Cutting up Continents has always been a contentious process. They are often thought of as physical limits, not just dividing lines but ramparts, like the walls of medieval cities. There are, however, more than continents of rock and soil: psychological and cultural continents are as often divided and as crucial to identity. Borders are metaphors for places where different discourses intersect, where forms of cultural transvestitism occur. Borders highlight the potential strength of hybrid, border-crossing cultures (Olalquiaga 1990:89). Those cultures-on-the-margins, so to speak, point to the possibility of redrawing borderlines, of the world being other than it is at the present.
Andrei Codrescu, in his book The Disappearance of the
Outside draws attention to this, saying,
A new map of the world is in the making. Countries of memory that were once real countries again make their appearance: once erased from the map, they first reappear as ghost images, quickly draw substance to themselves , and soon are undeniably here. Czeslaw Milosz`s long-gone Lithuania appeared from the fog of his Issa Valley and is now part f our world... Isaac Bashevis Singer's Poland took its place on the map a few hovering, ghostly inches above today's Poland. Alive in...memories....the erased countries of the world emerge into the twentieth century to finish their unfinished destinies. ...This is the geography of the victims of history returning via the imagination to possess the present. This map shows no distinction between reality and dream: it's drawn to scale. (1990:57-8)
Quebec is one of these countries - for almost exactly
a decade, a state has hovered abstractly in the pages of the daily media
just above the province, fitting itself and memories of identity couched
in the seventeenth century to boundaries drawn as recently as the twentieth
century (1933 to be exact).
There are other countries on the map, 'countries of both memory and some sort of geographical reality, whose mythic description is the only true one. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Columbia-become- Maconda is one of the these.... These are 'approximate countries' (Codrescu 1990: 58; 81). Others exist on a sort of anticipatory map, as if they have come into existence too early and must wait around to be properly born on the juridical and political maps of the globe. Nunavut is one of these. Where once, real wars were held to permanently change the geography of world, desire and discourse always (and now more clearly than ever) supplement the hardness of weaponry with the softness of information and ideology. Erikson, drawing on Durkheim, has argued that the only material available with which to mark borders is differences in everyday life and behaviour between each side. In an age of information, myths of borders, of foreigners and outsiders are the real facts, while borders are more mobile and changeable than ever. If borders function to frame and stabilise an official identity of insiders, that identity appears as a second order fiction, a myth based on an legend inscribed in language and territory.
Nunavut is the new territory in Canada's northeastern arctic. Nunavut doesn't exist, except as the Nunavut Implementation Commission (NIC) which has the mandate to advise the signatories to the Nunavut Political Accord - the Government of Canada, the Government of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. (NTI), the administrator of the Inuit land-claim settlement (with the Canadian federal government) - on 0the establishment of the Nunavut Government
. 
Nunavut does not exist. But for some time now, Nunavut has existed in that information-space we call the World Wide Web. Many people have been to the eastern arctic: some were born there, some work there, others go there only to discover they want to leave as soon as possible. I have never been to the eastern arctic, but I am one of the few to have visited Nunavut, in cyberspace. A counter records only some 4000 'browsers' to the Web pages of the Nunavut Implementation Commission. These pages read like not so much a self-fulfilling profesy, but a fait acommpli. Information on Nunavut is in the present tense (http://www.nunanet.com/˜nic). It is the uncanny property of visual and multimedia images on the computer to present a 'world picture' in which the 'not-yet' mixes with the 'always- already' (to turn old Heidegger upside down).
The full apparatus of governmental information covers pages and pages: socio-demographic profiles of small villages, make this area of Canada's Eastern Arctic the most heavily documented population of all of cyberspace. The public sphere is rounded out by up-to-date coverage of local events, issues and debates in the Nunistiaq News, based in Iqualiut (eg. Nov. 15 1996 news posted on http://natsiq.nunanet.com/˜nunat/61115.html#5).
This cyberspace, while it clearly refers to and, figuratively, hinges on and around, everyday geographical spaces, is characterized by Christine Buci-Glucksmann's baroque reason (1983) : 'a reason that incorporates desire, and whose strangemness and uncanny excess provide us the allegory of an alternative modernity that transgresses the mercantile reason of rationalism' (Chambers 1994:63). Nunavut, if it does not exist in reality or in juridical and administrative, exists in desire and aspiration - an eminence gris which colors the text of the NIC homepage on World Wide Web.
Nunavut will include the area the Keewatin District on the western coast of Hudson's Bay and most of the islands of the Arctic Archipelago all the way to the pole (see map, appended) and the Nunavut Goevernment will officially take over from the NIC and the Government of the Northwest Territories on April 1, 1999. The NIC's mandate is including training needs, government structure and the location of a capital. (see Canada, 1990 Nunavut Act, Section 58). Already extensive public consultations have been held, and strong expectations of the form of the Government and the prospects of job opportunities in a decentralised bureaucracy all over Nunavut have been raised. The Nunavut Government will have powers and responsibilities similar to those of the existing Government of the Northwest Territories. It will be a public government, representing all residents of Nunavut by a democratically elected Legislative Assembly.
