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She’ll also describe its problems—soaring food prices, the housing shortage, substance abuse, and climate change. Nunavut’s main travel platform—sea ice—is becoming unreliable. Various other problems commence if temperatures go above 21°C in summer. With a contagious laugh she explains that Iqaluit’s new buildings are being built with air-conditioning, something never seen before by the Inuit. Then, getting serious, she’ll talk about plans to convince the Canadian government to build a deepwater port for its newest capital city.446

She just might get one. With two giant military neighbors and virtually no presence in the region, Canada suffers deep insecurities about Arctic sovereignty and knows that her aboriginal settlements are key to shoring it up—even to the point of past abuses like relocating Inuit families to bleak High Arctic outposts in the 1950s. While Canada’s Inuit are a tiny people—only fifty thousand in 2006 (up from forty thousand in 1996), mostly in isolated villages scattered across the Arctic coast—they are the dominant human presence in such a vast empty place. In the Arctic, small numbers of people gain outsized importance. A village of two hundred becomes a major destination, two thousand a metropolis.

From all current appearances Canada’s sovereignty anxiety is sharper than ever. The world is staring hard at the Arctic in general and the Northwest Passage—which actually contains several possible routes—in particular. Like everywhere else Canada’s rural areas are depopulating; her fast population growth is fueled mainly by foreign migrants flocking to southern cities. Canada knows that the remote Inuit towns are her essential outposts, and that without them her entire northern front would be empty. But after decades of ham-fisted treatment, like discouraging native languages and yanking kids off to residency schools to be assimilated, the relationship between Canada’s central government and her northern aboriginal citizens is finally on the mend, an improvement that seems unlikely to reverse course.

One big example is Nunavut. With a population that is 85% Inuit, its creation marks the first time in history that an aboriginal minority has formed a standard governance unit—in this case a territory447—within a modern western country. Imagine creating a new U.S. state seven times bigger than Nevada, with the small aboriginal population of Nevada building its entire new state government from scratch. That is the scope of Nunavut.

It is a process wracked with false starts and growing pains. The Inuit people have milled across this tundra for millennia, but today’s permanent towns and institutions are very new. Nunavut’s evolving government is being invented and used at the same time, rather like assembling a truck while driving it. It is challenged by far-flung settlements unconnected by roads, high suicide rates, not enough educated workers to fill the new jobs, and an increasingly risky winter travel platform. But optimism abounds. A brand-new northern society is being built from scratch, and the Inuit are in charge. They know this is a grand opportunity—not simply to re-create the old ways, but to build the new.

Aboriginal Demographics

The NORCs hold between 6 and 20 million aboriginal people, depending on how the Russian population is counted.448 The Russian Federation probably has about 20 million, but only about 250,000 are legally recognized as such, so officially that’s 0.2% of Russia’s total population (unofficially 14%). The United States has 4.9 million (1.6% of total population), Canada 1.2 million (3.8%), Denmark 50,000 (0.9%), Norway 40,000 (0.9%), Sweden maybe 20,000 (0.2%), and Finland 7,500 (0.1%).449 Iceland, discovered empty by the Vikings in the ninth century A.D., has none.

Clearly, aboriginal population percentages in the NORC countries are small. Why, then, an entire chapter dedicated to their status and trajectories? Because aboriginal people are a key component of our northern future.

First, the national statistics above mask the importance of geographic