Franklin shipwrecks belong to Canada

Re: Of shipwrecks & sovereignty, July 15.

Adriana Craciun offers a tightly argued case to any who already share her premises about ideas of sovereignty and claims on relics like the Franklin ships, but also tosses us a couple of red herrings by emphasizing that the Inuit had already been in the region for circa 1,000 years or that “Canada” did not yet exist when the ships were lost.

Well, yes. No one is unaware that Inuit people began settling the region and replacing the previous, possibly kindred, Dorset peoples between 1300 and 1500, dominating the area of the Franklin expedition almost 500 years before its arrival. Canada is nevertheless correct to stress the laws of maritime salvage and sovereignty over ships, which covers wrecks going back many centuries earlier than Franklin’s all over the world and grants ownership to the United Kingdom.

One need hardly add that the ships are entirely products of 19th-century British culture and are not Inuit artifacts. Given the impact the expedition and its followers had on the Inuit, that needn’t preclude agreement on how to house some material in a northern museum.

The fact that “Canada,” the Dominion confederated in 1867, did not yet exist in Franklin’s day is hardly relevant. The earlier Province of Canada certainly did, and along with other Confederation partners it eventually inherited all British claims.

I agree the future handling of northern sovereignty may prove more complex, as will all clashes between the claims of Indigenous people who lived at a pre-state level and those of the modern system of states. But Canada is the local representative of that system and won’t likely be giving up its overall claims at this late hour. Graham Barnes, Ottawa