PERFORMING THE NATION AT THE FRONTIER: FILIPINO IMMIGRATION AND SETTLEMENT IN WHITEHORSE, YUKON by Kelsey Mae Johnson B.A., The University of Minnesota, 2011 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE AND POSTDOCTORAL STUDIES (Geography) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) August 2015 © Kelsey Mae Johnson, 2015 ii Abstract Over the past decade, Whitehorse, Yukon has emerged as a prominent site of settlement for Filipino newcomers to Canada. The phenomenon largely results from the implementation of new immigration policy in Yukon (starting in 2007) combined with regional economic growth, particularly in the mining sector. On the surface, immigration to Yukon - ostensibly ‘employer driven,’ with Filipino newcomers primarily finding employment in the service sector - bears resemblances to trends observed elsewhere in Canada. Yet the service sector Filipino workers who increasingly feature in the Yukon’s economy do so as permanent, not temporary, immigrants with the right to settle in Canada. This thesis explores the implications of this dynamic, situating it at the broader intersection of immigration and settler colonialism. I demonstrate how new narratives of northern settlement are enrolled in nation-building discourses of multiculturalism that circulate in and about Yukon. I stress how policy discourses support the essentialization of First Nations and Filipino histories. I also argue that state policies locate immigrants and local Indigenous peoples in competitive labor dynamics. In effect, Yukon’s immigration policy demonstrates how the governing of difference also involves processes of governing by difference – infusing performances of national belonging with powerful state imperatives. iii Preface This thesis, including the design, analysis, and presentation of research materials, is the original work of the author. It was approved by the University of British Columbia’s Behavioural Research Ethics Board, certificate number H14-01955. iv Table of Contents Abstract .......................................................................................................................................... ii  Preface ........................................................................................................................................... iii  Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... iv  List of Figures ............................................................................................................................... vi  List of Abbreviations .................................................................................................................. vii  Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... viii  Dedication ..................................................................................................................................... ix  Chapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................1  1.1   Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 1  1.2   Outline of the thesis ........................................................................................................... 6  1.3   Overlapping territories ....................................................................................................... 8  1.4   Methodological notes ....................................................................................................... 12  Chapter 2: Settling in...................................................................................................................19  2.1   Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 19  2.2   Frontier myths and masculinities ..................................................................................... 21  2.2.1   Frontier origins .......................................................................................................... 23  2.2.2   Frontier masculinities ................................................................................................ 25  2.3   Settling in ......................................................................................................................... 28  2.3.1   Mythical origins ........................................................................................................ 31  2.3.2   “Bringing the village” ............................................................................................... 34  2.4   Conclusion: progress and erasure .................................................................................... 41  v Chapter 3: Multiculturalism in print .........................................................................................45  3.1   Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 45  3.2   Newsprint media and the state ......................................................................................... 49  3.2.1   Colonial reporting ..................................................................................................... 52  3.3   Settler multiculturalism .................................................................................................... 53  3.4   Methodological considerations ........................................................................................ 57  3.5   Multiculturalism in print .................................................................................................. 60  3.5.1   Performances, logics, and futures ............................................................................. 67  3.6   Conclusion ....................................................................................................................... 71  Chapter 4: Mining Yukon’s imagined future ............................................................................73  4.1   Introduction ...................................................................................................................... 73  4.2   Indigenous citizenships .................................................................................................... 76  4.3   Scripting development ..................................................................................................... 81  4.4   ‘Developing citizenship’ .................................................................................................. 86  4.5   ‘Urbs nullius’ ................................................................................................................... 94  4.6   Conclusion: mining the imagined future .......................................................................... 99  Chapter 5: Conclusion ...............................................................................................................101  Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................105   vi List of Figures Figure 1 Mobile Trades Training Trailer.......................................................................................86 Figure 2 Brochure cover................................................................................................................88 vii List of Abbreviations Yukon Nominee Program (YNP) Provincial Nominee Program (PNP) Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) Live In Caregiver Program (LCP) Centre for Northern Innovation in Mining (CNIM) viii Acknowledgements Writing a thesis is an exercise in endurance best described by Samuel Beckett: I can’t go on, I’ll go on. I offer my sincerest thanks to the countless people who supported me throughout many twists and turns. Writing this thesis would not have been possible without the support of staff, faculty, and friends at the Department of Geography. Renisa Mawani’s thoughts on time and feedback on an earlier draft of chapter two opened this thesis to expanded analytic possibilities. My second reader, Juanita Sundberg, provided detailed comments and editing—and encouraging emails—that guided this thesis through the final stages. Above all, my thanks to my supervisor Gerry Pratt. Her unwavering interest and enthusiasm for my ideas gave me the confidence to pursue new and unexpected areas of inquiry. Gerry’s support also enabled a second trip to Whitehorse in September—thanks again, Gerry, for covering my TA duties. I am completing my Masters’ program with renewed excitement for research and writing, and am looking forward to beginning my PhD this fall. Hazel Venzon gave me with a deluxe place to stay in Whitehorse, and many hours of fruitful conversation. I am indebted as well to my interview subjects for granting me their time and the stories that irreversibly shaped the nature of this thesis. Liz and Dave provided me with food and friendship on my way home from campus every Monday night. Kate, Liz, Marlee, Molly, and Ace have made me at home in Vancouver. Alyssa spent nearly ever Saturday with me working and talking at a variety of locales along Commercial Drive. Paige always knew what I needed to hear. Emily allowed me to take over the apartment and spread my work over every possible surface. Alix talked with me about my masters’ so much she could be on my committee, and was always at my side even from Iceland. This thesis has been undeniably shaped by a conversation about ambition in a red canoe on Tadoule Lake. Thank you, Susan, for these many years of adventures and friendship. Max provided incredibly thoughtful (if at times painfully rigorous) editing and critique that has helped me turn my ambitions into a manuscript. Thank you for a beautiful summer of writing and paddling in Dodge Cove. To my family—Doug, Georgia, Hannah, and Spencer—I would be lost without your guidance. ix Dedication For my friends and family.1 Chapter 1: Introduction 1.1 Introduction One bright Sunday morning in August of 2014, I walked into a Catholic Mass in downtown Whitehorse, Yukon. I was there on the recommendation of Nicole, a Filipino community leader I had conducted an interview with a few days before. I was in Whitehorse to study a recent wave of Filipino immigration and settlement to the territory, and the immigration policy that had facilitated this development, the Yukon Nominee Program (YNP).1 The YNP is a common path to permanent settlement for Filipino immigrants to the territory; the majority of whom, Nicole explained, are Filipinos employed in Whitehorse’s expanding service sector. To really appreciate the extent of the Filipino population in Whitehorse, she suggested that I visit a main gathering place of Filipino workers and the families: Sacred Heart Cathedral. Despite her forewarning, I was shocked by the number of Filipino families crammed into the church pews – the clear majority of the congregation present. As the priest performed the liturgy, I couldn’t help but reflect on its applicability to the present audience. He asked for the good fortune of the worker—that all who need it may find work, such that they may live. Ÿ 1 The Yukon government developed the YNP in 2007 to address labour shortages, specifically in the territory’s food service, retail, and tourism sectors. The YNP is administered by the Yukon Government in partnership with Citizenship and Immigration Canada under the “Agreement for Canada-Yukon Cooperation on Immigration.” Over half of successful program applicants are from the Philippines (Alarcon 2013b). 2 Tim Hortons. McDonalds. Canadian Tire. The social geography of the YNP reads like the glowing strip mall one finds on the fringes of so many Canadian cities. As Nicole reiterated, the “majority [of workers] are Filipinos if you go to these places” (Nicole 2014).2 Since the implementation of the YNP in 2007, the Filipino population has grown exponentially. Prior to 2006, approximately 300 Filipinos lived and worked in Yukon (Patrick 2014).3 At present, approximately 2500 Filipinos live and work in Yukon.4 This figure reflects primary applicants, relatives who have immigrated through family sponsorship, and Filipinos who have moved from other parts of Canada. Filipinos now account for roughly 10% of the city’s population and 5% of the territory overall (Philippine Embassy Ottawa 2013).5 The fact of a sizable Filipino population attending church in downtown Whitehorse should not be surprising. Nor should the idea that the primary employment for Filipinos in Yukon is the service sector. In the broader Canadian context, the presence of Filipinos behind the counters of classic fast food and service establishments has become ubiquitous. Between 2005 and 2010, Filipino temporary foreign workers accounted for over half of the Tim Hortons 2 In a 2010 survey of businesses using the nominee program, the service sector was the largest employer of nominee applicants (Yukon Department of Education 2010). A labour market study released in 2014 listed the benefits of foreign labour were listed as follows: Locals stay at job until they find a better paying job, while foreign workers stay for at least 2 years; Foreign workers tend to be more flexible about the hours they can work while locals were less accommodating; Foreign workers want to come to Yukon because it is easier to get their permanent residency in the territory; Foreign workers will either stay at the jobs they received in Yukon or find jobs in their original profession; Workers in the Yukon Nominee Program can work two jobs, however they can then leave their present employer and go work for someone else; Philippines was the number one choice for finding foreign workers as they have a strong local support system in Yukon, and most Pilipino are now Permanent Residents (Miller Dickinson Blaise 2014). 3 Exact statistics of Filipinos residing in the territory prior to the YNP are non-existent. 4 Exact statistics of Filipino residents in Yukon are non-existent. All of my interviews estimated that the population is at or around 2,500 Filipinos. 5 There are a small number of persons residing in other communities i.e. Dawson, Haine’s Junction, etc. 3 workforce in British Columbia and Alberta, for instance (Polanco-Sorto 2013). By and large, Filipino service sector workers enter Canada through the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) and are largely excluded from permanent legal purchase in Canada.6 Many of Filipino service sector workers will be unable to enter the permanent migration stream, and will be forced to leave.7 In 2011, the Harper government instituted policy modifications that placed a four-year restriction on any individual TFW’s contract to work in Canada. This legislation came into effect in April of 2015. Estimates indicate that 70,000 “whose contracts are expiring will either voluntarily leave Canada, be given deportation orders, or will continue living here without legal documents” (Tungohan 2015). Given their disproportionate representation in temporary foreign worker program, Filipino workers and families will be unduly impacted by contract restrictions and deportation orders. In contrast to national trends, the service sector Filipino workers who increasingly feature in Yukon’s economy do so as permanent immigrants with the right to settle in Canada. This tells us something important about the YNP program: it is premised on the inclusion and eventual incorporation of Filipino workers as citizens. Less than a year before my arrival into Yukon, Canadian Minister of Multiculturalism Jason Kenney expressed his enthusiasm for Filipino workers and families during a visit Whitehorse. Looking to capture the significance of immigration to this part of Canada, he proclaimed: 6 In December of 2014, a mere three months after my morning in church, Minister of Multiculturalism Jason Kenney also implemented a series of modifications to a subsidiary program of the TFWP, the Live In Caregiver Program (LCP). The changes were made on the basis that the program was “out of control” and had “mutated” to become a means of backdoor family reunification nation wide (Keung 2014). 4 …it’s been said often that northwest Canada is the newest part of the New World, and if that’s true, it’s most true of Yukon. This is a place with a limitless future, and it’s so exciting to see just the little signs of that in my brief time here already. Getting off the airplane yesterday, I heard, for me, the familiar sounds of Tagalog with new members of the Filipino community joining you to make Yukon their new home. And I can see the growing diversity here as newcomers arrive… this is the sound of diversity and growth, of energy that we are seeing and feeling all around us in these amazing days in this territory (Kenney 2014a). Here, Kenney welcomes Filipino families as future citizens and contributing community members of Yukon. Tagalog suddenly becomes a ‘familiar’ sound of “diversity and growth.” The permanent settlement of Filipino families is imagined not as threat to Canadian order but rather as an optimistic sign of national modernity. Their presence shapes and contributes to the ‘limitless future.’ This thesis is situated within the changing axes of Filipino inclusion as they run from the Canadian South to the North. Yukon’s immigration program presents a curious paradox at work in federal policy trends. In Whitehorse, the population that is claimed by the nation through access to permanent residency is precisely the same population who are discursively constructed as a threat in the Canadian ‘South.’ On the one hand, the territorial government’s effort to retain new immigrants through family sponsorship speaks to the challenges of building a permanent 5 workforce in the Canadian North.8 On the other, the overt rhetoric of ‘welcoming’ and celebrations of diversity that have accompanied the arrival of Filipino immigrants alerts us to a much wider phenomena: the extension and negotiation of Canadian multicultural identity into a comparatively new geographical arena. Yukon has not been a significant site of permanent non-European immigration until very recently; consequently, contemporary patterns of Filipino settlement reflect a shift in what has been predominantly characterized by indigenous and (European) settler relationships. Narratives of Filipino arrival may also serve to integrate the North into a national conversation that its demographics have previously excluded. Nations, Edward Said (1994) observes, “themselves are narrations” (xiii). In this thesis, I argue that the emerging circulation of immigration narratives have important implications for theorizing some of the practices and exertions of colonial power in contemporary Yukon. The stories that follow invite us to consider immigration policy and multiculturalism as part of a larger social project of development and modernity. In the land of the Klondike Gold Rush, ‘development’ is often synonymous with mineral extraction. Between 2003 and 2013, for example, an unprecedented boom of mineral investment and exploration lead optimistic observers to conclude that the territory was in the midst of the “Second Gold Rush” (Pasloski 2013). The ‘rush’ of Filipino immigration that has occurred in the same time period as mining’s ‘boom’ is not a causal relationship. However, the concurrent development of new narratives of settlement in a context that repeats past tropes of Yukon’s foundational events warrants further attention. As the “newest part of the new world” Yukon’s colonial past is still very much in the present, even as development discourses gaze towards the future. 8 Provincial Nominee Programs (PNP) are often used in rural areas. 6 Accordingly, the following is a study of Filipino immigration, but it is also an analysis of the promises and practices of development and national modernity. The nation-state arranges “the social body in its own visions of a selectively imagined past, present, and future” (Mawani 2014, 72). Narratives of Filipino settlement act as entry points to trace how the friction between a colonial past and uncertain future generates relationships of difference in the present. This thesis is guided by the following questions: 1) What does it mean to story the Yukon as a space of arrival? What does the circulation of immigration narratives tell us of the contemporary relations of colonial power? 2) How do state sponsored discourses position Yukon’s new Filipino residents in relation to indigenous histories and experiences? What does the entanglement of indigenous, immigrant, and settler technologies of order tell us of the larger project of the governing of cultural difference? 3) What are the attendant consequences for the lived experiences and practices of labour and citizenship in a liberal multicultural Yukon? 1.2 Outline of the thesis I approach these questions through three distinct chapters. Chapters one and two examine moments in the conjunction of arrival with erasure. My goal in the first chapter is twofold: firstly, I lay out my conceptualization of Yukon as an imagined frontier space. I review the 7 notion of the frontier as both a theoretical space and a historical artifact; what Anna Tsing (2005) refers to as an ‘imaginative project.’ Secondly, I document a particular lineage of Filipino arrival and settlement in Yukon that centers on the role of Filipina women. My analysis centers on moments when stories of Filipino settlement collide with and confuse the mythology of the Northern frontier. Paying particular attention to the changing orders of race and gender, I set my account of Filipino arrival both within and against the hegemonic frame of masculinist frontier myths. I draw attention to casual means through which frontier language articulates with emerging stories of northern settlement. In these moments, Filipino arrivants are situated as the logical successors of previous white settler-citizens, further effacing indigenous histories. At the same time, however, the new position of migrant women of color within the frontier myth “unmaps” hegemonic tropes of the frontier and poises a potential challenge to processes of erasure. Chapter two examines erasure in a different empirical context: local newsprint reports, stories, and editorials of Filipino immigration. These sources provide a rich example of the emergence of liberal multiculturalism in Yukon, and the discourses of ‘welcoming’ it has generated. Through my review and reading of these texts, I draw attention to the persistent separation of indigenous and immigrant issues within public negotiations of immigration policy, and the absolute absence of First Nations perspectives from these deliberations. Although the dearth of First Nations voices in public media is not unusual, it is the common sense nature of this divide that warrants our attention. I argue that local news coverage is itself a site of state-managed discourses and contemporary colonial practices. My objective is to demonstrate how the performances and negotiations of immigrant inclusion presented in newspaper discourses 8 renew the mundane but fundamental frameworks of settler sovereignty. I center processes of erasure in these chapters in order to visualize how the integration of Filipino arrivants into state sponsored projects that re-imagine both past and future are connected to production of indigenous identity as a ‘past’ identity. In chapter three, I take a step back to observe the broader context of modernization and development in Yukon. While the first chapter focuses on the extension of Gold Rush mythology from the past, this chapter is situated in the Gold Rush of the present. In it, I examine the ‘development consensus’ of mineral extraction in Yukon, and it’s implication for immigrant and indigenous forms of citizenship. I focus on how promises of future prosperity are situated within a larger project of multiculturalism, and how citizenship practices are built in the present through the hegemonic projection of one possible future. I ground my inquiry in a comparative analysis of two brief case studies: 1) local state efforts that anticipate the placement of First Nations labour in mining and 2) the displacement of First Nations workers from the service sector in Whitehorse. Placing these seemingly discrepant spaces into the same frame allows us to understand how differentiated meanings of mobility and fixity relate to citizenship. These development discourses reveal spatial logics that direct the placement and movements of distinct bodies of citizens. 1.3 Overlapping territories While each of the chapters is situated within slightly different bodies of literature, they are all analytically oriented towards settler colonialism. A wide range of recent studies of settler 9 colonialism has emphasized its operation as a continuous and contemporary process.9 In particular, I follow Jodi Byrd’s (2011, 2014) call to re-frame analyses of settler colonialism and imperialism through a wider lens that includes questions typically deemed outside of the purview of settler colonial studies. Through this framework, we can center what Byrd refers to as ‘colonizing liberalisms’: discourses of freedom and cultural pluralism that were forged through the dispossession of indigenous peoples and which form the basis of national identity. Liberal ideas of progress, freedom, inclusion and national modernity are central to the ongoing social projects of the settler colonial state. Interrogating these tenants of Canadian liberalism and national identity, and their impact on relations of difference, is a central objective of this thesis. One way we can understand how the ‘colonizing liberalisms’ of settler colonialism connect Filipino and First Nations histories in Yukon is by concentrating on the seemingly empty space between them. Edward Said (1994) is useful here.10 In Culture and Imperialism, Said comprehends cultural identities in terms of “overlapping territories” and “intertwined histories.” This injunction requires us to hold together what he terms ‘discrepant experiences’: social experiences that appear discrete but which are actually in relation. “In juxtaposing experiences with each other, in letting them play off each other,” Said writes, “[we can] make concurrent those views and experiences that are ideologically closed to each other” (ibid, 33). This form of analysis—what Said refers to as a ‘contrapuntal reading’—“brings complex, diverse, and even antithetical issues and questions together in a moment of examination and interpretation” 9 This literature is broad and varied, and spans across settler colonial studies and indigenous studies. For an examination and critique of the institutionalization of settler colonial studies, see Snelgrove et al (2014). 