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Dew lin ephotos 1950s12/26/2023 Viewers followed the Vice Regent as he flew over the north pole in a Royal Canadian Air Force aircraft, met Inuit and other Indigenous peoples, visited an iglu and rode on a qamutiik or dog sled. Documented at every stop by accompanying photographers (including Lunney), cameramen and reporters from several news agencies, the tour was a highly choreographed performance of settler colonialism and a series of gestures that enacted Canada’s claim to sovereignty over the Arctic in the midst of the Cold War. At the time, Lunney was on assignment following the Governor General’s ambitious 10,000 mile tour from northern Quebec to Aklavik in the Western Arctic. Gar Lunney, a southern Canadian staff photographer with the National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division (NFB), shot this negative. Indeed, the image I am describing of the three photographers is also the product of a photographic gaze that frames and seems to fix an encounter from a specific bodily and cultural perspective. Posed as members of a greeting committee, the three men appear readying to capture an image of this illustrious visitor even as they themselves are framed by a camera. The three men in the photograph were among those High Arctic exiles. Just months earlier, between 19, the Canadian government had laid claim to sovereignty over the High Arctic in part by populating Resolute, the site of a military and a weather base, with Inuit coerced to move far from their homes (Marcus 1995 Tester and Kulchyski 1994 Grant 2016). Resolute was the northern-most settled community Massey visited and one of the tour’s most politically significant stops. Massey was undertaking an historic tour of the North as a public gesture aimed to assert Canadian sovereignty in the Arctic. According to an accompanying and contemporaneous caption, the three photographers are awaiting the arrival of Governor General Vincent Massey, the representative of the Crown in Canada, at a place known as Resolute Bay on the southern shore of Cornwallis Island in the High Arctic during the month of March 1956. The subject of their concentrated attention, just beyond the frame of the photograph you and I are examining, holds a prominent place in the history of Canadian nationalism and the Cold War as well as Canada’s relationship to the British Crown (Parsons 2023). I identify two key decolonizing strategies: first, attention to the agency of the sitter in the photograph and, second, recent Inuit re-narrativizations and remediations of images. In the second part of the essay, I turn to recent decolonizing strategies for approaching the colonial photograph, again using Lunney’s photographs of the 1956 tour as a case study. In the first part of the essay, I closely read Lunney’s 1956 images and their histories, with particular attention to indications of the gaze. I argue that these images thematize visuality itself and, as such, expose the colonized North American Arctic of the 1950s as a field of racialized visuality. As a specific case study, I discuss a group of images made by photographer Gar Lunney under the auspices of the National Film Board of Canada’s Still Photography Division (NFB) during the historic 1956 Arctic tour conducted by then Canadian Governor General Vincent Massey. The veterans of this northern experience, whose narratives have been collected by the author, reveal all about their sentinel role in that tense time half a century ago when they dedicated their lives to helping to prevent nuclear war.This article examines the role of visuality in both the imposition of settler colonial authority and its contestation. There are, however, also tales of fun, practical jokes, camaraderie, and human kindness that boosted the morale of those stationed in the far north. The stories of the DEW Liners reveal real danger here – not from Soviet bombers but from close encounters with polar bears, job-related accidents, and airplane crashes, such as the one that claimed the author’s father. Survival was a daily preoccupation in a land where outdoor temperatures can dip to minus 50 degrees with winds exceeding one hundred miles an hour while blinding snowfall whiteouts make vision impossible. This book tells the stories of those DEW Liners who worked in the hostile, remote climate of the North. The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, as the mammoth radar fence was known, was spawned from American fear that Soviet bomber aircraft might penetrate the Canadian Arctic airspace and drop nuclear weapons on American cities and military bases. Yet in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, thousands of young men from various countries were recruited to build and operate a complex radar system across the Arctic Circle from Alaska to Greenland. The North Pole seems an unlikely theatre of war.
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