Greenland and the Canadian North
Title: Greenland: a Model for the North?
Who: Peder Roberts, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
Title: The Rise and Fall of Greenland as a Model for the Canadian North
When: Monday February 24, 12-1
Where: The Nexus Centre, Science (SN) 4022
Abstract: This paper explores how Greenland came to be regarded as a source of lessons for administration of the Canadian north, and why that idea eventually lost purchase. My initial focus is on conversations between the (settler) Canadians who established themselves from around 1940 as experts on Danish administration in Greenland, through both personal experience in Greenland and through relationships with individual Danish scientists and administrators. I pay particular attention to the geographer Trevor Lloyd, whose career as professor of human geography at McGill University was preceded by a stint as Canadian consul in Greenland during the Second World War, and to the secretary of the Advisory Committee on Northern Development Graham Rowley. But the idea of Greenland as a kind of lodestar for enlightened northern administration was shared more widely – even by Farley Mowat, with whom Rowley had precious little else in common. The paradigm of progress through conversations among experts guiding investment by state authorities came under attack from Indigenous Greenlanders and Canadians alike from the end of the 1960s, who instead pushed solidarity amongst circumpolar Indigenous peoples over the voices of southern experts. The idealized Greenland thus became visible as a colonized space with its own problems and challenges – much like the territories of the Canadian Inuit.