Coastal Labrador: Incorporation, Exploitation, and Underdevelopment

Coastal Labrador: Incorporation, Exploitation, and Underdevelopment J.D. HOUSE I. INTRODUCTION The vast territory of Labrador, some 112,000 square miles, was long neglected by outsiders. In recent years, however, the discovery of natural resources - of iron ore, hydroelectric potential, and uranium on land, and oil and gas off the lengthy coast-line - has brought this mainland part of Canada's tenth province into national focus. But, despite various journalistic and ethnographic accounts, little attempt has been made to analyze the history and contemporary social structure of Labrador within a macro-level framework . This paper is an initial attempt at this for the coastal region of the territory. The argument that follows draws upon a number of secondary sources, and upon field notes compiled by and conversations conducted with two research assistants, Ms. Mollie O'Neill during the summer and autumn of 1977, and Mr. Roger Carter during the summer of 1979. Essentially , I am going to argue that the contemporary history of Labrador, that is its history since Europeans and their North American descendants started going there in the sixteenth century, has to be understood in terms of a changing drama of interactions among the natural resources of the region, peoples native to Labrador (Indians, Inuit, and Settlers), and European/North American outsiders interested in exploiting the resources for their own use. I will first make a number of conceptual distinctions. Types of Resources and Economic Systems While it has long been popular (but perhaps questionable) to refer to Labrador's "abundance of natural resources," it is more important for present purposes to distinguish among various kinds of resources. I would like to distinguish 98 among three types according to the economic systems with which they are implicated: subsistence resources, commercial resources, and industrial resources. Subsistence resources are used directly within the local economy by those that produce them, or by others closely related to the producers, usually by real or fictive kinship ties. In the pre-contact subsistence economies of Labrador, the major resources were, for the Inuit, whales (Taylor, 1974; Kennedy, 1978:40); and, for the Indians, caribou (Tanner, 1977; Henriksen, 1973). Numerous other resources were also used, and continue to be used, in a subsistence way by people in Labrador. These include various species of fish, sea and land mammals and birds, berries, and trees. There is no inevitable end to subsistence as other forms of economic behaviour become instituted. Commercial resources are tied into a radically different type of economic system, commercial capitalism. In this system, production is not for the use of the producer and his near relations, but rather for gainful market exchange. It implies inter-dependency among economies and societies, and a basic expansionist or growth-oriented approach to resource exploitation. The most important commercial resources in Labrador have been fish, particularly codfish, sea mammals (whales and seals), and various fur-bearing mammals such as foxes and beavers. The determining factor in typing a resource is its social definition and role within a socio-economic system, not its nature as a thing-in-itself. The same resource may serve both subsistence and commercial ends for a people, as have codfish for outport Newfoundlanders and Labradorians. Or the same resource may be used d,ifferently by different peoples , and may be a source of conflict between them. The economic history of Labrador since the coming of the Europeans until the middle of the twentieth century has been its transformation by and partial incorporation into a world-wide commercial capitalist system. While suffering from various forms of exploitation and cultural degradation , the native peoples of Labrador were able to accommodate fairly well to that change. While maintaining many subsistence activities, they beRevue d'etudes canadiennes Vol. 15, No. 2 (Ete J980Summer) came participants in the commercial capitalist system as independent commodity producers of fish and furs (Hedley, 1977:1; Tanner, 1978). As Tanner has noted with respect to land tenure: It was the fact that the traders left the Indians alone in the country and made few attempts to directly influence their organization of production that the system of resource use and land tenure remained in Indian hands and part of Indian culture, even...