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By Root 1025 0

projects until they were settled.456 Just four years after ANCSA, aboriginal resistance to a series of new hydropower dams led to the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement, Canada’s first modern land claims settlement. In 1974 the Dene, Métis, and Inuit people stunned the world by blocking the Mackenzie Gas Project, a long-planned pipeline to bring Arctic natural gas to southern markets and a cornerstone of Canada’s northern development plan. Their negotiations took even longer, but today, with their land claims agreements and businesses in place, most are now avid supporters of the pipeline.457 Like ANCSA their aboriginal-owned corporations and companies will benefit greatly from the project, which could begin as soon as 2018.458

Canada’s modern land claims agreements have evolved well beyond the simple business corporations of ANCSA. From the outset their aboriginal negotiators insisted that the new agreements affirm not only property rights but political, social, and cultural ones as well. Many settlements also set up political self-governance. They collect royalties from the extraction of subsurface minerals, oil, and natural gas, not only from the granted property but from surrounding public lands.459 Aboriginal corporations and the Canadian government now make joint decisions on development, wildlife management, and environmental protections on these public lands. Outside companies must hire prescribed numbers of aboriginal workers and companies. Numerous protections of native language and culture reverberate throughout these documents. Such complex agreements take years to negotiate, run hundreds of pages long, and often contain provisions for still more negotiations in the future.460

After nearly four decades the era of modern, geographically large land claims agreements in North America is drawing to a close. Over half of Canada is now under jurisdiction of one settlement or another, most recently in 2008 and 2009.461 The final push will be a wave of smaller agreements across Canada over the next decade or two.462 Then it will all be done.

Greenland Rules!

The third place where northern aboriginal people have clawed back political power from distant southern capitals is in Greenland. For almost three centuries this enormous, glacier-buried island just four hundred miles east of Iqaluit was a colony of Denmark, but its population and language—currently around fifty-seven thousand people—is overwhelmingly Greenlandic Inuit (“Greenlanders”) with a fair mixture of Danish blood.

As in Canada, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 did not go unnoticed in this icy Danish province. In the year of its passage Greenlanders voted into their provincial council463 some radical youth, including an unknown twenty-four-year-old schoolteacher, Lars-Emil Johansen (whom I would meet years later as the former prime minister of Greenland), and the young firebrand Moses Olsen. These two began stridently objecting to Denmark’s sovereignty of Greenland, and for the first time in memory, Greenlanders began thinking seriously about disentangling themselves from Copenhagen’s colonial rule.

One year later, Greenlanders heartily rejected Denmark’s referendum to join the European Community (predecessor to today’s EU) with 70% of the vote. Alongside their growing nationalism, natural resources were again a root cause, but this time going the other way: Danish membership in the EC would impose fishing restrictions and a sealskin ban on Greenland, both dear to her small aboriginal economies. The referendum passed anyway, but the vote was a wake-up call to Copenhagen. Within months the Danish Parliament was cooperating with Greenland’s minister and provincial council to explore the possibility of political self-rule. Greenlanders then overwhelmingly passed a public referendum on whether or not to advance the idea. In 1979 the Greenland Home Rule Act was passed, and Greenland became a politically autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark. 464 In 1982 she withdrew from the European Community.

Greenland Home Rule wasn