NCRC and Canada’s post-war agenda for the North

Canada paid little attention to either Inuit or their lands prior to the Second World War. As historian Shelagh Grant observed, most Canadians regarded the nation’s northern territories as “merely distant lands of snow and ice, sparsely inhabited by a race of uncivilized nomads, and of little value to settlement-conscious emigrants from Britian and Europe” (Reference Grant, Coates and Morrison1989, p. 47). At the beginning of the 1950s, nearly all Canadian Inuit resided in self-organised and self-governing seasonal camps of their own making; a decade later, most had established themselves in one of several government administered settlements. Advances in transportation and communications technologies available after the war enabled Canadians to envision the Arctic as a storehouse of mineral wealth ripe for development. Some in government imagined an Arctic industrial centre with up to 5000 people living in domed city and commissioned architectural drawings (Canadian Architect, 1958). In reality, the ensuing Cold War made the Canadian North a strategic military theatre inhabited by people described by Graburn as “living inconveniently in an area between and coveted by the two Cold War antagonists” (Reference Graburn, Harrison and Darnell2006, p. 247). In the context of Cold War military activities in the North, the government could no longer ignore Inuit.

The administration of Inuit lands and communities changed in 1953, when the government of Liberal prime minister Louis St. Laurent reorganised cabinet ministries to create the Department of Northern Affairs and National Resources (DNANR). The new department’s primary purpose was to advance the development of mineral and other resources on federal (in other words, territorial rather than provincial) lands. Although Inuit constituted a single paragraph in the prime minister’s speech to Parliament initiating the new department, they soon became a major aspect of the DNANR mandate. At the time, aside from military personnel and members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the government had just four junior administrative officers in the Northwest Territories. None were posted north of the treeline (Phillips, Reference Phillips1967, p. 169). The government’s knowledge of the North and of Inuit was at least 30 years out of date.

The Northern Co-ordination and Research Centre (NCRC) was established in 1954 ostensibly to bring the government’s knowledge of Inuit up to date so that it could administer Inuit communities in a way that would acculturate Inuit to Canadian forms of citizenship consonant with a Keynesian state that sought to erase difference. Along with new immigrants, Inuit were to be folded into the fabric of the nation. In a letter to the Treasury Board requesting funding for NCRC, Gordon Robertson, DNANR’s deputy minister, clarified that the NCRC would coordinate northern research conducted by other government ministries and would employ contract researchers only for matters that were outside the mandates of existing government agencies or departments. Thus, NCRC would pursue the following types of research:

1. (a) Social anthropology, especially in relation to the adaptation of native races to changing circumstances such as employment in mines, government services, and northern transportation.

2. (b) Investigation of methods of improving the economy of the native people.

3. (c) Application of modern technology to meet the special requirements of the north, including those of the native population.

4. (d) Philology and orthography of the Eskimo language especially in relation to education. (Robertson, Reference Robertson1954)

Robertson explained the selection of social anthropology as particularly important to his department’s mandate to facilitate the acculturation of Inuit to the norms of modern Canadian citizens. “So far as the Eskimos are concerned the problem in many cases is to adjust a Stone Age people to a completely new way of living. The problems are complicated and difficult and some special research could well help to avoid serious mistakes” (Ibid.). As a “Stone Age people,” Inuit, fit neatly into “the savage slot” (Trouillot, Reference Trouillot and Fox1991), thus the expertise of anthropologists was required to make Inuit legible, facilitate their governance, and advance their incorporation into the Canadian state. Cast as science, anthropological knowledge about Inuit would support the development of technocratic solutions to the problems of governance.

Perhaps not surprisingly, I have uncovered little evidence that the officials charged with administering Inuit made use of the ethnographic materials they received to design or alter programmes. Over the two decades that the NCRC existed in various forms, it employed dozens of anthropologists, along with a few geographers, sociologists, and other social scientists on short term, usually summer, contracts. Some were established scholars, but most were graduate students or like Toshio Yatsushiro, early-career academics. Many of the ethnographers were given broad topics to study – Inuit acculturation to settlement life and patterns of leadership were common topics – but relatively little guidance in defining the scope of their research.

