The prospects of culture: resource management and the production of difference in Nunatsiavut, Labrador

• Main Author: Procter, Andrea
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Memorial University of Newfoundland 2012
• Subjects: inuit
• Online Access: https://research.library.mun.ca/2383/; https://research.library.mun.ca/2383/1/Procter_Andrea.pdf; https://research.library.mun.ca/2383/3/Procter_Andrea.pdf

This dissertation examines how concepts of culture and cultural difference have been created, maintained, mobilized, and engaged in the struggle for political and economic control in Nunatsiavut over the past two hundred and fifty years, and how they have come to have material effect. From the Moravian Mission's attempts in the 18th and 19th centuries to isolate and contain Labrador Inuit, to the pursuit of the region's nickel and uranium deposits over the last thirty years, ideas about Inuit cultural difference and indigeneity have played fundamental roles in both resource dispossession and the achievement of self-government. Culture has proven to be both socially constituted and a creative force in Nunatsiavut, intricately related to the creation of political and economic inequalities and to the struggles to rectify these disparities. In examining the historical development and use of certain cultural constructs, the codification of these constructs in the Labrador Inuit Land Claim Agreement, and the resulting political and economic implications in the post-land claims context, this thesis explores how Inuit, state powers, and industry have mobilized various productions of difference, and how these concepts perform new roles in current neoliberal governance situations.