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The Old Colonialisms and the New Ones: The Arctic Resource Boom as a New Wave of Settler-Colonialism

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October 25, 2022
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An Inuit hunter boating through Greenlandic waters with snow mountains and icebergs in the back

An Inuit hunter boating through Greenlandic waters. Photo: Algkalv

Indigenous peoples have inhabited the Arctic since time immemorial, establishing rich regional cultures and governance systems long before the introduction of modern borders. The Arctic Institute’s 2022 Colonialism Series explores the colonial histories of Arctic nations and the still-evolving relationships between settler governments and Arctic Indigenous peoples in a time of renewed Arctic exploration and development.

The Arctic Institute Colonialism Series 2022

Recently, the Arctic began to be treated as a “geopolitical hotspot” and as a “resource frontier.” The region’s international (i.e., interstate) dynamics has been drawing the attention of scholars and policymakers seeking to make sense (and take advantage) of emerging geopolitical and economic phenomena in the region. One of the main drivers of such efforts is the so-called Arctic resource boom – an enhanced knowledge on the resource endowment of Arctic seas and lands, especially in terms of the presence of hydrocarbon and mineral reserves. Since the publication of the Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal in 2008, such knowledge of the region has only increased, and triggered a plethora of economic development projects for the region – most geared towards making the commercial exploitation of such resources viable. Such plans, typical of neo-extractivist modes of development and capital accumulation,1) demand new instruments and technologies of control over land, territory and resources – not only in enabling the resource exploitation, but also in displacing Arctic Indigenous populations that inhabit spaces where resource-based economic activity is meant to take place. This process has been coupled with a range of practices aimed at controlling space and mobilities in indigenous lands – what DuPlessis calls “striation activities”. 2)

Theorizations and debates on the Arctic resource boom or on the geopolitical tensions rising in the region are generally oblivious to indigenous political projects, institutions and articulations in the region. This erasure takes the colonial violence underlying the relation between Arctic States and Arctic indigenous peoples out of sight, obscuring the violent history of expropriation underpinning contemporary Arctic geopolitics and economic development. Another effect of such perspectives is the presentation of the Arctic as an “empty” space, devoid of people, social dynamics and politics other than those developed and brought by Westphalian States.3) This position seeks to justify State interventions in the region for “properly” seizing emerging economic and strategic opportunities – with little to no regard for indigenous cultures and subsistence in the Arctic, nor to the already sensible effects of climate change in the region.

The present article seeks to frame the “Arctic resource boom” as a new wave of Arctic settler colonialism. We argue that, although projects for resource exploitation of the Arctic are achieving unprecedented scale, they represent a continuity of the colonial project, benefitting from the way previous waves of colonization have shaped and reshaped Arctic spaces and the relations between Indigenous peoples and their traditional territories. Our discussion is focused on the impacts of colonialism over the Beringian portion of Inuit Nunaat – the Inuit homeland – and the impacts of colonialism over the relation between State, indigenous peoples and Arctic spaces. Then we move on to a discussion of the Arctic resource boom and the strategic and development projects emerging in the Arctic policies of littoral states and their treatment of indigenous issues amid economic and strategic pressures to carve out new extractive enclaves in Arctic territories.

We depart from a historical account of Arctic colonialism, seeking to understand how the colonial encounter between Inuit and Euro-American populations and the importance of resource extraction shaped contemporary Arctic spaces – from baleen and whale oil to the gold rush and discovery of hydrocarbons. One important element here is to understand how this first moment of colonialism set up the conditions for modern-day resource development projects. The discussion, then, turns to contemporary economic development projects in the Arctic, understanding them as neo-extractivist enterprises – i.e., enterprises that rely heavily on resource development and control over space in a late capitalist globalized economy. As such, these projects represent a geographical expansion of extractive frontiers in a global scale, seeking new resource reserves and to reshape space to make them commercially viable. This represents a new wave of colonialism – i.e., of attempts by state and capital to enhance control over traditional indigenous territories – and a new wave of threats and attempts at dispossessing Arctic Indigenous Peoples from their rights to their traditional lands and livelihoods.