10 In my use of Said, I am particularly indebted to Renisa Mawani’s (2009) discussion on theorizing indigenous/non-European immigrant encounters with Said. 10 (Morgan 2012, 1). A staunch critic of essentialism, Said understands cultural identities as ‘contrapuntal ensembles’ that ferment in “an array of opposites, negatives, oppositions” (ibid, 52). Social categories never stand on their own but are always written against, across, and in relation to others. From a starting point of “overlapping territories” we can begin to imagine the imbrication of categories of differences (i.e. ‘First Nations’ and ‘Filipinos’) that collapse, collide, and shift over and under each other in Yukon. The production of these categories is a seismic activity that reverberates across Canadian liberalism and settler colonialism. “As the liberal state and its supporters and critics struggle over the meaning of pluralism, habitation, inclusion, and enfranchisement, indigenous peoples and nations…are continually deferred into a past that never happened and a future that will never come” (Byrd 2011, 211). Like Byrd, Said displays a particular concern for a past that is never fully past and that continually shapes the present and the future. By centering “intertwined histories”, Said draws our attention to moments and spaces of cultural contact. His understanding of encounter, however, reaches far beyond a physical meeting or exchange. Read together, Said and Byrd both urge us to expand the meaning of cultural contact to include the incoherent and powerful play of ideas, practices, discourses, and imaginaries that span across both space and time to form identities. Framing our analysis in this way highlights experiences that have been marginalized from other accounts of colonial engagement. As Renisa Mawani (2009) notes, histories of indigenous and non-European immigrant encounters of colonial contact—and the state anxieties these relationships generated—have by and large been marginalized within postcolonial studies. By 11 contrast, Mawani demonstrates that Chinese and indigenous encounters were an important site of colonial governance in 19th century British Columbia. The arrival of the Chinese “created additional sources of anxiety concerning settler futures and their longevity, thus pushing colonial authorities to reconfigure and recalibrate their conceptions of racial superiority and inferiority in ways that continue to have contemporary resonance” (ibid, 204). While the production of racial knowledges aimed at maintaining distinctions between groups were central to the colonial project, Mawani also shows that encounters took place in shifting and uneven terrains such that they both settled and unsettled colonial power. Like Byrd, Mawani de-centers the white settler-citizen in analyses of colonial governance. In recent years, a substantial body of literature has emerged which theorizes the relation between immigration and the settler colonial state (Lawrence and Dua 2005; Sharma and Wright 2008; Saranillio 2014; see also Fujikane and Okamura 2008). If settler colonialism is conceived of as a contemporary process of dispossession, these studies ask, how then do we conceive of immigration histories? While scholars unequivocally accept European migration as akin to settlement, the role of non-European immigration in the settler colonial project is contentious. In particular, Lawrence and Dua (2005) assert that membership within the state —regardless of the differential conditions of inclusion in that category—is tantamount to participation in settler colonialism. This claim illuminates the ways in which immigration law can consolidate colonial objectives through the monopoly of power that the state possesses over national demographics. At the same time, it carries an important analytic risk: by placing all immigrants seeking citizenship in Canada into a singular category, i.e. as citizen qua settler, Lawrence and Dua threaten to collapse the heterogeneous and uneven histories that constitute different immigration 12 flows across space. This forecloses an important politics at stake in immigration dynamics – namely, how the state distributes certain bodies within particular places to advance colonial imperatives. While it is beyond the scope of this inquiry to treat these debates in full, that these conversations center largely on whether or not non-European immigrants are themselves settlers inadvertently adheres to state logics that seek to make some immigrants into settlers through inclusion and citizenship, but not others. I use Byrd’s term arrivant to signal non-European immigrants as distinct from settlers but by no means innocent. The “colonization of indigenous lands and peoples by the United States functions not so much as a binary between settlers and natives but through a series of recognitions and misrecognitions that coerce settlers, arrivants, and natives into service as proxies, agents, and at times beneficiaries, however undesired and unwanted, of the processes that have stripped land, lives, and nations away from the indigenous peoples” (Byrd 2014, 175). The story I tell of the Yukon is of course limited. I focus on moments and sites where the contemporary practices of colonial governance can be visualized in immigration narratives and state discourses. If difference is governed through the chasms of liberal multiculturalism, I seek to trace how state discourses foster and promote these divisions. Doing so will, I hope, illuminate some of the mechanics through which Yukon’s colonial past is re-imagined, instead, as a project of it’s future. 1.4 Methodological notes The chapters to come derive their empirical content from three sources of data: situated qualitative research and interviews conducted between August and September of 2014 in 13 Whitehorse, Yukon; government and policy documents; and local and national media coverage of Filipino settlement in Yukon. My use of other materials was initially a strategic response to the challenges of writing about the North from my physical location in the south. I soon realized, however, that the combination of local and national government and media sources was necessary to the overarching project. Using these sources together has allowed me to move beyond representations of Yukon as pristine and isolated in order to draw the particularities of place into national (if not global) conversations of national belonging and colonial erasure.11 Semi-structured interviews were the primary mechanism through which this project proceeded. In total, I conducted nine 30-90 minute interviews in person in Whitehorse. Given that one of my research goals was to situate Filipino immigration in a wider context of development and modernization, I reached out to three different groups for interviews: Filipino community members, government officials and settlement services, and representatives of the mining industry. Through my initial contact with the Canadian Filipino Association of Yukon, I was able to conduct four interviews with Filipino community members. Three of these interviews were with long-term Yukon residents and one was with a recent (less than 5 years) nominee. From these interviews, I learned the broader story of Filipino immigration to Yukon and how the community has changed since the introduction to the YNP. However, while these conversations were invaluable to the research process, they also reveal one of its limitations. I found great difficulty, for instance, making contacts with more recent members of the community. I learned quickly that most recent Filipino immigrants are employed at two or three jobs simultaneously, and that free time to give to a stranger is quite scarce. I focused my efforts 11 For discussion of ‘out of the way’ places see Tsing (1993, 1994). 14 instead on documenting the broader story of the community and the nominee program instead of individual experiences of immigration. In addition, I have also benefitted from Gerry Pratt and Caleb Johnston’s research visit to Whitehorse in January of 2015. I draw on three of their interview transcripts with Filipino residents. I note when an interview quote used is not my own, and credit them in the bibliography. I also conducted two interviews related to government and policy and three interviews with local representatives and consultants for Yukon’s mining industry. Conducting research in a small town poses a particular challenge to anonymity. As the Filipinos residents interviewed are considered the general public, they are identified by pseudonyms in this thesis. However, while I have tried to remove any identifying information, the broader community often knows of individual histories. Many of those interviewed here have also been interviewed by local media and identified by name in those accounts. For similar reasons, I also do not use names when quoting industry or government representatives. While these interviews offered rich and informative conversations and transcripts, the wide scope of subjects interviewed limited the depth of information gathered. To that end, I turned towards a detailed analysis of secondary sources. I examined government discourses, including public speeches by ministers, official government statements, policy reports, labour market surveys, and government websites. I also performed an extensive analysis of local news 15 media coverage of immigration issues.12 These sources allowed me to access important statistics (i.e. number of worker permits currently available, estimations of future economic growth and labour market needs). However, they also offer moments to visualize and analyse how the state produces selective imaginings of past, present, and future. I looked for moments where local territorial documents diverged from national policy discourses (i.e. the welcoming of Filipino immigrants) as well as moments in which localized ideas of development accord to national visions. Instead of two categorically separate sources of ‘data’, I rather began to see my interviews as my guides through these secondary sources. They pointed me towards moments when interviews confirmed the optimistic expectations expressed in policy reports but they also clued me into how state discourses build upon the real optimisms of liberal multiculturalism (Povinelli 2002) as they systematically obscure the social practices and possibilities of other imagined futures. While the goal of this approach was to include perspectives and issues typically excluded from Canadian immigration studies (i.e. First Nations histories), the materials collected and represented in these pages necessarily generated a series of selections and exclusions that warrant recognition. Firstly, in emphasizing the broader context in which immigration discourses have been generated, this thesis moves away from the lived experiences of immigration of Filipino interview subjects and community members. My analytic focus on permanent immigration, family reunification, and multicultural inclusion comes at the expense of other stories and experiences. For instance, although Filipino immigrants enter Yukon in the 12 In Chapter Three, I argue that local news coverage of Filipino immigration is itself a site of state-managed discourses and colonial practices. I detail my process of analyzing this source of data in further depth there. 16 ‘permanent stream’ of immigration policy, they effectively remain temporary workers who are tied to a specific employer and subject to possible deportation while their residency applications are being processed. The promise of eventual permanent residency does not entirely ameliorate experiences of precarity.13 This dynamic is further complicated by the role of family relationships that shape immigration, and the insular and somewhat isolated nature of the community. The Philippines itself also lay in the background of this thesis. My interviews centered on Whitehorse and Yukon; I asked few questions as to why people left the Philippines or their experiences of living transnational lives between here and there. Both of these issues warrant closer attention beyond the scope of this project and would be fertile grounds for future research. Secondly, I wish to acknowledge the lack of First Nations voices, perspectives, and interviews included. The critical reader will not miss the irony that a text premised on elucidating erasure also participates in this process through methodological absence. Put otherwise, by centering the space between First Nations and Filipino histories in Yukon, I have risked marginalizing First Nations experiences of contemporary settler colonialism (see Snelgrove et al 2014). In part, this absence is a reflection of the erasure of First Nations perspectives in state discourses of multiculturalism and development that I have tried to document. It also speaks to the processes of learning that took place during the course of research. The oppositional positioning between First Nations and Filipinos that I elaborate on emerged as a central story only during the research, and not during the process of planning. As a result, I did not seek out 13 For an analysis of precarity and the TFWP, see Goldring and Landolt (2013); Polanco Sorto (2013, 2014); see also Pratt (2012) on the Live In Caregiver Program. 17 interviews with First Nations community members or representatives in Whitehorse. As respectful research conducted with First Nations peoples in particular is dependent on an active and durative process of community consent (Chilisa 2012), I decided that it would more beneficial to work through the limitations of my existing framework than to hurriedly conduct further research. Moreover, as a white woman from the United States studying the overlaps of Filipino immigration and colonialism in the Canadian North, the many questions and issues of representation were never far from my mind. At many points I doubted the premise of the project and my ability to represent social relationships that are not my own. I likewise fretted about adopting a critical tone towards policy and industry oriented interviews when participants had granted me so much of their time. While the many anxieties that underpin the decisions I made as to how to represent interview subjects are fairly absent from the body of the text, they were crucial to the eventual conceptualization of the political goals of the project. As the research progressed, I realized that one of my sources of discomfort was that, as my research demonstrated, there is little critical discourse publicly circulating in Whitehorse concerning immigration issues. Although numerous cultural organizations (i.e. the Canadian-Filipino Association of Yukon) promote the interests and activities of different immigrant groups, to my knowledge there is no local organization or association that has articulated a pronounced critique of state policy.14 Whitehorse is remote in that regard, and not directly linked to broader struggles for immigrant rights elsewhere in Canada. 14 An exception lies in a series of articles in the Yukon News written by Krystle Alarcon. See Alarcon 2013c for an example. 18 Similarly, while organizations in Vancouver (such as No One is Illegal) and at UBC (Filipino studies) have made significant progress in connecting immigrant and indigenous struggles for social justice, I found no evidence of this form of activism in Whitehorse. I think this is due to the fact that the relationships discussed in this text are so newly emergent. Whitehorse strikes me, in a sense, as a very raw social experiment. In the absence of already existing critical discourses or organizations to partner with, I found few cues or guidelines to follow. As a result, I decided that a critical analysis of state discourses was a worthwhile contribution to the opening of other areas of discussion or conversation in Whitehorse. I hope to reveal in these pages the richness of the nation’s margins in order to outline some of the terms for future research and understanding of the contemporary practices of colonial experience. 19 Chapter 2: Settling in 2.1 Introduction The documentary film Cold Paradise opens with a shot of Yukon’s infamous winter landscape. The sun sits low in the sky and snow blows over the Yukon River. After a few moments, a voice begins to describe the scene: “Famous for its cold climate and the Klondike Gold Rush at the turn of the century, Yukon, Canada has been experiencing an employment rush as new Filipinos discover opportunities for work…” Abruptly, the film switches to a shot of a Filipina woman answering a phone at a local hotel. And then another scene: a generic image of a tropical beach. The narrator continues: “…exchanging tropical beaches for a hot economy and a chance for their families to join them.” Finally, the viewer observes a Filipina woman maneuvering a dogsled, her red winter anorak nearly trailing at her feet. As the film returns to the opening winter landscape, the narrator asks, “What sacrifices would you make for your family?” Made in 2013 by Whitehorse resident Werner Walcher, Cold Paradise is intended to educate local citizens to the difficulties faced by Filipino newcomers to Canada. A German-born immigrant himself, Walcher was curious about new Whitehorse residents he began noticing when the nominee program began in 2007, and wanted to do something to promote community integration (Ronson 2013). In Whitehorse, and its surrounding environs, frontier imagery is ubiquitous. Most prominent are the numerous public displays of the history of the Klondike Gold Rush. Plaques alongside the Yukon River tell the tale of bold travelers who faced the river’s formidable rapids on their way to the rush. Tourist pamphlets offer Gold Rush themed 20 adventures, restaurants feature cliché slogans, bookstores feature displays of Klondike histories, and the MacBride Museum offers a comprehensive display of the mining industry’s earliest formations. Walcher’s use of contrasting imagery reinforces frontier mythology by throwing into stark relief the boldness of the journey north from the temperate climate of the south. In Walcher’s film, we see the faint rewriting of frontier narratives that are perhaps still fueled by the myth’s internal logics. Yet, the very real presence of Filipino immigrants in Whitehorse disrupts popular representations of Yukon’s history that have long held sway in the public imaginary. This chapter treads the fault line between continuity and disruption. Here, I ask, how does the universalizing force of frontier mythology—a corner stone of Canadian nationalism and films like Walcher’s—grapple with new stories of Yukon’s settlement and the demographic changes wrought by capitalism’s need for labour? What happens to frontier narratives when they are put in conversation with bodies, peoples, places, and collective experiences that they were never meant to narrate? The central argument of this chapter is that frontier fantasies are political technologies that order race and gender, and these orderings come to be engraved in the stories of the Filipino workers who increasingly feature in Yukon’s cultural landscape. In the present context, these constituent features of the frontier are inscribed with powerful anxieties about place and belonging. In making this case, I play deliberately on the varying meanings of the verb “to settle.”15 I am interested in the ways in which frontier mythologies seek to settle the disruptive potential of the Filipino workers and families as they 15 For a review of the multiple meanings of the verb “to settle” as they relate to settler colonialism, see Snelgrove et al (2014). 21 newly inhabit frontier spaces. I seek as well to understand how the hard work of “settling in” to a foreign environment is set both within and against the hegemonic facade of frontier narratives. In Whitehorse, these questions of frontier mythology occupy spaces variously intimate and highly public. They are nestled in the family relationships and migratory networks which have channeled Filipino immigration in Whitehorse; they sit as well in public reactions to newcomers and the stories that are told to make sense of Filipino arrival. And they are necessarily glued to state managed discourses that portray Yukon’s immigration policy as a site of progress and leadership. I begin the messy work of tracing and untangling these threads by reviewing the notion of the frontier as both a theoretical space and as a cornerstone of Canadian history. In doing so, I pay particular attention to the normative construction of gender as pronounced in the discursive construction of frontier masculinities. Drawing on interview data, I then present an account of a dominant narrative of Filipino settlement in Yukon in order to flesh out how this story becomes participant to the discourses outlined previously. I conclude by placing this schema in its broader colonial context in order to outline the disruptive potential of writing new zones of encounter. 2.2 Frontier myths and masculinities What, exactly, does the notion of the frontier try to explain? Frontiers mark the physical borders that project and protect the “collective personality” of national citizens within them (Balibar 1990, 337). The frontier also signifies a liminal space of exception beyond the settler-state but not yet within another (Rifkin 2014, 177). Frontiers are as real as they are imagined; they are fixed hallmarks of national character at the same time as they symbolize the potential of 22 the unknown. In the broad brushstrokes of popular Canadian history, the frontier has marked a zone of encounter between European settlers and indigenous peoples. Cold Paradise takes us as well into a zone of encounter, but one that resounds in altered tones. Walcher consistently returns to the footage of the Filipina woman in the snow, her red anorak brightly lit against the sparkly white background of the snow. We see here a German man profiling a Filipina woman through imagery that draws on the vernacular texts of Yukon’s frontier history. The film depicts a space of interaction but it writes the story of encounter differently, such that the meetings that unfold are between Filipino immigrants and white-settler-citizen-natives. Frontiers are spaces where we can see how race encounters gender, and how these interactions are enveloped in a messy and sticky history. To work through these tensions, I employ the notion of the frontier in the vein of Anna Tsing (2005). For Tsing, the frontier is not a “place or even a process but an imaginative project capable of molding both places and processes” (32). The frontier is inventive; it has its own “technologies of space and time” (ibid). In different moments and in different spaces, frontier sensibilities of nationalism, exception, and encounter run against each other, and in often unsettling ways. As I will demonstrate below, the imaginative project of a ‘frontier Yukon’ is clouded in mythology but it exceeds the internal coherence of myth. The frontier is a discursive device but it is also a performance that is engaged and enacted by incongruous and paradoxical actors. “The activity of the frontier is to make human subjects as well as natural objects” (ibid, 30). I set my account of Filipino settlement in Whitehorse against hegemonic frontier narratives and subject positions that newcomers are positioned both within and against, particularly with 23 regards to gender. To do so requires a brief detour to outline the frontier rhetoric against which this story is written, and the configurations of race and masculinity that it unsettles. 2.2.1 Frontier origins The frontier is a cornerstone of the national mythologies that narrate the re-settlement of indigenous lands. In 1893, American historian Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the frontier spirit was the crucible for the successful expansion of the American nation. The frontier was a site of transformation where wilderness became society: “the outer edge of the wave–the meeting point between savagery and civilization” (cited in Smith 1996, xv). In Canada, the notion of frontier-as-transformation is operationalized differently. On the one hand, the frontier experience was characterized by the legal absence of indigenous peoples (terra nullius). European immigrants took on the role of ‘hardy settlers’ who succeeded against the empty and rugged environment of the North: “a robust Northern race pitting themselves against the harshness of the climate” (Razack 2002, 3). On the other, frontier encounters with indigenous peoples were justified as “conquest through benevolence” wherein ‘good’ natives sought and welcomed the redemptive prosperity of civilization (Furniss 1999). As a nation-building trope, the frontier is a powerful tool that organizes the diverse and diffuse experiences of European settlement into a cohesive story of national origins. I am interested here in the endurance of frontier-as-origins, and the contemporary exertions of this story in Yukon. This is precisely what Elizabeth Furniss (1999) terms the “frontier cultural complex”: the sheer “hegemonic bulk” of frontier based narratives, images, public values and identities that ultimately celebrate Canadian colonialism. “The frontier myth,” 24 she writes, “through its set of symbols, metaphors, and narrative structures, provides a structured way of looking at history in which “truths” are communicated intuitively and indirectly, appealing to imagination, fantasy, and emotion rather than through the direct, intellectual argument of scholarly historical narratives” (ibid, 187). When viewed from the South, the North remains structured as an unrealized frontier space (Grace 2002) such that claims for its future development are mobilized through the language of frontier mythology. On the level of local politics, frontier histories continue to be drawn upon to consolidate regional identities and public values in ways that alternatively reverberate with Canadian nationalism and draw distinctions between urban centers and frontier outposts (Furniss 1999, 188-189). “Canadians have gone soft” Yukon historian Ken Coates warned northern business leaders in 2014 (Whitehorse Star 2014). “We’re turning our backs on the frontier experience” (ibid). The endurance of the frontier story provides a means of looking forward as much as it shapes understandings of the past, and it provides the foundation for articulating regional identity in the present. However, when Furniss’s analysis is read instead as a component of a larger imaginative project, her understanding of the frontier myth is perhaps a little too smooth. Anxieties of place and belonging are navigated in the places where the myth runs aground, and in the spaces where mythology’s excesses find outlets in unforeseen directions. Foundational stories are most important when established orders of race and gender are called into question. Lurking within Whitehorse’s commonplace Gold Rush imagery is the implicit and explicit gendering of the frontier myth. As I’ll demonstrate below, frontier conceptions of masculinity offer a crucial entry point into these concerns. 