Settler Colonialism and Racialized Visuality in the Cold War Arctic

In 1954, movie audiences travelled vicariously to the Eastern North American Arctic through a newsreel distributed internationally by British Pathé [figure]. The short film records a ceremony at which Inuk hunter, Joseph Idlout, is awarded a Coronation Medal, commemorating the first anniversary of Elizabeth II’s ascension to the throne. Standing beneath a Union Jack flag, Idlout shakes the hand of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police Officer and smiles to well-wishers and the camera alike. The 1954 ceremony and newsreel were highly choreographed performances of settler colonialism, gestures that both posited models of idealized Indigeneity and enacted Canada’s claim to sovereignty over the Arctic in the midst of the Cold War and during a period of enforced assimilation. This was primarily a visual performance in which southerner audiences were shown the north and shown the Indigenous people living there as subjects of the British Crown and the Dominion of Canada as well as objects of a racialized settler colonial gaze. This paper is drawn from a monograph I am writing, entitled The Hunter, the Crown and the Cameras. It examines how settler assertions of authority over the Arctic and over Inuit lives during the 1950s and 1960s were played out and resisted in part through fields of visualization. My specific case study here revolves around Joseph Idlout, who was not only the most extensively photographed and filmed Inuk of his time, but also a photographer whose images look back at the settler colonial gaze.