Although it is not formally an ethnic self-government,
as sought by aboriginal groups in southern as well as northern Canada,
the vast majority of residents will be Inuit. Such a vision of a territorial
government which expresses the will of an ethnic majority is also the vision
which motivates calls for forms of Quebec sovereignty association, independence
or autonomy. The identity of these ethnic groups is clear, however, only
in contrast with another ethnic group whose identity is expressed in the
British parliamentary structures of the existing Canadian provinces and
federal government. This group is much more of a melting-pot than simply
being those of Anglo-Irish-Scottish heritage. Canada, for example, includes
the largest number of Finns outside of Finland. Canada is a strange land
of suburb- nations:. Thunder Bay, with its large number of Finnish first
generation migrants, is a kind of outpost of Finland. So, where are the
borders of the Finns if not as much in the imagination as in international
law? Vancouver appears to many to have become a commuter suburb for wealthy
Hong Kong capitalists. Hong Kong daily newspapers are available in synchronic
time with their publication in Hong Kong (technically across the dateline).
In every country the media pose the problem of the shifting boundaries between national and foreign, otherness and sameness, reprtiion nad difference. Italian television shows sharply how different cultures mingle and blend on the national screen in a flow of fictions...Dallas is naturalized in popular Naples, how Californian-ness can become part of the imaginary of a Southern Italian housewife, how the proximity of a poor Roman borgata to a petty bourgeois household in Riio, to a mansion in Denver, Colorado, is made acceptable and plausibly by its appearing on the same flat screen in the same household in close succession. (Curti cited in Chambers 1990: 52-3)
The result is often what Gloria Anzald£a refers
to as a 'border tongue' which is a 'critique of empire coded...on the spot.'
in an ongoing manner (cited in Chambers 1994:85). This is creole, a border
ideolect, in which the culture and identity of the centre is refashioned
into a constellation of possibility. The result is a hybrid that 'confounds
and confuses earlier categorisations througha vernacular mixing of languages
that were previously separated by aesthetic, social and geographical distinctions.'
(Chambers 1984:85).
What does the media tell us about Quebec and Nunavut? The Nunitsiaq News of November 15th features the halving of the quota for commercial caribou hunting - not by the Northwest Territories government, but by Quebec, to the south. Such a cut is a dramatic intervention into a regional economy focussed on hunting. The caribou also 'comute' across the existing borders of Quebec. While migratory animals may seem a quaint example, this micro-case drawn from everyday life highlights the jurisdictional nightmare. Border-crossing caribou remind us that the issues of transgression are not only present in the narratives of contemporary theory or cultural studies. 'Border-crossing' is a juridical and political phenomenon as well as a cultural one. Borders are crossed by other trans-national information flows. Already states worry about the loss of tax revenue due the difficulty of fixing the locality of transactions on the internet. The border has thus become a zone of 'going beyond'.
Geoffrey Bennington argues that frontiers are places of
both separation and articulation (1990:121). 'The border' is a noun which,
in English stands in for what is really should be a verb: the process of
joining together. 'The frontier does not merely close the nation in on
itself, but also, immediately opens it to an outside, to other nations...
boundaries are constitutively crossed or transgressed.' (Madan Sarup in
Robertson et al 1994:98).
A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognised, the boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding. That is why the concept is that of Horismos, that is, the horizon, the boundary (Heidegger 1977:332).
Borders are not only limits and edges, but shared
edges or thresholds, liminal zones of becoming. To borrow the phrase of
Victor Turner, they are betwixt and between regions or states []. The psychoanalyst
and artist Bracha-Linchtenberg-Ettinger refers to the border not as a line
but as 'borderspace' in which there is a joint, metamorphosis or co-emergence
in difference (in Robertson et al 1994:41). The border is the site of an
'out-of-focus passage of non-definite compositions along slippery borderlines
becoming thresholds, which transform together but differently, allowing
relations- without-relating between the I and the unknown,' (1994:44)between
'us' and 'them', 'here' and 'there'. Guattari refer to a similar process,
which they name heterogenesis, or 'differential commonality'. Governed
by the rules of complexity, outcomes are probabilistic rather than clearly
predictable, and stereotypes collapse under the weight of differences and
common similarities (1989:139; Chambers 1994:14).
The end effect may be to make contemporary borders appear more arbitrary than ever, more clearly something contingent, changeable and hence an object of endless conflict and transgression. I do not believe that borders have suddenly ceased to exist, or lost their importance, but their qualitative character and their strategic usefulness is historically contingent. In an age of border-permeability, where borders are zones of mutation and hybridity, national centres appear to maintain their sovereign centrality by lessening their reliance on the border as a frame which defines identity. They appear immune to the multiplying forms of territorial border-transgression. Instead there appears to be a greater reliance on the continual task of projecting the ethos of the centre to its peripheries. The state itself steps back from its simple, territorial identity, to extend itself into cyberspace - to hover a few ghostly inches above the territory. Nunavut is such a state-in-waiting: it is a state without a territory or sovereign government. Quebec is a government, without a territory. Territory, of course, remains important, but cyberspace presents an alternate landscape of anticipatory maps. These are not 'post- territorial' states but we can hypothesise that there has been a shift toward the 'trans-territorial' state.
