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Far Off Metal River: Inuit Lands, Settler Stories, and the Making of the Contemporary Arctic
Drawing on Samuel Hearne’s gruesome account of an alleged massacre at Bloody Falls in 1771, Emilie Cameron reveals how Qablunaat (non-Inuit, non-Indigenous people) have used stories about the Arctic for over two centuries as a tool to justify ongoing colonization and economic exploitation of the North. Rather than expecting Inuit to counter these narratives with their own stories about their homeland, Cameron argues that it is the responsibility of Qablunaat to develop new relationships with northerners – ones grounded in the political, cultural, economic, environmental, and social landscapes of the contemporary Arctic.
296 pages, Hardcover
First published June 1, 2015
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May 7, 2023
Comps reading at the intersection of many themes I am interested in: colonialism, mining and extraction, Indigenous metallurgy and mineral knowledge, water and rivers, revolutionary and public history. The main subject of this book is not scientific and this is not an STS text, but it resembles STS projects that have attempted to abide by Bloor’s principle of symmetry in the sense that it is not primarily concerned about whether a particular massacre that happened was true, but in a Foucauldian sense perhaps, is more interested in how that story of massacre functions now to justify mineral extraction on Inuit land. (There are many problems with this approach that Trouillot points out but it also can prove generative, as I think it does here.)
At the center of this book is the so-called Bloody Falls Massacre, which largely exists by way of the testimony of a Hudson Bay Company employee named Samuel Hearne. HBC’s instructions to Hearne is used as an opening epigraph for this book and summarizes well the core themes that Cameron works through in this book:
“The Ind*ans who are now appointed your guides, are to conduct you ... to a river represented by the Indians to abound with copper ore, animals of the furr kind, &c ... The river, which is called by the Northern Indians Neetha-san-san-dazey, or the Far Off Metal River, you are, if possible, to trace to the mouth ... and observe what mines are near the river, what water there is at the river’s mouth, how far the woods are from the sea-side, the course of the river, the nature of the soil, and the productions of it ... If the said river is likely to be of any utility, take possession of it on behalf of the Hudson’s Bay Company.” — The Hudson’s Bay Company’s instructions to Samuel Hearne, 1769
Hearne had little to show for his expedition in terms of mineral resources and Cameron suggests he compensated by detailing a tale about his Dene guides participating in a violent attack against the Inuit along Copper River.
Historians drawing on both Inuit and Dene testimonial accounts highlight how Hearne (according to the Dene guides on the Franklin expedition) was not present at the alleged massacre. And a portion of this book is dedicated to pointing out gaping holes in Hearne’s account that place its veracity into serious question, despite long being accepted as historical truth in subsequent colonial records. The story continues to persist in colonial commemorations of the massacre that pervade media, public history installations during some periods of time, and even in botanical nomenclature.
One particularly interesting part of this book is Cameron’s story about how she came across the massacre story. She speaks of encountering “a reference to Senecio lugens, a species of ragweed named in honour of the massacre, while lazily flipping through a field guide to northern wildflowers (lugens means “to mourn” in Latin…)”
This immediately reminded me about something an Anishinaabeg botanical scientist and birder named Joseph Pitawanakwat said about how eponymous Latin bird names were just like the statues of slaveowners that were being torn down in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Many bird names commemorated slavers like Audubon. In the case of Senecio lugens though, it commemorated a colonial story about supposed Indigenous violence that continued to further colonial purposes long after its alleged occurrence. Cameron explains:
“They invented a series of “things” that worked to establish the massacre as a historical event, even while its primary witness quietly retreated from view. These things – particularly a species of ragweed identified at Bloody Falls and the skulls and bones that appear in the first visual depiction of the site – acted as material proof of what was hitherto merely a story…”
In Chapter 5, Cameron discusses:
“The proposed erection of federal and territorial heritage plaques to commemorate Samuel Hearne and the Bloody Falls massacre in the early 1970s, a scheme that Kugluktukmiut firmly rejected. In resisting the commemoration, Kugluktukmiut were not so much rejecting abstract claims to the story of the North, I argue, but rather rejecting the capacity for such claims to enable much more material interventions into their lives and lands. Their resistance was shaped by shifts in federal and territorial governance, northern Indigenous political movements, and the rise of industrial resource extraction in the North, as well as by relations with the land and with each other that exceed the reach and understanding of both past and present Qablunaaq [roughly translates to ‘settler’] observers.”
