Facts About Nunavut

Population: (2001) 26,745

Nunavut ("Our Land"), self-governing homeland for the Inuit people of northern Canada. Spanning from the easternmost point of Baffin Island to Amundsen Bay off the coast of Victoria Island, the Nunavut Territory extended across some 772,000 square miles (1,999,236 square kilometers) of sparsely populated tundra. Authorized by Canadian voters in a public referendum held throughout the Northwest Territories in 1992, the Nunavut Territory officially came into existence on April 1, 1999. Inuit leaders and Canadian officials supported the creation of Nunavut to promote cultural and political autonomy among the ethnic Inuit people, who accounted for some 24,000 of the territory's 27,000 people.

After some five decades of sustained cultural domination at the hands of the Canadian government, the Inuit people of northeastern Canada greeted with celebrations the formation of a new autonomous region known as Nunavut. The creation of Nunavut--"Our Land" in the local Inuktitut language--marked the first significant redrawing of the Canadian map since the incorporation of Newfoundland as Canada's tenth province in 1949.

Carved out of the eastern half of the Northwest Territories, the newly created Nunavut Territory spans some 772,000 square miles (1,999,236 kilometers) from the easternmost point of Baffin Island to the Amundsen Gulf near Victoria Island. The Inuit people--long referred to by the pejorative term Eskimo, a Cree Indian word meaning "raw meat eaters"--account for some 24,000 of the 27,000 people who inhabit the sparsely populated tundra region.

For thousands of years, the Inuit people lived a predominantly nomadic lifestyle. Traveling by dog-drawn sleds and handmade boats, the Inuit traveled across the icy landscape of northern Canada, Greenland, and Alaska, surviving by fishing and hunting the caribou, polar bears, and walrus that inhabited the territory.

This traditional nomadic lifestyle first began to change with the steady arrival of European settlers from France, England, Denmark, and Russia that began in earnest during the 17th century. As settlers encroached on the Canadian territory from the west, south, and east, the Inuit withdrew further to the northern parts of Canada.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, the Canadian government established policies designed to permanently settle the Inuit. The government launched widespread construction and social service programs throughout the Northwest Territories. However, they also employed more controversial measures to break the Inuit of their traditional way of life. In addition to forcefully encouraging the conversion of Inuit children to Christianity, the Canadian government in the 1960s also undertook a policy of slaughtering hundreds of husky dogs in parts of the Inuit territories. While Canadian officials claimed that the slaughter of the dogs--who played an integral role in Inuit hunting--was necessitated by health concerns, many Inuit perceived the attack as a fundamental strike against their nomadic lifestyle.

The efforts to urbanize the Inuit proved successful in the most basic sense, as many of the Inuit of northeastern Canada were relocated in or near towns like Iqaluit, the capital of the new territory of Nunavut. The price of this urbanization, however, was high. Social ills, including widespread unemployment, alcoholism, suicide, and poverty plagued the Inuit throughout the settled areas.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, momentum toward greater autonomy for the Inuit began to build in Canada. Believing that greater self-rule and cultural autonomy would help to diminish social problems among the Inuit population, the government of Canada called for a public referendum on the creation of a self-governed territory. While opposition to the creation of the Nunavut state was high among the non-Inuit people of the proposed territory, the plan passed with strong support from the Inuit, paving the way for the establishment of Nunavut in 1999.