The path to Panarctic: The emergence of an extractive frontier in Arctic Canada, 1948–1958

Abstract

AbstractFrom the late 1940s to the late 1950s, the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) turned vigorously to the Arctic archipelago, expanding and confirming the colonial premise that the islands of the High Arctic were an extractive frontier for oil and gas. In this paper, the first of a planned pair, we show how the efforts of the GSC were hugely consequential for subsequent corporate hydrocarbon exploration, but were also intimately entangled with other, concurrent strands of militarization and Arctic colonialism. Numerous histories celebrate GSC geologists as heroic pioneers of extraction and northern field science. Both the militarization of the Arctic in the 1950s and the concurrent, infamous High Arctic Relocations have been discussed at length. This paper has a more precise, interstitial objective: to show that the GSC's fieldwork depended on both the infrastructure of Cold War geopolitics and the labour of Inuit who were moved to the region under duress—particularly to the new community of Qausuittuq (Resolute). Regardless of specific commercial outcomes, the version and vision of the Arctic installed by the GSC continues to foreground certain future geographies of the archipelago, while forestalling or marginalizing others.