Old colonialisms: the colonial encounter in Inuit Nunaat

‘Government, as such, was introduced when the whaling fleet came to the Beaufort Sea, when the trappers came to the Canadian Arctic, and when the Danes came to Greenland. Behind them came the Christian missionaries, and behind them came those who “governed” us.’4)

In the field of International Studies, analyses of Arctic geopolitics and economic development tend to overlook the process of transformation of the Arctic in a series of discrete territorial jurisdictions – and the colonial violence underpinning such process is generally absent from historical narratives and theoretical reflections. Since mainstream theorizations organize their gaze from the point of view of the State, subnational and non-national, non-state political organizations are rendered invisible. Therefore, the colonization of Inuit Nunaat – and, in fact, the colonization of the traditional homelands of many indigenous peoples are excluded from theoretical efforts and reflections developed within international relations in general. The recent spike in interest in Arctic issues has reproduced such erasures, thinking through narrow definitions of geopolitics and economic development, seeing such issues so long as they represent problems and/or opportunities for Arctic States. This framework has rendered Arctic international relations into discussions and theorizing of Arctic interstate relations, excluding indigenous political organizations from such debates. An account of the colonial encounter in Arctic spaces, more than a mere historical recapitulation of how States occupied and annexed Inuit Nunaat into their sovereign jurisdictions, is also a necessary step in comprehending and theorizing contemporary Arctic environmental, geopolitical and economic issues.

The colonization of Inuit Nunaat by Westphalian States such as Canada, the US and Russia, left its mark on several dimensions of Inuit life. Such populations were subject to a violent process that combined attempts at cultural assimilation with the disarticulation of their livelihoods and social organization. In her narrative of the environmental history of the Bering Strait, Demuth shows how the articulation of indigenous social and economic practices with the demands of distant markets also brought about ecological imbalances that upended life in Inuit Nunaat.5) While the colonial encounter did not mean outright expropriation of land, the discovery of gold and, afterwards, of oil in Arctic lands and waters radically changed this scenario. The material aspects of gold mining and oil extraction required new technologies for controlling space and economic activity, expanding State and capital control over portions of Inuit land through enclosure.

Bathsheba Demuth6) and Jessica Shadian7) have written detailed accounts of the colonial past of the Inuit peoples. Although a people with a large history of contact with European sailors and explorers in the Arctic, the interest that the Euro-American world showed for products present in Inuit land was a fatal blow to Inuit livelihoods, society and culture. Search for products like baleen, whale oil, walrus tusks and furs articulated subsistence activities of Inuit communities to the capitalist world market. The pressure in the US mainland for these products led European and Inuit hunters to team up in the hunt for whales, walruses and even the Arctic fox, nearly leading such species to extinction. The multiple dimensions of contact between US whalers and Inuit communities left a trail of disease, the near-extinction of these beings rendered subsistence hunting almost impossible – leaving a trail of dispossession, misery and disease in the Arctic.

In her account of the environmental history of the floating coast, Demuth describes how sustained contact between Euro-American states/societies and the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic also articulated their livelihoods to the global circuits of capital flows and global processes of capital accumulation.8) Demuth’s work is precious in its description of the social and ecological impacts of colonialism – specially when concerned with the ever-growing need for resources that came from the region’s fauna like whale oil, baleen, walrus’ tusks, fox pelts. Up to 1852, whale, walrus and fox hunting, for instance, were oriented towards the subsistence of Beringian communities, with the volume of activity ebbing in consonance with the rhythms of the lives of such beings. The contact with foreigners, specially those from the US, was initially driven by commercial whaling and, eventually, moved on to the hunt for walruses, substitutes for whale meat and source of materials used in the everyday lives of indigenous peoples, and of Arctic foxes, valued for their pelts as fashion accessories in Euro-American societies. This articulation of regional subsistence economies to those moved by motives of ever-growing profits of the capitalist Euro-American societies was the main driver of the predatory hunting of such animals and caused great turmoil in ecological and socio-economic terms.