Toshio Yatsushiro

Toshio Yatsushiro was an American anthropologist of Japanese descent. He was born in Hawaii in 1917 and was in his final undergraduate year at Redlands University in California when the United States entered the Second World War. Along with 110,000 other Japanese Americans and immigrants living on the west coast, Yatsushiro was “forcibly evacuated and confined” (Yatsushiro, Reference Yatsushiro1978, p. 304) to an internment camp: in his case to the largest of the camps, Poston, on the Colorado River Indian Reservation in southwestern Arizona. There, Yatsushiro, along with several other university-educated internees, was employed to collect data for a War Relocation Authority research project directed by anthropologist/psychiatrist Alexander H. Leighton. The study, conducted by the Bureau of Sociological Research (BSR), is described in Leighton’s book The Governing of Men (Reference Leighton1945) as designed to “aid the administration [of the camps] by analyzing the attitudes of evacuees … to administrative acts.” A primary expectation was that anthropologically derived data on the supposedly ethnically informed sentiments of Japanese-American internees would aid the effective control of them under the oppressive conditions of the camps. The work was meant to enable government authorities to successfully manage not only the wartime internment camps, but also “occupied areas of the Pacific, during or after the war” (Ibid., p. 373).

Yatsushiro seems to have played a substantial role in the internment camp research, and his relationship with Leighton continued for many decades. With Leighton’s intervention, Yatsushiro received special permission to leave the camp for some research-related activities. Leighton sent him and another internee to the University of Denver for training in survey research at the National Opinion Research Center. Later he followed Leighton to Washington, DC, participating in the analysis of the data collected by the BSR, later joining the part of the Office of War Information known as the Foreign Morale Analysis Division. Leighton also arranged for Yatsushiro to complete his undergraduate degree from Redlands through a special arrangement with the University of Chicago. As I will show, internment was formative in Yatsushiro’s development as an anthropologist and helped shape what he observed in Iqaluit during his NCRC fieldwork.

After the war, Yatsushiro along with other Nisei (first-generation Japanese Americans), employed by the US government, went to Japan as part of the Strategic Bombing Survey, a military-organised survey of the psychological and emotional well-being of Japanese civilians meant to support US occupation (Leighton, Reference Leighton1949). This was followed by work for the US Department of the Interior studying the post-war resettlement of Japanese Americans in Denver (Cullum, Reference Cullum1947) and with Morris Opler in Cambridge, Massachusetts, analysing the BSR data from the Manzanar internment camp. He then earned a PhD in anthropology at Cornell under the supervision of Opler. Yatsushiro’s dissertation was based on data he and other internees collected at Poston and Manzanar. Ethnographic research with Opler in Uttar Pradesh, India, and a year of teaching at Kansas University in Lawrence followed. In 1957, Toshio Yatsushiro was hired as a tenure track assistant professor of anthropology at McGill University in Montreal. He was 40 years old and married with two school age sons. Letters he wrote in 1958 and 1959 suggest that despite the experience of wartime internment, he perceived that his personal and professional lives were on positive trajectories. Many of the letters he exchanged with his wife discuss their personal finances. For example, in the first weeks of his 1958 stay in Iqaluit, he wrote:

To his mother just prior to his departure for Iqaluit, he proudly shared that he did not need to accept summer employment at the University of Hawaii, because:

Toshio Yatsushiro did not make a long-term study of Inuit. He spent the summers of 1958 and 1959 in Iqaluit, then known as Frobisher Bay, but did not return for a third summer of fieldwork. He was forced to cut his second field visit short by a few weeks when his wife became seriously ill and needed emergency surgery. Yatsushiro’s government contract for the Iqaluit research was not renewed for the summer of 1960. Although Lily’s poor health seems to have contributed to his failure to deliver a full report – one of the reasons that his contract might not have been renewed – available archival materials also suggest some truth in what Trevor Lloyd’s claim that some DNANR officials were angered by Yatsushiro’s academic conference presentations in Canada and in the USA (also Nelson Graburn, personal communication).

