Book Reading:
Wednesday, 6 November 2019, 4:00 p.m.,
Communications Building, Room 120
followed by a reception hosted by the Consulate General of Canada in Seattle, Communications 204

RSVP to canada@uw.edu (the first 15 to register will
receive a free copy of Hunting the Northern Character!)

Description:  We often hear world leaders, environmentalists, and the media invoke “the northern character” and “Arctic identity,” but what do these terms mean, exactly? Stereotypes abound, but these southern perspectives fail to capture northern realities. During decades of service as a legislator, mediator, and negotiator, Tony Penikett witnessed a new northern consciousness grow out of the challenges of the Cold War, climate change, land rights struggles, and the boom and bust of resource megaprojects. In Hunting the Northern Character, Penikett argues that the negotiation of Indigenous land rights treaties and self-government agreements in Alaska, Northern Canada and Greenland over the last fifty years have totally transformed the character of the Arctic, in ways the capital cities of Canada, Denmark, Norway, Russia and the United States
do not yet recognize.

Biography – Tony Penikett—UW’s Canada Fulbright Chair in Arctic Studies (2013-14)—is currently a mediator and negotiator in Vancouver, Canada. Penikett is a former politician from the Yukon who served as premier from 1985 to 1992, Minister for Aboriginal Land Claims Negotiations, and British Columbia Deputy Minister for Negotiations (First Nations Treaties and Labour). During his tenure as premier Penikett was the first leader of the Yukon to successfully negotiate land claims treaties with Yukon First Nations. From 2001 to 2005, Penikett was a senior fellow on native treaty issues and a visiting professor for the Undergraduate Semester in Dialogue at Simon Fraser University. He has also worked at the Walter and Duncan Gordon Foundation and for West Coast Environmental Law.