Inuit acculturation, Japanese internment: Toshio Yatsushiro’s Cold War era fieldwork in the Canadian Arctic

Abstract

During the early Cold War, Canada’s Northern Co-ordination and Research Centre (NCRC) employed anthropologists and other ethnographers to make Inuit legible to northern administrators. The government sought information that would demonstrate how well Inuit were adapting to life in the newly established and permanent government-administered settlements. Research in Iqaluit, then known as Frobisher Bay, was assigned to Toshio Yatsushiro, a Japanese-American anthropologist who had previously participated in anthropological studies of interned Japanese and Japanese-Americans. Yatsushiro spent two summers (1958 and 1959) in Iqaluit with the goal of documenting the extent to which Inuit were adopting the cultural norms, values, and lifestyles of Euro-Canadians. Although Yatsushiro never completed his intended project, his published and unpublished writings identify specific ways in which Canada’s post-war administration of Inuit communities and its efforts to acculturate Inuit to southern Canadian ways of living were failing Inuit. Archival documents, interviews with NCRC anthropologists, and Yatsushiro’s published and unpublished writings reveal his disillusionment with the authoritarian practices of government officials in the North. His ethnographic observations and recommendations, coloured by his own experiences of internment, were dismissed by government officials as inaccurate and irrelevant.