The loss of this research contract posed a significant problem. In the 1950s and 1960s anthropologists in Canada were expected to have research programmes focused on the Indigenous peoples in Canada (Harrison & Darnell, Reference Harrison, Darnell, Harrison and Darnel2006, p. 8). Although it might have been possible for Yatsushiro to conduct research in a First Nations community close to Montreal, working in Indigenous communities further away would be extremely difficult without access to research funds. Furthermore, continuing the research in Iqaluit or any other Inuit community would be extremely difficult without government support for everything from transportation to housing to translation of research materials. Additionally, to engage in any Arctic research, he would have needed a government-issued research license from the same officials he had angered.

In November 1960, Yatsushiro wrote to Leighton seeking advice. He reported that he had been recently reappointed for a second three-years as an assistant professor (prior to tenure), that he was “extremely happy” at McGill, and that he and Lily had purchased a house a year earlier. Omitted from his description, however, was any mention of the loss of his research funding. He was, he said, looking for an appointment at a university that would enable him to pursue a programme of ethnographic research in Asia. He may also have felt that he was a target of anti-Japanese animus, writing that “Although I can remain here for the next three years at least and perhaps indefinitely after that, I think you will agree that it would be better to seek an appointment elsewhere which provides a more congenial environment for a person with my background and research interest [in Asia]” (Yatsushiro, Reference Yatsushiro1960a).

Yatsushiro remained at McGill for two additional years but left in November 1962 without receiving tenure. The following January he sent a mimeographed holiday letter from Bangkok reporting his new appointment as an ethnographer for another war-related project, this time under the auspices the United States Operations Mission (USOM) to Thailand, a division of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) that we now know was tied to US intelligence operations (Watkin, Reference Watkin1992). He remained with USOM until 1969, although he continued to apply for academic appointments. From Thailand, he returned to Hawaii where he was affiliated with the East-West Center at the University of Hawaii. Later he directed that university’s continuing education programme. Toshio Yatsushiro died in 2015 at the age of 97.

A Japanese-American anthropologist in Iqaluit

Iqaluit, or Frobisher Bay as it was known until 1987, is today the capital and largest community in Nunavut. The origins of the Iqaluit as a year-round permanent home of Inuit trace to the Second World War. The US Air Force established an airbase there in 1942 to support Allied military activities in the North Atlantic during the war. A small number of Inuit who found casual work at the base settled at the site (Gagnon & Inuit Elders, Reference Gagnon2002). The presence of large numbers of Americans operating on Canadian territory without Canadian oversight was a motivating force for Canada to assert its governance of the Arctic region after the war. It moved some northern administrative activities to Iqaluit in 1953 (MacBain, Reference MacBain1970, p. x). The military infrastructure made the site easily accessible for Canadian government purposes and likely prompted its decision to designate Frobisher Bay as Canada’s Eastern Arctic regional headquarters a few years later. The base, eventually transferred to Canadian hands, continued to be used for military purposes through the early period of the Cold War.

The post-war construction of the Distant Early Warning (DEW) radar system or DEW Line and related activities, beginning in 1955, encouraged many more Inuit to settle there. Newly arrived Inuit lived in tents or built houses of scrap materials adjacent to the airbase. By 1963, nearly all Inuit from the region’s outlying camps as well as some from as far away as Kimmirut (Lake Harbour) and Pangnirtung had moved to the growing town (MacBain, Reference MacBain1970, p. 59).

In the summer of 1958, when Toshio Yatsushiro arrived in Iqaluit to begin fieldwork, the Inuit population of around 630 was split between two sites. Approximately one-third of Inuit residents lived in government-supplied electrified and heated housing in an area still known as Apex. This neighbourhood also housed non-Inuit working for government or private firms. The remaining two-thirds of Inuit lived adjacent to the military base several kilometres away in tents or small cabins constructed primarily from discarded packing materials. Yatsushiro reported that the government-owned housing was “a source of both envy and unhappiness” for those Inuit who, even though they were employed, were unable to obtain one (Reference Yatsushiro1963, p. 1). To government officials, the existence of this vernacular housing was both a source of embarrassment and evidence of Inuit failures to adopt Euro-Canadian domestic habits consonant with modern citizenship (Tester, Reference Tester, Stern and Stevenson2006).

Officials with the Department of Northern Affairs were anxious for Inuit to adopt wage labour and the norms and values associated with Euro-Canadian lifestyles. Yatsushiro’s research was meant to assess Inuit progress towards these externally imposed demands, and he was initially excited by the challenge. Writing to his mother soon after his arrival in Iqaluit, Yatsushiro described the town as a hub of industrial activity and a refuelling station for transatlantic air travel.

