Techniques of Citizenship: Health and Subjectivity in a New and Predominantly Inuit Territory

The lives and citizenship struggles of migrant workers, Indigenous peoples, immigrants, and others shape current thinking about citizenship, suggesting that it is an ongoing process of engagement. These struggles are often framed in citizenship terms because they are struggles for particular kinds of membership and participation within and beyond nation-states. They are, however, collective struggles for new space and suggest that treating citizenship simply as membership is inadequate. They demand, rather, recognition of both individual and collective subjectivities that emerge through efforts to shape and govern their own communities. This paper explores the relationship between the Inuit of the Central and Eastern Arctic and mechanisms of Canadian citizenship—those of national and territorial health institutions and discourse. In April 1999, the establishment of the new Canadian territory of Nunavut, with a population that is 85% Inuit, marked an important moment in both Inuit and Canadian histories. Through a qualitative exploration of the unfolding of health governance in this new territory, the paper examines how Nunavummiut (people of Nunavut) take up and challenge notions of health, governance, Canadian, Inuit, and Nunavummiut. It considers two discourses of health through which Nunavummiut, and others, employ “techniques of citizenship”, shaping both hybrid subjectivity and conceptions of health, giving rise to both constraint and resistance as Inuit Nunavummiut envision their engagement in health governance and in the collective Inuit struggle for self-determination.