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By Root 1113 0

distribution. In the coldest, most remote territories of the NORC countries—the same places where many of the more extreme phenomena described in this book are happening—aboriginal populations are disproportionately large, capturing large minorities or even a majority of the population. Alaska is 16% aboriginal. In Canada, aboriginal people capture 15% of the populations of Saskatchewan and Manitoba, 25% of Yukon Territory, 50% of NWT, and a whopping 85% of Nunavut. In certain northern areas of Sweden, Norway, and Finland, they have 11%, 34%, and 40% population shares, respectively. Denmark’s Greenland is 88% aboriginal. In northern Russia, even the officially recognized population share is 2%—ten times the national average—and that number ignores almost four hundred thousand aboriginal Yakut people comprising one-third of the population in Sakha Republic.450

Second, in North America aboriginal populations are growing very quickly. As of Canada’s last census it had ballooned 45% in just ten years—a growth rate nearly six times faster than the country’s population as a whole. U.S. aboriginals, currently totaling 4.9 million, are projected to rise to 8.6 million by 2050.451

So we see that the fast population growth of Iqaluit is not unusual but simply reflects a much broader demographic trend. Yet, a serious attitude contrast exists between the people of Iqaluit and the far larger numbers of aboriginal groups scattered in hundreds of impoverished reservations throughout southern Canada and the conterminous United States. Why are the people of Iqaluit bustling while those living on reservations are depressed? What are the implications for the future of the Northern Rim? The answers start across the border to the west and invoke a theme that is by now, I hope, familiar.

The state of Alaska was barely eight years old—even younger than Nunavut is now—when the largest oil field in North America was discovered at Prudhoe Bay on its northern coast. What followed was land-grab pandemonium.

It was 1968 and the fledgling state hadn’t even finished negotiating its land transfers from the U.S. federal government yet. Oil companies grasped immediately that the strike was huge but the waters too icy to reach by tanker ship. Instead, a very long pipeline over public lands was needed to decant it to southern markets, either to a year-round port in the Gulf of Alaska, or through Canada. Modern environmentalists, freshly inspired by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, readied themselves for an epic battle.

Meanwhile, another group had also galvanized to win closure of a long-suffering wound: Who owns the land upon which aboriginal people have always lived? Even before the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, aboriginal Alaskans had long asked when and how the tsar had come to acquire title to their homelands.452 But no one seemed to care much about this issue. It had simmered, neglected and out of public consciousness, for over a century.

By the time oil was found in Prudhoe Bay, times had changed. America’s civil rights movement had taught a new generation the power of organized protests and lawsuits. The Alaska Federation of Natives and other groups had been litigating Washington to block transfers of federal land to the new state of Alaska until their ancestral claims were adjudicated. Many of the claims overlapped and, when added up, covered a total land area larger than that of the new state. It was a mess, and in 1966, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall (father of the current senator from New Mexico Tom Udall) declared a “land freeze,” effectively stopping all transfers of land to the new state until the mess was cleaned up. When oil was struck and talk of a pipeline began, the legal implications of the aboriginal claims blew sky-high. Who, exactly, owned this land? Suddenly, Alaska—a place that was about as conspicuous as Nunavut is today—mattered to everyone. No pipeline could be built until the issue was resolved.

State legislators and oil companies began lobbying for quick congressional action on