Place them on a stamp: Inuit, banal colonialism, and the “pioneer experiment” of the High Arctic Relocations

Abstract

Postage stamps are considered to be silent messengers of the state, capable of transmitting ideas, representations, and often politically-charged messages of what nation states wish to present to both domestic and international audiences. Building on calls for further research into the specific stories of individual stamps and their producers, this article focuses on the “Eskimo Hunter” stamp issued in 1955 by the Canadian Post Office Department. Representing one of the first Indigenous-themed stamps, it is argued that it can be read as an attempt by the federal government to both incorporate Inuit as full citizens of the state, while portraying the Arctic as a key geographic space belonging to the Canadian imagined community. Furthermore, a connection is made between the “Eskimo Hunter” stamp and the High Arctic Relocations, which took place in 1953 and 1955. Primarily initiated due to concerns following the precipitous drop in Arctic fox furs, several Inuit families were relocated from northern Québec and Baffin Island to uninhabited Cornwallis and Ellesmere Islands in the High Arctic, in what the federal government called a “pioneer experiment”. The relocations also subtly served as a means of bolstering Canada's de facto sovereignty amid increased American presence in the region during the Cold War. By connecting the High Arctic Relocations with the “Eskimo Hunter” stamp as two nodes of a matrix of Postwar Canadian Arctic policy that sought to administer Inuit lives, bodies, and lands, it is argued that the stamp constitutes a prime example of what I term banal colonialism.