Susan McHugh publishes article on Inuit sled dog massacre by Canadian police

Susan McHugh, Ph.D., professor and chair of English, published an article in The Global Animal, a special issue of English Studies in Canada, the journal of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English.  The article, titled "'A Flash Point in Inuit Memories': Endangered Knowledges in the Mountie Sled Dog Massacre," explores how the demise of one of the oldest kinds of dogs in the Americas – descended of the creatures confirmed by recent genetic studies to have accompanied humans crossing the Bering Strait at least 13000 years ago – became interlinked with the coerced settlement of traditionally nomadic Inuit people in the second half of the twentieth century.

Drawing on eyewitness testimonies gathered by the Qikiqtani Truth Commission, one of the few First-Peoples-initiated justice inquiries to date, the essay argues that more is at stake in the debates surrounding reports that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police slaughtered Inuit sled dogs by the thousands from the 1950s into the 1970s, effectively incarcerating their owners in communities created by the government.

McHugh's essay "powerfully unmasks the ethos of government policies that devastate Inuit culture by eradicating valuable forms of interspecies companionship in the Canadian arctic," according to the special issue's guest editors Karen Ball and Melissa Haynes, who note the far-reaching implications of this case study.  "In defiance of narratives that construct the global animal as the passive object of political agendas, McHugh insists on the value of interspecies partnership in defending against our uneven exclusion from the legal protections afforded by a law that supposedly extends to all citizens."

The essay is part of McHugh's research into the role of human-animal relationships in historical and other narratives of mass killing.