SELECTED THESES ON THE CIRCUMPOLAR ARCTIC

Tracing the gradual transformation of relationships upon contact with successive waves of outsiders, this thesis demonstrates that Canadian Inuit are entering into class relationships, a process being tempered by a drive for ethnoregional collective rights. Although changes in the means of production were effected as Inuit entered into relationships with explorers, whalers, traders, missionaries and police, the definitive link with capitalist practice occurred with the state initiation of cooperatives beginning in the late 1950s. At this time, virtually all Inuit were transformed from independent to simple commodity producers with only limited control over what and how they could produce. The coop also fanned an incipient pan-Eskimo sentiment. Functioning for a time as an underground government, it tried, but failed to legitimate this role. Beginning in the 1970s, development corporations, created in conjunction with the settlement of land claims which are extinguishing Inuit rights to the land, usurped the coop's position of dominance. All Inuit are now shareholders in these corporations which exist on state capital and are controlled by an Inuit ruling class. Because of its denigrated ethnic status, however, this ruling class is precluded from involvement in mainstream political and economic power. On a theoretical level, this dissertation demonstrates Bonacich's proposition that nationalism develops neither spontaneously nor separately, but grows "out of the class relations generated by the development of capitalism and imperialism, and represents efforts to create alliances across class lines, or, alternatively to prevent alliances from developing within major classes across national lines. Furthermore, as articulationists argue, transformation of the indigenous mode of production and the genesis of a collective identity are not occurring in a linear fashion, but through a process of simultaneous undermining and reinforcing of indigenous practices, a process which is at times facilitated, and at times resisted by forces within the dominated mode of production.