The predatory hunting of whales and other animals brought about a deep ecological imbalance. Demuth’s discussion rightly puts it in terms of disappearing calories, of energy being syphoned away from Arctic waters through the commercial hunting of Arctic animals. This process dealt a terrible blow to the subsistence of the indigenous communities of the Arctic, materialized in the emergence of situations of deep deprivation, with the spread of diseases and vices (specially alcoholism) throughout Beringia. “The market” Demuth states “had taken Beringian blubber and traded it back for empty metal pots”.9) Demuth10) and Shadian11) highlight the importance of such ecological imbalances to the expansion of state control over Inuit communities. The perception of the social maladies caused by predatory hunting was deflected to the character of the indigenous communities, both in Beringian lands, but also in the rest of Inuit Nunaat, legitimizing policies aimed at remodelling their subjectivities. Paternalist policies to remedy such ailments were spearheads for assimilationist policies that sought to impede the reproduction of the Inuit culture.

The remodelling of indigenous subjectivities was one of the main goals, pursued through Christian indoctrination and a preparation for subsistence through work in capitalist economies. Coupled with the social and economic crisis brought about by the disappearing calories, it is visible a process that, deliberately or not, was bent on the disarticulation of non-European, non-capitalist social formations, be it through attacking their material conditions of livelihood or their cultural practices. These attempts to subsuming indigenous subjectivities and cultural practices under the demands of global capitalism, was another important aspect of State policies that sought not only to extract products from the Arctic, but also to turn the human element of the region into labour, making them “useful” for the activities carried on by white settlers in these regions.

While different colonialisms developed across Inuit Nunaat, it is important to note how, albeit presenting different rationalities across time and space, they developed the same solution – enclosure and border-making – to the question of how to regulate relations between settler populations and Inuit peoples. According to Demuth,12) the United States and the Russian Empire had very similar concerns about the contact between Arctic indigenous populations and Euro-American settlers attracted to the region. The commerce of whale-related products and even of Inuit labour in exchange for firearms, liquor and tobacco was seen as deleterious for the civilizing projects such empires purported to represent – as well as a direct threat to the control over Arctic spaces in the case of firearms. Enclosures and border making, in this first moment, served to contain market activity and direct the flow of goods and the energies of the populations to the objectives of the sovereign powers that sought to claim portions of Inuit Nunaat as part of their territories.

With the interest in products of animal origin like whale oil, walrus tusks and fox pelts waned, and the price of such commodities crashed during the late nineteenth century, this did not translate into an abandonment of settler colonialism. The colonial project got a new élan with the discovery of gold in some parts of Inuit Nunaat. As a commodity, gold had an important role not only as a tool for economic development, but also played an important role in the global economy due to the widespread adoption of the gold standard. The discovery of gold and, later, of oil, constitute the main turn in Arctic colonialisms. While harvesting or trading baleen with the peoples of the Arctic offered little room to direct control over space, resources embedded in the soil, such as gold and oil, demand that territoriality and property are made clear on site. Moreover, the exploitation of such resources is, from the standpoint of capital and State, dynamic in the sense that their exploitation spurs a series of associated economic activities, seen as a possible remedy for the poverty and deprivation faced by Arctic communities as well as providing Euro-American settlers with the products and labour needed to make such activities viable and profitable.

The Arctic resource boom and new Arctic colonialisms

In the turn of the twentieth century, news of the presence of gold in Alaska and in Chukokta attracted the attention of State, capital and individuals seeking to make fortune through mining. Demuth stresses how the commercial extraction of minerals demanded, on the settler side, enclosure and definition of property rights over land and underground.13) In different parts of Inuit Nunaat, different arrangements were made in attempt to define and reinforce borders as well as seizing the economic opportunity brought about by the knowledge of gold in the Arctic. In the Russian Empire, for example, gold mining was seen as an imperial concession rather than a private enterprise, undertook to secure the imperial bullion reserves. In the U.S, on the other hand, while gold mining was seen as a matter of private enterprise, it involved State intervention in defining property rights, settling disputes and defining which citizens were entitled to the exploitation of gold mining. Both solutions to the problem of enclosure and property over land were instrumental in extending the reach of the State inland. The sea was (at that moment) not liable to territorialization and the hunting activities over the shore and sea-ice did not entail long-term settlement opportunities, the need to settle ownership claims and to stimulate mining activity.

