SELECTED THESES ON THE CIRCUMPOLAR ARCTIC

The thesis examines the historical process of social change which affected the Dene and Inuit peoples of the Northwest Territories. After reviewing the conventional frameworks for studying social change, a Marxist perspective is proposed, centering on the concept of articulation of modes of production. The pre-contact social formation involves variants of primitive communal social relations, which encounter merchant capital in the form of the fur trading enterprises. Through this articulation, the natives are transformed into a petty commodity producing class of hunter-trappers. The rhythms of the articulation shape the prospects of production and exchange, and eventually elicit direct state intervention. Over the next fifty years the state both responds to and shapes the structure of economic-class relations. After delineating the institutional character of the state in the north, the study goes on to examine the substance and impact of policy interventions in the wildlife, mineral resource, and small-industry fields. An increasingly explicit economic strategy unfolds within the core state agencies, aimed in large part at turning native hunter-trappers into wage labourers in the new resource sectors. The study concludes that while it was only partially successful in this, the state nonetheless played a formidable role in shaping the northern class structure to 1967.