Far Off Metal River ─ Inuit Lands, Settler Stories, and the Making of the Contemporary Arctic

Far Off Metal River examines how explorer Samuel Hearne?s account of the alleged 1771 ?Bloody Falls massacre? in the Central Arctic has shaped ongoing colonization and economic exploitation of the North.

As Emilie Cameron demonstrates, the Arctic has for centuries been treated like a blank page onto which a long line of explorers, missionaries, anthropologists, resource companies, and politicians have inscribed stories that serve their own interests. These stories have played a central role in shaping how the region?s people have been, and continue to be, treated. They have also been used to justify opening the North to industrial resource extraction. Consequently, Qablunaat (non-Inuit, non-Indigenous people) have a responsibility to question their myths about the North, first by placing them within their proper historical, geographical, and social context and then by developing new understandings that reflect the actual political, cultural, economic, environmental, and social landscapes of the contemporary Arctic.

Emilie Cameron is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at Carleton University. She has a long-standing interest in non-Inuit knowledge production, including the geographies of northern social science research and the broader material effects of storytelling in the North. Her work has been published in Global Environmental Change; Antipode; the Annals of the Association of American Geographers; Progress in Human Geography; and cultural geographies, as well as in various edited collections.