Power Relations and Inuit Self-determination : A Foucauldian Analysis of the Power Relations Embedded in Inuit Claims to Self-determination in the Canadian North

Sammanfattning

Claims to group rights to self-determination have proliferated in the post-colonial era and so have the forms they take. The Inuit of Nunavut are a case of internal self-determination: they have developed ostensibly self-governing institutions, subject to oversight from the federal government. Settler-colonialism ensured the subjectification of Canadian indigenous groups, the Inuit among them, which can give rise to conceptual paradoxes in realizing self-determination. Post-colonialism, specifically the institutionalization of Inuit self-governance, becomes a part of the nation-state’s legitimizing discourse (politically, historically, also legally). A genealogical discourse analysis is applied to colonial interactions and the continuities of racial discourse from the late nineteenth and through the twentieth century to examine how power relations and knowledge production reenforce one other by subjectifying the Inuit and thereby investing their claims to self-determination.