Cameron emphasizes that the story of the massacre if registered at all by either the Dene or the Inuit were considered peripheral at best. Cameron says:
“Many first heard the story at residential school and learned of their apparent hostility toward Dene not from their elders but from their textbooks. This is not to say that the hostility did not exist or is not storied; it did and it is, alongside stories of cooperation, mutual aid, intermarriage, trade, and sharing. But many Kugluktukmiut suspect that, because so few Inuit likely survived the massacre (if, indeed, it occurred), specific accounts of the event did not occupy a prominent place in oral histories. Other violent encounters did.”
But more so, Cameron claims both the Dene and Inuit both deliberately engage in practices of forgetting and ignoring the story because they associate it with colonial justifications for mineral control on their lands.
Another fascinating part of this book is the way Hearne’s account of the alleged massacre became part of discussions and disputes over the French Revolution and was received poorly by anti-Jacobins who saw texts like Hearne's as potentially promoting revolutionary violence which they associated with ‘savagery.’ Cameron mentions one interesting account by Hearne that echoes a sort of communist ethic among the Dene, both in their shared and united purpose and in their liberal sharing of resources:
“There was not among them the least altercation or separate opinion; all were united in the general cause, and as ready to follow where Matonabbee led, as he appeared ready to lead ... Never was reciprocity of interest more generally regarded among a number of people, than it was on the present occasion by my crew, for not one was a moment in want of anything that another could spare; and if ever the spirit of disinterested friendship expanded the heart of a Northern Indian, it was here exhibited in the most extensive meaning of the word. Property of every kind that could be of general use now ceased to be private, and every one who had any thing which came under that description, seemed proud of an opportunity of giving it, or lending it to those who had none, or were most in want of it… the war-like manner in which they were equipped so greatly superior to what could be expected of the poor Esquimaux, that no less than a total massacre of every one of them was likely to be the case, unless Providence should work a miracle for their deliverance.”
Cameron comments on this excerpt by Hearne in this way:
“This passage evokes the pull of the “violent mob, the many-headed beast” that scholars argue was a defining image of the late eighteenth century, as Britons worried about the possibility of a republican revolution at home. Hearne’s struggle to make sense of Matonabbee’s violence resonated with debates about whether the Jacobins were justified in their own violent, mob-like overthrow of the aristocracy. For the editors of the Critical Review, at least, to sympathize with Matonabbee was not just to sympathize with the savages of the Americas, it was to cast the violence of the French Revolution in a positive light and to accept savage behaviour in civilized Europe. Indeed, Anti-Jacobins were specifically concerned about the influence of texts such as Hearne’s on the public. As McCann writes, “they saw the public consumption of literary texts, political pamphlets, popular journals and philosophical tracts as the means by which a gullible and manipulable audience could be swayed from passivity to the violence and atavism of revolution.”
…The British were making sense not only of the “massacres [that] were taking place in France” and the threat that “violent republicanism” posed to the “mythic image of Britannia,” but also of their own “savagery” in the Americas throughout the Indian Wars, the American War of Independence, and the slave rebellions across the West Indies.33 Reports of violent repression, murder, and torture by British subjects had begun to undercut public support for colonial expansion, as had accounts of scalping, rape, cannibalism, and other “savage” acts carried out by Britain’s Indian allies in the American War of Independence.”
Cameron’s larger point is that Hearne’s narrative situates himself as a neutral observer to violent and uncivilized peoples in a way that locates violence outside of the British colonial project. However, Cameron draws on Fanon to remark how in contrast to Hearne’s framing or ‘ordering of violence’, imperialism is in reality the project that is undergirded by violence:
“Many scholars have observed that the foundations of imperial and colonial “order” are themselves grounded in tremendous violence, a point that Frantz Fanon made with respect to the imperial project more widely. He argued that empire has always been about denying the violence that underpins it, not just through the identification of non-European peoples and practices as inherently and extraordinarily violent, but also through the constitution and celebration of civilized man as somehow not implicated in the violence of imperial dispossession and rule. I want to highlight two implications that flow from Fanon’s insight. First, if ordering violence in the interests of empire requires a reframing of particular violent acts and ideas as not violent, then ordering violence is as much about constituting a non-violent, civilized observer as it is about naming violence as such. In other words, it is not only knowledge of Indigenous peoples that is produced in descriptions of Indigenous violence but also conceptualizations of the civilized observer. Second, given that ordering violence involves differentiating between particular acts and particular peoples, it requires ongoing work that should be identifiable and analyzable.”
