Northwest Passage
European Space Agency Envisat mosaic image of summer sea ice in the Arctic. I’m in Ottawa and Washington this month doing interviews for a preliminary project with Phil Steinberg (Florida State University) on contested sovereignties in the Arctic and on Canada’s ‘virtual sovereignty’ in the North. On the one hand, we are reliably told that the Northwest Passage is a non-issue in terms of international law and transit. But by many others we are told that this goes to the heart of Canadian identity, is a claim fraught with ambiguities and even if steadily asserted, it is a sovereignty which is relatively recent, residents rather reluctantly and belatedly accepted as Canadians, and is a territory inconsistently developed… Until the last 20 or 30 years. But despite the bombast, it would be very Canadian to really hope everyone loses interest and goes home!
-Rob