As I discuss below, his enthusiasm for the research and for the future of Canadian Inuit did not extend beyond the first field season. At the time, Yatsushiro, along with many other anthropologists of that era, shared DNANR officials’ view that Western economic development would improve the lives of the world’s technologically and thus, politically and culturally, less advanced societies. This teleological view of human progress precipitated the engagement of post-war anthropologists in development and applied anthropology (Kelly, Reference Kelly1984).

It is not certain why NCRC research officer Vic Valentine and director Graham Rowley chose Yatsushiro for a project as critical as documenting the social adjustment of Inuit to life in the northern administrative centre. Not everyone in the Arctic division of DNANR was pleased with the decision to employ him. Yatsushiro’s degree from Cornell, his postdoctoral fieldwork in India, and faculty appointment at McGill would have signalled his capabilities to Rowley and Valentine. Bent Sivertz, who was the then head of the Arctic Division of DNANR, however, recorded his support for the proposed research, but he felt that Yatsushiro, “a non-Canadian,” was a poor choice to conduct the study.

Although it is possible that Sivertz’s objection to employing Yatsushiro was not racial animus, it is the case that many, if not most, of the anthropologists and other social scientists NCRC employed were non-Canadians, although nearly all were white. Their ranks included many Americans as well as scholars from the UK, France, and the Netherlands. Rowley and Valentine, supported Yatsushiro’s hire, and thus overruled Sivertz, noting his previous “experience in resettlement problems” (i.e. the wartime internment camps) and the urgency to have some anthropological data for “planning for the type of Eskimo community that will be there in the future” (Rowley,Reference Rowley1958). Yatsushiro was offered a contract, renewable for three years, to examine how Inuit were acculturating to wage labour and the expectations to adopt Euro-Canadian norms of public and domestic life. Inuit attitudes towards these forced changes were to be the focus of the research.

Yatsushiro drafted a research plan in which he proposed to employ what were then standard anthropological methods including participant observation, projective tests, and open-ended interview surveys to document the extent to which Inuit in Iqaluit were experiencing “social and psychological strain as a result of the introduction (planned or unplanned) of culture change” (Yatsushiro, Reference Yatsushiro1958d).

After several days of orientation in Ottawa, Yatsushiro arrived in Iqaluit on May 23 and was joined by Lily three weeks later. Lily had stayed on in Montreal to allow their young sons to finish the school year and travelled North after delivering the boys to Lily’s sister in Chicago. Needing to make other arrangements for the children partway through the summer, Yatsushiro wrote to his brother (also living in Chicago), explaining that Lily’s role was crucial to the research, “able to do things in the way of research that I have not been able to do as a man. For example, she has been able to visit families, and visit the mothers, helping them cook, and looking after babies, and in this way observing Eskimo family life in action” (Yatsushiro, Reference Yatsushiro1958e).

Yatsushiro’s observations from that first summer include information about food prices and availability at the local Hudson’s Bay store, formally organised seal hunts and sales of seal meat, Inuit visiting patterns between the Inuit-built settlement (Iqaluit) and the official townsite (Apex), the effects of screenings of multiple cowboy Westerns on young boys, the presence of dogs in the Inuit settlement but not in the townsite, the continued widespread use of dogs for hunting and other subsistence activities as well as the impending arrival of motorised vehicles, and Inuit purchases of both subsistence equipment (boats and rifles) and consumer goods (washing machines, furniture, and radios). Other critical data he recorded include the RCMP practice of shooting unchained Inuit dogs and that the northern administrators tended to socialise together and had a few unofficial interactions with Inuit, even when they were neighbours as was the case for residents of Apex. This social segregation reinforced and affirmed a hierarchical racialised social structure.

Yatsushiro’s fieldwork was hampered his inability to speak Inuktut and his great difficulty finding someone willing and able to work as an interpreter. Nearly every letter he wrote to Valentine from the field includes a report on his progress, or more often, lack of progress employing an interpreter. To compensate, Yatsushiro depended heavily on research help he received from the RCMP Corporal Robert David “Dave” Van Norman. Corporal Van Norman, who had been in the North many years, spoke Inuktut, and Yatsushiro was impressed by his library of anthropological works. He provided Yatsushiro with introductions, access to the police vehicle and boat, census data, and friendship.