25 2.2.2 Frontier masculinities The frontier myth is a deeply gendered cultural invention. J.W. Connell (1993) coined the term “frontier masculinities” to refer to a type of masculinity built on frontier myths and embodied in the heroic images of cowboys, Paul Bunyan, and Daniel Boone (612). Figures and qualities of frontier masculinity, Connell argues, are a characteristic feature of the sexual ideologies of settler societies in both their past and present iterations. Central to the masculine frontier is the idea of the self-made man. The self-made man represents and enacts the values of rugged individuality and democracy that resonate “with the frontier histories that celebrate heroic individualism as the driving force in the development of the Canadian nation” (Furniss 1999, 82). Writing of Williams Lake, British Columbia, Furniss maintains that the myth of the self-made man takes on particular importance in rural, resource economy based cities. In the view of local community leaders and politicians “the self-made man is the individual who takes entrepreneurial risks to establish his own business or works long hours as a labourer in the mining or forest industry” (ibid, 84). A member of the “Northern race” (Razack 2002, 3), the figure of the self-made man is undeniably white. His actions are set behind the frontier motifs, tropes, and narratives that seem to appear as a natural a part of Yukon’s landscape. Klondike mining, one Yukon guidebook concluded in 1897, “is the toughest kind of work. It compels great sacrifices of comfort and constant attention to business. It is no child’s play” (quoted in Beyreis 2005). Only a certain kind of masculinity could survive in the harsh climates of an unsettled Yukon. A plaque in the MacBride Museum of history reiterates this sentiment by praising the writings of Jack London and Robert Service for documenting “a rugged land, inhabited by hardy individuals with a 26 capacity for hard work and an appetite for luxury” (Whitehorse: field notes 2014). However, as Anahita and Mix (2006) argue, these forms of masculinity are based on myth and fantasy rather than on standards to which individual men are held. They add to Connell’s definition, maintaining that frontier masculinity is “an idealized form of public masculinity, a state-level masculinity, more than it is a form of masculinity to which individual men are held accountable” (Anahita and Mix 2006, 333). The frontier’s self-made man is the precise figure of what Elizabeth Povinelli (2005) refers to as liberalism’s autological subject: “projected by discourses and practices that measure the worth of life and society relative to their capacity to constitute and vest sovereignty in the individual” (174). The bold pioneer, whose actions gave rise to the city of Whitehorse itself, is configured as the ultimate bearer of future development and national modernity. However, while men were praised for exercising their agentive capacities, Connell argues that frontier masculinities were also sites of anxiety. The best qualities of frontier masculinities risked overexertion that could result in social chaos. Klondike mining camps, for example, were often reviled in the press as lawless places that were filled with crime and poor behavior (Beyreis 2005). Settler-state’s often attempted to rectify these anxieties by encouraging family settlement (Connell 1993, 612). In Dawson City, families often migrated and settled as entire units (Beyreis 2005). Women and children were necessary to temper the overzealous qualities of the self-made man and steer him towards virtue. If the Klondike miner represented modernity and progress, pioneer wives were akin to tradition: a necessary if secondary supplement that helped contain the limitless possibilities of the frontier’s potential. 27 As Connell demonstrates, hegemonic forms of frontier masculinities are necessarily entwined with and reproduced by normative ideas of women and family that are central to the state’s machinery to reproduce the nation and its values. In the broader narrative of settlement, the family operates as a site whereby the state (re)produces national subjects as a means of developing and containing the wild space of the frontier. As such, the project of transforming the frontier is generational. The foundational events of frontier settlement take on little significance except in retrospect. The ubiquity of Gold Rush imagery and mythology in Whitehorse speaks relatively little to the immediate risks taken and successes achieved by early settlers in the Klondike as it does to a view of history in which the founding acts of the Canadian nation in Yukon are laid bare. This view of history requires a clear line of inheritance that descends through generations of families from Yukon’s past, and extends indefinitely into the future. Yet frontiers, Tsing (2005) reminds us, are zones of unmapping: “even in it’s planning, a frontier is imagined as unplanned…Frontiers energize old fantasies, even as they embody their impossibilities” (2005, 29). Stories of Filipino settlement in Yukon refuse the gendered separation between modernity and tradition at the same as they re-gender, re-race, and re-repurpose hegemonic frontier tropes. What do new narratives of Yukon’s settlement tell us of the sticky spaces between national progress and colonial settlement, on the one hand, and potential spaces of disruption on the other? The trajectory of settlement outlined below illustrates what has quickly become a dominant narrative that explains the arrival of a new community in Yukon. I want to acknowledge that I am telling a specific version of Filipino arrival and I do so at the cost of other perspectives and stories. However, my purpose here is to document a lineage of settlement that has taken on a form of local dominance. It is significant that this is the story I was 28 told in both policy-oriented interviews and in conversations with Filipino community leaders: it’s a way in which the disparate and diverse experiences of immigration can be organized into a unified whole. In that sense, the narrative of success that has accompanied the growth of the Filipino population in Whitehorse has become, in a sense, it’s own entrenched frontier mythology. 2.3 Settling in Let’s begin with a personal history written by a Filipina nominee, Ruthcelie. Ruthcelie’s story relays her experience of immigrating and settling in Yukon, and is publicly available on the Government of Yukon’s immigration website under the title “Immigration Stories”, though it only includes Ruthcelie’s. She writes: I am the kind of person who loves changes. When life presented me an opportunity, I seized the moment. It was on the Year 2008 [sic] that my cousin who happened to be here in the Yukon asked if I was interested to come and work in Canada. Instantly my answer was YES!...I was under the Yukon Nominee Program and employed by Subway. The funny thing was, I never had the experience working in food industry, but I was so resolved that I will easily learn the ins and outs of it….The first time I ever step on the Canadian soil was May 2, 2009. I was so happy. Again, everything was new to me, people, weather, culture and my new job…It does not take long to adjust and adopt life here. All we need is to be open- minded and take it as a challenge instead of a barrier. It doesn’t mean that we will simply forgot our roots, it means embracing the positive from each country and keep on moving on. It may seem insignificant to others, but the thought 29 itself that I am now driving my car, not brand new though is a like a dream for me. [In the Philippines], I used to have a water buffalo back ride with my father, and now I am driving a car. I never dreamed of it, it was just a bonus. Coming from a big family that was so dependent on farming, the only ambition I have years and years ago was to help my family and right now I am fulfilling that dream. I thank the government of Canada for giving such opportunities to people like me who aims for a better life and steps forward to attain it (Diala 2014). On the one hand, this story appears to be a typical, if expected, affirmative account of the Yukon nominee program and the integration of a newcomer into the fabric of the Canadian nation. It also serves not just as a record of Ruthcelie’s triumphant experience but also as an official government advertisement of the kinds of possibilities that are available in Yukon. As a recruitment device, Ruthcelie serves as an example of the kind of person necessary to fully deserve and take advantage of these opportunities. But if Ruthcelie’s story seems typical or expected, it appears as such because it settles into the well-established tropes and fictions of the frontier myth. Adventure is a clear theme here. Driven by a desire to help her family and create a better life for herself, Ruthcelie boldly takes advantage of the opportunity to travel into the unknown. Her initiative is her own. Like the self-made man, Ruthcelie is the predominant agent of her success. Her mobility is distinctly upward. Her journey begins from the South and finishes in the North. At first confined to the seemingly backwards transport of a water buffalo, she is now free to move as she likes by the power of her own car. Ruthcelie’s story is not a fantastical account of wealth and riches, but rather, of an 30 entrepreneurial spirit who capitalizes on opportunity and makes her own way. She embodies the utopic potential of the frontier that is at work in Yukon’s immigration policy. I highlight these motifs not to discount the exertions behind Ruthcelie’s experience of immigration, or the economic conditions that make migration necessary. Rather, I want to demonstrate that when Ruthcelie’s story is told in the context of state managed discourses, it takes on a different register. The success that Ruthcelie achieves in the end works to erase possible conditions of necessity in favour of adventure and exploration. Thus Ruthcelie’s account of settling into a new life of Whitehorse becomes itself a trope that accords with the internal logics of the frontier myth. At the same time, the work of “settling in” is a site where the narratives of Yukon’s frontier history become confused. The upward mobility of the self-made man (white, male) becomes available to an immigrant woman of colour. Agency is distributed here to populations that frontier history has classically treated as exempt. Moreover, the labour that she performs to achieve her upward mobility is notably distinct from classic labour of northern pioneers: the service sector is her entry into a new life and new social position. What draws these together—the tension between the attributes associated with old pioneers and the new qualities that Ruthcelie’s narrative exhibits—is the persistence of a narrative of progress that is symbolically realized in the movement to the North and the exploration of Yukon’s hitherto unexploited opportunities. The work of settling in and making a life in Yukon is, much like gold prospecting, no child’s play. In the following, I want to explore both the consequences and possibilities of the re-working of frontier spaces at play in emergent narratives of Filipino settlement in Yukon. To so do, I first need to explain how Ruthcelie got here. 31 2.3.1 Mythical origins Ruthcelie’s story belongs to a broader narrative that begins with the arrival of a Filipina nanny in the 1980s. Soccoro Alfonso immigrated to Yukon in 1986. She came to Canada as a live in caregiver, after spending several years in Singapore employed as a domestic worker. Soccoro’s story was recorded for the Yukon News in 2013. The article reports that she was lucky, that her employer followed government stipulations and she was able to find work in Whitehorse after her contract ended (Alarcon 2013a). She received her permanent residency shortly after, and has lived in Whitehorse ever since. Soccoro’s story is important. As the first Filipina nanny, she set off a chain reaction of helping other Filipinos immigrate to Yukon, first as caregivers and later through the nominee program. The Yukon News recorded her story as follows: “She’s a pioneer and I definitely recognize her for that,” said Joy Allen, co-owner of Whitehorse’s KFC branch. “She created a ripple effect of helping others.” Allen also came to Whitehorse as a nanny, when Alfonso found her an employer. Allen, who is also originally from the Philippines, found sponsors for around eight of her domestic worker friends in Singapore, she said. Eventually, Allen and Alfonso became part of the first 10 Filipina nannies in the territory. When they arrived, there were only around four other Filipina women who preceded them, but they came to Canada by marrying Yukoners, Alfonso said (Alarcon 2013a). 32 This epithet illustrates what has become a somewhat legendary story of the beginning of Filipino settlement in Yukon. Soccoro’s story provides the foundation for a mythology of arrival that can be traced back to a core group of women in the 1980s and 90s who immigrated to Yukon as nannies and whose legacy is seen today in the immigration of Filipino service sector workers like Ruthcelie. As the article indicates, this group of nannies is often typified as the ‘pioneers’ who established a path for later waves of Filipino settlement. The publication of Soccoro’s story in local media effectively cements it as the origin story of the larger community. Ligaya was the fourth nanny to arrive from the Philippines via Singapore. She tells how she came to Whitehorse in 1989: So what happened was Joy came, and then she was working for a family, and the family had a friend and you know she was telling, you know, all the successful stories and you know how their lives made it easy having Joy in the home looking after the children while you know the employers running after the business. So the same story followed with Liberty. And then Liberty you know, while I was in Singapore, said hey you know there is an employer here interested in employing one. So. I said wow (Ligaya 2015).16 When Ligaya arrived, she estimates that there were perhaps 20 other Filipinos scattered in all of Yukon. In Whitehorse, the Filipino community began to grow slowly through a network of ‘friends helping friends’ (Nicole 2014). The small group of Filipino domestic workers that immigrated to Yukon in the 1980s and 90s successfully gained permanent residency after the 16 Interview conducted by Gerry Pratt and Caleb Johnston. 33 completion of their employment contracts. They were then able to sponsor immediate relatives to come to Canada, as well as find employers for other friends and relatives in the Philippines through federal immigration programs. The personal migration networks that were created during this period were crucial to the Filipino community’s later engagement with the nominee program. In the 1990s, the community continued to grow at a slow and steady pace. Nicole recalls the intimacy of the Filipino community 1995: It was very small, in 1995. I think there were just a few. It might be a few hundred, I don’t know, we could look at the stats. But there’s just a few hundred, and there’s really just a few. So we would get together in someone’s basement and we would have a party there, and get together and eat and so Christmas parties were in the basement of a home and so very small and you kind of get closer to each other because there’s just a few of you. And we eat what we kind of miss at home. It was intimate because, just a few people. And you know each other and it’s like you’re my cousin or you’re my relative even though your not. But since you came from the Philippines now all a sudden, it’s instant connection (ibid). Nicole’s words relay the distance between the Philippines and Yukon, and the sense of community that grows between those who find themselves so far away from home. The possible image that accompanies this scene—a large group of Filipinos in the winter landscape of Whitehorse—reads strangely into a popular imagination that figures Yukon as a rugged 34 wilderness. The possible sense of isolation that Nicole points to indicates the challenges through which a community settles in and transforms this foreign landscape and how newcomers must acclimatize themselves to strangeness. Ruthcelie’s triumphant story on the territorial government’s website is part of a broader, overarching narrative of good fortune that characterizes Filipino settlement in Yukon. The original group of nannies who came in the 1980s and early 1990s have been, in general, tremendously successful. “Filipinos, one thing that I know is that they’re very ambitious. They don’t just stop there. They always say, okay what’s next, what’s next” (ibid). One woman co-owns a local fast food franchise, one runs her own janitorial contract company, another former nanny co-owns the local Filipino grocery store. The success of the nannies laid the foundation for the ‘boom’ of immigration that has followed through a large network of 5-7 main family groups (Alicia 2014). I will address this theme in further depth shortly. Here, I want to briefly note that Ruthcelie’s success can be viewed in part as a process of descent that originates in the figures of the first nannies. The sense that these women are pioneers, those who ‘forged a path’ for others (Yukon settlement services 2015), is very significant. The reference, in one sense, rightly refers to the boldness of making a life elsewhere and facilitating that journey for others. It also demonstrates the casual mechanisms through which the language of frontier mythology settles into new accounts of arrival. 2.3.2 “Bringing the village” The figure of the pioneer only becomes powerful in retrospect: it means little to have forged a path if nothing followed. Frontier mythology requires an origin story in order to maintain its 35 explanatory power in the present. This is true, too, of the story of the nannies as relayed above, which derives its mythology from the dramatic expansion of the Filipino population in the years following the implementation of the nominee program. When the program started, “that was the start of the influx. The kind of gold rush” (Nicole 2014). Nicole continues: When the YNP started, I don’t know 09, 08, 07 I don’t remember, that was basically the start of the exodus. And that was, boom, wow, woah. Everyday there’s people coming, Filipinos coming. And then two years later they get their permanent resident status, now they can sponsor their relatives. So and then so exponentially it increased. Exponentially. Yeah because once you have your permanent resident status, now you can sponsor (ibid). Here, Nicole casually adopts the language of the frontier to describe the dramatic growth of the Filipino population since 2007. The language of a “boom” or a “rush” of opportunity subtly situate Filipino immigration as a wave of settlement that sits in parallel with the foundational acts from which this vocabulary derives. However, Whitehorse’s “rush” of Filipino settlement is gendered differently from the rugged masculinities of the Klondike Gold Rush. The gender dynamics of immigration were emphasized in an interview with the Yukon government’s Manager of Immigration: Since the inception of the nominee, so 2007-2014, we received about I would say probably around 900 principle applicants and 1500 with their dependents. So those are spouses and children. And I use on purpose the word spouse because most of the initial 36 immigrants were women. So a large number of immigrants in the territory were usually women who came to work in the food service and tourism and retail and so and so forth. So usually the husbands and the children came later on. So of course it’s a very interesting pattern also from women perspective where the initial immigrants, the large group were actually women (Manager of Immigration 2014).17 This statement is correct: it is interesting that the majority of primary applicants to the Yukon Nominee program are women. His remarks reveal the underlying assumption that the families reunited are those of a nuclear family, one who is lead by an immigrant mother who first gains access to Canada so that her family may follow. The influx of Filipino service workers under the nominee program has been accompanied by waves of family reunification that are reflective of the territorial government’s desire to retain a consistent, and permanent, work force in Yukon. At the same time, the openness and even overt celebration of family relationships indicates a clear shift in the gender dynamics of frontier mythology. Yet it would be a significant misstep to relate the YNP’s “success” in the territory as a linear narrative of labour shortages and subsequent state recruitment. That over half of Yukon nominee’s have arrived from the Philippines is also the result of the deliberate actions and organization of Filipinos residing in the territory prior to 2007. During the development of the program “there was a small group of Filipinos who approached [local] businesses and they said 17 Statistics reflect total applicants for the nominee program. Filipinos comprise 53% of total primary applicants. 37 if you are looking for people to work in your business, I know some” (Manager of Immigration 2014). Victoria elaborated on this account in an interview: And these nannies, so when they came, they created all these connections. So for example, Subway needs workers. They’re going to say, okay, I have a cousin in this town in the Philippines and she’s eligible and ready to go. And so Subway would take that person. And so they have become sort of the ad hoc recruitment agents” (Victoria 2015).18 Indeed, Krystal reported in the Yukon News that each of the 10 initial women was able to help facilitate and sponsor the immigration of 20-30 nominees (Alarcon 2013a). The personal migration networks that facilitated the previous wave of settlement were crucial to the Filipino community’s engagement with the nominee program. In effect, the YNP became an ad hoc family reunification program with earlier community members playing the role of labour recruitment agents. Several of the original nannies are now employers who have recruited service sector workers through the nominee program. One woman, who co-owns a fast food franchise, “brought her village here…Friends, neighbors, extended family…she just brought the village” (Nicole 2015). While friendship networks and family connections helped the Filipino community grow, the nominee program opened the doors for further migration and sponsorship of family members. As one interviewee put it: 18 Interview conducted by Gerry Pratt and Caleb Johnston. 38 It’s all family members. What I’ve heard is that under the Yukon nominee program because my understanding before, it’s a little bit lax in terms of bringing people in Yukon under the Yukon nominee program. So many members of their family, maybe the 7 families that you might be referring to, okay you want to come to Canada? Sure. So the availability of that Yukon nominee program when after about 6 months I think they can apply for permanent residency. And that’s why the population of the Filipino community grew from 1990 to probably until now (David 2015).19 This account of family migration relates how the growth of the Filipino population is enmeshed in a complicated network of family, business, and government interests. Yukon’s retention rate hovers around 90% across the entire nominee program (Manager of Immigration 2014); an indication that nominees consistently find the means to build a life for themselves after their enrollment in the program has ended. The strong sense of community support that threaded throughout these accounts is often taken up in ways that suggest the civilizing presence of Filipino families in Whitehorse. One local news editorialist laments the “laziness” and “selfishness” of the Canadian born workforce (Clarkson 2015). In contrast, he writes: Filipinos not only bring a strong work ethic to the Yukon, they also bring their culture, their family values and their sense of community. Asians in general tend to be very 19 Interview conducted by Gerry Pratt and Caleb Johnston. 