Cameron’s epigraph to this chapter includes this quote by Fanon:
“Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world.” – Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
This violence is not only epistemic in its erasure of Indigenous knowledge about copper and other minerals, though this is an important dimension of the colonial violence that Inuit and Dene nations have had to resist. Cameron writes:
“Until very recently, however, explorers, missionaries, and scholars have persisted in the racialized belief that copper use was not centrally important to the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic and Subarctic, believing instead that their interest in metals emerged with the European introduction of iron. Recent research challenges this long-standing belief and suggests that throughout Arctic Canada metal was in use long before even indirect contact with Europeans. The Thule, who preceded Inuit in the region, are known to have relied on metals traded over hundreds and even thou- sands of kilometres, and members of the Franklin expedition made extensive notes about Dene copper-prospecting practices, including the detailed topographical and geological information used by the Dene to locate sources of the metal.5 Notably, according to John Richardson, who was responsible for the expedition’s “geognostical [geological]” findings, Dene had ceased, by 1821, to make their annual journey northward in search of copper. “The establishment of trading posts near their hunting grounds,” he suggested, had enabled them “to obtain a supply of ice-chisels and other instruments of iron,” and thus they no longer needed to make “weapons and utensils” with copper. Stories of the discovery of metals, particularly copper, have been recorded by Arctic explorers and missionaries for the last two centuries.”
But this violence also takes form in very material ways, both violence to Indigenous lands and Indigenous peoples:
“The settler colonial state is just as interested in extracting resources as any imperial power, but it must justify its occupation and dispossession to itself and deny the ongoing violence upon which it is built. Settler colonial states do not simply invade and extract; they are built on a structure of ongoing dispossession, and they naturalize that dispossession as a necessary transition from the Indigenous past to the settler present.”
And in a similar vein, when summarizing Chapter 3, Cameron states:
“Both Hearne’s journey and his account of the massacre played a formative role in opening the Central Arctic to mineral exploration and mine development, and if the story of the Bloody Falls massacre is approached as a copper story, its implication in past and present efforts to extract copper from northern lands becomes apparent.”
This environmental violence of extractive companies in the North continues today. I was at a recent protest at the Barrick Gold AGM, and organizers arranged for a video to play outside during the shareholder meeting.
A number of the testimonials were by Indigenous activists of Kuskokwim Delta Nations around the Yukon and Alaska opposing the Donlin gold mine, which would become the largest gold mine in the world, threatening salmon that rely on one of the largest and most vibrant river deltas on earth. These struggles are connected to many others around the world. One activist from Balochistan confronted Barrick’s CEO at the shareholder meeting about mining injustices in his country and was told by the CEO to “go back to Balochistan” — not wholly unexpected from a man who literally fought on the side of the apartheid regime and once said: "Africa lives a lie, it sometimes doesn't realise you have to get up in the morning and do a day's work. The days of blaming colonialism or apartheid are a thing of the past."
South of Barrick’s proposed Donlin gold mine, in BC was the Mount Polley mine, where a tailings dam collapse spilled billions of litres of toxic mining waste into freshwater salmon ecosystems, and continues to drain effluent into the water of First Nations communities. I had the opportunity while working for the Student Christian Movement to help organize this webinar with Kairos and Development & Peace on mining justices around the world. One of the speakers on the panel, Loretta Williams, a land defender of the Tsilhqot’in Nation talked about her Nation’s struggle against Taseko Mines and recounted the story of the dam collapse happening at the time Taseko was trying to develop their land which was not too far from the Mount Polley dam collapse. After the webinar, we held a prayer vigil for victims of mining outside the Fairmont when PDAC was hosting its awards ceremony to honour criminals who are destroying Indigenous lands and nations who rely upon those lands (PDAC is one of the world's largest mining conventions held in Toronto every year).
