Next Step : Canada’s Inuit Reclaiming Ancestral Land : After 16 years of negotiation, they are about to get their own territory--Nunavut--and the potential problems that accompany self-government.

When he was growing up here in the Canadian Arctic, Malachi Arreak hunted seals and caribou on what he considered to be “his” land--the vast, treeless tundra where his forebears have managed to hold out against fantastic odds for thousands of years. From time to time, he would bump into a prospector, always a white.

“I’d say, ‘Hey! That ain’t no Eskimo,’ ” says Arreak, himself an Inuk, or one of the Inuit, as Canada’s Eskimos prefer to be called.

Arreak didn’t enjoy these encounters. “We were never told” what the prospectors had come looking for, he says. “Nobody ever bothered to consult us. We would just go out hunting, and here’s another . . . camp. When the helicopters would start buzzing us, I almost fired in anger.”

But instead of futilely squeezing off the occasional “expressive” round, Arreak and his fellow Inuit have spent the past 16 years negotiating twin compacts with the federal government: one a huge land-claim settlement in the Canadian Arctic, the other a deal that will give the Inuit a form of self-government by 1999.

The two agreements are now close to ratification. When they are in place, Canada’s existing Northwest Territories will be split in two, and the eastern portion--a wild and rugged region inhabited mainly by the Inuit--will become a new Canadian territory called “Nunavut.” (Pronounced “NOON-a-voot,” the name means “our land” in Inuktitut, the language of the eastern Arctic.)

Since 80% of the people living within the future territory’s boundaries are natives, the Inuit will inevitably control Nunavut’s elected government. The accompanying land-claim agreement will give them title to 18% of Nunavut’s land--about 136,000 square miles, larger than New Mexico, which is the fifth-largest U.S. state--and a say over the management of the rest. The Inuit will, in fact, become Canada’s largest landowners.

To Arreak, now 27 and acting chief negotiator for the Inuit, the most important benefit of Nunavut will be “getting the control of our resources back up north, where it belongs.”

“We’re tired of watching the world go by,” he says. “We want to be involved. We’re saying, ‘It’s our land, and if you want to develop it, you’ve got to talk to the owners.’ ”

But the implications of Nunavut encompass much more than mere resource development. Not only will the agreements settle longstanding uncertainties about who owns what in the eastern Arctic, they also call for the transfer of about $500 million, plus interest, from the government to the Inuit for native-owned business development.

In a world where seemingly every country now finds itself home to one or more restive and independence-minded minorities, Nunavut offers an encouraging lesson in how one country, Canada, is trying to bring an alienated people into the national bosom. (Australia and Brazil have already sent delegations to study the Nunavut package.)

With Nunavut, Ottawa has committed itself to paying all “reasonable” costs of creating and operating the new, Inuit-led territorial government--costs that will run to hundreds of millions of dollars.

And the Inuit have, for their part, responded with enthusiasm and patriotism.

“We’re Canadians and we’re damned proud Canadians,” says Arreak, who points out that the Inuit, unlike the French-speaking separatists of Quebec, have no wish to leave the confederation. “We’re probably more Canadian than anybody else,” he says.

Canada’s Inuit--and everybody else in this country’s vast Northwest Territories--are governed by a territorial legislature sitting in Yellowknife, in the western sub-Arctic. Though the legislature can hardly be called despotic--it includes Inuit representatives, as well as whites and Indians--it is distant. Pond Inlet, for example, is some 1,200 miles from Yellowknife, about as far as Los Angeles is from Dallas.

Not surprisingly, considering the daunting geography, Inuit concerns are not always at the top of the agenda in Yellowknife. One telling example: Inuit legislators found themselves debating the merits of a territorial seat-belt law, even though the eastern Arctic has no roads, and the Inuit generally get around by snowmobile, dog sled or light plane.

Less humorous are the social and economic conditions in which most Inuit find themselves today. Unemployment runs as high as 45% in Inuit hamlets. Alcoholism, teen suicide and spousal violence are sky-high. Hard drugs can be found in the most pristine villages, far from the urban ghetto scene usually associated with narcotics. One Inuk has already died of AIDS.

Though the roots of these afflictions are complex, most analysts trace them to the 1950s, when the once-nomadic, isolated Inuit were taken off the land by a well-meaning federal government and settled in permanent villages, the more easily to oversee their affairs.

“We’ve gone from basically the Stone Age to the Space Age in just three generations, which is why some people are having trouble now,” says Arreak.

Adds his federal-government counterpart, senior Nunavut negotiator Barry Dewar, “I think there was an erosion of their sense of ability to control their own fate.”

