April 1, 1999: The Day Canada's Map Changed and Nunavut Was Born

Most Canadians woke up on April 1, 1999 to a country that looked different on paper, and April Fools jokes about the weather in the Arctic wrote themselves that morning. But nothing about the day was a joke to the people celebrating in Iqaluit. Schoolchildren carried a new flag with a red inuksuk and a blue star. Elders who had been born on the land, in camps that no southern map had ever named, watched a territory come into existence with a name in their own language. Nunavut, pronounced roughly NOO nah voot, means “our land” in Inuktitut. For the first time in 50 years, since Newfoundland joined Confederation in 1949, Canada had a new jurisdiction. For the first time ever, it had one created because Indigenous people negotiated it into being.

The new territory was enormous and, by southern standards, almost empty. Nunavut covers about one fifth of Canada’s land mass, roughly two million square kilometres of Arctic islands, coastline, and tundra, with a population at creation of only about 25,000 people spread across 25 communities, most of them accessible only by air and sea. About 85 percent of those residents were Inuit. That last figure is the heart of the whole story. Nunavut was not drawn as an ethnic enclave, and its government serves every resident equally. It was drawn, deliberately, around the map of Inuit life, so that Inuit would form the majority in a public government of their own homeland.

A homeland long before a territory

Inuit and their ancestors have lived in the Canadian Arctic for thousands of years. The ancestors of modern Inuit, the Thule people, spread east from Alaska about a thousand years ago, bringing dog teams, umiaks, and a sophisticated technology for living from sea mammals in one of the hardest climates on Earth. Their descendants built a society ordered by family, season, and an intricate knowledge of ice and animals, governed by custom and consensus rather than by written law imposed from outside.

Contact with Europeans came in layers, whalers in the 1800s, then traders, missionaries, and police, and in the twentieth century the full weight of the southern Canadian state arrived quickly. Children were sent to residential and day schools where Inuktitut was discouraged or punished. Families were moved, sometimes pressured and sometimes forced, from camps into permanent settlements. In the High Arctic relocations of the 1950s, Inuit families from northern Quebec and Baffin Island were moved far north to Resolute Bay and Grise Fiord, in part to assert Canadian sovereignty, a decision for which the federal government formally apologized in 2010. By the early 1970s, Inuit leaders had concluded that if decisions about their homeland were going to be made by governments, Inuit needed a government of their own and a settled claim to their land. Nunavut was their answer, and it was an original one. They did not ask only for land and money, as most claim processes then assumed. They asked for the map itself to change.

The long negotiation

The Inuit Tapirisat of Canada, founded in 1971 as the national voice of Inuit in Canada, began the organized work. Research teams documented Inuit land use and occupancy across the Arctic, interviewing hunters and elders and mapping the places where people had hunted, fished, camped, and buried their dead for generations. The resulting map was the evidence. Inuit had never signed treaties covering most of the Arctic and had never surrendered their title to it, and the land use study showed occupation of an area the size of a continent.

In 1976 the Inuit Tapirisat formally proposed that the Northwest Territories be divided and a new northern territory, Nunavut, be created as part of a comprehensive land claim settlement. It is hard to overstate how audacious that looked in Ottawa at the time. The proposal asked Canada to redraw its internal map as an act of reconciliation, and negotiations, agreed in principle and then stalled and restarted more than once, stretched across more than a decade and a half. Voters in the Northwest Territories narrowly approved division in a 1982 plebiscite. An agreement in principle followed in 1990. In 1992, voters across the Northwest Territories approved the boundary that would separate the new territory, running from Hudson Bay up through the Arctic Archipelago, and Inuit beneficiaries voted to ratify the final claim agreement later that year.

The negotiators included a generation of Inuit leaders who had grown up on the land and educated themselves in southern institutions precisely in order to negotiate with them. Figures such as Tagak Curley, who founded the Inuit Tapirisat, and John Amagoalik, often called the father of Nunavut, spent careers on it.

The 1993 agreement

On May 25, 1993, the Nunavut Land Claims Agreement was signed in Iqaluit. It remains the largest Indigenous land claim settlement in Canadian history. Under its terms, Inuit gave up their undefined Aboriginal title to lands and waters in the settlement area in exchange for defined rights, and Canada recognized Inuit ownership of about 350,000 square kilometres of land, roughly 18 percent of the new territory, including rights to the minerals beneath the surface on about 36,000 square kilometres of it. The agreement provided capital transfer payments of more than $1 billion, paid over 14 years, along with a share of resource royalties, guaranteed rights to harvest wildlife, and a formal role for Inuit organizations in managing lands, waters, and wildlife through boards shared with government.

One article of the agreement mattered to daily life as much as the land itself. Article 23 set an objective that the territorial public service should employ Inuit at a representative level, reflecting their share of the population. The agreement also committed Canada, in a companion political accord, to the legislation that would actually create Nunavut. Parliament passed the Nunavut Act in 1993 alongside the act ratifying the claim. The two were twins. The claim settled the land. The act built the government. Between them, they set a date six years out, April 1, 1999, and a generation of work began at once, hiring and training a civil service, choosing symbols, and deciding the practical question of where the capital would be. In a 1995 plebiscite, voters chose Iqaluit, on Baffin Island, over Rankin Inlet, on the Hudson Bay coast.