Still, without facility in Inuktut, Yatsushiro could not do much of the ethnographic data collection he had described in his proposal; and without an interpreter, he could not do the life history interviewing he had initially proposed. To compensate for his language deficit, Yatsushiro shifted his primary data collection from participant observation to a questionnaire survey, a research method he had used for his BSR work in the internment camp (Yatsushiro et al., Reference Yatsushiro, Ishino and Matsumoto1944).

Vic Valentine, the research officer for NCRC, expressed disapproval of the questionnaire survey. Nonetheless, at Valentine’s direction, DNANR staff in Ottawa provided substantial technical support for the survey, translating it into Inuktut, duplicating it, and air freighting the copies back to Iqaluit. Valentine also arranged for the completed surveys to be translated into English for Yatsushiro to analyse.

Valentine might have shared his concerns about Yatsushiro’s research methods privately with his DNANR colleagues, but documents available to me offer no hint that NCRC was concerned about Yatsushiro’s 1958 research. Valentine is recorded in the minutes of multiple Fall 1958 and Spring 1959 meetings of the Arctic Research Committee reporting that Yatsushiro was providing the department with much valuable information that would be of assistance to their staff in the field.

Yatsushiro also believed that the summer field season in Iqaluit had been a success. Soon after returning to Montreal, he wrote to Corporal Van Norman that he had already been invited to continue the Iqaluit study the following summer.

Yatsushiro spent a second summer in Iqaluit, this time without Lily. She remained in Montreal having just given birth to their third son. If the 1958 fieldwork had been, as he told Van Norman, “one of the most rewarding of all my research experiences during the past 16 years,” (Ibid.) that feeling did not carry into his 1959 fieldwork. Letters from that period reveal his loneliness as well as frustration with the research, which was merely “grinding along.” Yatsushiro reported that he was beginning to learn some Inuktut and was developing relationships with some Inuit but was still unable to hire a good interpreter. Importantly, his letters begin to show that he was troubled by the activities of local government administrators with respect to the Inuit residents. He had also come to regard Inuit involvement with wage labour as socially and culturally destructive.

As was true of other anthropologists employed by the NCRC, Yatsushiro initially did not question the modernisation goals of the Canadian government or the intent behind the efforts to acculturate Inuit to the economic practices and cultural norms of southern Canada. He accepted without question the hegemonic view that Inuit were a Stone Age people “catapulted into the jet-age industrial economy” (Yatsushiro, Reference Yatsushiro1962, p. 19). He, like others, had believed that his research would help the government guide Inuit to make that transition. Although he may still have believed that modernisation was inevitable, by the summer of 1959, he was convinced that Inuit lives were not improved by the changes modernisation brought, and that the government’s administrative practices were a large part of the problem (Yatsushiro, Reference Yatsushiro1959a). He did not want to return to Iqaluit the following summer. He wrote to Lily that living in Iqaluit “is becoming more and more repulsive to me, this mainly because everybody seems to be so unhappy and mad at each other. There is no question that money is the only motive that compels people to remain here” (Yatsushiro, Reference Yatsushiro1959b).

In June 1960, Yatsushiro presented his Iqaluit research at the annual meetings of the Canadian Political Science Association, held in Kingston, Ontario, not Montreal as stated by Trevor Lloyd. He presented a similar paper to the American Anthropological Association the following November. The Kingston paper, entitled “Eskimo attitudes toward Wage Employment and Related Considerations,” was critical of administrative practices in Iqaluit. Yatsushiro reported that Inuit there were experiencing a great deal of social stress, largely due, not to the demands of wage labour, but to the government’s constant surveillance of their bodily habits and domestic arrangements along with its seemingly arbitrary demands for Inuit to adopt an entirely new way of life. One source of exceptional stress for Inuit was the culling by the RCMP of unchained sled dogs.Footnote ² Although Inuit were making many of the cultural changes government officials sought, especially with respect to reliance on wage labour, the stresses of their colonised situation he said were revealing themselves in martial breakdowns, interpersonal violence, and alcohol abuseFootnote ³ (Reference Yatsushiro1960b).

