1. The Northern Borderlands
A Nexus of Borderlands Bound by Nature, United by Indigenous Culture and Language, and Divided by
Expanding States
Presentation to the Panel on the Northern Borderland, Borders in Globalization Summer Institute, Yukon
College, Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada, June 21, 2016
By Barry Scott Zellen, Ph.D.
The presenter wises to gratefully acknowledge the Kone Foundation for their generous financial support for his
research project on “Tribal Buffer Zones and Regional Stability from the Polar to Oceanic Region:
Understanding the Interface between Indigenous Homelands and Modern States, and the Foundations for
Stable Borderlands and International Peace.”
* * *
In many ways, I’m only just starting my formal journey toward a formal study of borderlands, and only recently
found my way to its rich and diverse body of literature. And yet in other ways, I feel as if I’ve been immersed in
the study of borderlands for over a quarter-century, and one distinctive borderland in particular: the Western
Arctic borderland which stretches along the arctic coastal plain from Alaska’s North Slope to the Mackenzie
Delta which marks the NWT’s western boundary with Yukon, whose Inuit demographic predominance
continues to define the region from end to end.
While an influx of settlers during the Klondike Gold Rush would permanently rebalance the demographics of
the Yukon Territory further south, the Western Arctic borderland escaped such a fate, though only by a
whisker. While Russian-America, and British North America (and in particular the North-Western Territory
adjacent to Rupert’s Land), asserted sovereign control over the region and defined the international boundary
that continues to subdivide the Inupiat homeland, these competing fur empires would only lightly settle the
region.
Epidemics would decimate local populations of Mackenzie Inuit, exposing the region to a high risk of
demographic upheaval. But an influx of Inupiat settlers from Alaska would ensure the continued Inuit
demographic predominance, and in many ways helped to solidify the cultural and linguistic cohesiveness of

2. the region, imbuing it with enduring qualities that have ensured it remains a distinct borderland strongly
bound by geography, culture and language that reaches across the international boundary to this day.
I find it intriguing that it was the fluidity of cross-border migration by the Inupiat, drawn in part by economic
opportunities presented by the fur trade, that preserved the demographic balance, when it was a similarly
fluid cross-border migration by non-Native settlers during the Gold Rush that would transform the
demography of the Klondike. This challenged some of my preconceptions about settlers and about what
constitutes indigeneity; that both were in flux gives the Western Arctic borderland region a particularly
dynamic nature.
I first came to the Whitehorse in the late 1980s, and lived in Inuvik during the early 1990s, before moving
south to Yellowknife and eventually back to Whitehorse by the end of the 90s. I had the great privilege of
working for several Aboriginal media organizations during this period, including the Inuvialuit Communications
Society in Inuvik; the Native Communications Society in Yellowknife, and NNBY here in Whitehorse, which
provided me with a front row seat to the fascinating history of Aboriginal re-empowerment and renewal
sweeping across the region. These years would catalyze my interest in both the historical processes unfolding
in the region, which would take book form in 2008 with my first comparative history of land claims in the
Western Arctic, Breaking the Ice; and in subsequent manuscripts, I would take some tentative baby-steps
toward theorizing about these new structures of collaborative management and indigenous self-governance in
the Arctic, in order to understand how they affected the structure of world politics.
When I came North a quarter century ago, and when I put pen to paper in the years since, I did so without the
conceptual vocabulary of borderland studies, and I still scratch my head trying to figure out how it too me so