Earlier this year I had a chance to visit a small exhibition on Inuit knowledge in the context of the Franklin expedition at the Bradley Museum. I think public history has a lot of potential in spreading understandings of colonialism, which can be later leveraged to move others into action. Cameron’s book provides an important example of how Indigenous nations are resisting coercive mining development through challenging colonial public history that frames them as ‘violent savages’ when it is quite clear those racist slurs better describe the colonial powers that continue to plunder Indigenous lands and commit violence against Indigenous peoples and the earth.
At the center of this book is the so-called Bloody Falls Massacre, which largely exists by way of the testimony of a Hudson Bay Company employee named Samuel Hearne. HBC’s instructions to Hearne is used as an opening epigraph for this book and summarizes well the core themes that Cameron works through in this book:
“The Ind*ans who are now appointed your guides, are to conduct you ... to a river represented by the Indians to abound with copper ore, animals of the furr kind, &c ... The river, which is called by the Northern Indians Neetha-san-san-dazey, or the Far Off Metal River, you are, if possible, to trace to the mouth ... and observe what mines are near the river, what water there is at the river’s mouth, how far the woods are from the sea-side, the course of the river, the nature of the soil, and the productions of it ... If the said river is likely to be of any utility, take possession of it on behalf of the Hudson’s Bay Company.” — The Hudson’s Bay Company’s instructions to Samuel Hearne, 1769
Hearne had little to show for his expedition in terms of mineral resources and Cameron suggests he compensated by detailing a tale about his Dene guides participating in a violent attack against the Inuit along Copper River.
Historians drawing on both Inuit and Dene testimonial accounts highlight how Hearne (according to the Dene guides on the Franklin expedition) was not present at the alleged massacre. And a portion of this book is dedicated to pointing out gaping holes in Hearne’s account that place its veracity into serious question, despite long being accepted as historical truth in subsequent colonial records. The story continues to persist in colonial commemorations of the massacre that pervade media, public history installations during some periods of time, and even in botanical nomenclature.
One particularly interesting part of this book is Cameron’s story about how she came across the massacre story. She speaks of encountering “a reference to Senecio lugens, a species of ragweed named in honour of the massacre, while lazily flipping through a field guide to northern wildflowers (lugens means “to mourn” in Latin…)”
This immediately reminded me about something an Anishinaabeg botanical scientist and birder named Joseph Pitawanakwat said about how eponymous Latin bird names were just like the statues of slaveowners that were being torn down in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Many bird names commemorated slavers like Audubon. In the case of Senecio lugens though, it commemorated a colonial story about supposed Indigenous violence that continued to further colonial purposes long after its alleged occurrence. Cameron explains:
“They invented a series of “things” that worked to establish the massacre as a historical event, even while its primary witness quietly retreated from view. These things – particularly a species of ragweed identified at Bloody Falls and the skulls and bones that appear in the first visual depiction of the site – acted as material proof of what was hitherto merely a story…”
In Chapter 5, Cameron discusses:
“The proposed erection of federal and territorial heritage plaques to commemorate Samuel Hearne and the Bloody Falls massacre in the early 1970s, a scheme that Kugluktukmiut firmly rejected. In resisting the commemoration, Kugluktukmiut were not so much rejecting abstract claims to the story of the North, I argue, but rather rejecting the capacity for such claims to enable much more material interventions into their lives and lands. Their resistance was shaped by shifts in federal and territorial governance, northern Indigenous political movements, and the rise of industrial resource extraction in the North, as well as by relations with the land and with each other that exceed the reach and understanding of both past and present Qablunaaq [roughly translates to ‘settler’] observers.”
Cameron emphasizes that the story of the massacre if registered at all by either the Dene or the Inuit were considered peripheral at best. Cameron says:
“Many first heard the story at residential school and learned of their apparent hostility toward Dene not from their elders but from their textbooks. This is not to say that the hostility did not exist or is not storied; it did and it is, alongside stories of cooperation, mutual aid, intermarriage, trade, and sharing. But many Kugluktukmiut suspect that, because so few Inuit likely survived the massacre (if, indeed, it occurred), specific accounts of the event did not occupy a prominent place in oral histories. Other violent encounters did.”