The discovery of gold, and the initial ease with which it could be mined, attracted large contingents of foreigners to Alaska and crystallized ethnic/racial divisions within Inuit Nunaat. White foreigners sought fortune on gold mining, while the Iñupiaq of the region were not only physically segregated, but also relegated to providing subsistence goods and services (clothing, reindeer meat, transport) that supported the mining activity. In Russia, on the other hand, the Empire and then the Bolsheviks sought to control the flow of gold and resettling populations from other parts of Russia in the region, seeking to turn gold into the gravitational centre of Chukokta’s economy. For the populations of Inuit Nunaat, these different solutions meant the same – enclosure that sought to separate these peoples from their traditional lands and their livelihoods, which were redirected by the efforts of States to better serve settler dominated economic activities. The introduction of coal-powered dredges and the structuration of corporate mining over the beginning of the twentieth century14) were responsible for accelerating these trends.

Finally, the discovery of oil in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, in the late 1970’s closes the gap between what we dubbed the “old” colonialisms and the “new” ones. In the words of Eben Hopson, one of the founders of the Inuit Circumpolar Council:

Our people, who survived the fur trade, international whaling, and the gold rush, began being threatened by the world’s oil shortage. The oil discovery at Prudhoe Bay meant that the European immigrants to America had become rich, highly industrialised people, and had finally begun to covet our Arctic land.15)

Oil and gas extraction, much like gold mining, are activities that demand great control over space, not only in the regions where the extraction occurs, but also in the constitution and maintenance of logistic corridors. Allowing for movement to and from the producing regions, connecting them to global markets is fundamental in such economic activities, which makes land an important asset for State and capitalist agents involved. Moreover, and, like gold, oil and gas are deeply enmeshed in global geopolitics, meaning that the development of hydrocarbon reserves is important for States to achieving their political and strategic objectives in the global scenario. The mentioned perception of the coveting of Inuit land, together with the need to preserve Inuit culture also led to the establishment of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, a pan-Arctic Inuit caucus where Inuit rights and claims were collectively discussed, leading to the founding of the Inuit Circumpolar Council. Shadian’s research details how the ‘politics of oil’ articulated Inuit local politics in Canada, Greenland and the U.S with global issue.

The discovery of oil in regions like northern Alaska and the Arctic in general has been one of the main drivers of geopolitical interest in the region. There were, however, gaps in Euro-American awareness about the presence of hydrocarbon reserves in the region – a trend reversed by the Circum-Arctic Resource Appraisal of 2008. With the publication of the first comprehensive study by the United States Geological Survey on the resource endowment of the Arctic, interest in the economic development of the region spiked. It is estimated that 30% of the world’s undiscovered gas reserves and 13% of the undiscovered oil reserves are in the Arctic.16) The surge in interest reflects a global trend: the emergence of neo-extractivist capital accumulation,17) based on increasing pressure over natural goods and resources and one in which the global extractive frontiers expand, exerting additional pressures over lands and territories where resource reserves can be found. The expansion of the global extractive frontier is directly related to pressure over the traditional lands of Indigenous peoples, and in tandem with the growing struggle for the recognition of indigenous rights to self-government. The growing demand for hydrocarbons and mineral resources potentially can impact all of Inuit Nunaat, putting the security and economic development of Arctic States in a collision route with indigenous rights and demands in the region.

DuPlessis also points to how the expansion of the global extractive frontier is affecting the mobilities and spatialities of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic.18) Resource development activities and the discourses that support them are examples of “striation activities”,19) activities through which the modern biopolitical state imposes its striated spatiality over the smooth spatiality of the nomadic Sámi people. Transport infrastructure development plays a large role in this process, since it is one of the ways through which the state occupies a space and exercise control over it by organising it in points,20) thus striating it and enabling the government of movement and other spatialities in the region. Striation activities in the Arctic rely heavily on the planning and construction of physical infrastructure and logistic corridors that create the necessary lines connecting strategic points, not only for the direct objective of enabling economic activity via circulation but also to seize the strategic advantages given by such points and such connections.

