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“Canada is not a unified culture, and this shows that the Canadian government will continue to respect that. It shows respect for cultural distinctiveness. It’s a step toward the future, and I think it’s a good sign for the country as a whole,” said Canadian freshman Jeremy DeRoo.DeRoo was talking about the Canadian government’s recent creation of an official Inuit territory, called Nunavut.

On April 1, the Canadian government split the Northwest Territories and established Nunavut (NOO-na-voot). The government based this new territory on a land agreement with the Inuit people. The word Nunavut means “our land” in the Inuit language, Inuktitut.

The territory is a product of years of negotiations between Inuits and the Canadian government. Inuits have long felt that they deserved some amount of self-governing, and they had official backing for this position.

“The Canadian constitution states that natives have inherent rights of self government,” said Professor Charles Strikwerda of the Political Science Department.

Recent news photographs of Inuits celebrating this decision show that they seem ecstatic to have a land officially their own.

This new land makes up one-fifth of the total landmass of Canada, but it has a relatively tiny population - only 27,000 people compared to Grand Rapids’ 190,000. Currently 85 percent of the inhabitants are Inuit, and they account for more than half of the Inuits living in Canada.

“I think this reflects an ongoing issue in Canada. Land claims by natives are nothing new [there],” said Strikwerda.

Although the celebration of a new land continues, developing it does not promise to be easy. Nunavut must deal with having Canada’s highest rates of crime, suicide, alcoholism, unemployment and cost of living as well as the lowest levels of income and education.

The Canadian government acknowledges that the self-government of Nunavut is an experiment. “This is an astonishingly progressive thing for Canada to be doing, allowing these people to have this territory and to have a lot of autonomy. We should applaud this experiment,” said Professor Ronald Wells of the History Department.

The government will be a non-partisan consensus government. The 19-person legislature will have no parties, and votes will be decided by consensus rather than by a majority. Both of these characteristics differ from other Canadian territorial and provincial governments.

Even with the challenges and differences this territory has, many people feel that it is a step toward settling some of Canada’s former mistreatment of natives, known as First Nations.

“Steps like this seem to me to be ways of seeing justice done for native peoples,” said Paul Brink, husband of Jennifer Brink, Calvin’s Mosaic Community Program Coordinator and a Ph.D. graduate student in Notre Dame’s Political Theory program.

“It is a wonderful and idealistic thing Canada is doing. The norm in the world is not to have multiculturalism. Canada is doing a lot better than most countries,” said Wells.

“At the very least,” said Brink, “[this move] reminds Canadians and the world that the country is as high as it is wide.”

npc.nunavut.ca This map shows Nunavut’s size relative to Canada as a whole.