Making the Arctic Pay: Colonial Visions of the Far North in Early 20th-Century Settler North America

For the past five centuries, outsiders have often approached the North American Arctic as an area ripe for extractive colonialism, from explorer Martin Frobisher's failed Baffin Island gold mines of the sixteenth century, to present-day drilling for oil in Alaska's Prudhoe Bay. These sorts of commodities seem to match the possibilities of the Arctic environment: with its cold, dry climate and permafrost, few would conceive of the region as a place for permanent settler colonialism, much less agricultural production. However, around the turn of the twentieth century a few notable explorers and businessmen framed the destinies of the United States and Canada not just in expanding territorial control northwards, but in turning the Far North into a territory capable of supporting animal husbandry on a mass scale.

This paper will investigate visions of early twentieth-century Arctic colonialism, as espoused by two prominent North American explorers: Robert Peary and Vilhjalmur Stefansson. A self-positioned anthropologist, Stefansson urged his settler audiences to appreciate the sophistication of Indigenous Arctic people's technology and survival skills, even as he recruited business leaders and politicians to his plans to use Inuit homelands as sites of agricultural colonialism. In particular, he worked to establish commercial reindeer and muskoxen cultivation for meat and fur, though his efforts were thwarted by legal and financial challenges. Peary's visions for U.S. colonization in the Arctic, meanwhile, included specific eugenic-minded plans for cultivating a race of individuals fit to steward high-latitude colonies. By examining the colonial schemes of these two celebrated public figures, this paper will investigate the intertwining of geographical exploration and science with a particular form of capitalist, colonial imagination that speaks to the ambitions of the United States and Canada in the early twentieth century.