3. long. And so I applied the tools that I had, which was a mix of concepts and ideas from 1980s-era international
relations theory, as well as an intuitive distrust of the dominant paradigm at the time, neorealism or structural
realism, which overstated the causal role of international anarchy and overlooked the fascinating, complex,
and dynamic array of sub-systemic forces that dominated local and regional international politics.
So when I began to more systemically study and attempted to shed light on the international relations of the
Inuit homeland, and in particular the Western Arctic borderland region, I looked for alternate concepts in IR
theory for some guidance, finding a helpful metaphorical boost from the emergence of regional subsystems
theory in the early 1970s, and of regime theory a decade later. The former sought to fuse realism and
structuralism with the diversity of regional politics around the world, drilling downward from the infamous
“Third Image” toward the “second” in search of patterns and causal loops between these two. Then, with the
emergence of regime theory a decade later, one encounters a new structure that hovers between these same
two levels, describing an analytical unit that is at once trans-state and sub-state, and which can be used to
describe many collaborative and joint-management efforts between states and/or regions of states in what
we can now describe as borderlands.
Such a nimble use of regime theory as a lens through which to understand what we now know as the northern
borderland can be illustrated by the pioneering work of Oran Young, who single-handedly wedded regime
theory with the study of the Arctic and Subarctic in the 1970s and ‘80s, and whose examination of ‘Beringia’ as
a regional sub-system can be viewed as theoretical precursor to northern borderland studies, as can his

4. broader work on the circumpolar north which is, in essence, a circumpolar borderland that encompasses the
boundaries of all the Arctic states.
Just as regional subsystems and regime theory were broader than and inclusive of components of world
politics beyond borderlands, they provided a hint of the underlying structures overlooked by the image-three
system theorists who dominated IR theory on the eve of the Cold War’s surprising, and largely peaceful,
conclusion, taking with it the very bipolar system the neorealists embraced as perpetual. This systemic
collapse not only liberated hundreds of millions of people in captive nations under Moscow’s hegemony, but
also liberated a new generation of academics to re-imagine world politics.
In borderland theory, I’ve found a new and intriguing set of concepts to describe these very same corners of
the world system that had been overlooked during the rise of the neorealists. Indeed borderlands – like
regional subsystems and some cross-border regimes – emerge as a viable contender for this previously
nameless structures in world politics, snugly fitting between the second and third Waltzian images – the very
same level of analysis within which regional subsystems operate, where many cross-border interstate,
intertribal and hybrid state-tribe regimes (and other collaborative bodies) operate, including, some to be
discussed here this week, such as the Yukon River Intertribal Watershed Council, as well as the Arctic Council’s
permanent member organizations like the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC, formerly the Inuit Circumpolar
Conference) and the Arctic Athabaskan Council (ACC), and Aleut International Association (AIA).

5. Borderlands provide us with a hybrid “level of analysis” where cultures, languages, identity, geography, and
jurisdictional authority, blend – planting seeds for future autonomous regions and potentially even new
independent states to rise, and containing echoes of an earlier order before the modern state arrived,
absorbing everything in its path. These underlying echoes, I’ve found, continue to help bind a borderland
together, leveraging regional centripetal forces to offset the state’s centrifugal forces.
Before turning to this distinct nexus of northern borderlands that we find here in the Yukon and adjacent
territories, let me digress a bit to some of my earlier, and still evolving, writings in IR and strategic theory.
From around 2009 through 2013, I completed a series of interconnected manuscripts looking at, and
attempting to redefine, realism as an enduring effort by both theorist and practitioner to impose order on a
chaotic natural (and political) world.
Rather than being about power politics as over-emphasized by Morgenthau and many other 20th
century
realists, I found realism, from its classical roots onward, was more an impassioned body of political and

