Trina Zeimbekis 

Ph.D. Candidate
19th and 20th Century Indigenous Arctic Worlds, Colonial Encounters, Canadian Political History

E-mail: 5tz1@queensu.ca
Phone: 613-533-2150
Fax: 613-533-6298

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Education

M.A., Memorial University, 2005
B.A., Memorial University, 2002

About

‘Rumours' began circulating villages in Nunavik, Quebec, about an alleged slaughter of Inuit sled dogs in the 1950s and 1960s by officers of the RCMP. Supervised by Dr. James Taylor Carson, my doctoral thesis, ‘Under the Guise of ‘Law': Inuit Representations of Culture, Place, and Power,' uses the dispute as a point of departure to examine Inuit history and changes in society and belief systems before, during, and after the onset of colonial rule. Since the opening decades of the twentieth century, Inuit families scattered along the Ungava Bay, Hudson Strait, and Hudson Bay had come under increasing supervision and surveillance by agents of the national government. It was not until after WW2, however, that what had been a passive presence became active surveillance and an attempt by agents such as the RCMP to bring this northern colony into the mainstream. One of the symbols of such effort was to regulate life in villages, including controlling packs of dogs. Building on the techniques of ethno- and native historians who study Native-European encounters of an early colonial period, I pursue numerous issues - Inuit social, economic, political structures and their physical relationships with the land; cross-cultural encounters; creolization; law; decolonization; individual, community, regional and national identities - based on a theme of tumultuous power relations.