Northern Canada

Two-fifths of Canada's territory, about one per cent of a per cent of its people, and the only part where Indigenous peoples remained the majority throughout. Inuit occupation of the Arctic goes back to the Thule migration around a thousand years ago, and further with their Dorset predecessors; the Dene and Gwich'in hold the boreal interior. European contact was intermittent and driven by the search for the Northwest Passage, an obsession that consumed the Franklin expedition in 1845 and produced decades of searches that mapped the archipelago. The Klondike gold rush of 1898 brought forty thousand people to the Yukon in two years and created the territory, then emptied again. Real state presence came only in the twentieth century, with the Cold War: the Distant Early Warning radar line built across the Arctic in the 1950s, and a policy of settling nomadic Inuit into permanent communities, including relocations to the High Arctic undertaken partly to assert sovereignty. Residential schooling and the slaughter of sled dogs broke much of what remained. The response was political and it succeeded: the Inuit land claim negotiated from 1976 produced Nunavut in 1999, a territory covering a fifth of Canada with an Inuit majority and Inuktitut as an official language. Diamond mines opened in the Northwest Territories from 1998. Warming is opening the Northwest Passage and reviving sovereignty disputes. Food insecurity in Nunavut is the worst in any developed country. Yellowknife, Whitehorse and Iqaluit are the three territorial capitals. The Yukon holds the highest mountain in Canada. Franklin's ships were found in 2014 and 2016 using Inuit oral testimony. Much of the region sits on permafrost that is now thawing.

• Existed: 1000 CE – present
• Type: Entity