Contrary to the story told by Trevor Lloyd that I recounted in the opening paragraphs of this paper, with exception of Graham Rowley, no one from the Department of Northern Affairs or the NCRC appears to have attended Yatsushiro’s presentation (although Valentine had received an advance copy of the paper). Senior department officials learned of Yatsushiro’s report by reading about it several days later in the Ottawa Journal (1960) under the headline “Eskimo Faces Crisis Under White Law.” Although he allowed for the possibility that the reporter had misreported Yatsushiro’s statements, Bent Sivertz was unable to contain his anger. In a memo to Valentine,

Proposing that Yatsushiro was driven by a desire for attention, Sivertz also rejected Yatsushiro’s report of marriage dissolutions, sexual promiscuity and the police shooting dogs. He continued,

A note on Valentine’s copy of the memo indicates that he and Sivertz discussed the matter on June 23, and on July 12, forwarded a copy of Yatsushiro’s paper with a lengthy memo explaining that Yatsushiro’s methods were poor, and although he had naively overstated the situation in Iqaluit, he was not entirely wrong. “The statistical ‘findings’ are far from satisfactory and, to me, too often only indicate the obvious. In a confused and perhaps exaggerated way, Yatsushiro tries to make the point in the latter part of the paper that the Eskimos at Frobisher Bay find themselves in a dilemma” (Valentine, Reference Valentine1960). Valentine goes on to assure Sivertz that he does not anticipate that NCRC will employ Yatsushiro again.

The decision that Yatsushiro not to return to Iqaluit for a third season was likely mutual and occurred before he presented the conference paper that so provoked Bent Sivertz. Although Yatsushiro did not want to continue fieldwork in Iqaluit, his family circumstances – Lily’s continued poor health, no local extended family, and new baby – would also have made continued fieldwork extremely difficult. Although Valentine suggested that Yatsushiro present a different paper to the American anthropologists, there is no evidence that either Valentine or Rowley asked him either to revise or not to present the first paper to the new audience. Yatsushiro was slow to submit chapters of the required report about his Iqaluit fieldwork and may not have completed the full report. Government documents available to me make repeated requests for one.Footnote ⁴ He intended to write a monograph detailing the lives of Inuit in that administrative centre and drafted several chapters that are preserved at the Autry Library and Archives in Los Angeles, but he never completed the book. Aside from two preliminary reports published by NCRC (Yatsushiro,Reference Yatsushiro1958h, Reference Yatsushiro1963), his only published article based on the Iqaluit research appeared in the popular magazine The Beaver (Yatsushiro,Reference Yatsushiro1962) rather than an academic venue. The journal Arctic declined to publish a revised version of the Kingston paper.

Japanese internment and Inuit self-determination

From the outset, the task Yatsushiro was given was large and not well defined. This also was true for other anthropologists employed by NCRC. It appears that DNANR officials began the NCRC without clear ideas of the kinds of data would be useful, or more importantly, an expectation that they would need to alter policies based on the findings of the ethnographers. Officials at NCRC had been stung by a report written the previous year by anthropologist Robert William Dunning that, rather than describing Inuit acculturation in Coral Harbour, detailed rivalries among and inappropriate behaviour by department employees and other white personnel there (Dunning,Reference Dunning1957). Because of Dunning’s report, Yatsushiro and others were specifically directed not to concern themselves with the actions of government officials and other whites in the North. Following an early uncomfortable meeting with the Northern Service Officer in Iqaluit, Yatsushiro wrote to assure Valentine that with the “famous case of ‘D’” weighing heavily on his mind, “I think we are agreed that I am not to do a study of the dynamics of the administrative structure, but rather than [sic] I am to concentrate on the Eskimo social structure” (Yatsushiro, Reference Yatsushiro1958i, emphasis in original).

NCRC anticipated that Yatsushiro would report on how thoroughly Inuit were adapting to wage labour and other aspects of life in the government-administered settlement. Adaptation, in this sense, was a synonym for how thoroughly Inuit were absorbing Euro-Canadian values and acculturating to Euro-Canadian norms of behaviour. As Yatsushiro had written in his outline for the study, he would examine:

He seems to have believed that the latter was not only possible, but was, in fact, the goal of the Canadian government.