But more so, Cameron claims both the Dene and Inuit both deliberately engage in practices of forgetting and ignoring the story because they associate it with colonial justifications for mineral control on their lands.
Another fascinating part of this book is the way Hearne’s account of the alleged massacre became part of discussions and disputes over the French Revolution and was received poorly by anti-Jacobins who saw texts like Hearne's as potentially promoting revolutionary violence which they associated with ‘savagery.’ Cameron mentions one interesting account by Hearne that echoes a sort of communist ethic among the Dene, both in their shared and united purpose and in their liberal sharing of resources:
“There was not among them the least altercation or separate opinion; all were united in the general cause, and as ready to follow where Matonabbee led, as he appeared ready to lead ... Never was reciprocity of interest more generally regarded among a number of people, than it was on the present occasion by my crew, for not one was a moment in want of anything that another could spare; and if ever the spirit of disinterested friendship expanded the heart of a Northern Indian, it was here exhibited in the most extensive meaning of the word. Property of every kind that could be of general use now ceased to be private, and every one who had any thing which came under that description, seemed proud of an opportunity of giving it, or lending it to those who had none, or were most in want of it… the war-like manner in which they were equipped so greatly superior to what could be expected of the poor Esquimaux, that no less than a total massacre of every one of them was likely to be the case, unless Providence should work a miracle for their deliverance.”
Cameron comments on this excerpt by Hearne in this way:
“This passage evokes the pull of the “violent mob, the many-headed beast” that scholars argue was a defining image of the late eighteenth century, as Britons worried about the possibility of a republican revolution at home. Hearne’s struggle to make sense of Matonabbee’s violence resonated with debates about whether the Jacobins were justified in their own violent, mob-like overthrow of the aristocracy. For the editors of the Critical Review, at least, to sympathize with Matonabbee was not just to sympathize with the savages of the Americas, it was to cast the violence of the French Revolution in a positive light and to accept savage behaviour in civilized Europe. Indeed, Anti-Jacobins were specifically concerned about the influence of texts such as Hearne’s on the public. As McCann writes, “they saw the public consumption of literary texts, political pamphlets, popular journals and philosophical tracts as the means by which a gullible and manipulable audience could be swayed from passivity to the violence and atavism of revolution.”
…The British were making sense not only of the “massacres [that] were taking place in France” and the threat that “violent republicanism” posed to the “mythic image of Britannia,” but also of their own “savagery” in the Americas throughout the Indian Wars, the American War of Independence, and the slave rebellions across the West Indies.33 Reports of violent repression, murder, and torture by British subjects had begun to undercut public support for colonial expansion, as had accounts of scalping, rape, cannibalism, and other “savage” acts carried out by Britain’s Indian allies in the American War of Independence.”
Cameron’s larger point is that Hearne’s narrative situates himself as a neutral observer to violent and uncivilized peoples in a way that locates violence outside of the British colonial project. However, Cameron draws on Fanon to remark how in contrast to Hearne’s framing or ‘ordering of violence’, imperialism is in reality the project that is undergirded by violence:
“Many scholars have observed that the foundations of imperial and colonial “order” are themselves grounded in tremendous violence, a point that Frantz Fanon made with respect to the imperial project more widely. He argued that empire has always been about denying the violence that underpins it, not just through the identification of non-European peoples and practices as inherently and extraordinarily violent, but also through the constitution and celebration of civilized man as somehow not implicated in the violence of imperial dispossession and rule. I want to highlight two implications that flow from Fanon’s insight. First, if ordering violence in the interests of empire requires a reframing of particular violent acts and ideas as not violent, then ordering violence is as much about constituting a non-violent, civilized observer as it is about naming violence as such. In other words, it is not only knowledge of Indigenous peoples that is produced in descriptions of Indigenous violence but also conceptualizations of the civilized observer. Second, given that ordering violence involves differentiating between particular acts and particular peoples, it requires ongoing work that should be identifiable and analyzable.”
