Abstract This paper studies the social issues for the Circumpolar North, with its thin population and great wealth of natural resources. The paper explains how there are growing social and economic dislocations, coupled with scientific concern over anthropogenic stresses, on the environment and resources. This paper therefore studies the complex series of shared problems related to: (1) climate change, (2) economic globalization, (3) international scrutiny of the peoples of Arctic North, (4) conflicts over the use of natural resources and (5) health,education and environmental concerns for the indigenous communities.
Outline
Introduction
Background
An Overview of Social Issues
Social Issues in the International Context
Sustainable Development and Self-Determination
Health Issues: General Overview
Indigenous Health Issues
Education as a Social Issue
The Environment-Health Nexus
Conclusion: The Impacts of Change
Challenges Facing Arctic Communities
From the Paper "The interaction of climate, landscape, human migration and cultures has been fundamental to the development of the circumstances local communities now find themselves in. Indigenous northern peoples developed many similar methods and techniques for coping with the extremes of environment in which they lived and the effects of contact on northern Indigenous peoples, in the long run, were somewhat similar across the Circumpolar North. National governments, understanding it was their role and duty to integrate northern Indigenous peoples into the nation, to define national borders and assume responsibility for the people inside those borders, applied thinking rooted in cultures vastly different from those of the northern Indigenous peoples. A form of what we would now recognize as cultural imperialism, colonialism, or ethnocentrism often underlaid the relations between government representatives and northern peoples. The results of often well intentioned programs were the decline in the use and health of Indigenous languages, the erosion of cultural elements that no longer served to make sense of the changing northern world, and the undermining of national and individual identity."
