1999

1999 is a hinge year in the novel’s account of human relations with land and sea. For the Inuit, it marks the creation of Nunavut after decades of campaigning for rights and compensation; in the wider environmental picture, it is also the year in which Haifa Chemicals dumped 60,000 tonnes of toxic sludge. The juxtaposition places political recognition beside the continuing damage of industrial activity, without suggesting that one development resolves the other.

A political turning point

The establishment of Nunavut in 1999 follows a history of displacement described by Leon Anawak’s uncle. During the Cold War, the Canadian government moved Inuit from their traditional territories to settlements farther north, partly to clear the way for military installations. Earlier upheavals had also driven people from the land: white trappers arrived with guns in the 1920s, animal populations were depleted, and epidemics of polio, tuberculosis, measles, and diphtheria accompanied the move into settlements. By the end of the 1950s, Inuit were dying from starvation and infectious disease while the government failed to provide adequate help.

Against that history, Nunavut represents a substantial change in political authority. Inuit now govern Inuit, and, as Anawak’s uncle explains, no one can simply force them to move. The milestone followed thirty years of struggle through the courts and public campaigning, in which both Anawak’s uncle and his father took part. Its significance is nevertheless qualified: political self-government could not restore the way of life that had been lost.

Recovery without restoration

The account distinguishes cultural revival from a return to the past. People are again using dog sleds, teaching young people to build igloos, and passing on how to start a fire with flint. These practices matter, but they cannot undo the disruption of a nomadic society or the loss of its former relation to territory. A community once organized primarily around family now lives within the structures of a modern civil state, where property and bounded territory have become part of everyday life.

Anawak’s uncle describes the consequences of that transformation as continuing rather than finished. Many Inuit are still dealing with profound trauma, and suicide remains a grave problem. At the same time, he sees younger people using the Internet to communicate across borders and tell others about Nunavut. His account refuses both easy triumph and permanent despair: the old life cannot be recovered, but the living should not be made to surrender their hopes to the dead.

The year in the pollution record

The novel sets this political milestone against a detailed account of pollution that crosses borders. In 1999 alone, Haifa Chemicals dumped 60,000 tonnes of toxic sludge. Currents carried pollutants including lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, and chlorine toward the coasts of Lebanon and Syria. Meanwhile, the fertiliser industry in the Gulf of Gabes continued to discharge 12,800 tonnes of phosphogypsum into the sea every day. These quantities give the year a second, sharply different significance: environmental harm is not confined to the place where waste is released.

The surrounding evidence describes a marine system already under broad pressure. Seventy of the world’s two hundred most commonly exploited fish species were endangered, even as the fishing industry expanded: the number of people earning a livelihood from fishing rose from thirteen million in 1970 to thirty million by 1997. Bottom-trawl nets swept up ecosystems as well as target species, depriving marine mammals, seabirds, and other predators of prey. The figures place 1999 within a worsening pattern of extraction and damage rather than presenting it as an isolated pollution incident.

Unequal exposure and ecological connection

The Arctic account shows how distant industrial activity can become intimate and intergenerational. DDT and highly toxic PCBs were carried by wind and currents from Asia, North America, and Europe into the Arctic Ocean. They accumulated in the fatty tissue of whales, seals, and walruses, animals eaten by both polar bears and people. Inuit women’s breast milk contained PCB levels twenty times the amount identified as harmful by the World Health Organization; Inuit children suffered neurological impairments, and potassium levels were falling.

This pattern gives the year’s contrast its force. Political authority had shifted toward the Inuit in Nunavut, yet the wider currents of pollution did not respect that boundary. The novel connects ecological interdependence to a question of unequal consequence: industrial societies spread contaminants across the planet, while communities whose food and lives remain closely tied to the land and sea bear severe costs. In that sense, 1999 records both a recovery of political agency and the persistence of harms that self-government alone cannot stop.