April 1, 1999, and a different kind of government

The territory that came into being that day governs itself in ways southern Canadians often find surprising. There are no political parties in the Legislative Assembly of Nunavut. Members are elected as independents in their constituencies, and after each election the members choose the premier and cabinet from among themselves, in what is called consensus government, a system Nunavut kept from the Northwest Territories and one that fits older Inuit traditions of decision by discussion. Regular members hold real power in that system, including the power to remove a premier, and they have used it.

Paul Okalik, a lawyer from Pangnirtung who had worked on the claim as a negotiator, became the first premier, chosen by the first assembly. At 34, he led a government whose working life ran, by law and by conviction, in the languages of the place. Nunavut’s official languages are the Inuit Language, meaning Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun, together with English and French. Laws are published and debates are interpreted in Inuktitut, signage carries Inuit syllabics, and the territory has since passed language legislation aimed at protecting and revitalizing the Inuit Language in schools, workplaces, and services. The new flag and coat of arms, granted that year, carried Inuit symbols chosen through a process that involved artists and elders across the territory.

None of this was decoration. For a people whose children had been punished for speaking their language at school within living memory, conducting the business of a Canadian government in that language, in public, was the point of the exercise made visible.

The legend vs. the record

The legend, in the cheerful southern version, is that Canada generously gave Inuit a territory in 1999, the way a parent hands over the car keys. The record shows the opposite direction of travel. Inuit proposed Nunavut, produced the land use evidence for it, negotiated it across more than two decades, and traded an undefined claim to a fifth of the country for the defined rights in the agreement. Ottawa did not invent the idea and resisted parts of it for years. Nunavut exists because its creators were patient and organized.

A second piece of the legend needs correcting in the other direction. Nunavut is sometimes described, carelessly, as an ethnic government or an Inuit only state within Canada. It is not. It is a public government, elected by all its residents, serving a population that is majority Inuit in roughly the same way that other provinces serve majorities shaped by their own histories. Its distinctiveness lies in that demography, in its languages, and in institutions built to carry Inuit values such as consensus and respect for elders, a body of guiding principles known as Inuit Qaujimajatuqangit. Precision here is a form of respect, in both directions.

Why it still matters

Nunavut changed what Canadians could picture. It proved that the map of Confederation was not finished in 1949, that treaties and claims in the modern era could build governments and not only settle lawsuits, and that Indigenous languages could run a modern public service. Every land claim and self government negotiation since has operated in a country that has already done this once. The territory has also become a working argument in Arctic sovereignty debates. Canada claims the High Arctic as its own in part because Inuit have lived there for centuries and live there still, a fact Canadian governments now state openly.

Honesty requires the harder half of the ledger too. The promise of 1999 is unfinished. Nunavut faces a severe housing shortage, with many families living in overcrowded homes and long public housing wait lists. Food shipped by air costs several times the southern price, and food insecurity is widespread. The representative Inuit employment goal in government jobs has improved over time but has not been met at senior levels, and the territory continues to recruit teachers, nurses, and other professionals from the south on short rotations. Inuit leaders name these facts themselves, usually in the same speeches where they defend Nunavut most fiercely, because both things are true at once. The creation of Nunavut was never sold by the people who built it as a finished triumph. It was a tool, a government of their own with which to do the work. On April 1, 1999, Canada did not complete that work. It finally handed over the tools, and the work, as Nunavummiut will tell you, is underway.

Common questions

When was Nunavut created and what does its name mean?

Nunavut came into being on April 1, 1999, when the Northwest Territories was divided. Its name means our land in Inuktitut. It was the first change to Canada's internal map in 50 years, since Newfoundland joined Confederation in 1949, and the first jurisdiction created because Indigenous people negotiated it into existence.

How big is Nunavut and how many people live there?

Nunavut covers about one fifth of Canada's land mass, roughly two million square kilometres of Arctic islands, coastline, and tundra. At its creation in 1999 it had only about 25,000 people, spread across 25 communities, most reachable only by air and sea. About 85 percent of those residents were Inuit.

What did the 1993 Nunavut Land Claims Agreement give Inuit?

Signed in Iqaluit on May 25, 1993, the agreement recognized Inuit ownership of about 350,000 square kilometres of land, including subsurface mineral rights on about 36,000 square kilometres, plus capital transfer payments of more than $1 billion over 14 years, a share of resource royalties, and guaranteed wildlife harvesting rights.

How is Nunavut governed differently from a province?

Nunavut has no political parties. Members of its Legislative Assembly are elected as independents, and after each election they choose the premier and cabinet from among themselves in a system called consensus government. Its first premier was Paul Okalik, a lawyer and former claim negotiator, chosen by the first assembly at age 34.

Sources

Every story on this site ends with the sources it was built from. Check us.

• Nunavut — The Canadian Encyclopedia
• Nunavut Land Claims Agreement — The Canadian Encyclopedia
• Government of Nunavut — Government of Nunavut
• Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated — Nunavut Tunngavik Inc.
• Nunavut Act and Nunavut Land Claims Agreement Act — Government of Canada