"Consolidation and Control of All Eskimo Income": The Motive for the 1953 High Arctic Relocation.

In 1953, the Canadian government relocated Inuit from northern Quebec and Baffin Island to the High Arctic. Some secondary accounts identify sovereignty worries as the government's key motive, arguing that for decades, Ottawa bureaucrats had seen Inuit resettlement on uninhabited islands as an effective way to bolster Canada's territorial claim. Others deny that sovereignty played any significant role. Writers in the latter group insist that a longstanding concern for Inuit welfare was the real reason for the 1953 move. This article offers a third explanation. It demonstrates that in the 1920s, civil servants opposed relocations, while the Hudson's Bay Company favoured them. In the 1930s, some relocations by the company were allowed, but during the next decade Ottawa again imposed restrictions. Then in 1949 the northern fur economy collapsed, and the need for government relief increased. Between 1949 and 1953, bureaucrats became preoccupied with the perceived need to ensure that in future Inuit would follow southern ideals of personal thrift, saving enough to carry them through hard times. The major aim of the resettlement was to place a test group in an isolated location where government representatives could control the use of their income and impose approved patterns of economic behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]