Student Travel Diary: Katherine Saunders
Below, MA student, Katherine Saunders, recounts her SITA-funded reseach trip to Ottawa:
In May 2017, I travelled to Ottawa with funding provided by Scholarship in the Arts to do archival research for my Master’s Major Research Paper on the Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line. The DEW Line was a Cold War defensive project which was a joint effort by the United States Air Force, the Royal Canadian Air Force, and the Department of Northern Affairs and Natural Resources. It was composed of a series of radar stations across the Canadian North as well as in Alaska, Greenland, and the Faroe Islands. My research topic was how the DEW Line impacted northern Inuit communities, both socially and environmentally, during the Cold War, and the significance of the remediation effort in the 1990’s and 2000’s for these communities.
I spent my five days in Ottawa at Library and Archives Canada looking at Canadian government records related to the DEW Line. Because of time constraints, I photographed these records so that I could look at them when I returned home to St. John’s. When I began to read the files, I found a wealth of useful information. I have found evidence of different standards of treatment of Inuit and non-Native DEW Line employees, descriptions of environmental destruction which occurred as a result of the DEW Line, and examples of how Inuit people refused to accept the destruction of their lands by the military. This information was invaluable for me and formed a major part of my argument.
I would not have had access to any of this information without the ability to visit Library and Archives Canada in person. I enjoyed my trip to Ottawa and was able to take advantage of the opportunity to visit some tourist sites during the evenings, including Parliament Hill, the Canadian Museum of History, and the National Art Gallery. I wish to thank the Scholarship in the Arts committee for their generous gift of $1,300.00 towards my travel and research. I used this archival material to produce my major research paper towards the completion of my Master of Arts degree.