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Creating Canada’s largest territory
00:08:58
For generations, Inuit communities lived across the Arctic, travelling with the seasons and relying on the land. But in the mid-20th century, Canadian government policies, including relocations, moved many into permanent settlements, reshaping their...
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Hello and welcome to the Witness History podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Sam Grouet, and the story of the creation of Canada's largest territory and a decades long fight by its people, the Inuit, to reclaim their land and sovereignty.
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We were young and we had a goal, we had an audacious goal to reclaim what Inuit have lost.
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It's 1973 and across Canada's Arctic, a new generation of Inuit activists are organizing. Among them, Paul Kwasser.
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There were a lot of traumas that Inuit had experienced and we had to get over that hump. One way of doing it was to get back our territory, get back in recognizing that we have a unique language called Inuktitut, we have our own culture, and we don't want our next generation to lose anything anymore. We've lost enough.
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Long before those days of political struggle to reclaim sovereignty over native Inuit land. We're going back to 1952 in a remote Arctic settlement where Paul started life.
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My traditional name is Agurlak. I was born in an igloo, not in a hospital, not anywhere, but in an igloo. And, and I'm one of the last generations to have experienced a nomadic way of life. We relied on the animals that we hunted, seals, narwhals, those were our main staple foods.
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With each season, Paul's small community would move across the vast ice plains.
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The only contact we had with the outside world was when my father used to go by dog team to a Hutchins Bay company. And that would take about a day or two, maybe a week, sometimes travel just to get supplies. That's how we lived in the olden days, before we got introduced to a European way of living.
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That introduction came in the early 1960s as Inuit families like Paul's were pressured to move to permanent outposts. At the time, Canada's government said it was to provide access to schooling, healthcare and housing.
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People started getting congregated to one particular location. They started limiting our way of hunting, our way of living. That totally changed our way of eating, our means of acquiring country food that we've been accustomed to for thousands of years.
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At the same time, Inuit children began to be forcibly removed from their families and sent to residential schools. There they were made to abandon their native languages and speak English or French, as heard in this CBC news report.
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I went to a residential school for eight years and I was about nine years old. Children that as young as five years old were taken away from their parents. And that changed completely the way of thinking, the way of looking at Our culture, the way of our language. We started losing all these things, and that's when the true culture was being lost.
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Canada's government would formally apologise in the subsequent years and acknowledge the residential schools policy caused great harm. A 2.8 billion Canadian dollar settlement to Native communities was made by the government in 2023. But despite the trauma endured, Paul says the experience gave him an important tool in the fight for. For Inuit sovereignty.
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I picked up an English language that my parents didn't. So it gave us courage. We can understand them, they can understand us. We were the very first Inuks that became so fluent in English. You know, we didn't even think of the fact that Kaluna or the white people were more superior than us. We didn't think that way like our parents did.
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Fast forward more than a decade to the late 1980s, and Paul Kwasser had become one of the key figures in the movement to establish Nunuvert. The name came from the Inuktitut word meaning our land, but at this point it was part of the Northwest Territories, a large region in Northern Canada controlled by the federal government. In 1989, Paul was appointed chief negotiator, tasked with with persuading those in power to hand back control of the territory to the Inuit people who lived there, but had no formal ownership over it. But it wasn't easy, especially when the
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federal government was always giving us a hard time not to negotiate certain things, but yet we were persistent. We had to be pretty strong. We couldn't take no for an answer because we're talking about Inuit rights that have been ignored. And as true Canadians, if we are true Canadians, we're not second class citizens.
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Years of talks with the government in Ottawa had passed with limited success.
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When we started first negotiating the Nunavut land claims agreement in there, right away we said, we also want our own Nunavut territory and our own Nunavut government. But. But at that time, the government of the day was saying, there's no way you can get a political deal. You cannot through land claims agreement. But we were persistent. It didn't matter which government was the government of the day. We went through three different parties throughout the negotiations, maybe four different prime ministers.
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Then in 1990, an event elsewhere in Canada gave the Inuit people an opportunity to realize their goal.
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Mohawk versus police with their guns aimed at each other and one Quebec police force officer dead. That's the situation tonight at two native communities in the Montreal area.
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The ochre crisis started as a dispute over plans to Expand a golf course onto land claimed by the native Mohawk community in Quebec. But turned into a tense 78 day standoff with police and culminated in an operation by the Canadian Army. It drew national attention, including this report from the cbc.
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On one side, heavily armed provincial police robbed tear gas and stun grenades. The Mohawks responded with automatic firepower.
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And we knew that was happening. While we were negotiating our Nunavut Land Claims agreement and the federal government was looking terrible in the eyes of the Canadians because the way they were treating Indigenous people at that particular time, we said, look, we can uplift your ratings if you give us this deal, give us Nunavut territory. Your ratings are going to go up if you do. This had to be the moment or not. And we had to take that chance.
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On May 25, 1993, three years after the Oka crisis, Canada's Prime Minister, Brian Mulro Rooney signed the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement.
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The north wants self reliance, dignity and prosperity brought about by economic development here in Northern Canada.
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Stood alongside him was chief Inuit negotiator Paul Kwasser.
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Oh, wow. I never can forget that moment. We were all here in Iqaluit, which was to be the future capital city of Nunavut. The Prime Minister Mu Rooney came in. We had invited Inuit from all over the territory. It was a magic moment for all of us because all the Inuit realized, here it is. We finally got it. We will now be able to take the next step on our own. The 1993 agreement was the tool that made the creation of a Nunavut territory and the Nunavut government become a reality.
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It was six years later in 1999 that the newly created Nunavut territory would finally get its own government, official language and capital.
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I look at it in a sense where I was born to do this. There were a lot of Inuit leaders that are not here now that done so much work. It is something that our ancestors would be very proud of. I'm never ever going to be ashamed of speaking my own language again.
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Retired Inuit politician Paul Kwasa speaking to me. Sam Grouet for Witness History.