The Canadian North was the focus of my working life for fifty years. In 1962 I was hired by the Department of Northern Affairs as a field assistant on a resource survey on the Western Arctic coast, and for several summers afterwards continued as assistant and then director. I also conducted my field research in the region for my doctoral degree in geography. This led to a job in the Department’s Northern Science Research Group in Ottawa. I left government in 1973 and moved back to the Western Arctic to work for Indigenous organizations on their land claims, and to coordinate their intervention in the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry (1974-77). There could have been no better beginning to my working life, and no better learning experience.
I then established a consulting practice on Indigenous land claims, environmental and social impact assessments, and renewable resource management. I advised on these issues for clients (mainly community and regional Indigenous organizations) across the North from Labrador to Alaska, especially in Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Quebec, and Labrador. For several years I was research director for Inuit Tapiriit Kanatamii (the national Inuit organization). Between 1997 and 2010 I was a member of two federal environmental assessment panels, one on a mining project in Labrador and the other on a pipeline project in the Northwest Territories. I also chaired the Wildlife Management Advisory Committee, a co-management body established under the Inuvialuit Final Agreement.
My decades in the North shaped me personally as well as professionally. I came to know and appreciate life in a very different part of Canada, and the social and environmental challenges confronting its people. I am indebted to those, especially in the Western Arctic, who became my teachers and my friends. My years in the North made me who I am and how I see the world.
I recently donated all of my research, writing, and correspondence from those years to the Northwest Territories Archives at the Prince of Wales Northern Heritage Centre in Yellowknife. These records, which include field diaries, correspondence, research reports, memos, interviews, photos, and supporting documentation, are now accessible to the public. The catalogue can be viewed online (Fonds 434 – Peter J. Usher fonds). The only exception is with respect to my work on the adverse impacts of mercury contamination and hydro-electric development on First Nations communities in northwestern Ontario, which I donated to the Archives of Ontario in Toronto.
My donation to the NWT Archives included 991 photographs which they digitized with captions. These can now be viewed on-line. Most were taken in the Western Arctic and the Mackenzie Valley in the 1960s and ‘70s.
I am so pleased that these records have a permanent home in the Northwest Territories, where I considered they rightly belong. It is especially gratifying to me to hear from people in the Western Arctic that I knew as children, who are finding photos of their elders and of the places they knew a long time ago, and to read their comments and memories. I am also very grateful to the staff at the Northwest Territories Archives for their professionalism and care in organizing, cataloguing, and digitizing these records.
