An Alaskan Perspective

Abstract

My perspective on the Arctic is that of a Brit who has become an Alaskan: I am a Scot who grew up in England, where I earned my bachelor of science degree and a doctorate from the University of Essex. My first academic appointment was at the University of Ghana in West Africa and I have been on the faculty of the University of Alaska Anchorage, where I have specialized in comparative politics and international relations, for more than 30 years. I became interested in Arctic issues upon my arrival in Alaska and was the founding director of the Canadian studies program. Like many of my British compatriots, I grew up with broad global interests and an awareness of Britain's heritage of exploration, discovery, and colonization, including significant contributions to polar exploration both north and south.Educated in the UK, I had learned about British Antarctic and Arctic explorations and the role of the Hudson's Bay Company in exploring the remote regions of North America. I knew more about Canada than about the United States from my high school studies of North America, so I was amazed to discover on my arrival in Alaska in 1974 that there was very little knowledge or understanding of Canada in Alaska, and virtuaUy no communication between Alaska and the adjacent areas of Canada, British Columbia and the Yukon. Despite Alaska being a virtual exclave of the US, cut off from the contiguous states by Canada, there were no courses on Canada in the elementary or high school curriculums in Alaska, nor any at the campuses of the University of Alaska until the Canadian studies program was established at its Anchorage campus in 1986.The prevauing attitude towards Canada on the part of the informed public in Alaska could best be characterized as one of generalized suspicion, although I should hasten to add that that would also have been true for Alaskan attitudes towards most other foreign countries during the Cold War period. And indeed, Alaskans even had suspicions of their own federal government and of Americans outside Alaska.US-CANADA ARCTIC RELATIONS ATTHE OUTSETThe history of the relationship between Canada and the US as Arctic neighbours begins in 1867 with the US purchase of Alaska from the Russians, an act that is often regarded as one of the precipitating factors of Canadian confederation.1 In purchasing Alaska, the US gained territory in the north that extended into the Arctic; confederation created Canada out of what were formerly British colonies and Hudson's Bay Company territory (Rupert's Land) in the north and far north of North America. Thus the US and Canada became neighbours in the Arctic in 1867 at the border between Alaska and what later became the Yukon territory and the province of British Columbia.Relations between the remaining British in North America (largely in Canada) and the Americans had been tense after the U S won its independence: borders were not demarcated and there were regular skirmishes before and after the War of 1812 when the British burned the White House. The report that the British had traveUed right across the continent from Trois-Rivieres to the Arctic and Pacific oceans spurred President Thomas Jefferson to dispatch the corps of discovery under the leadership of captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to make good American possession of the continent after the Louisiana purchase. And the 1823 Monroe doctrine, which pronounced that henceforth the western hemisphere was not open to European intervention, was partly aimed at getting rid of the British from the Oregon territory. There was a definite feeling in the US at the time of the purchase that owning Alaska would facilitate America's acquisition of the rest of what is now western Canada, which was seen as a natural development in accordance with the US conception of manifest destiny.The original border between Russia, in possession of Alaska, and Great Britain, in possession of Canada, had been demarcated in 1825 but emanated from a series of treaty negotiations to end the Napoleonic Wars in which the US government had been deeply involved. …