 65 miles, averaging a width of 15 miles. A chain of small islands cross the northern part of Pelly Bay, from the Harrison Islands in the northwest to Helen Island on the eastern side, blocking the southward drift of pack-ice from the Gulf of Boothia. The village of Pelly Bay is located on huge Precambrian rock outcrops which run along the southwest coast of Simpson Peninsula at approximately 68° 53' north latitude and 89° 51' west longitude. East of the coastal outcrops, the bulk of the peninsula is composed of a till plain interspersed with numerous lakes. The village is bordered on the north by the Kugajuk River which flows between the rock outcrops into the small island-studded inlet of St. Peters Bay. Thirteen miles south of the village, the Kellet River flows into Pelly Bay. Pelly Bay lies well within the tundra climatic and vegetation zone. The mean daily temperatures for January and July approximate 165 166 Z PELLY BAY emu/=50») PENINSULA Figure 13.--The Pelly Bay Region. 167 -20°F and 45°F respectively and produce a typical tundra vegetation of hearty shrubs, tufted grass, and lichens and mosses. Yet, despite the greatly restricted season of plant production an adequate land and marine wildlife population is native to the region. Hunting conditions were extremely good in aboriginal times. The Arviligjuarmiut told Rasmussen they knew nothing of hunger and times of distress. Their hunting year was evenly divided between caribou, musk-oxen, seals and salmon, and if one occupation failed they always had another to fall back on.1 Both the ringed and bearded seals are available in Pelly Bay, while during the fall the rivers abound with Arctic char, a member of the salmon family. Prior to the introduction of firearms, large herds of caribou migrated to Boothia Peninsula during the summer, and throughout the year herds of musk-oxen grazed on the tundra south of Pelly Bay. Arctic foxes, important in the contact economy, are common near the ice-edge along the northern boundaries of the bay. The area surrounding Pelly Bay is inhabited by the Arviligjuar- miut (the people of the big one with the whales). The name is derived from a mountain formation whose outline resembles whales on the surface of the water. The name refers singularly to this topographic feature, for whales played no role in the Arviligjuarmiut's subsistence economy. The Arviligjuarmiut are the eastern branch of the Netsilingmiut, or "people of the seal." In aboriginal times, the Netsilingmuit were a loosely organized group, sharing a common mode of living and freely 1Knud Rasmussen, Report, p. 22. 168 intermarrying. When Rasmussen first contacted them in 1923, they numbered 259 people, with 54 of this total living around Pelly Bay.2 An Historical Overview: The Influence of Geographical and Situational Factors on the Contact History of Pellyngy Historically, the vast expanses of sea-ice and tundra sepa- rating Pelly Bay from Eurocanadian outposts played an important role in tempering the nature and intensity of contact. Year-round ice conditions in the Gulf of Boothia prevented penetration of Pelly Bay by sea (Figure 14), while overland journeys across the tundra were, and still are, both hazardous and costly. As a result, the Arviligjuarmiut were Spared the disruptive influences of the whalers and early traders. Furthermore, neither the commercial trading interests nor the RCMP have ever established opera- tions at Pelly Bay. The only permanently based Eurocanadian institu- tion operating among the Arviligjuarmiut until the post World War II period was the Roman Catholic mission, founded in 1935. At the time of Balikci's 1959 field study, Pelly Bay remained one of the most isolated, self-sufficient communities in Arctic Canada with only a minimum of participation in the market economy. Balikci categorized the Arviligjuarmiut's methods of procuring a livelihood as a ". . . transformed subsistence economy . . . characterized by highly successful rifle sealing, net fishing and the absence of system- atic trapping with traplines."3 He credited the peOples' ability to 21bid., p. 84. 3Asen Balikci, Two Eskimo Communities, p. 60. 169 Arch‘t; EIL‘L'. — — - " ' T - ~ -. ‘~-- FAVORABLE YEAR mm T IT “ Tl IIII TI 'IITIII' TT II M" SUMMER ICE CONDITIONS mindlpomoimlmmhmymm Department of Mines and Technical Surveys, 1968). Non: Favorable ammummwimyoo Pilot of Arctic Canada (Ottawa: Eiilmmknxk a‘aé Icebergs Source: Figure 14.-Summer Ice Conditions in Arctic Canada. 170 live Off the land to a number of geographical and situational factors summarized below: 1. The area was remote and the unfavorable ice conditions precluded the establishment of a trading post by the Hudson's Bay Company. 2. Trading was not encouraged as an essential activity. The absence of the Company trader, plus the limited number of imported goods at the mission store did not constitute an important enough incentive to generate an energetic search for a cash income. 3. Game was abundant in the area and the introduction of rifles and nets, which facilitated hunting and increased the game returns, obviated the necessity of importing larger amounts of foodstuffs. 4. Wage employment possibilities either did not exist in the area, or later, when the nearby DEW line site was established did not receive the encouragement of the local missionary. The unique set of geographical and situational factors Operat- ing at Pelly Bay reduced the impact of the disruptive processes associated with the dependency-generating process, the cultural synthe- sis, and the collapse stages of the contact history. 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