Erasure as a Tool of Nineteenth-Century European Exploration, and the Arctic Travels of Tookoolito and Ipiirvik

Abstract

The American publisher Charles Francis Hall had no previous experience with the Arctic before he travelled there in 1860. Yet, Hall transformed himself into an Arctic authority, and was given command of a United States governmental funded expedition in 1870. Hall was only able to undertake his work in the Arctic because of his relationship with Tookoolito and Ipiirvik, a married Inuit couple from Cumberland Sound, and this article examines the structural processes that enabled Hall to rescript their expertise as his own. Tookoolito and Ipiirvik travelled with Hall for over a decade, a relationship where the unequal power-dynamic was continuously transformed and renegotiated in the United States and the Arctic. Drawing on recent historiographical insights on the construction of exploration knowledge in the imperial context, this article interrogates the epistemic and physical violence involved in Hall's erasure of Tookoolito and Ipiirvik's expertise and personhood. In doing so, I highlight the structural function of the erasure of Indigenous knowledge and labour in the production of nineteenth-century European and Euro-American Arctic science, and its enduring influence on the historiography.

The ‘deer‐men’ and the ‘bowhead‐men’: The colonial co‐optation of Arctic Indigenous knowledge within the ‘origins of the Inuit’ debates

“…These studies have revealed that much of the vast range of information generated through exploratory processes in different parts of the world was in fact regularly produced in collaboration with local Indigenous peoples. Of particular relevance to this article, scholars have more recently turned their attention northwards and have applied these particular approaches to the Arctic context (Cameron, 2015; Kaalund, 2021, 2022; Kaalund & Woitkowitz, 2021; Martin, 2020, 2022; Woitkowitz, 2021). As a result, we now are beginning to understand the various ways in which Indigenous peoples inhabiting the circumpolar Arctic have exerted a profound influence in shaping geographical knowledge of this region and have thus been central to many of the key debates within the discipline's history.…”

“…The account also demonstrates the increasingly recognised fact that explorers, travellers and traders in the Arctic rarely traversed northern landscapes in isolation. Instead they were regularly supported in various ways by the Indigenous inhabitants of these regions (Kaalund, 2022; Martin, 2020, 2022). Yet the interactions that took place between Nocum and the expeditionary party are of particular historical interest for other reasons.…”