Dew Line Passage: Tracing The Legacies Of Arctic Militarization

Abstract

Grounded within the context of modern American militarization, this dissertation is a descriptive, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic study focusing on the impacts and legacies of the development, implementation, and decommissioning of the western sector of the Distant Early Warning radar line (DEW Line) in northern Alaska and Canada's western Arctic. Understanding the localized social and environmental impacts of global militarization is a critical task for anthropology and one that coincides in the North with the need to gather histories from Inuit perspectives. This study's purposes are to elucidate how the global phenomenon of modern militarization penetrates and brings about change in small communities and to determine whether local attitudes towards security, the environment, industrialization, and political participation can be traced to the policies of the Canadian and American governments during the construction, operation, and clean up of the line. Ethnohistorical research and pilot studies in communities adjacent to radar sites provided background for the project. Personal narratives of arctic residents and employees, combined with documentation of the radar stations and remnants, were collected during a multi-season voyage along the western sector of the DEW line in the Canada's western Arctic and Alaska.