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Buci-Glucksmann, C. 1983. La Raison baroque (Pari: Galil‚e).
Chambers, Iain 1990. Border Dialogues. Journeys in Postmodernity (London: Comedia-Routledge)
Chambers, Iain 1994. Migrancy, Culture, Identity (London: Comedia-Routledge)
Codrescu, A. 1990. The Disappearance of the Outside New York: Addison-Wesley
Erikson, K. 1966. Wayward Puritans (Chichester: Wiley)
Grosz, E. 1994. Volatile Bodies (Indiana University Press)
Guattari, F. 1989. 'The Three Ecologies' in New Formations 8 (Summer). 139.
Heidegger, M. 1977. 'Building, Dwelling, Thinking ' in Basic Writings (New York: Harper and Row).
Olalquiaga, Celeste 1992. Megalopolis. Contemporary Cultural Sensibilities (Minneapolis Minn.: University of Minnesota Press)
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Brennan, T. 1990 'The national longing for form' in H. Bhabha (ed.) 1990
Shields, R. 1989. Places on the Margin (London: Routledge)
Brief Bibliography of Documents on Nunavut in MacOdrum Library, Carleton University Government Documents Section.
Canada. Dept. of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Annual report on the implementation of the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement. Ottawa. Annual. Text in English, French and Inuit. Library of Congress catalogue number: DOC CA1 IA .A535 .EFN
Canada. Dept. of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Contract relating to the implementation of the Nunavut final agreement. Ottawa, Supply and Services Canada. 1993 1 v. Library of Congress catalogue number: DOC CA1 IA 93.C53 .ENG
Tungavik Federation of Nunavut.
Canada. Dept. of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Agreement between the Inuit of the Nunavut Settlement Area and Her Majesty the Queen in right of Canada. Ottawa. 1993 282 p. Library of Congress catalogue number: DOC CA1 IA 93.A33 .ENG
Canada. Dept. of Indian Affairs and Northern Development.
Guide to the Tungavik Federation of Nunavut Land Claim Agreement-in- Principle.
Canada. Dept. of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Agreement between the Inuit of the Nunavut Settlement Area and Her Majesty in Right of Canada. Ottawa, Inuit Ratification Committee. 1992 229 p. Library of Congress catalogue number: DOC CA1 IA 92.A33 .ENG
Canada. Dept. of Indian Affairs and Northern Development. Agreement-In-Principle between the Inuit of the Nunavut Settlement Area and Her Majesty in right of Canada. Ottawa, Supply and Services Canada. 1990 1 v. Library of Congress catalogue number: DOC CA1 IA 90.A36 .ENG
Cameron, Kirk. Northern governments in transition; political and constitutional development in the Yukon, Nunavut and the Western Northwest Territories. Montreal, The Institute for Research on Public Policy. 1995 151 p. Library of Congress catalogue number: JL462.C35
Duffy, R. Quinn (Ronald Quinn), 1937- The Road to Nunavut; the progress of the eastern Arctic Inuit since the Second World War. Kingston, Ont., McGill-Queen's U. P. 1988 308 p. Library of Congress catalogue number: E99.E7D827
Inuit Tapirisat of Canada. Agreement in principle as to
the settlement of Inuit land claims in the Northwest Territories and the
Yukon Territory, between the government of Canada and the Inuit tapirisat
of Canada.
Northwest Territories. Legislative Assembly. Constitutional
alliance of the NWT and the Nunavut and Western "constitutional forums".
Nunavut; political choices and manifest destiny. Ottawa, Canadian Arctic Resources Committee. 1989 126 p. Prefatory material in Inuktitut. Merritt, John.
Nunavut Constitutional Forum. Building nunavut: a discussion
paper containing proposals for an Arctic constitution.
Nunavut Implementation Commission. Footprints in new snow:
a comprehensive report from the Nunavut Implementation Commission to the
Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Government of the
Northwest Territories and Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated concerning the
establishment of the Nunavut government.
Nunavut: changing the map of Canada.
Nunavut atlas. Edmonton, Canadian Circumpolar Institute. 1992 259 p. Accompanying material: 6 maps at back of book. Library of Congress catalogue number: G1183.N6N86 1992
Rieve, R. R. (Roderick R.).
Purich, Donald J., 1947- The Inuit and their land; the story of Nunavut. Toronto, Lorimer. 1992 176 p. Library of Congress catalogue number: E99.E7P87
Simpson, Elaine L., 1947- Nunavut; an annotated bibliography Edmonton, Canadian Circumpolar Institute. 1994 168 p. Library of Congress catalogue number: Z1392.N6S56 LOCATION(S): FLOOR 2 REF
Environmental Review Great Whale Project.
R. Shields html ver:12/10/1997 corrected 21/04/2002