The Northwest Passage

In 1980, Michel Serres, a French philosopher and mathematician, wrote a book called Hermès V Le Passage du Nord-Ouest. In this book he searches for what he describes as a passage between the “exact sciences,” humanities, and the arts. He characterises this as the conceptual divide, the conceptual passage, the geographical idea of the Northwest passage.

The book, Conversations on science, culture, and time (1995) brings together the discussions of Serres and a French sociologist and philosopher called Bruno Latour. Latour created a teaching method, conceived as a toolkit, to cope with an increasing hybridization of disciplines. This method, called Controversy Mapping or the Cartography of Controversies, was “an effort to follow disputes when they cut across disciplinary boundaries” (Venturini, 2010). While originally a “didactic version of Actor- Network Theory," this technique has blossomed into its own research method through its absorption by university courses and international projects (Venturini, 2010). Today, Controversy mapping is a method in itself. It strives to “explore and represent modern socio technical issues,” and “to make the intricacy of scientific debate readable for a larger public” (Venturini, 2015).

The Northwest Passage has always existed as both a geographical space, but also as a space within human imagination, shaped by a history of exploration and colonialism that continues to impact and effect how we think about it today. It is both ice and ocean. However, despite our efforts to interact with it as a singular, unchanging landmass, the Northwest passage continues to change. 

As the ice continues to melt more each year, the Northwest passage is regaining interest worldwide. While it falls within the distance classified as Canada’s sovereign waters or exclusive economic zone, the melting ice is causing increasing debate on whether this should be the case. As the ice melts, the controversy heats up. With the Northwest Passage as international waters opportunities for cargo, tourism, and mining continue to open. The increasing economic potential of this area as the ice melts is immense, and the debate on whether the passage should be international or internal waters is greatly swayed by countries' individual interests. As physical temperatures rise, so too do the political ones. 

“Heat in this relation can be said to be transcendental; it changes the state of political thinking and political acting (from pedagogy to activism), and it gives rise to a larger geography of engagement for science and scientists. But, where does it take us?” (Yusoff, 2011, p.306)

Background video is called "Arctic Immersion" and is created by collaboration between artists, scientists, animators and Scripps Whale Acoustic Lab. It is an audiovisual experience that "strings together an acoustic soundscape of an Arctic Ocean environment, data from historic ocean and climate observations and abstract graphics generated from natural materials to produce a captivating and moving experience of rapidly changing conditions at the top of the world." Based north of Alaska in the Chukchi Sea, this soundscape, lasting 365 seconds, "reproduces a year of underwater recordings" (Fee et al. 2019)

The first people to explore and settle on the land around the Northwest passage were known as Paleo-Eskimos (Neatby, 2016). They first crossed the Bering Strait, between Asia and North America, around 3000BC, following marine and land animals which they depended on for food (Travel Nunavut, 2021). In 2500BC, their descendents, the Saqqaq (Pre-Dorset Culture) inhabited the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. These people, around 500BC developed into the Dorset culture, but were nearly extinct by 1500AD. However, it is still believed that Inuit people today are culturally and perhaps biologically related to the Dorset culture, through their interaction with the Thule people. The Thule lived in coastal Alaska in 1000AD and traveled East towards Greenland. Inuit communities today are direct descendants of the Thule people (Sale, 2002).

Today, the Northwest Passage runs through the Canadian Artic Archipelago and the province of Nunavut.

The Background video is from the Nunavut Animation Lab called I am but a Little Woman. The animation is inspired by an Inuit poem first assigned to paper in 1927. The story and these visuals evoke the beauty and power of nature through a bond between mother and daughter. It shows a child watching her Inuit mother create a wall hanging with traditional Arctic imagery and icons. "The boundaries between art and reality begin to dissolve."

As early as the second century A.D the idea of the Northwest Passage began in European imagination. The earliest documented reference to this historic route is in Ptolemy’s (Greco-Roman) world maps. During the 15th century, the Ottoman empire had control of land trade routes between Europe and Asia. European civilizations gained interest in the idea of the passage that would provide them equal opportunities to valued trade routes. The Northwest Passage, as a symbol of achievement and modernity drove many men to their deaths. 