39 family oriented; they live together in extended families long after their kids finish high school. The grandparents also live with the family, acting as elders and free babysitters. These living arrangements are foreign for some nuclear families in North America and undesirable in most. It is amazing to see people engaged in their new community events, playing volleyball together at Rotary Peace Park, performing at community events, fundraising, serving their delicious home cooking, and a variety of other activities that relay a strong commitment to family, friends and community (ibid). As pioneers, the original nannies are not just the founders of the community. The emphasis on family migration and reunification also, in some sense, positions them as the ‘mothers’ that enabled the growth of an entire community. The presence of immigrant families descending from this lineage signifies change, but it also indicates that they bring with them the soothing presence of tradition that is celebrated in terms of family and community relationships. Let’s return here to the image of the Filipina woman standing in the snow. Like Ruthcelie’s story, this image exemplifies the hard work of “settling in”—the journey and labour of making a life in Whitehorse and acclimatizing to a foreign landscape. The role of family dynamics is an important means of community in a place so far away from home. We can also observe the ways in which the overarching narrative that explains the trajectory of Filipino settlement in Yukon operates, in part, as a new form for an old frontier myth. There’s something about this broader narrative—of taking a chance in a foreign, cold, northern landscape and making it work—that establishes a commonality with previous modes of Yukon’s settlement. The dominant narrative of settlement that I’ve detailed here demonstrates how past tropes that 40 operated as axes of exclusion have come available to a new population such that mobility is inscribed in the body of the female Filipino arrivant. The female figures that populate the revitalized sense of what it means to be a ‘pioneer’—the nannies, and their later descendants like Ruthcelie—are shaped through hegemonic frontier narratives even as they stand in contrast to them. “Frontiers energize old fantasies, even as they embody their impossibilities” (Tsing 2005, 29). The anxieties of change that often accompany the arrival of new populations are mediated in part through incorporation into the larger framework of Yukon history. As such, the cliché motifs that have settled into these accounts risk facilitating acts of erasure. Pioneer, Neil Smith (1996) notes, is itself a conceited term that implies uninhabited space prior to arrival (xvi). And while the term aptly describes the minimal presence of Filipinos from Yukon prior to the nannies arrival, it also implicitly situates present generations of new immigrants in relation to previous modes of settlement. Moreover, the open and overt celebration of family relationships and migratory networks in Yukon also renders the Filipino community as a single, cohesive family. This ‘celebration myth’ risks silencing some of the other problems with the immigration program, as well as labour conditions that ensure that most newcomers work 2-3 jobs to support and sponsor their families. Overall, the larger Filipino community is portrayed as a facilitator of freedom rather than as a constraint. The modes of descent that are at the heart of the community’s phenomenal growth in Whitehorse reach not only forward into the present, but backwards into historical settlement. New generations of Yukon’s ‘pioneers’ represent a new face of an inherited legacy. The frontier as such is a utopic imaginary that implicates the 41 development of new communities who carry on the work of actualizing the frontier’s potential. In turn, these changes feed into the larger imaginative project of a ‘frontier Yukon.’ 2.4 Conclusion: progress and erasure In summary, the central argument of this chapter is that the frontier functions as a technology that orders race and gender. Thus far, I have demonstrated that frontier encounters are a cornerstone of Canadian national mythology. The myth of frontier settlement inscribes mobility into the figure of the self-made man. Hegemonic ideals of frontier masculinities discursively produce normative ideas of women and family that are necessary to the generational labour of frontier settlement. In the second part of the chapter, I set these ideas against contemporary accounts of Filipino arrival in Yukon. In re-counting the origin story of Whitehorse’s large Filipino community, I’ve shown how the common sense language of the frontier myth settles into new narratives of settlement in such a way as to position Filipino newcomers as inheritors of Yukon’s history of settlement. Here, I want to briefly suggest that these accounts of Filipino immigration resound in a broader context of colonial erasure and the Canadian settler state that additionally constitute and complicate imaginaries of a ‘frontier Yukon.’ We can observe this insight through two examples. Firstly, the persistent reference to Yukon as a frontier space both in popular and in state discourse suggests that Yukon is somehow behind the rest of Canada or lingering in the process of settlement. However, the success of Yukon’s newcomers also establishes Yukon as at the fore of progressive development. Filipino 42 success in Whitehorse is commonly contrasted to the possibilities that exist for Filipino newcomers in the “south”: One good thing about the Yukon is that, yeah you work here for two years as a Yukon Nominee, or at Canadian Tire. And then once you’re done with your contract you become permanent resident and then you can go to school, you can, you have more opportunities compared to say one in Vancouver. I actually know of one nanny, Filipino nanny, in Vancouver. And she was working for this family for 15 years. And she still doesn’t have a house. I mean she was given an old car and she was still doing the same thing. And the kids have grown up and she’s still there, like doing whatever she can. And I look at her, and I look at the person here in the Yukon, and the person here in the Yukon has more opportunities (Nicole 2014). Whitehorse comes to be conceptualized as a rare pocket of opportunity in Canada; it is a place of utopic potential that is no longer possible in the south. It is only at the frontier where the future remains unsettled. Local politicians and community leaders in Whitehorse similarly view themselves as at the fore of progress. This is particularly apparent with regards to Yukon’s immigration policy. The Yukon Nominee Program is the first federal-territorial immigration partnership in the Canadian North; Northwest Territories has begun looking to Yukon to understand how they’ve developed their policy and their model of immigrant integration (Yukon settlement services 2014). Moreover, the YNP is often discussed as a superior version of federal immigration 43 policies. In 2011, for example, the territory instituted new requirements for the YNP. “Yukon was the first jurisdiction in Canada that introduced language requirements,” the Manager of Immigration told me. “Guess what. The federal government followed exactly the same levels when they introduced it as mandatory for the whole jurisdictions. Yukon was the first jurisdiction to introduce it…” (9-5). Immigration policy is a site of much pride but also a mechanism through which the territorial government can assert its leadership capacities. Here, the promises of the frontier myth are realized in the figure of the successful Filipina migrant. The persistent references to narratives of progress and open futures that populate the discourses outlined in this chapter speak directly to the broader colonial context in which these stories take shape. The frontier myth, even in its contemporary, repurposed allocations is a reductive formula. By necessity, it writes itself over other histories. Narratives of progress presuppose a blank slate upon which progress can be actualized—given here in the form of “immigrant pioneers.” Thus the frontier operates as a technology of ordering not only within its most visible figurations but also outside of them. The myth itself, even as it takes up new meaning in new contexts, settles on top of the history of colonization that it sanctions. Walcher’s film, for example, portrays the frontier as zone of encounter but limits those encounters to Filipino newcomers and Whitehorse residents who were previously figured at the center of the frontier myth. Even the casual adoption of Gold Rush clichés writes over encounters with indigenous peoples that pre-figure the necessity of the frontier myth. And yet, zones of encounter need not be zones of erasure. The frontier is nothing if not inventive. The act of unmapping that places Filipina women at the center of new mythologies of 44 settlement also contains a very different kind of potential energy. Thus while this chapter has observed the sticky force of frontier mythology as it interweaves itself it has also pointed to the friction that this action generates. Zones of encounter are never completely smooth. The image of the Filipina woman standing in the snow never totally loses its strangeness. “The effects of encounters across difference can be compromising or empowering…Hegemony is made as well as unmade with friction” (Tsing 2005, 6). Tracing the enrollment of non-European immigrants in the narrative arc of Yukon’s frontier histories opens possibilities not just to outline the contours of state power, but to better illuminate where this power fails; where gaps, fissures, cracks and seams may set themselves apart from the predominant origin stories in order to craft something new. 45 Chapter 3: Multiculturalism in print 3.1 Introduction After observing the citizenship ceremony offered to Yukon’s new Canadians on Canada Day in 2014, Whitehorse city councilor John Streicker offered the following reflections on Yukon’s growing diversity in the local paper, the Whitehorse Star: “Diversity is an important part of this county. And it has been a growing part of the Yukon. And let's face it, the Yukon has undergone a lot of change on this front in the past decade. We have gone from basically First Nations and non-First Nations (with a significant history of racism) to a much more multicultural community. Everyone has witnessed the increasing Filipino population and the positive energy they are bringing to our communities. We have seen an increase in local Chinese culture; la communaute francaphone has increased in numbers and effectiveness over the past decade; the gay pride parade was super colourful this year... At the same time, First Nations culture and heritage are definitely on the upswing” (Streicker 2014). Streicker’s remarks come at time of complex demographic changes. In Whitehorse, the increasingly visible presence of Filipinos behind the counter of Whitehorse retail and fast food establishments has garnered significant attention in the local press since the introduction of the YNP in 2007. While a scattering of articles and opinion pieces stoke fear of ‘Canadian’ (read: white-settler) economic displacement, these are greatly outnumbered by reportage that defends – 46 and even promotes - this new, multicultural city. As Streicker clearly indicates, the Filipino community is perhaps the most visible front of these shifting dynamics. Streicker is suggesting a radical change in Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships in Yukon. In this statement, he positions the Filipino population as a leading signifier of this transformation. He then goes on to say: “Still some people criticize multiculturalism, declaring that with so many different lifestyles it dilutes the Yukon cultural identity. Not me. First Nations have a history of embracing diversity and I think the recent changes in our demographics have encouraged them to express and share their culture with a pride of place as the first Yukon peoples. Remember also that the foundation of Western culture here in the Yukon was the ragtag patchwork of stampeders that came for the rush. In other words, I think diversity is in our very nature and lately it has been good to see more of it” (ibid). Herein lies the second key constituency in the new pluralist Yukon. For Streicker, First Nations are the original exemplars of diversity and inclusion. They serve to “embrace” the arrival of multiculturalism while also suggesting that it has, in some form, always been there. As such, Streicker’s explanation of the distinctiveness of Yukon’s cultural identity draws on the firmly established multicultural national narratives that have been a part of Canada for over 40 years. What does it mean to imagine multicultural futures in a place whose colonial past - note the reference to stampeders - is actively being reworked in the present? What would it mean to 47 foreground the settler in the “discursive and performative regime of settler multiculturalism” (Povinelli 2002, 33) emergent today in Yukon? These questions lay out my task in this chapter: to read Yukon’s optimistic turn towards multiculturalism not solely in relation to national sovereignty but rather, in part, as a practice of settler governance. By ‘reading’ I mean both a metaphorical and a literal act: Local newspaper coverage of Filipino settlement offers a rich site from which to understand how state logics vis-a-vis immigration are comprehended within Canadian civil society. As a critical tradition from Gramsci to Raymond Williams has observed, newspapers present powerful and ambivalent sites of cultural activity: they can operate as organs of the state in the traditional sense, but they can also be moments where cracks in the consensus appear. Here, I focus on newspaper presentations of immigration specifically, and how they reflect, deter, or complicate state efforts to manage a “consensus reality” regarding Canadian immigration. In Canadian newsprint media, immigration issues are typically presented as questions of national membership. Harald Bauder (2011), for instance, has explored the persistent separation of Indigenous and immigrant narratives within the contemporary Canadian immigration debate, showing how the Canadian media systematically occludes Indigenous perspectives in its framing of immigration debate. Reportage that emphasizes cultural representations of immigrant labour in terms of inclusion within the nation is equally problematic insofar as it constructs the terms of immigration debate strictly in relation to the sovereign power of the state to determine membership. Reading newsprint accounts of Filipino arrival as practices of an explicitly settler nation-state opens allows me to make explicit the 48 overlapping questions of nationalism and settler colonialism that are presently at work in the imagining of Yukon’s multicultural future. This chapter proceeds in four parts. First, I review the relationship between newsprint media and institutional performances of national identity. I further these insights by drawing on Anderson and Robertson’s (2011) argument that newsprint reporting in Canada emerged as, and remains, a colonial instrument. In the second, I outline Elizabeth Povinelli’s (2002, 2011a, 2011b) critique of settler multiculturalism in order to make explicit the background management and governance of difference that frames accounts of inclusion and multiculturalism in the Canadian press. These perspectives combine for a fruitful line of inquiry to examine Whitehorse’s newsprint media. While Filipino settlement in Yukon has received a small amount of attention in the national press20, it has not yet received attention in other forms of public media or news coverage. By contrast, the local press in Whitehorse21 has produced a rich archive of news articles that document immigration policy and Filipino arrival in Yukon, and is by far the largest public source of information on these topics available in Yukon. It is also the only source of consistent news content that is produced in Yukon, and provides an alternative to the importation of news media from the ‘South’ (see Alia 1999). I further detail Yukon’s press and the methodology of my review of it in the third section of the chapter. My groundwork laid, I turn to a close reading of a selection of texts from the newsprint archive. The texts selected are not entirely representative of the newsprint media as a whole; 20 See Wingrove (2014) for an example. 21 The local press in Yukon consists of two major papers: Whitehorse Star and Yukon News. 49 rather they represent one strand of the negotiation and performance of multiculturalism in Yukon. While this limits the generalizability of my analysis, it is nonetheless an important mode of engagement. Closely examining the performances of multiculturalism implicit in these texts illuminates important grounds for a larger analysis. By doing so, I instantiate and interrogate the self-evident good of ‘caring for difference’ in relation to colonial pasts and futures that are present today in Whitehorse. 3.2 Newsprint media and the state Newspaper reporting occupies a particular place in relation to the state and the production of national culture. In Canada, Mary Vipond (2000) writes “governments have looked to the mass media to help create and express a sense of unity and identity to weld together a vast and disparate nation” (133). For Benedict Anderson (1991), the origins of nationalism lie in the development and dissemination of newsprint media. Print media invites citizens to participate in national discourse and identify themselves as members of the nation’s extended ‘imagined community.’ However, as Anne McClintock (1991) argues, there is nothing fantastical or imagined about the power of nationalism. Nations, she writes “are elaborate social practices enacted through time, laboriously fabricated through the media and the printing press…they represent relations to political power and to the technologies of violence” (ibid, 104-105). This is not to say that newsprint discourses are determined by state power. Newspapers are also sites of complication that typically represent a diversity of viewpoints such that the press “rarely speaks in a single voice” (Bauder 2005, 45). Nonetheless, the press sits in close proximity to formations of national and state power; the representation of public debate in news media is critical to the arbitration of the meanings and values of national politics. 50 Control of migration is crucial to the assertion and exercise of state sovereignty (Benhabib 2004). This theme is especially prominent in the newspaper coverage of immigration issues, which play a critical role in ‘creating and maintaining’ popular perspectives of immigrant labour (Suarez-Navaz 2007, cited in Bauder 2008). Narratives of immigrant labour in newsprint media play a crucial role in crafting the ideological and public support for immigration policies. Bauder (2008) contends that cultural representations of foreign workers in newsprint discourse not only reflect popular views of immigrant labour but also play an active role in creating the legitimacy and popular justification for particular programs and policies. The press is above all productive: “Newspaper reporting not only reflects but often produces—and reproduces—anxieties about social change and economic uncertainty” (ibid, 105). The production and representation of immigration debates in newsprint media mediates the meanings of particular immigration laws through which the differences and divisions of national belonging are articulated, enunciated, and performed. While the state doesn’t directly control depictions of immigration debate, the overall effect of such representations is to demonstrate the contours of state sovereignty by outlining and adjudicating the power to expel or receive immigrant solicitation at the varying scales of national politics. Newsprint media plays a central role in the facilitation of public debate in remote regions. Drawing on Harald Innis and Andrew McLuhan, Perrin and Vaisey (2008) write: “The modern polity is itself the historical product of communications technologies that enabled citizens to imagine a unified public in the face of practical limits on physical interaction: a collectivity of citizens removed from one another” (785; cited in Anderson and Robertson 2008, 14). This 51 comment is especially apt with regard to northern societies, which sit at a literal and figurative remove from the remainder of the Canadian body politic. Local newsprint coverage in Whitehorse presents an interesting study of this phenomenon. In Yukon, daily papers provide the grounds of collective national belonging across distance and in remote spaces; the Yukon News, for example, is the only daily paper that circulates in all of Yukon. Yukon papers provide coverage and editorial comments on national issues, at the same time as reportage on local issues invokes and consolidates place-specific Yukoner identities, which are often at odds with federal political agendas (see Sabin 2014). As a political platform, the Yukon press offers space for public debate that both allows residents to exercise access to the broader realm of Canadian nationalism while also querying and complicating the place of the Yukon within the Canadian federation. Issues of immigrant arrival and settlement portrayed within Whitehorse news media sit at the convergence of sovereign state membership and the local politics of Yukon identity. Moreover, local media in Whitehorse has an observably direct relationship with both the municipal and territorial government. The majority of articles included in this study featured interviews and statements from municipal and territorial representatives and bureaucrats; numerous opinion pieces written by local politicians were also reviewed. The representation of cultural difference in newsprint media is necessarily intertwined with the governance of difference and the regulation of citizenship. However, while I have so far addressed immigration as it relates to contemporary forms of Canadian nationalism, the discussion as such fails to address, in McClintock’s words, a crucial technology of violence that subtly, and often silently, underpins the relationship between the press and national formations: colonialism. 52 3.2.1 Colonial reporting Newspaper reporting in Canada emerged as a colonial instrument (Anderson and Robertson 2011). “In the Canadian case, one might expect newspaper content to promote and defend Canadian colonialism because it provides the fabric upon which Canadian culture has been embroidered…In this way the press operates as a sort of colonial genre” (ibid, 16). The local Yukon press has an extensive history of news coverage that reinforces the dispossession of indigenous lands. During the Klondike Goldrush, for example, Anderson and Robertson find that reportage in the Yukon press reflected social norms and common perceptions of “Indianness” that reinforced the frontier mythology of a wilderness transformed. Newspaper stories, including those found in the Whitehorse Star, manifested the decline of the indigenous population “in the way that the news froze Natives in time. This is striking in the context of the frontier myth because at the core of the frontier idea rests the proposition that whites evolved whereas Aboriginals did not and, in fact, could not” (ibid, 95). Facing opposition to local control over territory, newspapers wrote a future for Yukon settlers that was predicated on the relegation of indigeneity to a past that was beyond progress22. Anderson and Robertson write that the conjunction of the press with a “normative imagined Canadian identity constitute[s] the basis for an unambiguous narrative of a thriving colonial imaginary” (ibid, 18). In the present study, my concern is not with contemporary newsprint representations of indigeneity per se; work that Anderson and Robertson have already performed so well. Rather, it is to understand how representations of the perceived arrival of difference—and the attendant anxieties it generates—in the Whitehorse press are implicated in 22 See McClintock (1995, 133) for an example of this kind of temporal logic. 53 the negotiation of meanings of local and national forms of community membership, but in ways that reinforce fundamental colonial logics. This is not to equate the varying forms of differential inclusion that are present in newsprint coverage of immigration issues with settler colonialism per se. Jodi Byrd (2011) rightly warns that framing racialization as colonization risks “allowing all experiences of oppression within settler colonialism to step forward as colonized” (54). However, reading newsprint coverage of immigration debates in relation to active forms of settler coloniality provides the grounds for two important interventions. Firstly, acknowledging colonial structures within contemporary immigration debate refuses to collapse immigrant and indigenous histories into an overarching narrative of ‘otherness’ (Bauder 2011). Secondly, it allows us to conceptualize how the performances and negotiations of immigrant inclusion presented in newspaper discourses renew the mundane but fundamental frameworks of settler sovereignty. To do so, however, requires a closer examination of the political regime of Canadian multiculturalism. 3.3 Settler multiculturalism When John Streicker affirmatively acknowledges the changing dynamics of Yukon’s cultural landscape, he does not appear to be acting maliciously. As Elizabeth Povinelli notes, “multiculturalism is a deeply optimistic form of liberal engagement with the democratic form under conditions of extreme torsion as social and cultural differences proliferate and as capital formations change” (Povinelli 2002, 25). Multiculturalism, she writes, is “represented as the externalized political testament to the nation’s aversion to its past misdeeds, and to its recovered good intentions” (ibid, 18). Multiculturalism functions as a mechanism through which the 54 Canadian state has re-invented itself from a settler society to a multiethnic, liberal democracy (Ahmed 2000; Thobani 2007). As a state sponsored program, multicultural policy works to relegate settler colonialism to the past at the same time as it fosters national cohesion from racialised forms of exploitation that were necessary to the foundation of the nation-state: the dispossession of indigenous lands and the labour of non-European immigrants. Multicultural policy reinforces colonial racial hierarchies precisely through the elimination of their visibility through discourses that center on inclusion and diversity (Bannerji 2000; see also, Perry 2012) while maintaining the structures and strictures of white supremacy (Thobani 2007). How did the celebration of difference come to be an accepted part of the Canadian national character? And, perhaps more importantly, how are these discourses of diversity and inclusion joined in the reproduction of larger projects and projections of settler sovereignty and futurity? Povinelli understands the ‘care for difference’ as a central component of the governance of difference during the durative present of late liberalism. She conceptualizes late liberalism as the response of Western states to crises of legitimacy that emerged in the 1960s as the realities of anticolonial social movements and diasporas confronted the internal cohesion of national identity. In this mode of liberal governmentality, however, the ‘crisis of difference’ is reorganized by settler nation-states as the promise of the ‘care for difference.’ She writes: “In the wake of the liberal state’s recognition of past harm, the crisis would no longer be a crisis of liberal legitimacy but a crisis of how to allow cultures a space within liberalism without rupturing the core frameworks of liberal justice. In short, in late liberalism to 55 care for difference is to make a space for culture to care for difference without disturbing key ways of figuring experience—ordinary habitual truths” (2011, 25-26). What, exactly, does it mean to ‘care for difference’? Since it’s implementation in 1971, the institutionalization of Canadian multiculturalism has shifted the language and grammar through which difference is assessed from race to the seemingly benign realm of culture. Culture becomes the primary means through which the degrees of difference that can safely be incorporated into the national body are determined. Multiculturalism as such performs varying acts of erasure. Perry (2012) contends that multiculturalism “is a state-level discursive device which promotes ethnic plurality and cultural tolerance while simultaneously concealing the state’s continued and historical involvement in the oppression of racialized bodies” (195). Multiculturalism transforms the historicized myth of a benevolent and transformative resettlement of indigenous territories into a national narrative of ‘welcoming’; in which past misdeeds are atoned for in the name of a reconstituted and re-imagined future. Multiculturalism operationalizes a new narrative of national identity while also renewing the racial hierarchies that organize Canada, which continues to persist as a ‘settler society’ (see Razack 2002) while outwardly performing itself as a ‘welcoming society.’ How, Povinelli asks, do states and publics draw on “a multicultural imaginary to defer the problems that capital, (post)colonialism, and human diasporas pose to national identity in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries[?]” (2002, 29). Her question draws our attention towards the work of multicultural national formations to support the formative structures of the settler nation-state at the very moments in which they are the most challenged. However, the 56 significance of Povinelli’s argument is not just that multiculturalism fails to deliver on promises of equality, and in fact, executes the opposite. Rather it is that this failed promise hangs on what she terms the ‘real optimism’ of liberal multiculturalism: the affective, not solely discursive, dimensions of the values and actions that liberal democratic forms call forth. Povinelli emphasizes the action of caring within the model of the ‘care for difference’. Canadian citizen subjects perform the act of care as a perceived enactment of the values of progress and equality that constitute liberal democratic forms. Elsewhere Povinelli has pointed to the ‘impossible demand’ that cultural recognition places on Indigenous peoples by mechanics of state recognition that control precisely “what part of those who have no part can be incorporated safely into the national lifeworld” (2011b, 21-22). However, for my purposes here, my interest is in how discourses and performances of liberal multicultural ‘welcoming’ in Yukon trade on the promised arrival of an egalitarian future that ‘cares for difference’; a future that the state discursively wields but never fully claims responsibility for. News media figures crucially in the reinforcement and reiteration of ordinary truths, namely, the common sense terms and boundaries of the national belonging. At the same time, however, newspapers record and reproduce the very same events, transformations, and transitions that impact, or potentially threaten these unstated assumptions. How does newsprint documentation of Filipino arrival work to craft new multicultural imaginaries? How do texts involved in the negotiation of local and national membership—i.e. the modes and expression of ‘welcoming’ specific to Yukon—draw on the notion of a transformed future, while also creating continuity with the present? And in doing so, how does the local press partake in and perform the management of difference amongst changing demographic conditions and anxieties? 57 To take local newsprint media as a colonial instrument is not to understand settler colonialism as a singular, cohesive project. Instead, placing Whitehorse’s local press in relation to past and present colonial formations is to ask how the mundane experiences of the everyday that are reflected and enacted in newspaper reporting depend on and reinforce the normative scaffolding of settler sovereignty. Mark Rifkin (2013) asks how the “ongoing performance of quotidian modes of inhabitance and selfhood” perpetuate “equations of political existence and peoplehood with the nation-state form” such that performances of nationalism that appear benign fundamentally renew the legal and discursive frameworks of the settler nation-state. Settler colonial cultures, he contends, are forged through the banal social practices of belonging within the nation-state, that are unremarkable and thus beyond critique. “For me,” Streicker writes, “one of the pillars of Canadian-ness is not that we are all the same. Rather it is when we embrace different cultures that we show our unity and strength as a nation” (2014). The mediation of inclusion present in narratives of Filipino arrival offers an opportunity to interrogate the self-evident good of ‘caring for difference’ as it relates to both colonial pasts and futures. 3.4 Methodological considerations From here I build my case through an analysis of a series articles from the local press. Whitehorse is home to two major newspapers: the Yukon News and the Whitehorse Star. The Yukon News is published twice weekly and provides extensive Yukon wide-coverage. As of August of 2015, the Yukon News stated on it’s website that “Yukon News is distributed for free to all of the Yukon's 13 disparate communities outside of Whitehorse, reaching a potential readership of all Yukon's 35,000 residents.” Yukon News has a lower readership than the 58 subscription based Whitehorse Star (Alia 1999; Canadian Journalism Project 2013). The Whitehorse Star is published five times weekly and includes both local and national content. Alternative local news sources produced in Yukon are limited. The Yukon News prints the volunteer run Klondike Sun on a bi-weekly basis. The Yukon Free Press publishes limited and irregular online content, and does not cover immigration issues. While national news sources such as the Globe and Mail and CBC News do include Yukon content, coverage of Yukon is decidedly minimal. Moreover, there are no daily news television or radio programs produced in Yukon; much news content is imported from the Canadian ‘South’ (Alia 1999). The local press is the only source of news content that is produced and published in Yukon. News coverage produced by the Whitehorse papers allows local residents to participate in national discussions. At the same time, the local press operates as an alternative to a national media structure that produces topically northern content from the South, or ignores Yukon entirely. As such, the local press remains an important site of information and public debate in Yukon. This is particularly apparent with regards to immigration issues. “On the strength of public commentary,” a Whitehorse Star editorialist comments, “the issues surrounding net migration into and out of the territory is rarely far from the newspaper headlines” (Ion 2015). Moreover, both the Yukon News and the Whitehorse Star also publish and archive their content online, which contributes to the continued public relevance of their articles. This was made clear when I asked an interview participant about public reactions to Filipino workers and she implored me to ‘just read the comments’ (Nicole 2012). 59 As part of the overarching methodology of the thesis, I conducted a survey of immigration-related issues in both papers. My sample spans from January of 2007 to June of 2015, and includes articles, editorials, and images with captions. I performed a search with the following terms: Philippines; Filipino(s); multiculturalism; nominee program.23 After examining the contents of the articles, only those pertaining directly to Filipino workers, public reactions to immigration and multiculturalism, or relevant policy changes local to Yukon were included.24 In total, 126 articles were reviewed for this thesis: 68 from the Whitehorse Star and 58 from Yukon News. This sample size reveals the diversity of immigration coverage and includes editorials by local politicians, pieces written by Filipino newcomers, coverage of deportation proceedings and citizenship ceremonies, policy analysis and so on. Despite this range, First Nations were referenced a scant four times: twice as a component of multiculturalism, and twice in relation to employment concerns. No article included interviews or perspectives of First Nations residents or leaders. Due to the large size of this sample, the following analysis centers on a close reading of a series of articles from the Yukon News published in June of 2011. The series offers a review of the Yukon Nominee Program and the arrival and settlement of Filipino service sector workers during that time. The articles speak to one another both figuratively and literally: the first concerns the role of the program in the service industry while the other two articles are editorials responding to the first article. While these pieces were selected because they are consistent with 23 My search in the Whitehorse Star was conducted via Canadian Newsstand Complete; for Yukon News used the website archival search feature. 24 In 2013 and 2014, both papers reported extensively on the short-lived Yukon Temporary Foreign Worker program. Articles from this coverage were selected if they included relevant comments on the nominee program or representations of Filipinos in particular. 60 broader themes revealed in the course of my media research, they should not be read as representative. They do not reflect, for example, local journalism that has taken seriously the need to reveal the darker side of immigration policy and labour conditions (overcrowded housing, deportation, etc). However, since my task is to instantiate dynamics of ‘welcoming’ and the bases for the production of multicultural imaginaries, the readings at hand are more than appropriate. The method of performing a close reading is conducive to this end. It allows me to put into practice the action of reading newsprint text in relation to settler colonialism, while also revealing the underlying logics through which authoritative pronouncements of immigrant inclusion and intersect with larger, more covert projects of the governance of difference and settler sovereignty. 3.5 Multiculturalism in print In the following, I present a selection of three articles published in the Whitehorse paper Yukon News during the month of June, 2011. The series offers a review of the Yukon Nominee Program and the arrival and settlement of Filipino service sector workers during that time. The articles speak to one another both figuratively and literally: the first concerns the role of the program in the service industry while the other two articles are editorials responding to the first article. Unlike Streicker’s editorial, these pieces do not offer overt celebrations of Yukon’s shifting cultural dynamics, nor do they specifically address or invoke local First Nations cultures or communities. Instead, they provide a discursive basis for the exclamations of multiculturalism and the ‘caring for difference’ we subsequently find in Streicker. In addition, when read as a series, they provide an opening through which to view the larger narrative arc that describes the implementation of public immigration policy in Yukon. 61 “Yukon Retains its Foreign Workers,” appeared in the Yukon News in June 2011. Here, we find an overview of the nominee program and an interview with the owner and manager of Canadian Tire, Dan Charlebois. Charlebois speaks favorably about the YNP, noting that he “wouldn’t be able to run my business without it,” adding, “Customers would not be able to get the level of service that they’ve become accustomed to” [without it] (Oke 2011). At the time of the article, all of Charlebois’ recruitees through the YNP had been Filipino. Although the article notes that immigration policy requires that preference for employment be given to Canadian citizens, it also emphasizes the difficulties of building a reliable local workforce. Charlebois relays experiences hiring a nondescript “local student” and a “young man” - both of whom quit without warning. Charlebois states that 95% of his nominee employees have remained in the Yukon and are “contributing to our community and our business” (ibid). Charlebois continues: “I have some employees that came in 2008 and are still here. Some of them have bought houses and brought other members of their family. They’ve moved up to management positions and built a life here in the Yukon” (ibid). Such evidence motivates the author, Chris Oke, to muse about the virtues of Yukon’s provincial immigration policy in relation to the federal temporary foreign worker program. While Yukon is established as a site of unique opportunity that welcomes Filipino settlement, “temporary foreign worker programs down south were mired with controversy” (ibid). This evidence motivates the author, Chris Oke, to muse about the virtues of Yukon’s provincial immigration policy in relation to the federal temporary foreign worker program. While Yukon is established as a site of unique opportunity that welcomes Filipino settlement, 62 “temporary foreign worker programs down south were mired with controversy” (ibid). This is consistent with our observations in the previous chapter that Yukon’s immigration policy is often conceived of as progressive relative to the rest of Canada. Rather than providing ideological support for a national program, this example of newspaper reporting establishes that Yukon is a comparative leader of immigration policy and services. Oke’s overall message is twofold. Firstly, he demonstrates that a real level of opportunity exists in Yukon, but more people are needed who will fully take advantage of it. Secondly, he makes the case that labour migration is an economic necessity as well as a feature of community development in Whitehorse. Oke’s piece is notable for it’s pronounced emphasis on permanence and the incorporation of Filipino newcomers into the city’s community. While Filipinos workers are portrayed as a boon to employers, the larger Filipino ‘community’ is praised for its extensive support networks that help these workers navigate the challenges of finding housing and transitioning to life in Yukon. There is a distinct narrative of progress within the text in which workers transition from foreign workers to full-fledged Canadian citizens and contributing community members. In sum, the YNP is portrayed as an economic necessity from which Whitehorse residents stand to benefit. “Local Ire”, written by Whitehorse resident Isaac Skylar, is a response to Oke’s piece. Skylar begins by stating that his initial reaction was to “laugh out loud” at Oke’s notion that Filipino workers provide good customer service. He explains this view by recounting a recent experience shopping in Canadian Tire: 63 First, if you ask for help, you can consider yourself quite lucky indeed if you happen to stumble across a worker who has even a remote understanding of the English language. Otherwise, any hopes you might have had for a smooth and dare I say enjoyable encounter quickly evaporate as your quest for help devolves into a frustrating game of charades (Skylar 2011). Skylar suggests the presence of an insurmountable impasse between himself and Canadian Tire’s Filipino employees. His unfavorable assessment of Filipino worker’s English language abilities calls into question their qualifications for Whitehorse’s service sector. The centrality of language barriers in his critique indicates a personal and frustrated sense of displacement. What is at stake is not just his experience at the store but his sense of belonging within it. Skylar then returns to the laughter that spurred his initial reflections: “Once I started pondering the issue a bit more, the aforementioned wave of euphoric laughter that had given me such joy suddenly turned to anger as various unanswered questions about the Yukon Nominee Program itself filled my head” (Skylar 2011). His initial, affective response to the article led him to reflect on his own sense of non-belonging at play in his interactions in Canadian Tire as well as on the larger policy framework that has newly structured his experiences. Skylar clearly demonstrates that his expression of ‘non-welcoming’ proceeds through affective, emotional experiences. 64 Skylar then articulates these concerns in relation to his right to employment as a Canadian citizen: Why is it that a high school graduate, such as myself, can’t find a job in this town, but someone from another country who doesn’t even have Canadian residency can? I’m educated, hardworking, a fast learner and have a veritable mastery of the English language, but I can’t get a job anywhere doing anything, and for one very simple reason I’m not a Filipino (Skylar 2011). In stating that Filipino workers are not Canadian residents, Skylar condemns the progressive arc of immigrant-to-citizen present in the first piece. He instead understands Filipinos workers as outsider threats to local labour and unnecessary in the current economy. His main complaint is that the recruitment of Filipino workers positions him as a stranger on his own territory, despite his own citizenship. As such, he is reasserting a difference between himself as a Canadian citizen who is deserving of work, and newly immigrated Filipinos who have no claim to employment. In sum, the sentiments expressed in this piece place immigrant labour in direct competition with local labour such that the entitlements of citizenship are articulated in terms of employment. The article demonstrates a clear connection between individual and collective reaction: the author’s personal affective response scales up into a questioning of who is allowed into the collective society of national membership. The concluding piece, “A nod to New Canadians” by Whitehorse’s deputy mayor, Mike Gladish is a rejoinder to the previous editorial. Gladish frames his response as an example of a 65 “typical Whitehorse attitude” towards the presence of foreign newcomers. “Isaac”, he writes, “should first of all put himself in the shoes of these brave, hardworking people” (Gladish 2011). Gladish continues: Would he have the courage to leave his country to make a fresh start in a strange place? Would he work hard for $12 an hour? Would he work evenings, weekends or two part-time jobs to support a family? My guess is that he wouldn’t. That’s why businesses are so happy with the Yukon Nominee Program. They can’t get young, high school grads to do these jobs (ibid). This is a loaded statement. Gladish praises Filipino immigrants in terms of their ability to fulfill a role that Canadians are unable to perform, establishing a necessity for the immigration program. At the same time, he employs the theme of the ‘brave, hardworking’ immigrant to justify their established location within a particular sector of the local economy. In praising the dedication of the Filipino workforce, Gladish unwittingly implies that Filipinos possess a particular cultural work ethic that make them uniquely suited for service sector work. The piece simultaneously naturalizes the grueling demands of service sector work, as if Filipinos and poorly paid labour two naturally go together. And while his response is an attempt to justify and even venerate this group of Yukon newcomers, by evaluating Filipino immigrants in relation to Canadian youth, Gladish also reinforces the class position of Filipino workers and devaluation of service sector labour. 66 Gladish proceeds to reiterate how the brave actions of Filipino immigrants benefit the larger Whitehorse community: Immigrants mostly do jobs that the rest of us don’t want. They work hard at low-paying jobs so that their children will have freedom from fear and oppression and a chance for the kind of life that we enjoy in Canada. In my opinion, we need the people that choose to come here to live and work and I welcome them because they enrich our community. Next time I’m in Canadian Tire, I’ll make a point of being patient with any employee who is learning to speak Canadian! (Gladish 2011). In a return to the logics of the initial article, Gladish asserts a clear narrative of progress in which immigrants become national members by performing work deemed unsuitable for Canadians. However, Gladish also promotes a discourse of settlement in which this hard and unseemly work will be rewarded in the lives of future generations of Filipino-Canadian citizens. The development of this new generation is dependent on the sacrifice of Filipino parents; it becomes, in itself, a proving ground of what it means to ‘become Canadian.’ Similarly, the use of the word ‘Canadian’ in replacement of English is significant in that it implies not just that Filipino immigrants are learning a new language, but also that they are learning to adapt to the kind of life that is particular to Canadian citizens. While this piece is not organized in terms of the same emotional reactions as the previous, it does demonstrate a commitment to a particular performance of welcoming, which interacts productively with the policy. 67 3.5.1 Performances, logics, and futures Together, these editorial pieces suggest two poles of collective response to the presence of Filipino newcomers in Whitehorse—ranging from overt welcoming to fear and exclusion. The editorial decision to publish these articles as a series demonstrates that both nominally negative and positive reactions are each considered legitimate within civil society. Filipino workers are dually represented as hard working immigrants who support the local economy as well as threats to the local labour force that upset a distinctly ‘Canadian’ national order. However, that the Skylar Isaac’s negative response is framed by the two nominally affirmative pieces serves to suggest some a resolution wherein the ‘fear’ of newcomers is acknowledged as legitimate, but is outweighed by positive responses. Deputy Mayor Gladish refers to Isaac’s response as an example of “xenotypic nonsense,” that indicating his belief that instances of racism fall into the hands of a few bad apples but cannot characterize the whole. Read as a series, the texts offer a decisive conclusion in which the merits of immigrant welcoming are contested but ultimately reconciled. The clear rhetoric of welcoming present within the nominally affirmative pieces evinces a distinctly multicultural dialogue that reveals aspects of Povinelli’s ‘care for difference.’ Difference is established here in the presence of a distinct cultural group; the attitude of “caring” (read: cultural recognition) is necessary to fashion cohesion in the midst of social and economic change. Yet Povinelli’s central point remains clear: the liberal promise of the ‘care for difference’ is itself a form of the governance of difference and the fashioning of particular subjectivities. The predominant rhetoric of ‘inclusion’ that frames the series indicates the role that the press plays in the double sided production of what it means to be a ‘welcomed’ 68 immigrant, and a welcoming citizen subject. Here, I want to identify three logics that underpin performances of ‘welcoming’ in Yukon’s emergent multiculturalism. First, as demonstrated in the first chapter, is the overarching narrative of success that surrounds characterizations of Filipino settlement. Here, this storyline is reiterated, for example, by Gladish’s statement that “in two or three years, when these new Canadians can speak fluent English and have worked steadily at one job, they will be the managers or business owners” (2012). Success is portrayed as an inevitable result of the Filipino labour force’s culturally specific work ethic. If the first aspect of ‘welcoming’ is modeled on success, the second logic we can identify is that of gratitude. Residents of Whitehorse are made grateful in Yukon’s emergent multiculturalism. The depiction of Filipino immigrants as a necessity to the Whitehorse economy establishes a clear benefit to local residents from the presence of immigrant labour. Moreover, Gladish admonishes readers to value foreign workers both on the basis that Filipinos “perform jobs no one else wants” as well as their capacity to “enrich the community”. This statement acknowledges the distinct class position of foreign workers while also suggesting that the discomforts of inequity between newcomers and existing Whitehorse residents is ameliorated through the expression of gratitude. Closely related to gratitude is a necessary supplement: sacrifice. This is apparent in the consistent reference to immigrants as ‘hard workers’ or ‘brave’ martyrs whose sacrificial labour supports the futures of their children. These terms determine the narrative structure of what it means to build a life in Canada. There’s a pronounced attitude in both of the affirmative pieces that the Filipinos who have come and settled in Whitehorse actually deserve it, because they’ve sacrificed themselves in order to take real advantage of the opportunities that places like Canadian Tire have been able to offer. 