1. For a description of the early history of efforts to find and navigate the Northwest Passage, see P. Bernier, The Arctic Grail: The Quest for the Northwest Passage and the North Pole, 1818-1909 (1988). For a shorter but updated account, see D. Pharand (with L. Legault), Northwest Passage: Arctic Straits (1984), 22-58.
2. On this vision, see Graham Rowley, "Bringing the Outside In: Towards Development of the Passage," in F. Griffiths, ed. Politics of the Northwest Passage (1987), 25-45.
3. The most prominent exception is the Svalbard Archipelago (Spitzbergen), where the issue of sovereignty between Norway and Russia is not finally resolved but has been circumvented by functional treaty arrangements dating back to the early 20th century. So far as is known, the only unresolved territorial (as distinct from boundary delimitation) issue in the Canadian sector of the Arctic is that between Canada and Denmark/Greenland with respect to the status of Hans Island in the Nares Strait between Greenland and Ellesmere Island. Canada and Denmark have negotiated bilateral functional arrangements in fishery management and environmental protection and a continental shelf delimitation agreement, partly with a view to finessing the territorial issue over Hans Island. Nigel D. Bankes, "Forty Years of Canadian Sovereignty Assertion in the Arctic, 1947-87," 40 Arctic 285, at 286 (1987). See also, Susan J. Rolston and Ted L. McDorman, "Maritime Boundary Making in the Arctic Region," in D. M. Johnston and P. Saunders, eds., Ocean Boundary Making: Regional Issues and Developments, 16-73 (1988), at 28-32.
4. See, for example, Luzius Wildhaber, "Sovereignty and International Law," in R. St. J. Macdonald and D. M. Johnston, eds., The Structure and Process of International Law (1986), 425-52. Sovereignty might be regarded as "the aggregate sum of several powers, so that a part may be taken away or delegated without destroying sovereign statehood as such." Ibid., at p. 442. Indeed one can list at least a dozen kinds of restrictions that might be suffered by a nation-state without infringing upon its formal sovereignty or independence. James Crawford, "The Criteria for Statehood in International Law," 48 British Year Book of International Law 93 (1976-1977).
5. The process of establishing Nunavut began with the Nunavut Political Accord signed in Igaluit in 1992. See Canada, Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, Agreement between the Inuit of the Nunavut Settlement Area and Her Majesty the Queen in Right of Canada (1993). For an analysis, see K. Cameron and G. White, Northern Governments in Transition: Political and Constitutional Development in the Yukon, Nunavut, and the Western North-west Territories (1995), 89-115.