Cameron’s epigraph to this chapter includes this quote by Fanon:
“Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world.” – Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth
This violence is not only epistemic in its erasure of Indigenous knowledge about copper and other minerals, though this is an important dimension of the colonial violence that Inuit and Dene nations have had to resist. Cameron writes:
“Until very recently, however, explorers, missionaries, and scholars have persisted in the racialized belief that copper use was not centrally important to the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic and Subarctic, believing instead that their interest in metals emerged with the European introduction of iron. Recent research challenges this long-standing belief and suggests that throughout Arctic Canada metal was in use long before even indirect contact with Europeans. The Thule, who preceded Inuit in the region, are known to have relied on metals traded over hundreds and even thou- sands of kilometres, and members of the Franklin expedition made extensive notes about Dene copper-prospecting practices, including the detailed topographical and geological information used by the Dene to locate sources of the metal.5 Notably, according to John Richardson, who was responsible for the expedition’s “geognostical [geological]” findings, Dene had ceased, by 1821, to make their annual journey northward in search of copper. “The establishment of trading posts near their hunting grounds,” he suggested, had enabled them “to obtain a supply of ice-chisels and other instruments of iron,” and thus they no longer needed to make “weapons and utensils” with copper. Stories of the discovery of metals, particularly copper, have been recorded by Arctic explorers and missionaries for the last two centuries.”
But this violence also takes form in very material ways, both violence to Indigenous lands and Indigenous peoples:
“The settler colonial state is just as interested in extracting resources as any imperial power, but it must justify its occupation and dispossession to itself and deny the ongoing violence upon which it is built. Settler colonial states do not simply invade and extract; they are built on a structure of ongoing dispossession, and they naturalize that dispossession as a necessary transition from the Indigenous past to the settler present.”
And in a similar vein, when summarizing Chapter 3, Cameron states:
“Both Hearne’s journey and his account of the massacre played a formative role in opening the Central Arctic to mineral exploration and mine development, and if the story of the Bloody Falls massacre is approached as a copper story, its implication in past and present efforts to extract copper from northern lands becomes apparent.”
This environmental violence of extractive companies in the North continues today. I was at a recent protest at the Barrick Gold AGM, and organizers arranged for a video to play outside during the shareholder meeting.
A number of the testimonials were by Indigenous activists of Kuskokwim Delta Nations around the Yukon and Alaska opposing the Donlin gold mine, which would become the largest gold mine in the world, threatening salmon that rely on one of the largest and most vibrant river deltas on earth. These struggles are connected to many others around the world. One activist from Balochistan confronted Barrick’s CEO at the shareholder meeting about mining injustices in his country and was told by the CEO to “go back to Balochistan” — not wholly unexpected from a man who literally fought on the side of the apartheid regime and once said: "Africa lives a lie, it sometimes doesn't realise you have to get up in the morning and do a day's work. The days of blaming colonialism or apartheid are a thing of the past."
South of Barrick’s proposed Donlin gold mine, in BC was the Mount Polley mine, where a tailings dam collapse spilled billions of litres of toxic mining waste into freshwater salmon ecosystems, and continues to drain effluent into the water of First Nations communities. I had the opportunity while working for the Student Christian Movement to help organize this webinar with Kairos and Development & Peace on mining justices around the world. One of the speakers on the panel, Loretta Williams, a land defender of the Tsilhqot’in Nation talked about her Nation’s struggle against Taseko Mines and recounted the story of the dam collapse happening at the time Taseko was trying to develop their land which was not too far from the Mount Polley dam collapse. After the webinar, we held a prayer vigil for victims of mining outside the Fairmont when PDAC was hosting its awards ceremony to honour criminals who are destroying Indigenous lands and nations who rely upon those lands (PDAC is one of the world's largest mining conventions held in Toronto every year).
Earlier this year I had a chance to visit a small exhibition on Inuit knowledge in the context of the Franklin expedition at the Bradley Museum. I think public history has a lot of potential in spreading understandings of colonialism, which can be later leveraged to move others into action. Cameron’s book provides an important example of how Indigenous nations are resisting coercive mining development through challenging colonial public history that frames them as ‘violent savages’ when it is quite clear those racist slurs better describe the colonial powers that continue to plunder Indigenous lands and commit violence against Indigenous peoples and the earth.
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