69 Narratives of Filipino arrival are demonstrative of the geographical extension and negotiation of national multicultural identity. Moreover, the affirmative relationship between the welcomed and the welcomer depicted here also represents an imagined future of belonging. It is not only that current immigrants will have the opportunity for citizenship, but that the sacrificial present of immigrant labour will produce future generations of ‘fully welcomed’ Filipino-Canadian citizens. Thus the egalitarian future promised by multiculturalism and implicit in the textual mediation of permanent settlement serves to justify a particular form of ethics in the present. Povinelli (2011) writes that “the ethical nature of present action is interpreted from the point of view of the reflexive future horizon and its cognate discourses, such as that of sacrificial love” (3). As this foretold future is produced through the banal experiences of the present, it justifies current arrangements that include the sacrificial labour of Filipino newcomers and the presence of negative reactions to immigrant presence. It is precisely within the mundane practices of national belonging and imagined futures that we can see the shifting sites of settler governance in the local press. The texts reveal a narrative of progress in which Filipino immigrants are able to transition from outsiders to local residents capable of ‘building a life in the Yukon’. This demonstrates how a foreigner can become a citizen: a subject endowed with the crucial power to receive or expel immigrant solicitation. Moreover, that the articles depict a ‘local’ reaction to Filipino arrival establishes that the authors themselves are ‘natives’ by virtue of their ability to determine reactions to immigrant presence. These stories of the negotiation of immigrant integration and ‘native’ welcoming in Yukon thus perform national sovereignty in such a way as to reinforce the 70 Canadian state’s claim to primacy over territory. While the selection of texts presented here is necessarily limited, the absolute absence of First Nations perspectives warrants further elaboration. Indeed, no article reviewed that concerned public reactions to immigrant settlement included First Nations as participants in immigration debate. The dearth of indigenous voices reinforces colonial histories and determinations of which groups may lay claim to the power to determine membership. The colonial genre of the Yukon press reveals itself not only in direct representations of indigeneity but also in newspaper reportage of immigration issues that are strung together by institutionalized forms of indigenous silences. Filipino newcomers are deemed participant and necessary in the construct of the multicultural future. Jodi Byrd (2011) writes that the central objective of settler societies is to “make native the foreign through an abandonment of the foreign to the native” (229). We can observe this working on two distinct levels within these examples of newsprint discourse. As noted, the ‘nativeness’ of local residents is asserted through their projected capacities to receive or expel newcomers. Whitehorse residents achieve a form a priorness that determines their position as participants of immigration debate. They are granted the ability to choose whether or not to act in accordance with the ideal of ‘caring for difference.’ To participate in the act of welcoming—as exemplified by the first and final texts—is to be associated with progress and futurity. Recall Gladish’s statement that “in two or three years, [] these new Canadians…will be the managers or business owners, while Skylar Isaac and those who think like him, will still be complaining about the same old thing” (Gladish 2011). The synthesis of the welcomed with the welcomers activates latent, nationalist imaginaries of liberal multiculturalism. 71 The promise of multiculturalism—seen here in the emphasis on permanent settlement and citizenship—stresses that Filipino newcomers will eventually find themselves in a position to welcome as well. This is the process through which the foreign is made native. At the same time, this process demands that those who are native in terms of indigeneity are made foreign through their exclusion from these acts. Indigeneity in this case restricts First Nations residents from formal participation in immigration debate via the press. Povinelli (2011b) argues that the state holds a monopoly on which aspects of indigenous life and culture can be “safely incorporated” into the nation (22). Here we see that it is not only that multicultural indigenous subjects are not included in immigration debate in the press, it is that they necessarily cannot be. This aspect of indigenous lifeworlds—communal claims to admit or expel—represents a kind of claim that can cannot be, in the perspective of the state, “incorporated safely” as such claims would deny the sovereign power of the state to determine membership. As a result, while the newspaper reportage explore here contains the conditions for writing a multicultural future it also writes the indigenous into an enclosed past; one that does not lead to change, transformation, or futurity. 3.6 Conclusion By way of a conclusion, I’ll return to the questions that I started from. What does it mean to imagine multicultural futures in a place whose colonial past is actively being reworked in the present? What does it mean to foreground the settler in the “discursive and performative regime of settler multiculturalism”? Towards the conclusion of Councilor Streicker’s exegesis of Yukon’s multiculturalism, he writes: 72 It is profoundly moving to watch people take the decision to declare themselves to be Canadian, to make this their home of choice, and the home for their children to come. Of course Canada has a lot to offer, health care, security, education, stability, and freedom of thought, belief, expression…Another thing we try to offer in Canada is the ability for people to have their own cultural expression. This is the beauty of it. It isn't what Canada offers to new citizens, so much as what new citizens bring to Canada. Here, Streicker is drawing on the well-established fictions of Canadian multiculturalism as they become relevant in new ways to the Yukon context. This raises a larger question of who, exactly, gets to benefit from such imaginaries of liberal multiculturalism’s promised future. I hope to have demonstrated that the politics of national belonging produced through local press coverage of Filipino arrival sit at the intersection of the larger project of settler governance. Positioning narratives of Filipino arrival in Yukon in relation to settler coloniality reveals both novel and continuous means through which the settler state practices operate actively in the present. As an organ of the political class, the local press produces liberal multiculturalism’s promised future through the representation and delineation of the terms and scope of immigration debate and resulting forms of newcomer integration. In so doing, newsprint discourses renew the mundane but fundamental frameworks of settler sovereignty that implicitly relegate First Nations peoples outside of the frame, placing the other other in the past. 73 Chapter 4: Mining Yukon’s imagined future 4.1 Introduction We all know the demographic story as our baby boomers retire—we have less than a replacement birth rate. We’re trying to deal with those things with a high level of immigration, and that’s why we’re delighted to see Yukon’s population growing and newcomers arriving and getting permanent residency here. But we still have to do so much more to ensure that we include all Canadians in the workforce of the future, and that means particularly focusing on those parts of our community that have typically not been in the active workforce, who have not benefited from the dignity of work, from the ability to realize their potential in the workforce for many reasons, including our Aboriginal communities. And that’s why we’re making major investments here in Yukon, and throughout Canada, in skills development and linking that to jobs for our First Nations people such as the Yukon mine training initiative… - Jason Kenney, Whitehorse YT, February 19th, 2014 At first glance, Minister of Multiculturalism Jason Kenney’s words confirm little beyond the bloated optimism of a self-proclaimed deal-broker. Upon closer inspection, they capture a moment in which complementary myths of national modernity and local progress converge and crystallize. Here, as in the other of Kenney’s Yukon speeches, the contradictions of differentiated citizenship are harmonized such that new immigrants and Yukon’s First Nations can equally partake in the Canadian “workforce of the future.” Yet, as Kenney also indicates, the high unemployment rate of Yukon’s First Nations residents has long been politically untenable. The permanent presence of foreign workers has raised concerns of the further displacement of First Nations from the local labour force (Thompson 2010). As such, the promises of workforce citizenship can be read as a targeted response to a deep social fissure. 74 Thus far, this thesis has attempted to trace accounts of Filipino arrival in terms of the erasures to which they are unwittingly participant. I’ve argued that the integration of Filipino arrivants into state projects that re-imagine both past and future necessarily work towards the production of indigenous identity as a ‘past’ identity.25 Yet promises of future mineral development and employment loom large for Yukon’s First Nations. The central objective of this chapter is to demonstrate how resource-led development in liberal multicultural Yukon is premised on the unequal promises of future prosperity as they are scripted through differentiated models of citizenship. In 2014, the Yukon News reported that the majority of territory’s jobless residents are First Nations (ibid). “This embarrassment was only tiptoed around during the chamber [of commerce] meeting, where there was nary a First Nation person present. “We have the foreign worker program because we can’t get locals to do the job,” said [President] Karp in an interview. “And when they do come in, it’s for a short time” ” (ibid, emphasis added). In Karp’s justification of the foreign worker program, the perceived reliability of foreign workers comes into contact with the well-established stereotype of the transience of urban First Nations populations. By contrast, mining development on indigenous lands is deemed the alternative and appropriate space for non-transient First Nations citizens to participate in Yukon’s modernization. 25 Mawani (2014) writes: “In settler colonies, the future was often envisioned not solely through promises of social, political, and moral development and transformation but through annihilation, by relegating colonial subjects, especially indigenous peoples, to the past and to history” (76). 75 Yet mining futures are above all speculative.26 Since Kenney’s speech, two of Yukon’s three operating mines have restricted operations due to falling mineral prices (Tobin 2015; CBC News 2015). The cyclical, boom and bust nature of the mining industry forms a necessary backdrop to this chapter.27 In a context of constant speculation, I am interested in how citizenship practices are built through the authoritative projections of one possible future. In the following, I explore the political context of mineral-led economic growth in Yukon and the myths of modernization this consensus fosters. I focus, in particular, on how promises of future prosperity fit within an overarching multicultural logic. To that end, I follow Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez’s (2004) critique of the ‘marketization’ of indigenous citizenship through neoliberal resource-led economic development. I texture her account by concentrating on the spatialized logics and implications of differential modes of citizenship, particularly in relation to employment. I ground my inquiry in a comparative analysis of two brief case studies: 1) local state efforts that anticipate the placement of First Nations labour in mining and 2) the displacement of First Nations workers from the service sector in Whitehorse. While these examples span across seemingly separate rural and urban spaces, they are drawn together 26 Tsing (2005) writes of the speculative nature of resource frontiers: “resource frontiers are subject to the “quick, erratic temporality of rumor, speculation, and cycles of boom and bust” (32). For speculation as a condition of neoliberalism, see Tadiar (2013). 27 Between August of 2013 and July of 2014, the Yukon government implemented a pilot the Temporary Foreign Worker Program (TFWP) primarily as a response to anticipated labour shortages in extractive industries. The program was designed to address the “seasonal” and speculative nature of the mining industry and placed a 4-month restriction on employment contracts. Yukon’s TFWP received only received a few applicants in the mining sector, and was canceled by the federal level. That the government deemed the mining industry speculative and not sufficient cause for immigrants to access citizenship gives us pause to consider the realities of promises of mining employment for First Nations citizens. 76 through their mutual constitution in the telos of Yukon’s ever-forward march towards national modernity. 4.2 Indigenous citizenships The development discourses that support the revitalization of Yukon’s mining industry have been constituted within a broader field of recognition politics. By recognition politics, I am referring to state attempts to incorporate indigenous peoples into the multicultural nation through recognition of and compensation for colonial harms (Coulthard 2007, 2014; Povinelli 2002). In Yukon, these efforts are most prominent in state acknowledgements of First Nations self-governance that has accompanied the settlement of land claims since 1993.28 Critics have argued that state responses to indigenous self-determination claims have led to new and insidious modes of incorporating indigenous peoples into the Canadian nation (Coulthard 2007, 2014; Nadasdy 2012). These assimilative practices can be read in relation to parallel efforts to restructure the national economy through resource extraction (Altamirano-Jimenez 2004; Standford 2008). Accordingly, this section examines one valence of First Nations politics: emerging forms of indigenous citizenship that form the backbone of efforts to imagine Yukon’s future. In particular, Isabel Altamirano-Jimenez (2004) is useful for understanding how the continued dispossession of indigenous peoples operates through the complementary mechanics of economic development and state recognition. Glen Coulthard’s (2014b) concept of ‘urbs nullius’ and Paul Nadasdy’s 28 Eleven of fourteen Yukon First Nations have finalized self-governing agreements that detail the management and use of “traditional” territories (Nadasdy 2012). In 1993, the Council of Yukon First Nations, Government of Canada and territorial government signed the Umbrella Final Agreement (UFA). This agreement provides a structure through which each of Yukon’s First Nations could finalize land claims (Alcantara et al 2012). It also addresses a number of other topics related to self-governance and includes the creation of co-management governing bodies which have been involved in mining permitting processes since then (ibid). 77 (2003, 2012) account of First Nations territorial relations add a textured, geographic sensibility to Altamirano-Jimenez’s arguments. Altamirano-Jimenez (2004) argues that state responses to indigenous self-determination are driven by a neoliberal agenda that necessarily “separates culture from territory” (354). In effect, discourses of sustainable development suggest that indigenous lands can be ‘developed’ without impacting indigenous cultures, effectively untying self-governance/culture from territory. This neglects the central relationship with land through which indigenous life-making practices are constituted. First Nations citizenship is therefore “marketized” through neoliberal models of resource-led development that seek to integrate indigenous governments and peoples into the global market.29 As Altamirano-Jimenez explains: In the 1960s, the promise of enfranchisement failed to attract and assimilate Indigenous peoples. Today, the promise of a better economic future could be successful among desperately poor Indigenous communities. Promises of development target Indigenous communities living either in isolated areas, though rich in resources, or communities that are self-sufficient (ibid). Indigenous peoples historically excluded from the benefits of Canadian citizenship are thus promised inclusion through a form of citizenship that “forces or induces individuals to enter new 29 For Jimenez, state responses to self-determination align with the logic of statist multiculturalism: “[G]overnments separate Indigenous self-government from territory, thus transforming the identity of Indigenous peoples from peoples to other minority groups that do not have a territorial/homeland attachment” (ibid, 354). This is consistent with Bauder’s (2011) observation that multicultural policy debate conflates indigenous and minority groups “into the same narrative of otherness” (518). 78 relations with global networks where economic criteria and market incentives are predominant” (ibid). First Nations governments are invited to be both beneficiaries of and ‘partners’ in resource-oriented projects that are promoted in the rhetoric of cultural recognition. First Nations governments assume the role of ‘entrepreneurs’ – globally integrated free entities that are also active contributors to the Canadian economy (see also Altamirano-Jimenez 2013). Promises of job creation further the incentive structure of this form of development. Colonialism is nothing if not pragmatic. This hegemonic model of resource-led economic development introduces spatial dynamics to articulations of indigenous citizenship. “Indigenous peoples living in urban centers are left behind, showing the exclusionary character of this model of development” (2004, 354). While Altamirano-Jimenez is not directly concerned with the geographical disparities of citizenship, her analysis nonetheless demonstrates that the marketization of indigenous citizenship has consequences for First Nations people living outside of areas that are targeted for resource development. Glen Coulthard (2014b) has recently used the term “urbs nullius” to describe processes wherein colonial justifications for dispossessing indigenous territories—terra nullius, empty land—are applied to urban contexts to create space needed for economic expansion. The marketization of indigenous citizenship also delineates how and where First Nations citizens may economically contribute to the nation via resource extraction and industry employment. The institutionalization of resource led development gestures towards the ‘nullius’ of urban space by placing the economic promises of First Nations citizenship by and large in rural areas. While neoliberal integration “frees” indigenous cultures from territory it also 79 necessarily binds First Nations citizens to specific territorial spaces in order to justify extraction. In this way, economic development acts as a mode of spatial governance. In a similar vein, Paul Nadasdy (2012) focuses on the territorial requirements of First Nations self-governing agreements in Yukon. He argues that for Yukon First Nations governments to be accorded state recognition as governing bodies, they must constructed in the terms of the jurisdictional language of the modern state, or else not be considered governments at all. Nadasdy maintains that the current map of territorially constituted Yukon First Nations is a significant departure from previous forms of social organization. “Although many people—First Nation and Euro-Canadian alike—assume that these traditional territories reflect “traditional” patterns of land-use and occupancy, indigenous society in the Yukon was not in fact composed of distinct political entities each with jurisdiction over its own territory; such entities are a quite recent phenomenon in the Yukon” (ibid, 503). Furthermore, these territories are not “owned” but are rather governed through co-management strategies that also stipulate the nation’s special rights to employment opportunities and economic development (Nadasdy 2003). This system of legal and administrative relationships is transforming how First Nations people engage with one another, and with the land. “It is becoming ever more common to hear First Nation people invoke language of “us” and “them” to assert their First Nation’s exclusive rights to control the resources within its territorial boundaries” (Nadasdy, 2012, 528). Nadasdy cautions that the recent formation of territorially constituted First Nations must be viewed as both the colonial legacy of federal efforts to incorporate First Nations into the Canadian state, as well as the result of 30 years of anti-colonial organizing and resistance (ibid, 506). While 80 Nadasdy’s argument is specific to Yukon agreements, his theoretical contribution is that self-governing agreements ultimately reveal deeper colonial logics. Present forms of “traditional” territory demonstrate a fidelity to the state in terms of their underlying legibility to its political structure. Cultural recognition is made amenable to the colonial project through the creation of territorial relationships premised on the ‘fixity’ of individual nations. This creates not just boundaries but also circumscribes a bounded indigenous citizenship. The benefits of citizenship are bounded through First Nations-state agreements that delineate which territories First Nations citizens may access primary employment and resource benefits. The divisions between nations are ultimately sanctioned by the colonial state, which further inscribes these boundaries. The centrality of cultural recognition (given here in the form of self-governance) to the larger project of resource-based economic development contributes to the ongoing dispossession of First Nations through their enrollment in a form of market-based citizenship. Moreover, these practices of citizenship have important implications for the spatial governance of indigenous citizens. If we read Nadasdy’s emphasis on territorial ‘boundedness’ into Jimenez’s account of the ‘freeing’ of indigenous people from territory via market integration, an interesting picture emerges. Political-economic forms of indigenous citizenship simultaneously “free” First Nations peoples from land through continued dispossession as well as “tie” groups to specific territories through state-sanctioned forms of traditional boundaries. “Surplus people are maintained as surplus through processes that alternately and simultaneously “free” them from the land and tether them to it” (Tadiar 2013, 28). The tension between mobility and fixity governs the potential of economic development for First Nations peoples as well as the spaces in which promises of prosperity may be realized. It contorts the pragmatics of ‘good citizenship’ and the 81 forms of labour that this model describes. The viability of resource-led development is premised not just on the social license granted by state recognition, but also on the creation of a surplus labour force. The rhetoric of cultural inclusion engendered through the state recognition of First Nations governments obscures these processes of spatial governance. Cultural recognition is foregrounded within the optimistic expectations and promises of development. It is precisely within this context that I would like to return to the broader mythos of Yukon’s future, and the centrality of mineral extraction in these anticipations and imaginations. First, I want to briefly describe the historical moment in these processes are situated, and their visibility in state scripts of modernization. 4.3 Scripting development The relationship between economic development and indigenous citizenship takes on a slightly different meaning when circuited through the frontier space of the Yukon. Recall Minister of Multiculturalism Jason Kenney’s enthusiastic endorsements of Yukon as the “land of opportunity” and the “newest part of the New World”. In frontier mythology, the role of the pioneer was to uplift the national spirit by leading “the nation into a new world where the problems of the old world are left behind” (Smith 1996, ii). On that note, the territorial government considers itself as modern day pioneers of indigenous-state relationships in Canada: “we have 14 first nations here and [11] self governing agreements. Which is historic for this country. Lots of other jurisdictions are looking at Yukon on how they handled the agreements with the First Nations” (Manager of Immigration 2014). The formal implementation of self-82 governance dissolves the backstory of colonial exploitation in favor of a future based on cultural recognition. Moreover, the Yukon government is also to first territory in Canada to achieve jurisdictional control over lands and resources through governmental devolution (Alcantara et al 2012). Both government and industrial representatives consider First Nations self-governance and state devolution the necessary pre-conditions for the subsequent revitalization of Yukon’s mining industry (ibid).30 These two interrelated examples of the ‘pioneering spirit’ of the local government carry a consensus regarding economic prosperity and mineral development. In turn, this development consensus structures the syntactic relations of labour and citizenship through which development is realized. In 2003, the finalization of land claims agreements was followed by governmental devolution, wherein the Canadian government granted the Yukon government managerial capacities over all lands and resources. In the face of increasing indigenous land entitlements, non-indigenous Yukoners argued that it was unfair to allocate “land ownership to the Aboriginal population without giving the capacity to the regional (territorial) government to manage land and resources throughout the territory” (ibid, 331). The Auditor General of Canada proclaimed in 2003 that Yukon devolution was “a historic event that marked a significant step in nation building” (quoted in Alcantara et al 2012). Local relationships between First Nations and territorial governments work towards a national vision of resource-led economic growth. To use a Gramscian term, this formulation represents the ‘common sense’ of economic development: state recognition of First Nations governance and governmental devolution. This consensus 30 This belief was also expressed in interviews with two industry representatives. 