From state-initiated to Indigenous-driven infrastructure: The Inuvialuit and Canada’s first highway to the Arctic Ocean

Abstract

Between 2010 and 2050, the world's combined road and rail network will grow an estimated 60%. National governments are building many of these roads, which are often perceived as disenfranchising Indigenous communities. Yet in the Canadian Arctic’s Mackenzie Delta, a joint venture between two Indigenous-owned construction and transportation companies built the first public highway in North America to the Arctic Ocean, which opened in November 2017. This research, based on qualitative fieldwork in the Inuvialuit Settlement Region where the highway was constructed, challenges ideas that roads are invariably top-down initiatives which negatively impact Indigenous peoples and their lands. Inuvialuit community leaders lobbied for this road project and succeeded in winning CAD $299 million in government funding to construct the Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway. They leveraged opportunities afforded by land claims treaties and shifting geopolitics in the warming Arctic, which turned their region into a frontier of renewed national and global interest, to accumulate funding. Strategically, they discursively rescaled a road they sought to promote economic development and improve local mobility between two communities into a highway of national importance. This study thus extends work on tribal capitalism to explore the place-based dynamics of Indigenous political economies. It unpacks the scale-oriented strategies Indigenous peoples use to advocate for new roads and increased connectivity, finding that these discourses and practices can complement the state’s promotion of nation-building and market capitalism in frontier spaces. This research also suggests that more attention is required to the circumstances in which Indigenous peoples initiate or become partners in infrastructure development rather than examining only instances of resistance.