A virtual exhibition (link below) by historian, Eleanor Baldassarri, called The Northwest Passage: Myth, Environment, and Resources tells the story of the Northwest Passage from the pursuit of a myth to the exploitation of natural resources. Baldassarri takes her audience on a multimedia tour of the Arctic. Below is the link to her exhaustive timeline of European exploration through the Canadian Archipelago in search of the Northwest Passage.

In 1958, the National Academy of Science committee that was part of the Antarctic International Geophysical year created   a booklet  which provides a brief introduction to the earth and environmental sciences.

The booklet is organised around six posters by the artist Herbert Danska. Each of these posters depicted an area of geographic including Sun, Earth, Ocean, Weather and Climate, Space and Poles.

This booklet shows both the scientific and artistic work that was available to a wider public at this time.

While interest and economic investment in the Northwest passage waxed and waned between the 1500s to the 1800s, its inspiration has continued to reverberate through societies in less documented ways. 

One example of this is through the detailed needlework of European women depicting the cartography and routes of these explorations. In a paper called Cook map samplers: women’s Endeavours, the writer Vivien Caughley describes how “by the end of the eighteenth century a needlework sampler functioned as an artistic diploma of educational accomplishment, no longer merely a record of stitched pattern and technique” (Caughley, 2015, p.1). In her paper, Caughley focuses on James Cook's exploration, how the stories and tales of these explorations inspired needlework depicting maps and charts, and how these today document these womens “travels with [Cook] in their imagination or expressing their own understanding of his discoveries afterward in their own ways” (Caughley, 2015, p.2). 

Despite the popularized narrative of early Arctic explorers in Western audiences as a “monstrous, feminized polar landscapes waiting to be “penetrated” and “conquered” by heroic men,” countless women applied to join expeditions (Seag, 2019). In most Western countries, women were excluded from Arctic research until the 20th century (Seag, 2019). However similarly to the needlework, women have continued to contribute and had influence in polar science since the mid-19th century.

While this gendered exploration and colonialism in this capacity might feel like relics of a distant past, the ghosts and legacies of these interactions still reverberate around the world today.

Video: authors own

The 1845 lost expedition of Franklin, onboard the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror was and continues to be one such reverberation (Sale, 2002). After the ship and crew were lost in 1948, many British vessels went to search the Northwest passage for remnants. As a result, most of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago around the Northwest passage was mapped and explored by British vessels before 1859. Between 1948 and 1859, many British vessels searched for the Franklin expedition (Sale, 2002).  Today the ships, Erebus and Terror are considered an important part of Canada’s development as a nation. As McCorristine argues, in The Spectral Presence of the Franklin Expedition in Contemporary Fiction, “Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic, so the argument goes, rests upon its inheritance of British attempts to solve the mystery of Franklin’s disappearance.” In this context, by “discussing the searches for Franklin...involves discussions of haunted history, possession and geopolitical sovereignty” (McCorristine, 2018).

In 1997, among a renewed interest in the geopolitics of the Northwest Passage and finding the Erebus and Terror, Britain signed a Memorandum of Understanding. This assigned Canada with both custody and control of the two shipwrecks, thus solidifying its cultural and heritage stature. “Franklin” McCorristine argues, through this memorandum is changed “from a ghost into an ancestor who lived again in Canadian modernity (2018). 

Image:  First Desertion of the Ships . A Dramatic (and imagined) enactment of the Franklin expedition by Julius Von Payer.

Before the dispute started in earnest, the Canadian government continued to defer making Arctic maritime claims. This is thought to be because of a “combination of the region’s limited use (reduced pressure for any immediate action),” “positive bilateral cooperation and tactful diplomacy with the United States” during the 40s and 50s. (Burke, 2018)

For more information on the factors concerning the legal parameters on whether the Northwest passage can be considered internal Canadian waters or an international strait click  here .

Due to Canada’s continued deferral of claims over the Northwest Passage and negotiation over the access and use of Arctic waters for the Dew Lines Early Warning System, there was little controversy between the US and Canada (Burke, 2018).

However...

