The Inuit of Peterborough, Ontario Canada - Research Paper Example

‘The Inuit of Peterborough, Ontario Canada Introduction Inuit and their forebears have lived in the Canadian Arctic for thousands of years. According to archaeologists, peopling of the Arctic occurred roughly 12,000 years ago. Present-day Inuit moved east to live in the eastern and western Arctic, and Peterborough, Ontario (Magocsi, 1999, 56). The Inuit perhaps moved into the province through Alaska. Woodland Natives lived in the province, as well as the Iroquois. Two of the major locations remaining from this period are the petroglyphs at Serpent Mounds and Petroglyphs Provincial Park. The petroglyphs can be found in Peterborough and are thought to have been created between 900 and 1400 CE by the Algonquin community (Corriveau, 2002). In spite of contact with Europeans, Inuit continued patterns of seasonal, regional movement that were rooted in the accessibility or presence of natural resources and preserved their customary means of subsistence until the 20th century (Magocsi, 1999). This paper discusses the history of the Inuit in Peterborough, Ontario and the issues they face today. History Adam Scott lived in the western part of the Otonabee River in 1818. After a year he started building a gristmill and sawmill, naming the place Scott’s Plains. In 1825, a large number of Irish immigrants entered Peterborough. In 1850, the province was consolidated as an urban area (Zimmerman, 2010). Since the 1859s, a major canoe construction industry developed all over Peterborough. In 1893, the Peterborough Canoe Company was built. The province would witness large-scale industrial expansion as the area was one of the first provinces in Canada to start producing hydro-electrical energy (Belanger et al., 2011). There are a number of important episodes that took place in Peterborough in the twentieth century. The first event was the township of Ashburnham being added to Peterborough. This considerable expanded the size of the developing metropolis. This portion of the city is called East City by native inhabitants and is considered as a rather independent unit to Peterborough capital (Corriveau, 2002). It has preserved an identity or image in the province and is one of the most popular communities. The second event was the accomplishment of the Peterborough Lift Lock. Peterborough then was consolidated as a city in 1905 on Dominion Day (Zimmerman, 2010). On the other hand, the Inuit in the province normally traded items acquired by means of their customary subsistence acquisition methods in return for European products, like food, cloth, tobacco, weapons, needles, and knives. Products traded by Inuit included fish, dogs, whalebone, caribou meat and skins. In the 1860s, the whaling business in the province reached its height (Belanger et al., 2011). And then, whaling workers increased their earnings through hunting walruses, seals, and caribous, fox catching and fishing, which abused numerous subsistence resources of the Inuit in Peterborough. Eventually, populations of caribou, musk ox, and bowhead whale became seriously diminished, resulting in more severe abuse of the more lucrative fox fur (Belanger et al., 2011). By the latter part of the 19th century, fur merchants had started to migrate into previous whaling areas. They built stations and pushing Inuit to hunt foxes. The arrival of Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) merchants and whalers in Peterborough was followed immediately by missionaries, who built churches, hospitals, and schools (Magocsi, 1999). Even though 19th- and 20th-century exploration of the Arctic charted a large portion of the Arctic, it proved to the government of Canada that a Northwest Passage was not a sustainable economic path to Asia (McMillan, 2004). Nonetheless, the subsistence of the Inuit became more and more and permanently connected to European economic factors and overseas consumer products, adding to the extensive famine after the downfall of fur business in the 1930s. All over the 1930s and 1940s, the government of Canada carried out relief services for the Inuit, but until 1950, federal law supported a customary, self-supporting means of subsistence for the Inuit, as much as that was feasible (Corriveau, 2002). By the advent of the 20th century, those in the government were challenging the status of the Inuit, uncertain if they must be classified citizens of Canada or constituencies of the state, similar to the First Nations. A decree was passed in 1924 to modify the Indian Act, giving obligation to the Department of Indian Affairs for the Inuit, but guaranteeing that Inuit would continue to be citizens of Canada. In 1930, this decree was cancelled, passing responsibility for the Inuit to the Northwest Territories (NWT) Council (McMillan, 2004). The process by which the Inuit in Peterborough became sedentary was directly associated with the growing social, political, and economic assimilation of Arctic indigenous people with Western cultures. The first interaction between the Europeans and the Inuit may have taken place in northern Newfoundland and southern Labrador, which were frequented by the Greenlandic Norse settlers in roughly 985 C.E. (Magocsi, 1999). However, it appears more probable that the native pagans met by these colonists were somewhat of Amerindian type. If this is true, it was not prior to the 16th century that the interaction between the Europeans and the Inuit truly started (McMillan, 2004). In the beginning, these were somewhat antagonistic. For example, in 1566, an Inuk mother and her child, perhaps abducted in Labrador the previous year, were displayed in a number of European exhibitions. Years later, when Martin Frobisher, a British voyager, found out about the bay that currently carries his name, the native Inuit slaughtered some of his workers, and in revenge he imprisoned three individuals who were transported to London (Magocsi, 1999). Relationship with the Inuit kept on being somewhat antagonistic until the advent of the 18th century, when French, Basque, and Dutch fishermen and whalers were able to build a trade in furs and blubber with the northern people. Interactions became very often that, in order to enhance contact or communication, a pidgin language eventually arose in