home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- <text id=91TT2889>
- <title>
- Dec. 30, 1991: World Notes:Canada
- </title>
- <history>
- TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991
- Dec. 30, 1991 The Search For Mary
- </history>
- <article>
- <source>Time Magazine</source>
- <hdr>
- WORLD, Page 31
- World Notes
- CANADA
- This Land Is Our Land
- </hdr><body>
- <p> They call themselves Inuit--"the people"--and they eke
- out simple lives in tiny communities scattered across the frozen
- tundra of the Northwest Territories. Last week, after 15 years
- of negotiations with Ottawa, an agreement was announced under
- which the Inuit will take political control of one-fifth of
- Canada's land area.
- </p>
- <p> The accord, the largest native land-claim settlement ever,
- will carve a new territory to be called Nunavut (Our Land) out
- of the 770,000 sq. mi. that makes up the eastern two-thirds of
- the Northwest Territories, where 17,500 Inuit live. The Inuit
- will gain mineral rights on 14,000 sq. mi. but will give up
- other subsurface claims in exchange for $1 billion.
- </p>
- <p> Louis Pilakapsi, head of the Tungavik Federation of
- Nunavut, predicted that the pact "will result in a better social
- and economic state for the Inuit people," But it must still
- pass muster in the federal Parliament and plebiscites in both
- the Northwest Territories and the future Nunavut. Dene Indians
- in the western third of the Territories charge that the
- settlement undermines their demand for total self-government and
- control of oil and mineral wealth in their region.
- </p>
-
- </body></article>
- </text>
-
-