Nunavut: a political dream is realized.

• Author: Edmond, John B.H.
• Position: Feature Report on Nunavut

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Nunavut was born ten years ago out of the eastern Northwest Territories by the long and arduous labours of Inuit leaders of the eastern Arctic. There is deep irony in this: almost four decades earlier, just such a territory nearly came into being in response to the wishes of the politically dominant white population of the Mackenzie Basin, whose agenda was hardly driven by concern for the fate of their eastern co-residents.

In the 1950s and early 60s, the N.W.T.'s seat of government was Ottawa; a majority of Territorial Council members were southern appointees. Government was truly colonial. Apart from public servants and RCMP in settlements and hamlets, the non-Aboriginal population of the Territories was concentrated in a few centres in the Mackenzie: Yellowknife, with its gold mines; Norman Wells, with its oil; Pine Point, with an embryonic mine; and so on. To these transplanted southerners, responsible government was a birthright. Disgruntled at being held back from provincehood by the distant and seemingly barren East, with its largely Inuit (then "Eskimo") population, the Council, in 1962, asked Ottawa to divide the Territory. The West, they asserted, was % natural economic and social reality." The East, which opposed division, had no say in the matter, as only the Mackenzie District elected members to Council.

The Diefenbaker government promised division but lost power in February 1963. The new Pearson government tabled two bills that would create two territories: Mackenzie and Nunassiaq (Inuktituk for "Beautiful Land") divided at the 105th meridian. Arthur Laing, the Northern Development minister, citing the huge distances of the single N.W.T., pronounced that "division of the territories is a prerequisite to the establishment of a resident commissioner and a seat of government in the Mackenzie district." The focus was entirely on the Mackenzie. These bills died on the order paper when the parliamentary session ended. Thirty-five years later, a larger Nunassiaq was reborn as Nunavut--"Our land"--no longer a Yellowknife-Ottawa creation but the hard-won product of its own leaders. Its boundary was now roughly the treeline, mostly well to the west of 105[degrees].

Successive commissions and quasi-commissions had considered geographic and ethnic issues in the N.W.T. and the economic disparity between the Mackenzie and the North and East. Walter Gordon's 1957 Commission on Canada's economic prospects noted that...