Peterborough. A German Protestant religion—Moravian Brethren— built a trading and missionary station in 1771 in northern Labrador (McMillan, 2004). A semi-inhabited village eventually grew there, as well as all over a number of other Moravian churches. In Arctic Quebec and Northwest Territories, continuous communication and contact just began in 1830, when HBC started forming trading stations. Nevertheless, much prior to that, American and Scottish whalers had by that time began communication with the Arctic indigenous people, trading with them and recruiting them on their boats (Belanger et al., 2011). By the close of the 19th century, majority of the Inuit in Peterborough already owned steel cages and rifles and aware of tobacco, flour, sugar, and tea (Zimmerman, 2010). Missionaries came after the whalers and traders. The Anglican Edmund Peck formed a congregation at Little Whale River in 1876. At the same time, missionaries were starting to communicate with the Mackenzie Inuit. From different places, Anglicanism grew fast (McMillan, 2004). The Roman Catholics followed; hence by 1940 nearly every Inuit in Peterborough had converted to Christianity. The day before the Second World War, the Inuit inhabited semi-nomadic hunting-trapping areas in Peterborough. Their economic practices were mainly focused on the fur trade. They had motor boats and weapons, were dressed in commercial clothes, and consumed bannock and biscuits (Belanger et al., 2011). Almost all adult Inuit were knowledgeable and proficient in their own language. Nevertheless, the Inuit population in Peterborough had drastically reduced due to starvation and epidemics (Steckley, 2008). During this period, the federal government, whose only officers were a few law enforcers, was only beginning to give help to the Inuit. In the 1940s, Ottawa becomes completely engaged in Inuit supervision. The war had revealed the economic and strategic value of the Arctic areas, including provinces like Peterborough, and thus the governmental principle of ‘invisible hand’ was no longer applicable (Bonesteel, 2006). In a matter of years, a full system of health, administrative, social, and educational programmes were formed all over Peterborough and the Canadian north. Because these services or programmes needed to be centralized in specific places, the Inuit were firmly instructed to become non-nomadic, and, consequently, the hunting-trapping settlements vanished in the 1960s and 1970s (Abu-Laban & Garber, 2005).The acceptance of a sedentary way of life, alongside formal education, involved the formation of a generation of young Inuit proficient in two or several languages and familiar with Western cultures. It was these young bilingual/multilingual Inuit who, in the 1970s and 1980s, attempted to redefine the ties between Canada and its indigenous people (Steckley, 2008). Administrative and territorial arrangements were made and new Inuit-managed associations/groups were formed in Peterborough and elsewhere in Canada. Contemporary Issues the Inuit are Dealing With In the creation, development, and implementation of numerous services and programmes, like housing and education, the federal government was not able to talk with Inuit before carrying out these programmes, thus raising Inuit discontent. For instance, e-number disks were launched in the 1940s to help government authorities and medical teams monitor the Inuit. These people believed that they have to obtain and document census data, police and medical information, and trade transactions precisely without the uniform last names and spellings (Bonesteel, 2006, vii). The Inuit people detest this monitoring process, which was terminated since 1968 when last names were chosen by every Inuit. A declaration by the government in 1962 revealed uncertainties about the situation of the Inuit, which was caused by the drastic transformation in lifestyle and the penetration of cultural forces from southern Canada to the North (Bonesteel, 2006, vii): An Eskimo population growing at the rate of 3.8% a year is in transition between the old world of the snow house, the seal-oil lamp and primus stove for heat and light, clothing of skins, and a diet almost entirely of meat, and the new world of the snow-banked tent or wooden shack, fixed in one place (usually without sanitary facilities), clothing of cotton, nylon and wool, high carbohydrate foods purchased at the local store and the white man’s rules about coming to work on time. Getting jobs, especially established, permanent employment was hard for a large number of adult Inuit who were not very proficient in English and have poor education and inadequate skills preparation (Zimmerman, 2010). The Government of the Northwest Territories (GNWT) relocated to Yellowknife from Ottawa in 1967. Relocating the GNWT to northern Canada indicated an enlargement and spreading out of the territorial public programmes, and the formation of numerous jobs (Borrows, 2010). The greater involvement of government officials in Peterborough, who were at times Inuit, expanded the knowledge and understanding of the federal and territorial government about social issues and the imperative to enhance welfare services, especially in the domains of health and education. Due to the establishment of stable communities all over the North in the 1960s, the territorial and federal officials tried to form systems of community administration the same as that in the South (Crawford, 2013). The Inuit were motivated to take part in administrative and local government activities. The federal government also helped with the formation of collaborative commerce to support Inuit learning and training in the field of economic management (Abu-Laban & Garber, 2005). The Inuit were permitted to take part in the federal election in the 1950. The political participation of the Inuit in the 1960s and 1970s was generally driven by issues with federal government-supported expansion of mineral, gas, and oil resources in the North. The Inuit had thought of themselves as wardens of northern Canada ever since the beginning of time, and tried to conserve the balance of their natural environment and amount of resources available that had traditionally sustained their living (Bonesteel, 2006). Federal legislation and research, like the 1967 Hawthorn