If the passage is considered internal waters then Canada has exclusive sovereign authority over that space and can enforce navigation laws and regulations. This would also include the airspace. However, if this is rejected then..

Canada’s maritime zones “will be calculated from each individual land formation, each individual island.” (Lalonde, 2018) This would mean a “complex patchwork of Canadian territorial sea, contiguous zone and the 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) (Lalonde, 2018). However, even if this was the case, most of the Northwest Passage would still be enclosed within Canada’s EEZ because the marine areas between different islands does not exceed 400 nautical miles. 

For a live, interactive map of the publics thoughts on whether Canada's Northwest passage should be international strait click  here .

The controversy then lies, not within concern for Canadian domestic governance of the Northwest passage, but is founded within “global geostrategic interests” (Lalonde, 2018). 

To explore the thematic categories of search engine results about the Northwest Passage click  here . These categories (as seen below) highlight the public focus and connection with certain elements or idea of the Northwest Passage as a Voyage for the Discovery, as an Electronic resource, or as territory.

Video: Authors own (taken on the overnight ferry from Newfoundland)

Despite there not being benefits for Canada or the United States to alter their perspectives on the dispute of whether the Northwest Passage should be considered Canadian sovereignty and within its internal waters where it cannot be used as an international strait, the debate continues. As the climate continues to change and the ice melts, more nation states begin to “wade in on the legal status of the Northwest passage” (Burke, 2012).

In the article Like a Map Over Troubled Water, Laura Lo Presti introduces the Mediterranean sea as a geography that connects and separates “Europe from the rest of the world” and how it has been at the centre of oceanic philosophy where its “ongoing reformation, currents, and flows are often perceived by critical thinkers as crucial for unsettling the solid politics of the land.” “The sea as ice,” in the case of Arctic Archipelagos “confuses and complicates acts of territorial and sovereign control” (Steinberg, 2015). As the ice melts, the controversy heats up.

Background video: Brooks, Kevin. (2010). Ice Melt 2.

At the ArcticNet conference in Halifax (2013), Elden gave a lecture called “Undermining geopolitics: sea, seabed, ice.” In this he said:

“We can’t simply think of a straight-forward up-down vertical axis alongside this flat, planar, areal imagination. We need to think about this in terms of slopes, in terms of the materiality of these kinds of questions....We need to think about geopolitics not simply as global politics or as international politics, but very much as a politics of the earth, and thinking about that in terms of bringing the geophysical into relation with the geopolitical, thinking about the materiality of the “geo” in terms of how we think about the question of geopolitics....[The politics that results is] not, then, simply a politics of the solid land, but politics in relation to water, ice, subsoil, and the submarine”(Elden, 2013).

It continues to be voiced through different disciplines, that in order to make decisions in a constantly changing cartography of the Arctic, that governments, Inuit leaders, and regional Arctic communities need to have an understanding of the impacts of the biophysical and cultural change. One example of this is a study on the Temporal and spatial patterns of ship traffic in the Canadian Arctic from 1990 to 2015 (2018) which focused on marine traffic patterns over time. It studied “overall activity, vessel types, regional spatial distribution, and proximity to communities” (Dawson et al, 2018).

Background Video: Ice Melt by Maddison Haywood (2013)

"Ice melting" she says "is at the heart of understanding global warming." Read more at  LivingData.net.au 

Background video: Arctic Exclusive Economic Zones and Claimable Areas. EEZs and claim areas are approximate. (Roston, 2017)

As the ice melts and the controversy continues, there are considerable factors which will inevitably change. However, how these are responded within the context of the Northwest Passage depends on whether it is internal waters or an international strait. 

Arguments both for and against decisions run hot both ways; however aspects of international safety and environmental standards continue to rise to the top. 

On the right is an interactive visualisation, exploring the different opportunities, relationships, and considerations that will change along with the melting of the ice. With increasing navigability that comes along with diminishing ice, comes with increased possible uses, interactions, and imaginations of this space.

Whether or not the Northwest Passage is considered internal Canadian sovereign waters or an international strait, the changing climate and our ability to navigate through the cartography of the debate is the deciding factor in the future of this space.