83 scales up into a broader discourse in which mining, as a privileged site of co-management and private investment, is the central indicator of future prosperity. Yukon Premier Darrel Pasloski and Minister of Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney provide useful examples of this discourse in action. In 2013, Pasloski reflected on the benefits of devolution in an opinion piece (“You say you want a devolution”) in the Globe and Mail: Since our devolution deal came into effect, Yukon has done very well. We have experienced steady prosperity, with nine consecutive years of real GDP growth, exceeding the national rate in eight of those nine years. Private-sector contributions to our economy have soared. In the mining sector, a pillar of our economy, three mines have gone into production in the past five years; six more are in permitting and 10 in advanced exploration and feasibility stages. Mining and mineral exploration are at levels not seen since gold seekers flooded the Klondike in 1898 – people call it the “second Gold Rush” (Pasloski 2013). The imaginative project of a ‘frontier Yukon’ is alive and well in Pasloski’s casual adoption of frontier language. The “second Gold Rush” gestures towards a repetition of this past history as it simultaneously provides evidence of a novel and transformed future. Unlike the days of the Klondike, however, the revitalization of Yukon’s mining industry has occurred in a larger context of recognition politics. Pasloski continues accordingly: “We are at the forefront of land-claims implementation in Canada – 11 of Yukon’s 14 first nations have signed modern-day 84 treaties and are self-governing. These agreements provide clarity and mechanisms to guide land management, development assessment and co-operative management of wildlife and renewable resources” (ibid). First Nations and state relations in Yukon are marketed as in indication of the favorable environment for private investment. Recognition politics signify national progress precisely because they appear to offer a tangible financial return. Pasloski draws on the common sense past of the Klondike to project a future that is economically vibrant and ostensibly egalitarian through its inclusion of First Nations in the “second Gold Rush.” State discourses that invoke the colonial past to imagine the prosperity of a non-colonial future are not necessarily coercive. Rather, Pasloski provides yet another example of the ‘settling in’ of frontier mythology in the contemporary moment. It is a similar logic through which Kenney reminds his audience of the central role of mining in Yukon’s past and future: Mining and Yukon of course are synonymous. The Yukon Chamber of Mines has grown from 12 members in 1943, when it was founded, to more than 400 members now. According the Chamber, as recently as five years ago, mining exploration in the territory was worth about 30 to 40 million dollars, but last year the territory had $320 million invested in exploration, nearly a tenfold increase. An increasing number of people who immigrate to the Yukon as well do so because of the opportunities in mining and all of the secondary and tertiary benefits that presents. And I have to say as a former Minister of Immigration how happy I was to work with this territory to increase the number of newcomers arriving through the Provincial Nominee Program, and we hope that momentum will continue (Kenney 2014b). 85 If the state recognition of indigenous self-governing agreements have enabled mining’s ‘return’ to the region, then, they also act as a pre-condition for the diversity that Kenney explains has accompanied the economic momentum of the “second Gold Rush.” In this imaginary, the benefits of mineral development are claimed to span both rural and urban (Whitehorse) spaces. As Kenney’s comments on the “Canadian workforce of the future” make abundantly clear, labour is the predominant form through which the cultural scripts of frontier development may be enacted. The foregoing can be comprehended as a spatialized grammar of labour and citizenship that structures the utopic myths of modernity espoused by Pasloski and Kenney. This grammar constructs idealized typologies of ‘good’ worker-citizens who fulfill the anticipated needs of development; it orders the future by delineating the conditions necessary for its articulation. In Kenney’s speeches, everyone—First Nations, new immigrants, and general Canadians—is drawn into the ‘limitless potential’ of this new, multicultural frontier through their participation as worker-citizens. The frontier trope is offered as a container for the projections of collective prosperity that foregrounds the common sense implementation of extractive development. The frontier, however, also draws lines and indigenous and new immigrant workers are located in different sectors in different places: “the sharpness of the geographical frontier [is] an excellent conveyance for the social differences between “us” and “them” ” (Smith 1996, 186). The benefits of mineral development are asymmetrical; they run along the seams between different groups and are distributed in different places. It is within these divisions that we can return to the articulations of indigenous citizenship and spatial governance outlined previously. 86 Thus far, I’ve shown how cultural recognition and resource led economic development simultaneously push and pull First Nations citizens from territory through a monopoly on the meanings and mechanisms of development. I’ve also demonstrated how state myths of Yukon’s modernization fit within an overarching logic of multicultural cohesion. Below, I trace the consequences of these intersecting features through a comparative analysis of two typologies of worker-citizens: 1) efforts to that place First Nations workers in mining and 2) the displacement of First Nations workers from the service sector in Whitehorse. The analysis draws these seemingly discrepant spaces together through the differentiated meanings of mobility and fixity that are categorically inscribed into First Nations and immigrant models of citizen incorporation. 4.4 ‘Developing citizenship’ “First Nations people are not transient. They’ll be here for a very long time.” — Alexco Resources vice-president Rob McIntyre, Yukon News, 2008 Figure 1: Mobile Trades Training Trailer: Centre for Northern Innovation in Mining, Yukon College. Used with permission. 87 Consider the vehicle in this image. This is the Centre for Northern Innovation in Mining’s (CNIM) mobile trades training trailer. It is one of the purest expressions available of the contradictory forms of mobility and stasis that define First Nations employment within the regime of neoliberal, resource-lead economic development in Yukon. “Soon this mobile school,” Prime Minister Harper announced in Whitehorse in 2013, “will be visiting communities in mine sites from Watson Lake to Dawson City and many places in between. It will bring, quite literally, hands-on training to Yukoners everywhere. And that means those living in small remote communities will no longer have the same barriers to sharing in new opportunities” (Harper 2013). While Harper refers to ‘Yukoners’ in general, in the context of Yukon’s recognition politics, he is implicitly speaking about First Nations communities. In an interview, a representative of the Yukon Chamber of Mines elaborates on the cultural aspects of mobile education: The mobile trades trailer. Isn’t that phenomenal?...[S]o my perspective on that, that’s taking into account culture. So that’s a word that we don’t hear thrown around very often. But the culture of growing up in a small community, and coming to Whitehorse of 27,000 people can be considered like Toronto. For never having gone to a major urban center, going to Toronto or Vancouver for the first time in your life, coming to Whitehorse is a huge culture shock for some people. Not only that but there may be all sorts of other cultural aspects as to why you bring the training to a community. Which has proven to be hugely successful. Going into a community, and again the cultural challenges of coming to Whitehorse or any other place, could be very intimidating and very challenging to be able to focus on your studies when you’re worried about who you’re staying with and 88 where you’re going to go, the bright lights of the big city, versus also, you know, maybe you have traditional activities (Yukon Chamber of Mines 2014). The mobile trades trailer is the physical embodiment of the promises of cultural recognition and mineral extraction. This program attempts to ensure the ability of First Nations to participate in modern development without compromising “tradition.” Figure 2: Brochure cover. Centre for Northern Innovation in Mining, Yukon College. Used with permission. 89 The mobile trades trailer was developed by the Centre for Northern Innovation in Mining (CNIM), a department of Yukon College. CNIM opened in 2013 with funding from both the territorial and federal government. The goal of CNIM’s educational programming is to train and develop a stable workforce in Yukon to enable the anticipated growth of Yukon’s mining industry. The cover of a brochure for the CNIM features bodies hard at work. A male welder takes up the majority of the page; another man, a miner, appears in a hardhat and orange reflective jacket, while a smiling woman learning to operate heavy machinery sits attentively below him. CNIM, the brochure tells us, “is very much the product of close cooperation and dialogue among the mining industry, government, First Nations, and Yukon College.” The representation of laboring First Nations is not just advertisement strategy but central to the management of First Nations governments and the mining industry. In his study of a similar industry-oriented educational program in Northern British Columbia, McCreary (2013) notes: “Aboriginal Peoples’ struggle for control over their territories and industry’s desire for greater certainty over their investments in resource development have translated to the development of education programs specifically designed to prepare Aboriginal people for employment in resource development projects on their traditional lands” (287). In a regulatory context defined by finalized land claim and self-governing agreements, mining companies “look first to First Nations communities and surrounding communities” as workers and beneficiaries of mineral investment projects (Yukon Chamber of Mines 2014). When Alexco Resources VP Rob McIntyre referred to the ‘permanence’ of First Nations peoples, he was speaking precisely to the territorial relationships and primary rights to employment that the self-governance agreements are based on. Moreover, McIntyre implies that 90 as a ‘permanent’ group of peoples, First Nations are a necessary resource to develop in order to ensure labour for future projects. As a site of state and industry sponsored educational programming, CNIM is an apt place from which to begin interrogating how the ‘marketization’ of indigenous citizenship materializes in efforts to develop a permanent First Nations mining labour force. In an interview, a CNIM representative stated that a main objective of their programming is working with communities to prepare First Nations to participate in mining. This process was referred to as ‘developing citizenship.’ The phrase ‘developing citizenship’ suggests an indigenous citizenship that is still in the process of formation; a recent configuration of social relations that is not yet fully enacted. First Nations citizenship as such is developed through its affixture to mining development. In this schema, national and indigenous citizenships overlap such that economic contribution to the nation is recognized as legitimate offerings to the Canadian economy. McCreary argues that the institutional culture of industry training programs geared towards First Nations “prepares students to become Aboriginal workers: Aboriginal students are not conditioned to simply assimilate but are instead taught in and through their difference” (281). In the course of the interview, CNIM did not speak to a particular nation that would profit from CNIM’s brand of ‘developing citizenship.’ Despite the distinctiveness implicit in self-governing agreements, First Nations ‘communities’ are often referred to as a loose category of potential beneficiaries. This collapse of difference works to offset variegated social responsibilities, as public promises of mineral investment do not need to be accorded to specific nations in order to be conceived in terms of ‘developing citizenship.’ At the same time, the flexible nature of the mobile trades trailer is consistent with the bounded citizenship of Yukon’s territorial agreements. 91 As Yukon’s First Nations “are not transient”, mining education must be brought to them. The Chamber of Mines representative elaborates of First Nations cultures: …maybe you have traditional activities. You’re a very close-knit family, you’re very close to your grandmother or grandparents. And I mean, First Nations culture is very tight knit, family, you know, they have clans, family structures that are very close and so people grow up and are born, live, and die in these same communities and have for generations, right. So bringing the training to them was, well, very innovative and so far has proven to be very successful as well too (Yukon Chamber of Mines 2014). The mobility of labour training strives to incorporate indigenous knowledge and life practices into industry training. The ‘good’ First Nations citizen—bound by their culture of family and tradition—receives a culturally sensitive education without having to break their territorial binds. In this view, the mobile program effectively harmonizes the integration of anachronistic life-making practices into the mechanics of the modern day resource economy. The city is termed a “very challenging” place for First Nations students who may be unable to adapt to the demands of an urban environment. Liberal values of cultural inclusion underpin the recruitment and incorporation of First Nations labour in mining: They’re [First Nations] very familiar with mining projects and the benefits they provide. And those benefits are many different facets, be it education, training, infrastructure, opportunities, and employment. So they’re more apt to be the ones who have a vested 92 interest in the projects in their communities. As are obviously their levels of government. I mean obviously they’re occurring on their traditional territories, so you know, culturally again they’re on the trap line, they’re working the trap line or they live on a trap line, they hunt, they fish, they live a traditional lifestyle, and there’s a mining project that just happens to be in the vicinity too that they work at, two weeks in and two weeks out, right. So you know it’s a different way of life…a way of life and it has been for at least the last 100 and 120 years, and obviously before that the traditional lifestyle for First Nations spans millennia (Yukon Chamber of Mines 2014). This view of a ‘traditional lifestyle’ is compatible with mine training and future employment, as well as with mineral developments on or near traditional territories. The ‘good’ indigenous citizen participates in the ‘consensus development’ of Yukon’s economy without interruption of traditional life. Here, mining’s promises produce the indigenous past and the modern future as different sides of the same coin through the cultural recognition, citizenship, and economic development. The use of the mobile school in First Nations communities has so far been limited.31 This reflects, in part, a recent dip in global mineral prices that has impacted the viability of current mining operations (CBC News 2015). However, the mobility of the program and the flexibility of mining capital reveal the spatial logics that map idealized topologies of First Nations citizen-workers. Firstly, the flexibility of the school is based on the perceived fixedness of First Nations 31 At the time of interviews, two trainings had been completed near Pelly Crossing and Dawson City. Leaders of both the Selkirk and Tr’ondek Hwechin’in nations offered enthusiastic comments on the program in the local press (CBC News 2013; Yukon College 2013). 93 communities. As a category of people deemed ‘non-transient’, industrial development must accord to that aspect of cultural recognition. ‘Good’ First Nations worker-citizens are made by staying in place. In the above comments, for example, the urban is implicitly portrayed as a space of non-belonging where the benefits of citizenship cannot be fully extended. Secondly, despite the rhetoric of cultural inclusion that underpins efforts to incorporate First Nations labour, in none of my interviews were individual nations referred to by name. Rather, ‘First Nations’ collapses distinct nations into a general category of presumably rural, would-be participants in mining projects. The flexible nature of CNIM’s educational programming reflects the shifting nature of mining projects even if economic development promises to be all encompassing. First Nations citizens are rendered a potential, surplus labour force through this model of ‘good citizenship.’32 The convergence of cultural recognition with market-based indigenous citizenship delineates how and where First Nations citizens may contribute to the national economy through resource extraction. The authority of this form of development, and the grammar of labour and citizenship it entails, additionally implicates the governance of mobility in urban spaces typically considered outside of the purview of resource-lead development. That there is a dominant model of good First Nations worker-citizens alerts us to the possibility that there is also a typology of the opposite. The institutionalization of resource lead development places the economic promises of First Nations citizenship in decidedly rural areas. In turn, this impacts the ways in which the development scripts of Yukon’s future are enacted in urban spaces. 32 See also Tadiar (2013) on surplus and neoliberalism. 94 4.5 ‘Urbs nullius’ Let’s return to the Whitehorse Chamber of Commerce’s summary remarks on immigration policy: “We have the foreign worker program because we can’t get locals to do the job. And when they do come in, it’s for a short time” (quoted in Thompson 2014). By now, it should be unsurprising to learn that the service sector that has celebrated Filipinos has not been as kind to First Nations workers. In Whitehorse, the perceived transience of First Nations persons acts as a restriction to their access of service sector employment. In comparison to the economic citizenship granted to Filipinos, the marketization of indigenous citizenship operates in a more roundabout fashion between citizenship and place – crafting alternative meanings of flexibility and mobility in the process. In this section, I want to briefly elaborate on the spatial logics between different forms of economic citizenship. My purpose is to illuminate how resource led-development in liberal multicultural Yukon is premised on the unequal promises and practices of citizenship. To deliver these central claims, I shift focus from the mining industry, and draw instead on conversations with government and Filipino community members. These comments—mostly pertaining to local perceptions of First Nations workers—allow us to glimpse, if briefly, angles of the reverse side of ‘developing citizenship’: the particular urban spaces in which First Nations worker-citizens are further marginalized. When I asked Yukon government’s Manager of Immigration about the impact of immigration on the territory, and Filipino settlement in Whitehorse in particular, he responded that the Filipino community has positively impacted the cultural landscape. There are now “lot’s of multicultural activities where before let’s say that the population was mostly, mainstream 95 population, people who came with the gold rush and so on so forth” (Manager of Immigration 2014). Just as the original Filipina nannies are held up as pioneers, the Filipino community is positioned here as an agents of diversity and multiculturalism. After he re-affirmed the positive impact that the Yukon Nominee Program has had on the social dynamics of the territory, he concluded his answer: “The Filipinos are very hardworking people, and all the newcomers are very hard working people. People love them” (ibid). The qualities identified—positively impacting the cultural landscape and the capacity for hard work—offer a powerful justification for immigration into Canada and entry into citizenship. Filipinos are conceived as distinct, but also assimilative. They can be joined with other immigrant groups to cultivate a rich, multi-ethnic society, as well as a robust labour force. The sum result is that “people love them”: the Filipino community is fully welcomed into Yukon society. However, as suggested here, Filipinos are “loved” primarily in their capacities to act as ‘good workers.’ These qualities provide the grounds for their permanent incorporation as citizens and community members. The construction of Filipino service sector employees as ‘good worker-citizens’ is a central feature of the larger grammar of citizenship that underwrites Yukon’s modernization myth. This construction also forms the basis for the exclusion of others from certain forms of work. After a brief review of the virtues of multiculturalism, I inquired if there were ‘other’ examples of public reactions to newcomers. My question was addressed my question head on: “If you are going to ask some questions regarding have you seen any increase of racism, I would say no. I think that the community responded in a very positive manner” (ibid). He continued: “You also have to remember that Yukon has a very large number of First Nations. So always in Yukon the population work collaboratively with First Nations. You also have to look at the 96 history of Yukon, where Yukon is, we have 14 first nations here and 12 self governing agreements…The government and the city they work collaboratively with First Nations because that’s just the dynamic…” (ibid). First Nations self-governance is invoked as evidence of affirmative multicultural relationships in Yukon. Despite the fact that Whitehorse itself is home to the territorial boundaries of one self-governing nation (Kwanlin Dun), he did not elaborate on the role of individual nations in the process of negotiation. First Nations governments are once again positioned as a general social category that, in this context, signifies diversity. Moreover, by apparently anticipating my underlying inquiry, the possibility of racial tensions between First Nations and new immigrants is also acknowledged. Victoria, a local journalist and Filipino community member, confirms the friction between First Nations and Filipinos in Whitehorse: “I think there’s this weird sort of tension between First Nations and Filipinos. It’s horrible. Because there’s absolutely no cultural understanding between the two groups. Like, the First Nations are apparently really angry at Filipinos for stealing their jobs because they were the ones working at Tim Hortons and Walmart and these other service sector jobs before we came. And then Filipinos think that they’re lazy and they’re drunk and they’re this and they’re that. And they don’t know” (Victoria 2015).33 In Victoria’s view, the arrival of Filipino workers has led to the displacement of First Nations workers from the service sector in Whitehorse. Her comments also indicate the extension of 33 Interview conducted by Gerry Pratt and Caleb Johnston. 97 common stereotypes that apply to First Nations who are ‘off’ their traditional territories. We can observe here how typologies of Filipinos as ‘good worker-citizens’ play off the perceived inappropriateness of First Nations in this segment of the labour force. As the statements of Yukon’s Manager of Immigration indicate, the development of First Nations self-governance is a necessary component of multiculturalism in Yukon. However, the service sector work that constitutes the basis for the entry for Filipinos seeking Canadian citizenship serves as an axis of exclusion for First Nations who may be seeking similar entitlements. Nicole, a Filipino community leader, similarly commented on themes of displacement and barriers to cross-cultural understandings: …if they don’t understand us and they don’t know us, we’re not going to establish a connection with them. They’re always going to hate us. They’re always going to think that we took over, right?... Not a lot of Filipinos really know the story of First Nations…A lot of Filipinos don’t have time to read, to go to college, because they’re here to work. Time is money. Per hour (Nicole 2015b).34 Nicole’s remarks raise two important themes. First, she highlights the class structure of service sector work and the processes of normalization that fit Filipino workers within it. The ability to work hard—which often includes performing several jobs—is a central component of the model 34 Interview conducted by Gerry Pratt and Caleb Johnston. 