Report, redirected focus on the legal, economic, and social issues of indigenous groups in the Canadian North, including Peterborough (Zimmerman, 2010). Aboriginal reaction to federal policies and programmes drove the federal government to financially support groups supporting the needs and demands of native communities, and to form rules for discussing the concerns of indigenous groups, and to formulate policies for resolving individual and wide-ranging land disputes. The Inuit established the countrywide organization Inuit Tapirisat of Canada (ITK) in 1971 to encourage the Canadian government to expand their autonomy, as well as to approve land claims and sovereignty encompassing portions of northern Quebec and Northwest Territories (Bonesteel, 2006). In the 1970, the Committee for Original Peoples’ Entitlement (COPE) was established in West Arctic to examine the land entitlements of the indigenous groups (Abu-Laban & Garber, 2005). Instead of being chosen for their lead in traditional Inuit interests, the pioneers of COPE and ITK were primarily young individuals, who were formally schooled and trained at vocational and secondary schools in Ottawa, Yellowknife, and Churchill (McMillan, 2004). As stated by ITK, these educational institutions “provided an opportunity for young Inuit men and women from different regions to start discussing the types of problems all Inuit were facing. From these gatherings and discussion sprang a commitment to the politics of change” (Bonesteel, 2006, ix). After the establishment of ITK and COPE, regional organizations, including those in Peterborough (e.g. First Nations, Inuit and Metis (FNIM)), were formed to offer Inuit representation. Common goals held by Inuit political groups all over northern Canada involved care for natural environment and preservation of environmental sustainability; guaranteeing that the Inuit obtained infrastructural services from economic programmes in their areas, like housing and transportation improvements; and local administration of resource development programmes, as well as generation of local jobs (Zimmerman, 2010). With the resolution of several land disputes, the Inuit associations in Peterborough have reoriented their goals and are currently tasked to oversee the conditions of the inclusive claim arrangements in the best interest of the Inuit. They are also mediums for the Inuit to enhance understanding and awareness of problems like economic, environmental, education, housing, and healthcare. Guaranteeing the accomplishment of land claim agreement provisions, transferring control to regional and Inuit associations, and sustaining control over their resources and lands are concerns of persistent regional importance for the Inuit (Steckley, 2008). The Inuit are worried about the dedication of the federal government to carrying out the provisions of their wide-ranging claim arrangements, and the unfavourable economic and social consequences for their communities if the land provisions are not completely instigated. As a distinctive aboriginal culture confronting issues unique to the topography of their customary land, the Inuit demand programmes that deal with their unique situations (Borrows, 2010). Even so, the Inuit are worried that environmental problems, especially climate change, which is a global problem, were not taken into consideration in federal policymaking. Inuit associations are vital instruments for guaranteeing the protection of traditional culture and language. Technological use among the Inuit has transformed. Specifically, modern communication and technology have made information about customary cultural practices broadly accessible to young people. Incorporation of customary languages with advanced technology is vital for the continued existence of languages and aids in ensuring their continuous use (Bonesteel, 2006). Moreover, besides building systems of Inuit-based authority and control that will make government applicable to Inuit circumstances and will enhance their self-government within the federal structure, these indigenous people pursue the formulation of federal programmes that reveal their uniqueness as indigenous peoples and the distinctive topographical issues that they confront (Borrows, 2010). Main aspects for boosting living standards in numerous northern areas, including Peterborough, involve housing; enhanced healthcare access; and continuous economic development. Conclusions The Inuit in Peterborough, Ontario Canada today comprise a very small portion of the total population of the province. However, the richness of the history of the Inuit, how they arrived, grew, and flourished in the province, is undeniable. The Inuit had confronted numerous challenges since time immemorial, from subsistence issues to governance concerns, yet they almost always were able to overcome them. Their history attests to the fact that the Inuit are resilient people. Today, they confront more serious, pressing issues, especially with regard to their natural environment and land, but with the help of the federal government and other concerned organisations, they will definitely once more overcome such challenges. References Abu-Laban, Y. & Garber, J. (2005). The Construction of the Geography of Immigration as a Policy Problem. Urban Affairs Review, 40(4), 520-561. Belanger, R. et al. (2011). Canada’s Entrepreneurs: From the Fur Trade to the 1929 Stock Market Crash. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bonesteel, S. (2006). Canada’s Relationship with Inuit: A History of Policy and Program Development. Canada: Indian and Northern Affairs Canada. Borrows, J. (2010). Canada’s Indigenous Constitution. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Corriveau, D. (2002). The Inuit of Canada. New York: Lerner Publications. Crawford, A. (2013). The trauma experienced by generations past having an effect in their descendants. Transcultural Psychiatry, 51(3), 339-369. Magocsi, P. (1999). Encyclopedia of Canada’s Peoples. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. McMillan, A. (2004). First Peoples in Canada. New York: Douglas & McIntyre. Steckley, J. (2008). White Lies about the Inuit. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Zimmerman, K. (2010). Canada. 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