6. strategic philosophy concerned with the construction of enduring orders where none had previously existed,
starting with the polis, later expanding to include the early and modern state, and continuing into the colonial
world as realism became global in its aspirations.
At each stage in the realist journey from city-state to global superpower, the state, and those at its helm,
sought to pacify the uncertain and largely unknown world beyond the border, whether it was a city-gate or a
continental frontier. Realism presumed a zero-sum world divided between the ordered tranquility of domestic
politics and the chaotic anarchy of the international realm. But realism, like neorealism, surrendered to the
persuasive logic of over-simplification, and projected disorder beyond borders when in reality, islands of order
and oases of regional stability, were as ubiquitous as the eddies of anarchy that so worried the keepers of the
realist canon. Had they ventured out beyond those very borders they theorized about a little more, they may
have come back a little less Hobbesian, and a little more Rousseauian.
In the postcolonial world, and now in our post-Cold War era, realism has right-sized from the earlier era of
imperial overreach, finding equilibrium in smaller orders, some carved out of multinational states cobbled
together during the colonial period, some along the outer edges of bona-fide nation-states, or some securely
nested deep in their interiors – often insulated by natural and geophysical boundaries that helped to sustain a
distinctiveness and moderated the influx of settlers, preserving a demographic balance and with it, an
enduring order. This is the realm of non-state, sub-state and trans-state entities so salient in today’s world, a
group of actors in world politics recently portrayed as the root of international insecurity, ungoverned spaces
and failed states that threatened the global order.
But in actual fact, these complex, granular components of world politics are the very foundation stones of
international order – especially so the further you got from Europe’s Westphalian core. I’ve thus tried to
derive some insights from the Western Arctic borderland, which has offered us a compelling example of
enduring order, even in the absence of strong state institutions and traditional tools of border security and
fortification to apply to the world at large.
It was amidst this post-Cold War right-sizing of realism (and our expectations of the foundational building
blocks of world order), that I began to combine my research on the Western Arctic, and its world of settled
land claims, emerging systems of indigenous and regional governance, its balancing of subsistence culture
with economic modernization and development, its blending of two worlds, one traditional, one

7. contemporary, with my thinking about IR theory and world politics, looking for lessons from the former to
inform our understanding of the latter.
Not all regions of the world are defined by international anarchy, nor dominated by armed conflict and
political violence. Quite a few have found their own ways to mitigate regional conflict and to foster peaceful
and collaborative interaction across borders, sometimes borrowing ideas and emulating policies for
application from adjacent areas. In many ways, the northern borderland is just such a place. H
ere, we’ve witnessed an alternate historical narrative defined by an historic reconciliation of tribe and state, a
restoration of indigenous land and cultural rights, and a rise in native participation in international relations at
the regional level. I spent much of the 1990s observing and writing about these processes in the Mackenzie
Delta region, where insights and experiences from the Alaska land claims process flowed across the Alaska

8. boundary, into the Western Canadian Arctic, where they were re-thought, revised, and re-applied – resulting
in a stronger, more resilient, and ultimately more scalable model for northern development.
In Breaking the Ice, I focused on this historical evolution and refinement of the land claims model as it
journeyed from Barrow to Baffin and beyond. While the manuscript is something of an intellectual history
comparing the land claims experience on both sides of the Alaska boundary, with only a modest amount of
theorizing, I later realized – quite recently, in fact – that I had been immersed in the study of “borderlands”
without really knowing it, or without the conceptual or theoretical vocabulary to describe it as such.
This late realization reminded me of Moliere’s Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,
when Monsieur Jourdain is informed by his tutor that he has been able to
speak in prose his whole life – and he is both amazed and quite proud at this
discovery!
Ever since my “Moliere moment,” I’ve been every bit as amazed (and proud) to
discover that I’ve been studying one of the continent’s most fascinating
borderlands for as long as I can remember – one where demographic realities
continue to infuse the borderland with significant, in some cases predominant,
indigenous involvement.
I’ve been intrigued by, and drawn to, the Yukon’s distinct nexus of borderlands ever since my first visit here in
1988, almost three decades ago. When I came to the Yukon the first time it was on a Honda Rebel 250cc
motorbike up the Alaska Highway, with my goal to reach Fairbanks intact. Like many Americans traveling the
Alcan to Alaska, knowing nearly nothing about the vast expanse of northern Canada stretching from northern
British Columbia to the Yuko, this goal would change once I got to the Yukon, where I would change course,
turning right up the Klondike, and then right again at Dempster corner, with Inuvik my new objective.
The Alcan, by linking northern BC to Alaska, is of itself a fascinating highway and an equally fascinating
metaphor for the resilient and enduring links that crisscross the northern borderland, or as I think of it, a
nexus of overlapping borderlands that converge in the Yukon with its interconnected natural corridors from
high mountain passes along the coast; to interior rivers stretching from the headwaters of the Yukon all the
way to the Bering Sea; to the Arctic coastal plain; along with several remarkable man-made corridors like the
Alcan and Dempster highways, and even the equally metaphorical Top of the World highway, superimposed

