At the Intersection of Apology and Sovereignty: The Arctic Exile Monument Project

At the southern tip of Resolute Bay on Cornwallis Island, located in the northern reaches of the Arctic Archipelago, stands a sculpture of a lone Inuk man looking out toward the Arctic Ocean. Though the sculpture is a testament to endurance in the face of isolation, it also gestures toward the possibilities of reconnection with land, kin, and culture. For roughly four hundred kilometers farther north on Ellesmere Island, a second monument answers the first, depicting missing pieces of the Inuk’s family—an Inuit woman and child similarly bracing against bitter winds and the sting of abandonment in an unknown place. Meant to be read together, as two parts of a whole, these sculptures collectively commemorate events that were first set in motion sixty years ago and that continue to reverberate in the Inuit hamlets of Resolute and Grise Fiord today. These two smallest and northernmost settlements in North America, with populations of just 229 and 141 residents respectively (Statistics Canada 2007b; 2007a), were not created by Inuit intent; rather, they were the product of what mid-century bureaucrats in Canada’s Department of Resources and Development called a "pioneer experiment" (RCAP, 94) that exploited Inuit as test subjects for establishing settlements in the remote High Arctic,¹ a region Inuit had not "inhabited [for] centuries" (Byers, 109).² While this "experiment" was plagued from the outset by misinformation and poor planning, the aspect of its "inhumane . . . design" (RCAP, 162) that has become most contested is that of motive—what investigations have subsequently diagnosed as an entangled combination of mid-century Arctic colonization under the auspices of welfare state programs and a Cold War struggle for Arctic territorial control (Tester and Kulchyski, 9). The net result was that Inuit were coerced to leave their homelands, deserted in an alien environment more than 1,500 kilometers farther north, and used as "human flagpoles" to bolster Canada’s sovereignty claims in the Queen Elizabeth Islands (114).³

The monuments at Resolute and Grise Fiord collectively commemorate what has become known as the High Arctic Relocations of 1953 and 1955. At the same time, the sculptures also signify Inuit ingenuity in an era of so-called reconciliation in Canada: they are the medium through which Inuit have waged their most recent effort to obtain a formal apology from the federal government for the relocations. The struggle for redress has been a long one, born of the rise of Inuit political consciousness and the establishment of Inuit political organizations in the 1970s and 1980s (RCAP, 34).⁴ As reconciliation has emerged as a dominant discourse shaping Indigenous–state relations over the past two and a half decades, Inuit have leveraged their currency to bring their particular experiences of colonial injustices to national attention. In 1987, under the leadership of Makivik Corporation, the Arctic Quebec land claim organization, an Inuit redress coalition submitted a position paper outlining its grievances to the federal government. Further investigations ensued and, in 1990, the House of Commons Standing Committee on Aboriginal Affairs filed a report recommending compensation and an apology, as did the Canadian Human Rights Commission in 1992. During the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP) in the 1990s—arguably the first large-scale reconciliatory forum in Canada—Inuit leaders convinced RCAP to conduct its own detailed investigation into the High Arctic Relocations (RCAP, 4). RCAP collected testimony from relocatees and government employees, considered research by several academics, and published a report in 1994 that also advocated for reparations and an apology (163). In the face of public pressure, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government negotiated a "Reconciliation Agreement" with Inuit survivors in 1996 that offered $10 million in compensation but adamantly withheld an apology. Aging relocatees, seeking some measure of redress in their lifetime, signed the agreement "under duress" (Byers, 110).

Twelve years later, in the wake of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s highly publicized 2008 residential schools apology and the commencement of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission particular to that colonial policy, Inuit renewed their calls for the apology they had previously been denied.^5...