Yatsushiro’s hopeful anticipation of a benevolent colonial administration matched the public pronouncements of government officials about their goal to fully incorporate Inuit as Canadian citizens. It was also informed by his experience working for the BSR, his doctoral thesis concerning the Manzanar and Poston internment camps, and his relationship with his mentor, Alexander Leighton. For example, Leighton (Reference Leighton1945) had asserted that anthropologists’ ability to discern Japanese cultural practices was critical to making the internment camp governable. Yatsushiro’s dissertation probed the institutional contradictions and cultural barriers to the administrative directive for the internees to become “self-governing.” Similar to Leighton, he described camp administrators’ missteps that came, in part, from their blindness to cultural norms within the Japanese-American community. Once these were corrected through the intervention of anthropologists, Leighton and Yatsushiro each asserted, camp administrators were able to establish structures to allow interned Japanese to govern themselves within the confines of the camps. With the passage of time, the effectiveness of these anthropological interventions has been challenged by anthropologists who have reviewed the internment camp studies (Price, Reference Price2008; Starn, Reference Starn1986; Suzuki, Reference Suzuki1981). Importantly, even if BSR anthropologists had succeeded in changing administrative practices in the internment camps, the NCRC directive not to report on administrative activities would have precluded any recommendations for adapting administrative practice to Inuit social and cultural needs.

In early 1960, months before the Canadian Political Science Association conference incident, Yatsushiro provided NCRC with a case study of the Poston internment camp that he suggested demonstrated how a subject population, such as Inuit, could be encouraged to govern themselves within the structures of the Canadian state.Footnote ⁵ He presented his argument indirectly, without making any explicit reference to the lack of Inuit involvement in their governance. Sivertz (Reference Sivertz1960b) described himself as “puzzled” by the “interesting though not particularly well told” story and announced that he could not “see much of a parallel” between the experiences of Inuit under Canadian administration and interned Japanese.

From the perspective of Sivertz and others in the Department of Northern Affairs, the Inuit situation was entirely different from that of the interned Japanese. As a former internee, however, Yatsushiro saw resemblances. Although he never fully developed the comparative case, it is worthwhile to consider his observations and what they reveal about the ways he saw administrative activities failing Inuit.

Unlike interned Japanese, many Inuit, although not all, had come to Iqaluit voluntarily. In theory they were free to return to hunting camps or to relocate to smaller settlements. In reality, most had no ability to leave. Those with school age children would have been separated from their children, with the children most likely sent to residential schools. Having arrived in Iqaluit seeking employment opportunities, they had become captive to both the wages and the temporal regime associated with wage labour. Wages had allowed Inuit to accumulate numerous consumer goods including bulky furniture and appliances that would be difficult to move and not suitable for life in a hunting camp (Yatsushiro, Reference Yatsushiro1963). Wage labour tied households to a time schedule that was incompatible with subsistence hunting. Most critically, Inuit were imprisoned in the settlement by the extermination of their dogs. Without dogs, they had no effective ways to hunt for meat in the wintertime and, thus, were further obligated to work for wages. Yatsushiro wrote that loss of their dogs “gnawed at a very sensitive and highly important aspect of the [Inuit] traditional culture” and provoked “bitter resentment” against the administrative authorities (Yatsushiro, Reference Yatsushiron.d., Chapter 11).

Although the specific reasons differed, in both situations administrative authorities ignored preexisting status and leadership systems. Prior to internment, the immigrant generation of Japanese (Issei) controlled both family wealth and community leadership positions. These were stripped from them by the administrative policies and practices of the War Relocation Authority, who demanded that younger American-born and educated Japanese (Nisei) take on leadership roles in the camps (also Yanagisako, Reference Yanagisako1985, p. 73). Internment camp authorities couched this decision in the American legal norm that elective offices must be occupied by citizens (Nisei rather than their immigrant, non-citizen parents). Similarly, Canadian officials found it easier and more expedient to interact with younger men who were likely to speak some English. The effect among the Japanese was to intensify already existing generational divides and produced “evacuee hostility towards the Government authorities and their programs” (Yatsushiro, Reference Yatsushiron.d., Appendix). For Inuit,