9. on top of the underlying network of natural corridors – further facilitating cross-border flows of commerce,
tourism, ideas, and settlers.
Before the Alcan was rapidly cut during World War II, the region served more as a natural boundary of forest
and mountains, not so different from the interior of Borneo or the highlands of Papua, that in many ways
insulated North America from the outside world, across which the projection of offensive military power was
all but impossible before the age of airpower, limiting the colonial footprint of those states whose fur empires
reached into and ultimately subdivided the region.
While I was entranced by the beauty of the southeast Alaskan borderland, I found myself pulled further north,
up the Klondike and Dempster highways, to Inuvik and the Mackenzie Delta, and the surrounding ecoregion

10. connected by the Arctic coastal plain. This is the borderland that I would study most closely, even before I
thought of it as a borderland – and it became the topic of much of my writing. It’s served as a both a land and
sea migration route for successive waves of Inuit, including a recent migration by Inupiat settlers who came
into the Delta in the early 1900s after the demographic collapse of the Kittigazuit community, and the
resulting revival would strengthen the cross-border bond between the Inuvialuit and the Inupiat, helping to
unify the Western Arctic borderland by extending the edge of the Inupiat homeland further east into Canada.
This cross-border population flow would nurture the environment in which the Inuvialuit, three-quarters of a
century later, would successfully negotiate their historic comprehensive land claim, with direct inspiration
from the Alaska land claim settlement – both positive to emulate and negative to revise – resulting in a
successful and paradigm-shifting integration of the Alaska land claim model (which was highly assimilative and
predominantly corporate in its structure) with Canadian and indigenous values (including a deep commitment
to the preservation of their traditional subsistence culture) – paving the way for the even-more transformative
Nunavut land claim that followed. The Inuvialuit land claim presents a substantial evolutionary leap beyond
the Alaska land claim which inspired it, with many prescient and enduring advances in collaborative
management and stronger protections of native lands and traditions missing from the Alaska claim.
Had the Inuvialuit not so enthusiastically embraced and constructively improved the land claims model, the
many structural weaknesses of the Alaska land claim – noted by Thomas Berger in his famed Village Journey
and more recently by UAF professor and Alaska publisher Edgar Blatchford in his 2009 master’s thesis at
Dartmouth and his 2013 doctoral thesis at UAF with much longer-winded titles than Berger’s elegantly titled
Village Journey: “The unintended consequence of the U.S. Congress and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement
Act : the demise of corporate democracy and the threat of native ownership of the land base” (2009) and
“Alaska Native claims settlement act and the unresolved issues of profit sharing, corporate democracy, and
the new generations of Alaska Natives” (2013) – might well have doomed the model altogether.
Blatchford noted how the very land claim model that has transformed the political economy of Alaska, Yukon,
the NWT, and Nunavut, would ultimately be rejected by Indian Country in the “lower 48” as a flawed model;
but in the Arctic, it has become a central and evolving blueprint for strengthening the bond between First
Nations and the state, and a defining feature not only of the Western Arctic borderland but of the entire nexus
of borderlands overlapping and adjacent to the Yukon. This embrace of, effort to improve, and continuing
process of reforming the land claim model as it flowed from the Inupiat to the Inuvialuit and on to Nunavut
and Nunatsiavut is a reflection of the mechanism that defines the Western Arctic borderland. It presents us