98 of ‘good citizenship’ to which Filipino newcomers must accord.35 This political rationality reinforces the overall class position of Filipino service sector workers, while also creating a permanent, surplus workforce of flexible worker-citizens. Second, she observes that the capacities for hard work and flexible labour for which Filipino workers are praised for enact structural barriers to cross-cultural dialogue between Filipinos and First Nations. The institutionalization of the “good worker” in Whitehorse works towards the marginalization of some First Nations residents while also reinforcing the overall class position of Filipino service sector workers. Filipino and First Nations relationships in the service sector reveal contrasting meanings of mobility and fixity that are categorically inscribed into typologies of labour and citizenship. The fictitious promises of indigenous and immigrant citizenships are strung together through differentiated forms of labour. Whereas the national membership of Filipino workers is enabled by their mobilities (between the Philippines and Canada, and between work places), the perceived transience of First Nations persons in Whitehorse acts as a restriction to belonging within this frame of urban employment. We can also observe a second way in which the First Nations—as a constructed social category—are treated as a surplus population. The displacement of First Nations from the service sector potentially erases this form indigenous labour in the city. In the broader context, First Nations peoples are recognized as indigenous citizens and multicultural subjects, but additionally marginalized through the restriction of economic opportunities in the city. Once again, the state recognition of self-governance and economic 35 Immigration has begun to alleviate the labour market shortages that initially prompted the development of the YNP. This logic, however, is dependent on the fact that the majority of Filipino nominees retain their original jobs and then take on additional positions in similar fields. 99 development actively fosters the ‘nullius’ of urbs nullius. “Untethered” from territorial boundaries and performing work not sanctioned as “traditional”, they are excluded from the same jobs that signal the territory’s economic growth and opportunities for citizenship. As Jason Kenney states: “And that’s why we’re making major investments here in Yukon, and throughout Canada, in skills development and linking that to jobs for our First Nations people such as the Yukon mine training initiative…” (Kenney 2014b). 4.6 Conclusion: mining the imagined future The displacement of First Nations workers in Whitehorse is consistent with the spatial logics of neoliberal resource led-development. This chapter has traced the tangled relations of cultural recognition and the revitalization of Yukon’s mining industry. The ‘marketization’ of indigenous citizenship is crafted within the frictions of mobile capital, and the perceived fixity of territorial connections. This relationship governs the potential of economic development for First Nations peoples in Yukon as well as the spaces in which promises of prosperity may be realized. Yukon’s mobile educational programming exemplifies efforts that deliberately place ‘non-transient’ First Nations workers in mining. The concurrent displacement of First Nations labour from the urban service sector is certainly not a direct, causal effect of the prominence of mining in projections of Yukon’s future. However, the differentiated meanings of mobility and transience applied to First Nations and Filipino worker-citizens does accord with the underlying spatial logics that govern which populations are appropriate for which spaces. The development scripts of a future Yukon also contain stage directions that seek to guide the movements and placements of differentiated citizens. While state directives are never all encompassing, we can nonetheless observe their effects in the lingering tensions between First Nations and Filipinos in 100 Whitehorse. Promises of workforce citizenship respond to social fissures, but they also actively foster them. Recalling the national mythos of the frontier, Jason Kenney proclaims that Yukon is a ‘land of opportunity’ and a place with a ‘limitless future.’ It is a place whose potential has not yet been mined. It is precisely this monopoly on an anticipated future that warrants our concern, as it shapes the practices of citizenship within the present. According to Nerferti Tadiar (2013), it is the “seemingly limitless resource that is the future” that is “in actuality the lives of people whose own futures are offered up as exchange values in the present” (30). And yet if the future is limitless, it is also slippery and elusive. I take up the potential of other imagined futures in the final conclusion. 101 Chapter 5: Conclusion This thesis has sought to comprehend the overlapping geographies of Filipino immigrants and First Nations in Yukon, and specifically in terms of their imbrication within the state projects of liberalism, nationalism, and settler colonialism. Throughout the thesis, I have focused on moments and sites where contemporary practices of colonial governance can be visualized and analyzed in relation to immigration narratives. I have sought to examine how state sponsored discourses that promote Yukon’s liberal multiculturalism actively support the essentialization of First Nations and Filipino histories. The case studies and arguments presented here demonstrate that life in the Yukon—and in the Canadian North more generally—is not remote from national (and global) processes and indeed actively contribute to their constitution (see Tsing 1993). Oft-overlooked ‘frontier spaces’ like those in Yukon are important sites from which to the interrogate the uneasy production and consumption of social categories within liberal multiculturalism. The promise of national cohesion implicit in a discourse of cultural recognition reinforces and renews the fundamental frameworks and practices of settler sovereignty. The chapters in this thesis have observed different ways in which the governing of difference in Yukon also involves processes of governing by difference—infusing performances of national belonging with powerful state imperatives. Yet the margins themselves are not coherent, but are also messy and capricious. As Anna Tsing (1994) reminds us, margins are “zones of unpredictability at the edges of discursive stability, where contradictory discourses overlap” and “sites from which we see the instability of social categories” (279). They invite us to imagine “re-articulating, enlivening, and re-arranging 102 the very social categories” that surround the existence of different social groups (ibid). By understanding how Filipino and First Nations histories are written with and against each other—extending from the mythos of the Gold Rush and into a projected future—we can begin to see both the constraints and possibilities of contemporary colonial contact. It is precisely from encounters—indigenous and immigrant—that have been marginalized in theorizations and accounts of colonialism and imperialism where we can observe how the state rectifies colonial anxieties through liberal multiculturalism, as well as where this power may be disrupted. The image of the Filipina woman standing in the snow from the chapter one is no less strange by the end of the thesis; we would do well to continue to ask what other histories she is surrounded by and what other stories she may be able to speak and listen to. I have focused my attention on tracing the logics of state projects in this thesis, and in doing so I hope to have illuminated avenues for further research. The phenomena that I’ve observed in Whitehorse are place-specific, but they also reflect emerging patterns of immigrant settlement that contribute to the changing social and cultural landscape of the North.36 Filipinos are the largest foreign-born population in Yukon, Northwest Territories, and Nunavut combined (Wingrove 2014). The Globe and Mail reports that Filipinos are “part of the changing face of Canada’s North at a time when development boosts demand for labour and the chance for a firm foothold in Canada” (ibid).37 Other immigration programs and policies have great potential to alter population dynamics and social relationships in Northern and rural areas of Canada. 36 For a relevant example from Nunavut, see Rhose Harris-Galias’ (2011) account of Filipino settlement in Iqaluit. 37 For relevant depictions of a ‘changing North’ in a context of climate change, see the Globe and Mail series “The North: Myth, Reality, Future.” Anxieties pertaining to climate change are often mixed with population concerns. For an example see “Future Histories of Whitehorse: Scenarios of Change” (Whitehorse Adapation Project Team 2010). 103 Northwest Territories, for example, recently won an exemption from a hiring ban on temporary foreign workers; a change that will help businesses cater to Chinese tourism (Brohman 2015). The implementation of a new Express Entry Stream within the Yukon Nominee Program also has the potential to alter some of the immigration dynamics that this thesis has observed.38 With this broader context in mind, I return here to the questions of temporality that have run throughout this thesis. The governing of difference in Yukon is not just spatial, but also a project of time39: the “interlocking of presents, pasts, and futures that retain their depths of other presents, pasts, and futures” (Mbembe 2001, 16). How might we begin to “unlock” these multiple temporalities? In this thesis, I’ve used to the term ‘imagined futures’ to highlight the play of projected and anticipated futures that are necessary to state discourses of multiculturalism, modernity, and development. By centering settler colonialism in this analysis, however, I have also examined futures that are not just imagined, but remembered. In settler societies, the past poses a continuous set of challenges to the legitimacy of colonial objectives. As Grant Farrad (2008) writes: “For the settler, the time before persistently presents itself as the only time that matters, the time that unsettles the settler, the time that cannot be passed. Settlement marks a kind of infinity because it represents, due to its foundational violence, the time that will not pass—and cannot be passed— away” (799). The on-going spectre of colonial settlement haunts the recognition politics of contemporary Yukon, in all their variable iterations. Anxieties of past and future are produced in this friction, with significant consequence to relationships of difference in the present. 38 see http://www.education.gov.yk.ca/employers/express_entry.html 39 On time, colonialism, and settlement see Mawani (2014). 104 As such, what I’ve documented in this thesis is not just the production of futures that are imagined, but also the active invention of remembered futures. I use this term in the dual sense to refer to both the real and continued violence of colonialism and indigenous erasure, as well as state sponsored imaginaries that numb the past through multiculturalism. If diversity, inclusion, prosperity, and multicultural nation belonging—exemplified by the ‘success’ and transformative capacities of the Filipino community—are the future, then they can also be imagined as the past. Contemporary colonial power operates in part as a collective vision in which the past has been settled so that the future may be claimed. But if the future is an object of colonial anxiety precisely because of it’s uncertainty, it also holds the potential for new and unexpected possibilities. The future never resides solely in the purview of the state, and imagined futures are necessary to the day to day lives of Yukon residents—Filipinos, First Nations, or otherwise. Indeed, as Neferti Tadiar (2013) argues, it is these other temporalities that are rendered excess through capital accumulation: “entire life-times of lived and felt relations, borne disappointments and worked-up aspirations, pasts never to be memorialized, and imagined futures never to be realized” (32). From this vantage, how might we begin to craft alternative potentials for possibilities and social relationships outside of the processes of separation that I’ve described in these chapters? This is, of course, a far larger question than can be answered in this thesis, but I end with it nonetheless. In a broader context of such vibrant, visible, and constant change, it is necessary to look towards excesses of day-to-day life—to encounters and imaginaries rendered disposable through state and capital projects—to recall and remember the potentials of other sorts of futures. 105 Bibliography Ahmed, Sarah. 2000. Strange encounters: embodied others in post-coloniality. London: Routledge. Alarcon, Krystle. 2013a. First Filipina nanny helped community grow. Yukon News. August 30. Alarcon, Krystle. 2013b. ‘If we can be six in the apartment, why not?’. The Tyee, retrieved January 20, 2014 from http://thetyee.ca/News/2013/07/19/Whitehorse-Migrant-Workers/ Alarcon, Krystle. 2013c. Living in limbo: a temporary foreign worker’s story. Yukon News. July 31. Alcantara, Christopher, Kirk Cameron, and Steven Kennedy. 2012. Assessing Devolution in the Canadian North: A Case Study of the Yukon Territory. Arctic. 65(3): 328-338. Alia, Valerie. 1999. Un/Covering the North: News, Media, and Aboriginal People. Vancouver: UBC Press. Alicia. 2014. Interview, September 3. Altamirano-Jimenez, Isabel. 2004. North American first peoples: slipping up into market citizenship? Citizenship Studies. 8(4): 349-365. Altamirano-Jimenez, Isabel. 2013. Indigenous encounters with neoliberalism: Place, women, and the environment in Canada and Mexico. Vancouver: UBC Press. Anahita, Sine and Tamara L. Mix. 2006. Retrofitting Frontier Masculinity for Alaska’s War Against Wolves. Gender & Society. 20(3): 332–53. Anderson, Benedict. 1991. Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso Books. Balibar, Etienne. 1999. The Nation Form: History and Ideology. In Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, eds. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, 86-106. London: Verso. Bannerji, Himani. 2000. The dark side of the nation: essays on multiculturalism, nationalism and gender. Toronto: Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc. Bauder, Harald. 2005. Landscape and Scale in Media Representations: The Construction of Offshore Farm Labour in Ontario, Canada. Cultural Geographies. 12(1): 41–58. 106 Bauder, Harald. 2008. Foreign Farm Workers in Ontario (Canada): Exclusionary Discourse in the Newsprint Media. Journal of Peasant Studies 35 (1): 100–118. Bauder, Harald. 2011. “Closing the immigration–Aboriginal Parallax Gap.” Geoforum. 42(5): 517–19. Benhabib, Seyla. 2004. The rights of others: aliens, residents, and citizens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beyreis, David Charles. 2005. Middle class masculinity and the Klondike Gold Rush. Unpublished MA thesis. Oklahoma State University. Brohman, Erin. 2015. Yellowknife wins exemption from temporary foreign worker hiring ban. CBC News. April 23. Byrd, Jodi. 2011. The transit of empire: Indigenous critiques of colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Byrd, Jodi. 2014. Arriving on a Different Shore: Us Empire at Its Horizons. College Literature. 41(1): 174-181. Canadian Journalism Project. 2013. 7 interesting facts from the Newspaper Canada 2012 Circulation Data Report. Retrieved August 24 from http://j-source.ca/article/7-interesting-facts-newspaper-canada-2012-circulation-data-report CBC News. 2013. Yukon College takes trades training on the road. CBC News. December 12. CBC News. 2015. Yukon's Wolverine Mine shutting down due to falling resource prices. CBC News, January 26. Center for Northern Innovation in Mining. 2014. Interview, September 25. Chilisa, Bagele. 2012. Indigenous research methodologies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Clarkson, Joshua. 2015. Foreign workers take jobs nobody else wants. Yukon News. March 11. Connell, Robert. 1993. The Big Picture: Masculinities in Recent World History. Theory and Society. 22(5): 597–623. Coulthard, Glen. 2007. Subjects of empire: Indigenous peoples and the ‘politics of recognition’in Canada. Contemporary Political Theory 6(4): 437-460. Coulthard, Glen. 2014a. Red skin, White masks: Rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 107 Coulthard, Glen. 2014b. Urbs Nullius: Gentrification, Settler-Colonialism, and Indigenous Sovereignty in the City. Lecture presented at the Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, April 22. David. 2015. Interview, January 28. Interview conducted by Gerry Pratt and Caleb Johnston. Diala, Ruthcelie. 2014. My Immigration Experience to Yukon, Canada. Yukon Department of Education. Retrieved November 3, 2014 from http://www.education.gov.yk.ca/employers/immigration_stories.html Farred, Grant. 2008. The Unsettler. South Atlantic Quarterly. 107(4): 791-808. Fujikane, Candace, and Jonathan Okamura, eds. 2008. Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaiʻi. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press. Furniss, Elizabeth. 1999. The burden of history: colonialism and the frontier myth in a rural Canadian Community. Vancouver: UBC Press. Grace, Sherrill. 2001. Canada and the idea of North. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Gladish, Mike. 2011. A nod to new Canadians. Yukon News. June 24. Goldring, Luin and Patricia Landolt, eds. 2013. Producing and Negotiating Non-Citizenship. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Harper, Stephen. 2013. Prime Minister Harper’s 2013 Northern Tour. Retrieved August 1, 2014 from http://www.northernpublicaffairs.ca/index/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/HARPER-2013.pdf Harris-Galia, Rhose. 2011. Arctic Bayanihan. In Mathur, Ashok, Jonathan Dewar, and Mike DeGagné, eds. Cultivating Canada: Reconciliation through the lens of cultural diversity. Ottawa: Aboriginal Healing Foundation. Ion, Peter. 2015. New program must work hard to offset negativity. Whitehorse Star, April 17. Kenney, Jason. 2014a. The Honourable Jason Kenney delivers a speech on recent changes to Employment Insurance in the North at Yukon College. Government of Canada, retrieved August 10, 2014 from http://news.gc.ca/web/article-en.do?nid=824439 Kenney, Jason. 2014b. Jason Kenney makes an important announcement that will help Yukon residents with disabilities get jobs. Government of Canada, retrieved August 10, 2014 from http://news.gc.ca/web/article-en.do?nid=824079 108 Keung, Nicolas. 2014. Filipino Canadians fear end of immigrant dreams for nannies. Toronto Star. July 22. Lawrence, Bonita, and Enakshi Dua. 2005. Decolonizing Antiracism. Social Justice. 32(4): 120–143. Ligaya. 2015. Interview, January 28. Conducted by Gerry Pratt and Caleb Johnston. Manager of Immigration. 2014. Interview, September 5. Mawani, Renisa. 2009. Colonial proximities: Crossracial encounters and juridical truths in British Columbia, 1871-1921. Vancouver: UBC Press. Mawani, Renisa. 2012. Law’s Archive. Annual Review of Law and Social Science. 8: 337-365. Mawani, Renisa. 2014. Law As Temporality: Colonial Politics and Indian Settlers. UC Irvine Law Review 4 (2014): 65-95. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley, University of California Press. McClintock, Anne. 1991. ‘No Longer in a Future Heaven’: Women and Nationalism in South Africa. Transition. 104–23. McClintock, Anne. 1995. Imperial Leather. New York: Routledge. McCreary, Tyler. Mining Aboriginal success: The politics of difference in continuing education for industry needs. The Canadian Geographer. 57(3): 280-288. Miller Dickinson Blaise. 2014. Yukon Labour Market Supply and Migration Study. Retrieved September 1, 2014 from http://www.education.gov.yk.ca/pdf/Yukon_Labour_Market _Supply _and_Migration_Study_April_10_2014.pdf Morgan, Nina. 2012. Concurrency in Transnational American Studies. The Journal of Transnational American Studies. 4(1): 1-6. Yukon settlement services. 2014. Interview, August 15. Nadasdy, Paul. 2003. Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal- State Relations in the Southwest Yukon. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Nadasdy, Paul. 2012. Boundaries among Kin: Sovereignty, the Modern Treaty Process, and the Rise of Ethno-Territorial Nationalism among Yukon First Nations. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 54(3): 499–532. Nicole. 2014. Interview, August 27. 109 Nicole. 2015. Interview, January 28. Interview conducted by Gerry Pratt and Caleb Johnston. Oke, Chris. 2011. Yukon Retains Its Foreign Workers. Yukon News. June 11. Pasloski, Darrell. 2013. You say you want a devolution? In Yukon, it’s reality. The Globe and Mail, March 25. Patrick. 2014. Interview, August 31, 2013. Perrin, Andrew, and Stephen Vaisey. 2008. Parallel Public Spheres: Distance and Discourse in Letters to the Editor1. American Journal of Sociology. 114 (3): 781–810. Perry, Adam. 2012. Barely legal: racism and migrant farm labour in the context of Canadian multiculturalism. Citizenship Studies 16(2): 189-201. Philippine Embassy Ottawa. 2013. Yukon Premier Calls on the PH Ambassador – Praises Filipino Community for Contributing to Local Economic Development. Retrieved August 25, 2015 from http://philembassy.ca Polanco Sorto, Geraldina. 2013. Behind the counter: migration, labour policy, and temporary work in a global fast food chain. Unpublished dissertation. University of British Columbia. Polanco Sorto, Geraldina. 2014. Social citizenship in an age of temporary flows: migrant workers in British Columbia’s immigrant settlement sector. Transnational Social Review: A Social Work Journal. 4(2-3): 193-206. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2002. The cunning of recognition: Indigenous alterities and the making of Australian multiculturalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2005. What’s Love Got to Do with It? The Race of Freedom and the Drag of Descent. Social Analysis, 173–181. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011. Economies of abandonment: Social belonging and endurance in late liberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011. Povinelli, Elizabeth. 2011b. The governance of the prior. Interventions. 13(1): 13–30. Pratt, Geraldine. 2012. Families apart: Migrant mothers and the conflicts of labor and love. Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Razack, Sherene. 2002. Introduction. In Race, space, and the law: unmapping a white settler society, ed. Sherene Razack, 1-20. Toronto: Between the lines. 110 Rifkin, Mark. 2013. Settler Common Sense. Settler Colonial Studies. 3(3-4): 322–40. Rifkin, Mark. 2014. The Frontier as (movable) Space of Exception. Settler Colonial Studies. 4(2): 176–80. Ronson, Jacqueline. 2013. Film fest brings world stories home. Yukon News. February 1. Sabin, Jerald. 2014. Contested Colonialism: Responsible Government and Political Development in Yukon. Canadian Journal of Political Science 47 (02): 375–96. Said, Edward. 1994. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Saranillio, Dean. 2013. Why Asian Settler Colonialism Matters: A Thought Piece on Critiques, Debates, and Indigenous Difference. Settler Colonial Studies 3(3-04): 280–294. Sharma, Nandita, and Cynthia Wright. 2008. Decolonizing resistance, challenging colonial states. Social Justice. 35(3): 120-138. Skylar, Isaac. 2011. Local Ire. Yukon News. June 15. Smith, Neil. 1996. The new urban frontier: Gentrification and the revanchist city. New York: Routledge. Snelgrove, Corey, Rita Dhamoon, and Jeff Corntassel. 2014. Unsettling settler colonialism: The discourse and politics of settlers, and solidarity with Indigenous nations. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society. 3(2): 1-32. Stanford, Jim. 2008. Staples, Deindustrialization, and Foreign Investment: Canada’s Economic Journey back to the Future. Studies in Political Economy. 82: 7–34. Streicker, John. 2014. Diversity and waiving the Canadian flag makes it all worth it. Whitehorse Star. July 14. Suarez-Navaz, Liliana. 2007. Immigration and the Politics of Space Allocation in Rural Spain: The Case of Andalusia. The Journal of Peasant Studies. 34(2): 207-239. Tadiar, Nerferti. 2013. Life-Times of Disposability within Global Neoliberalism. Social Text 115. 31(2): 19-48. Thobani, Sunera. 2007. Exalted subjects: Studies in the making of race and nation in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Tobin, Chuck. 2015. Company shuts Ross River area mine, lays off workers. Yukon News. January 26. 111 Thompson, John. 2014. Territory to expand foreign worker program. Yukon News. June 18. Tsing, Anna. 1993. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-way Place. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tsing, Anna. 1994. From the Margins. Cultural Anthropology. 9(3): 279-297. Tsing, Anna. 2005. Friction: An ethnography of global connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tungohan, Ethel. 2015. Migrant advocacy groups fight April 1 temporary foreign worker deportations. Rabble, retrieved April 1, 2015 from http://rabble.ca/news/2015/03/migrant-advocacy-groups-fight-april-1-temporary-foreign-worker-deportations Victoria. 2015. Interview, January 28. Conducted by Gerry Pratt and Caleb Johnston. Vipond, Mary. 2000. The mass media in Canada. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company. Walcher, Werner. 2014. Cold Paradise. Documentary Film. Cold Paradise Productions. Whitehorse: Yukon. Retrieved April 15 from https://vimeo.com/ondemand/cold paradise/107279799 Wingrove, Josh. 2014. Filipinos find opportunity and community in Canada’s North. Globe and Mail. January 22. Whitehorse Adapation Project Team. 2010. Future Histories of Whitehorse: Scenarios of Change. Northern Climate ExChange. Retrieved July 14, 2014 from https://yukoncollege.yk.ca/downloads/future-histories-of-whitehorse.pdf Whitehorse Star. 2014. Be bold, exploit your strengths, historian urges. Whitehorse Daily Star. October 10. Yukon Chamber of Mines. 2014. Interview, September 27. Yukon College. 2013. $1.8 million Yukon College mobile trades training lab open for business. Retrieve July 26, 2015 from http://yukoncollege.yk.ca/news/post/1.8_million_yukon_college_mobile_trades_training_lab_open_for_business Yukon Department of Education. 2010. Yukon Nominee Program Survey Report. Retrieved October 10, 2013 from http://www.education.gov.yk.ca/pdf/edu_YNPreport.pdf Yukon News. 2008. Ottawa announces job-training plan for aboriginals. Yukon News, July 10.