In his unfinished monograph, Yatsushiro questioned the “moral right” of the government to undermine Inuit social relations in this way. He argued that even if unintended, the effect was to create “socio-cultural disorganisation” sowing division in the Inuit community and posing “a serious threat to what must constitute the ultimate goal of the administration, i.e. the establishment of a viable and integrated native community.” He went on to describe a workplace incident he observed in which a 25-year-old Inuit supervisor used a “bellicose” tone to order a much older man to do a particular task. “The older Eskimo, who is the acknowledged head of an important extended family and recognized as something of a community leader, reacted in a defiant manner, his face flushed with anger and resentment” (Ibid.). He had observed open defiance of government dictates and intrusions at Poston and expressed surprise that similar events had not occurred in Iqaluit. Instead, he said, Inuit anger and frustration largely simmered under the surface, often expressed as interpersonal violence during drinking episodes.

By his second field season, Yatsushiro came to recognise that Inuit were suffering under the conditions of life in Iqaluit, and he identified government actions that disregarded Inuit cultural values and practices as the root cause of the social dysfunction. The government had made no efforts to include Inuit, either Elders or young adults, in policy development. Many officials regarded Inuit not yet capable of meaningful participation. Nor did the government explain its decisions to Inuit (i.e. Stevenson, Reference Stevenson2012). The unpublished manuscript (that he likely shared with NCRC) called for a form of Indigenous self-government that is found in Canada today but was not imaginable by most in the 1960s (see for example Blackburn, Reference Blackburn2009; Fabbi & Wilson, Reference Fabbi, Wilson and Stern2022; Wilson et al., Reference Wilson, Alcantara and Rodon2020).

During the 1950s and 1960s, Canada was engaged in a very conscious programme to establish a unified national identity, including a vast expansion of Keynesian social benefits. Inuit were included (imperfectly) in these benefits. State provision of universal benefits was a technology of governance meant to build a sense of solidarity and common identity that would transcend ethnic or linguistic divisions (Brodie, Reference Brodie2002). At the time, inclusion of non-white peoples as equal citizens was understood as a progressive stance. The denial of racial differences also accorded with the dominant intellectual position among North American anthropologists. Still, Keynesianism privileged a heteronormative, male-headed nuclear family, constraining and controlling the domestic and public lives of citizens (Rose, Reference Rose1999). In Iqaluit and other parts of Inuit Canada, officials threatened to withhold social benefits to force compliance with official dictates (King, Reference King2006; Qikiqtani Inuit Association, 2013b, 2014).

Keynesian programmes in Canada were designed to suit the social and cultural needs and practices of the majority – white, southern Canadians. In the era prior to official multiculturalism in Canada, officials could not imagine that Inuit (or any culturally distinct group of people) could desire or need different arrangements. Yatsushiro, a perpetual outsider because of his Japanese heritage and his experience of internment, could. In an odd way, Bent Sivertz was correct that Yatsushiro did not share the cultural values and way of life that DNANR officials wished to inculcate in Inuit. Overlooked in the paper he presented to the Canadian Political Science Association – the one Sivertz took such offence to – Yatsushiro asserted that government had the “moral obligation to create conditions that would lead to minimising the tensions and conflicts, and eliminating those that are avoidable.” Inuit might be included in some citizen benefits, but they were excluded from citizen participation in decision-making. Inuit needed to have “a voice in the management of their community and in the shaping of their destiny.” Yatsushiro continued,

One purpose of the NCRC research programme, as I noted above, was to make Inuit legible to government administrators, to provide them with the knowledge required to rationally implement policies of acculturation. There was no expectation that the knowledge gained would require government to adjust itself to Inuit culture. Rather, it was widely accepted that Inuit, like other Indigenous Canadians, would be incorporated into the Canadian state once they abandoned any cultural practices and beliefs that did not fit with the norms and institutions of the dominant society. It is remarkable that Yatsushiro envisioned multiculturalism and Indigenous self-governance decades before these were on the horizon in Canada. Yatsushiro observed that government officials regulated the lives of Inuit subjects in ways that were experienced as autocratic and capricious. “Even his home is no longer a private domain, for it is subject to periodic inspections by health officials. In many other ways he has become a helpless captive of Western civilization,” wrote Yatsushiro in The Beaver (Reference Yatsushiro1962, p. 23).