11. with an intriguing model for cross-border collaboration – both intertribal collaboration and tribe-state
collaboration. Such collaboration is not unique to this borderland, and is evident
in the other borderlands that converge in the Yukon, from the coastal borderland along coastal Alaska and the
high interior of Northwestern BC, to the vast and extensive riverine borderland of the interior that flows from
the head waters of the Yukon River down to the Bering Sea. Indeed, in my current research project very kindly
funded by the Kone Foundation comparing what I originally described as “cross-border indigenous
homelands,” I’m finding the Western Arctic borderland stands out as a highly illustrative exemplar of what I
now more knowingly and elegantly describe as an “indigenous borderland,” a specific category of borderlands
defined by the interface of expanding states and traditional indigenous homelands worldwide -- from Borneo
to Barrow.
During the course of my recent literature immersion on borderlands inspired by my fortuitous introduction to
Trent University professor and B.I.G. conference co-organizer Heather Nicol earlier this year – whose work on
the Arctic I knew well but whose earlier (and continuing) work on borderlands somehow escaped my attention
until then – I came across an interesting observation in the introduction to “Languages at/of the Border”
(presented as the February 2013 issue of the St. Petersburg Chto Delat newspaper) that argues: “Borderlands
always aggravate differences,” as a “border’s physicality, particularly in the form of rigid paramilitary zones
impeding the free circulation of people, causes anyone who becomes caught up in their force fields to re-
examine the world and themselves.” And yet, these contested border areas have also been “special habitats
encouraging the development of new forms of language, behavior and culture. The border is a place for

12. experiment, a zone of mobility and change.” This juxtaposes two competing visions of the borderland: one
defined by “a history of wars, militarization, securitization, bureaucratic control, biopolitical regulation, forced
displacement, flight and migration;” while the other defined “[p]aradoxically” as “an essential factor of
existence, shaping not only the lives of people, but also impacting the natural environment and the animal
world.” I am greatly intrigued by this paradox, and how the nexus of borderlands that converge in the Yukon
may have at times been defined by the former vision, particularly during the rapid influxes of outsiders during
successive gold rushes, and again during the construction of the Alcan, while over time evolving toward the
latter. Indeed, when you look at the confluence of northern borderlands that converge in the Yukon, you find
yourself at a strategic hub, connected by road, river, mountain pass, and air corridor; a natural meeting point
for us to be gathered this week to discuss borders, borderlands and globalization.
The Western Arctic borderland contains many of these very same ingredients, including intense pressures of
militarization and geopolitics earlier in history. And yet from this cauldron has emerged a strikingly
collaborative, cross-border dynamic reflected in the relations between the indigenous communities on both
sides of national, territorial/state, and regional borders. This is particularly evident in the close collaborative
relationship between the Inupiat and the Inuvialuit, who have partnered on numerous cross-border issues
including the Inuvialuit - Inupiat Polar Bear Management Agreement in the Southern Beaufort Sea and the
Inuvialuit Inupiat Beaufort Sea Beluga Whale Agreement, and whose collaboration extended to the
resumption of bowhead whale harvesting by the Inuvialuit during the 1990s, when community-to-community
exchanges ensured the transfer of traditional knowledge required for a successful and safe restoration of
bowhead hunting.
That the modern state, in its many northern forms, whether the State of Alaska, or the Yukon and Northwest
Territories, overlaps with these underlying indigenous cross-border networks, has resulted in the emergence
of a diverse, inclusive, and fascinating political culture in the North, one where this nexus of borderlands has
embraced a deep and enduring commitment to collaborative cross-border management, inter-group (and
international) partnerships, and constructive transboundary relationships that present a compelling model for
how the world can and should be governed. It’s not always frictionless collaboration, since there are times and
issues where interests can and do clash – as evident in the ongoing struggle to protect the Peel River
watershed, which is now heading to the Supreme Court.

13. But despite these very real and recurring collisions of values between Native, environmental, settler, and
resource-extractive interests – as we’ve seen ever since the oil strike in Prudhoe Bay catalyzed the rapid
emergence of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in 1971 – collaborative efforts between neighboring
Native communities that reach across the border are ongoing, and continue to help counterbalance those
conflicts when they do arise.
While still at the start of my own borderland journey, in the months and years ahead I will continue comparing
the fascinating Western Arctic borderland, with its strong indigenous dimension, to other indigenous

14. borderlands around the world where indigenous voices are again being heard, and where collaboration
between state and tribe has begun to rebound – processes that mirror and in some cases consciously emulate
the experience here in the North.