Although images of the Canadian Arctic are central to Canada’s vision of itself as “the true North strong and free”, the rapid process of colonization in relation to Canada’s land and sea mass north of the 60th parallel has gone almost completely unnoticed by most Canadian citizens clustered along the southern US/Canada border. The creation of the territory of Nunavut in 1999 triggered some attention, but few Canadians have ever traveled more than a few hundred miles away from the 49th parallel. Nunavut and the Arctic remain remote and exotic locations on the periphery of Canadian political, economic and cultural agendas. Canada’s place as a circumpolar nation extending to three, not just two, “shining seas” is not often remembered. The race to establish Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic under international law has largely lain in the hands of ambitious Arctic explorers and polar “experts”, cartographers, scientific “researchers” and government officials following in the trail of missionaries, Hudson’s Bay employees and the RCMP. But this apparent marginality hides the Arctic’s real centrality in the development of Canada as a nation and as a state in international law.

But any belief in this environment as having ever been static is also a mistake. The circumpolar region has seen a constant movement and flux of land, sea, wildlife and peoples for thousands of years. The apparently rigid expanses of ice, rock and barren land is much more complex, alive and mobile then might first appear. There were people here long before the present-day Inuit. There has even been a European presence in the Eastern Arctic for more than a thousand years. Indigenous peoples related to Inuit inhabit the American, European and Asian sides of the Polar region. To the peoples who are native to the North the Arctic is not a barren wasteland of snow and ice but a home of abundance and great beauty. Questions of sovereignty and national boundaries seem more artificial here than anywhere else on earth – and are also more intensely guarded.

In the years following the Second World War the settlement and rapid colonization of the Arctic continued with the establishment of DEW Line (“Distant Early Warning”) posts across the Arctic. Iqaluit, the new capital of Nunavut, was settled as the town of Frobisher Bay because of this military presence. Canada continued to struggle with issues of sovereignty as the Americans began aggressively moving into the area from their Cold War base in Thule, Greenland to the Beaufort Sea in the Western Arctic. Nuclear powered submarines (both American and Soviet) were believed to be lurking through the Northwest Passage, intercontinental ballistic missiles were aimed in all directions over the Pole and extensive oil and gas, mining and fishing development meant that the Arctic was no longer perceived by national governments as the vast empty wilderness on the edge of the world that it had once been. Today, a “Star Wars” type establishment of a missile defense shield, involving Arctic airspace and surveillance, has put Canada back on the frontier of potential hostilities. The Northwest Passage, from being a northern mirage of grandiose ambitions and insane failure, is again being resurrected as a source of ambitious development and potential conflict in international law. Much of the Passage is still inaccessible for most of the year, but this may change.

Beneath the cartographic and legal debate over sovereignty in the Arctic lies a much richer and more complex mosaic of history that needs to be told. Much of this history is pervaded by deception, secrecy, ignorance and loss. There is a natural phenomenon in the North similar to a desert mirage called the “Fatima Morgana” – a refraction of light that often makes distant objects loom into view or small icebergs rear up like skyscrapers. Ships can seem to float in the air or disappear without a trace. Nothing is as it seems. Even when the light is not playing tricks the most barren landscape can hide small miracles of persistent flowering beauty. Traveling to the floe-edge on the spring ice means moving and standing above an oceanic world of animals and plants as rich as any tropical coral reef. For the adventurous traveler or searcher for wilderness beauty the Arctic is a place where beluga whales sing like canaries and birds called thick-billed murres dive into the sea depths as easily as tiny whales. For most people living in “the South” the Arctic is an exotic space on the edge of our maps of the modern world. For Canadians of European descent, both English and French, the conquest and control of a vast hinterland has determined who we are as a culture and a people – as a nation. This in turn fuels the Canadian government’s desire to establish secure claims of legal sovereignty over the Arctic up to and including the North Pole. For the Inuit this land is their home.