Geography 302: The Canadian North is designed to link to and build from knowledge that students may have acquired in courses such as cultural geography, environmental studies, Canadian studies, and Indigenous studies. It presents an overview of the human geography of the Canadian North and covers topics such as imaginings of the North, the biophysical features of the North, the history of European exploration and contact with Indigenous northern populations, Aboriginal culture and society, political developments in the North, and natural resource developments in this region and their environmental impacts.
Required Readings |
Pruitt, W. O., Jr. “The Ecology of Snow.” Canada’s Changing North. Ed. W. C. Wonders. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UP, 2003. 153–162. |
Huntington, Henry P., et al. “Ecology.” Arctic Flora and Fauna: Status and Conservation. Conservation of Arctic Flora and Fauna Working Group (CAFF), 2001. 17–29.
Please read the first 13 pages of the document that you can access from the link above. |
Hebert, Paul D. N., ed. “Environments.” Canada’s Polar Environments. Guelph, ON: University of Guelph, CyberNatural Software, 2002.
The Canada’s Polar Environments website is divided into three major headings: Environments, Climate, and Maps. You are expected to read much of the Environments section. Environments is subdivided into Inland Waters, Land, Marine Waters, and Sky, and there are often many levels under this. You are not responsible for the details beyond the headings and subheadings indicated below (i.e., no exam questions will be taken from this material) but, because it may be helpful in completing your assignments, you may want to look through this more detailed material on your own. Under Inland Waters read: Cool Facts and under this read:
Ecozones and under this read:
Ice and under this read:
Lakes Rivers Wetlands Under Land read: Cool Facts, and under this read:
Ecozones, and within this read:
Features, go into Arctic Lands and within this read:
Glaciers, and under this read:
Under Marine Waters read: Cool Facts, and within this read:
Ecozones, and within this read:
Features, and within this read:
Ice Under Sky/Optical Phenomena read: Snow In total you will encounter about 60 pages of text. Some of these pages contain only a map or a few sentences of text, but others are several paragraphs in length. You can use the commentary and study questions to focus your reading, but please read and examine all that is indicated above. |
Required Readings |
CBC News. “Mackenzie Valley Pipeline: 37 years of negotiation.” CBC News. Tuesday, January 11, 2011. 26 June, 2013.
|
Mandel-Campbell, Andrea. “Rough Trade.” The Walrus 1.4 (April/May 2004): 36–49.
|
Hall, Rebecca. “Diamond Mining in Canada’s Northwest Territories: A Colonial Continuity.” Antipode 45.2 (2012): 376–393. |
Assignment 3C: Northern Economic Development |
Robinson, Michael, and Elmer Ghostkeeper. “Native and Local Economics: A Consideration of Economic Evolution and the Next Economy.” Arctic 40.2 (June 1987): 138–144. |
Supplementary Resource |
The Berger Inquiry is considered by many to be a landmark public inquiry not only for the kind of participation it allowed and encouraged from northern Indigenous peoples, but also for the nature of the insights it captured and the conclusions Mr. Justice Thomas Berger formulated based on this information. The Inquiry dealt largely with a proposal put forth by Canadian Arctic Gas Pipeline (a consortium of large oil companies including Shell, Exxon, and TransCanada Pipelines) to build a gas pipeline from Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay across northern Yukon to the Mackenzie Delta, and then south through the Mackenzie Valley to Alberta. Justice Berger held not only formal hearings in which expert evidence was presented, but also held informal community hearings designed to capture local opinion about not only the pipeline proposal, but general concerns about northern development and its effects on native society. Berger’s recommendations were presented in two separate volumes: the first, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland (and considered by most to be the report) covered the basic commentary on public policy issues in Canada’s North, and the second, released six months later, detailed the technical aspects of the project. The controversy surrounding the report focused on Berger’s two principal recommendations: that pipelines should be permanently prohibited from crossing the environmentally fragile North Slope of the Mackenzie Valley, and that any pipeline in the region should be delayed for ten years to allow for Indigenous land claims to be settled. |
Young, Oran R. “Emerging Priorities for Sustainable Development in the Circumpolar North.” The Northern Review 18 (1998): 38–46. |