Old colonialisms and the new: legacies, continuities and further issues

While contemporary projects of economic development in the Arctic have reached new scales and exploit new resource frontiers, they are closely related to the continuity of ‘old’ Arctic colonialisms. In their development, the perpetuation of the settler-colonial logic of capitalist economic development coupled with reasons of the Euro-American polities that claim the Arctic as part of their territory constitute the basis of ‘Arctic geopolitics’. Another new element is the growing importance of the Arctic as a geopolitical hotspot in world politics. While economic reasons are an important driver for territorial reorganizations in the Arctic, national security and defence issues also play an important part in such processes. The reorganization of military structures and the redefinition of military strategies and objectives in the Arctic – seen in Russia, in the US and Canada, encompassing all of the Inuit homeland – points to a tendency of increased control being exercised over hyperborean spaces by States.

The emergence of neo-extractivist capitalist development21) might be the defining feature of emerging Arctic colonialisms. Neo-extractivist capital accumulation is characterized by pressure over natural resources and the demand for greater capitalist control over space, reinforcing a relationship between humanity and nature based on the economic value of land and natural resources. While colonial projects attempt to recast themselves as necessary in the face of external threats or as the reasonable way of seizing the Arctic resource boom, their objectives are similar to those of old colonialisms: subsume indigenous territories and subjectivities under the logic of capitalist accumulation and extending State (and capital) control over the populations that inhabit them. It is possible to note that, if their scale and methods are somehow different from eighteenth and nineteenth century colonialisms, they still represent a continuity of the colonial project. Moreover, the long history of the nefarious impacts of colonialism and the deep disarticulation it brought to the Inuit peoples allowed the erasure of indigenous presences and the emergence of ‘empty Arctic’ narratives – used by both neo-extractivist capitalism and the national-territorial State in legitimizing the rationale behind such projects.

Another important aspect of the colonial project in Inuit Nunaat (and, in fact, in many other colonized regions), brilliantly explored in Demuth’s work, is the remodelling of the relation between humanity and nature in colonized spaces. Be it with land, the sea, sea ice or animals, capitalism as a mode of production, and neo-extractivism as a path of economic development under such system, demand the construction of an instrumental relation to these non-human elements of the environment. This understanding entails a relation between human and non-human nature developed under the mediation of value and valorisation – the main goals of capital accumulation and economic activity under capitalist relations of production. This forecloses a range of different social practices, seen as something to be moulded under the logic and temporality of (capitalist) economic practices. While Demuth discusses how Beringian cultures in general did not have stark distinctions between humanity and non-humanity, Shadian, on the other hand, highlights how such relations, among the Inuit are expressed through the concept of inua. Rather than seeing man as a separate of and dominating nature, Inuit populations understood themselves not only as part of nature, but also as being stewards of the non-human nature and of their homelands and home-environments.

In the present text we focused on how Arctic colonialisms came to be and the technologies they employed in the attempt of disarticulating Inuit livelihoods, their social and cultural practices; this is not the only history to be told. The Inuit – and, in fact Indigenous peoples in the Arctic and in the world – have a long history of resistance to and struggle against colonialism. The Inuit Circumpolar Council is an institution born of such efforts and, to this day, it disputes the contents and objectives of Arctic policies through the development of its own political instruments and Arctic policies in many dimensions. Rejecting the acritical acceptance of policies based on settler-colonial understandings of Arctic geopolitics and economic development, the ICC articulates understandings of autonomy, self-government and economic development other than those deployed by settler-colonial, capitalist, westphalian States.

Understanding colonialisms and their development is an important step in reckoning with the colonial violence underlying present-day rationales for dealing with geopolitical and economic issues in the Arctic. It is important to know and tell the histories of struggle and resistance to colonialism, but it is also important to understand how the understandings deployed by indigenous populations and their social and political practice might inform future debates on Arctic geopolitics and economic development. While such struggles put in question the Euro-American definitions of economic development, sovereignty and self-government, they were also invested in the construction of alternative understandings and alternative social practices. Unearthing such understandings and their impact over present-day Arctic Indigenous policies, as well as understanding how they can articulate alternative visions of Arctic economic development is an urgent task.

Pedro Allemand Mancebo Silva is a Brazilian researcher and PhD student at the Institute of International Relations of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (IRI/PUC-Rio).

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