Certainly the Inuit weren’t going to control their own fate as long as they remained part of the Northwest Territories. According to Dewar, some 42,000 people live in the Northwest Territories, but only 17,000 of them are Inuit--not enough to command a majority in the Yellowknife legislature.

It was in the 1970s that Inuit activists began to talk seriously about breaking their ancestral lands away from the western portion of the Northwest Territories, which is home, mostly, to Indians and people of mixed white-Indian ancestry.

The Inuit were motivated, in the late 1960s, by the political activism of other minority groups--notably blacks and American Indians--and also by the sudden feeling that their lands were threatened. Across Canada, developers had begun touting a number of resource-based mega-projects for Indian and Inuit land. Huge dams were slated for Inuit and Cree land in northern Quebec, oil drilling and pipelines planned for Inuit and Dene land in the Northwest Territories and logging projects proposed that would affect a number of Indian tribes in British Columbia.

Indians and Inuit across Canada filed lawsuits and won a Supreme Court ruling that if their forebears hadn’t signed treaties surrendering their land, then they still held “aboriginal title” to it.

But what did that mean? The courts offered no clear answer. With native peoples and the developers at loggerheads over who really owned the land and which activities could proceed upon it, the federal government stepped in, announcing in 1973 that it would negotiate land-claim settlements with all Indians and Inuit whose ancestors had not already signed treaties.

That was the start of nearly two decades of negotiations all over Canada.

In the eastern Arctic, Inuit activists began surveying the land, gathering evidence about which places their ancestors had made their own. In 1976, they unveiled the first version of Nunavut.

That early proposal bears only a passing resemblance to what Nunavut will look like if it comes into full flower as expected in 1999. For one thing, the Inuit hoped to include the oil-rich littoral zone of the Beaufort Sea in their new territory, but that ambition came to nothing.

Another major problem for the Inuit has been the fierce resistance of the Dene, the Indians who inhabit the western portion of the Northwest Territories. The Dene see the question of “aboriginal title” differently from the Inuit and have opposed the Inuit’s willingness to surrender it in exchange for modern-day landowner status. In addition, the Dene have maintained that some of the lands the Inuit claim as Nunavut are, in fact, theirs.

It has taken 16 years to resolve these and other differences. And doubts linger. The Dene have been threatening to block the birth of Nunavut in the courts. Also, the Inuit must vote on the land claim, and the touchy matter of surrendering “aboriginal title” that it raises, in November.

Some Inuit will certainly vote against the new territory.

“Most Inuit, including our leaders, have always thought it highly improper for anyone to demand that we sell our land and extinguish our fundamental rights,” argues Saali Peter, an Inuk television producer in Iqaluit who has been speaking out against the Nunavut arrangements because he is philosophically opposed to surrendering aboriginal title. “Perhaps it is time we sent feelers to the United States, Norway, or even the United Nations . . . to see if someone else could give us a fairer deal.”

But despite such opposition, most observers expect the Inuit to ratify the Nunavut agreements in November. Already, educators in the Arctic have begun offering classes to train a new cadre of Inuit civil servants. (Since many Inuit villages offer instruction only through junior high school, the Inuit fear they could end up with a government staffed by white southerners if they don’t train a proper civil service of their own now.)

And Arreak, the negotiator, will soon be off on a transarctic series of town hall meetings, where he hopes to sell the deal he helped craft.

If the mood when the agreement in principle was signed is any indication, he’ll have an easy time of it. On that day in 1990, hundreds of Inuit flocked to the tiny hamlet of Igloolik from all over the Arctic, eager to take in the signing ceremony. They built a huge igloo, called a qaggiq , and feasted on caribou meat and the salmon-like Arctic char.

And when a local elder, Noah Piugattuk, spoke out in favor of Nunavut, many wept tears of joy.

“In the past, before the white man came, Inuit survived on their own,” Piugattuk says. “To this day, we can still make it on our own.”

Breaking New Ground

If the Nunavut agreements are ratified by the Inuit and the Canadian Parliament, the Inuit will receive:

* A guarantee that the federal government will create a territory called Nunavut in the Inuit-majority eastern Arctic.

* Exclusive title to 136,000 square miles, or 18% of Nunavut.

* Hunting rights on Nunavut lands not owned by the Inuit.

* A share in the federal government’s oil, gas and mineral royalties.

* The right of first refusal on sporting developments and commercial uses of Nunavut resources.

* Equal representation on boards that will manage Arctic resources.

* Compensation totaling about $500 million in 1989 dollars, payable over 14 years.

* An $11.3-million fund to train Inuit civil servants.