“Exceeding Beringia”: Upending universal human events and wayward transits in Arctic spaces

Abstract

In this article I examine the enlistment of Arctic ice to tell grand, universal stories about humanity’s origins and endings. Specifically, I analyze 18th century Natural History musings that linked Arctic climate to race and human difference. I demonstrate that these musings are constitutive to an invention of pathologized migrancy across Arctic spaces that emerge as a consequence of the inability of ice to foster agricultural settlement. I call this phenomenon temperate-normativity, in which Arctic spaces of ice are produced as inferior, not meaningful on their own but read as where transit to temperate locales occurs and those who linger are consequentially rendered as aberrant. To upend temperate-normative ideals of landscape and livelihood, I analyze a poem titled “Exceeding Beringia” by Joan Naviyuk Kane (Inupiaq) wherein Inupiaq relations to more-than-human kin articulate transit and migration as a mutual, obligatory responsibility.

Against decline? The geographies and temporalities of the Arctic cryosphere

“…Elemental substances such as frozen earth, sea ice and glaciers were surveyed, mapped and manipulated, with colonial agents seeking to thaw out permafrost and restructure parts of the Arctic landscape in terms of agriculture. The needs of colonial desires to cultivate particular foods in particular ways that aligned with property making through labour and land were thwarted by ice and its liminal shapes of constituting land not water (Smith, 2021).…”

“…We offer a reading of Arctic ice and its dynamic relationship to narratives about Arctic geopolitics and futures. We take up and engage with a growing body of literature falling within what might be called ice humanities (for example, Bloom & Glasberg, 2011; Bravo, 2019; Bravo, 2017; Bravo & Rees, 2006; Carey, 2007; Carey, 2010; Dodds, 2019; Dodds & Sörlin, 2002 Ruiz et al, 2019; Smith, 2021; Sorlin, 2015). The most recent and rising scholarly turn to ice has parallels with ocean geographies and critical ocean studies (Steinberg & Peters 2015; Deloughrey, 2019; Jue, 2020) in the sense that both strands of writings have drawn impetus from feminist, Indigenous and post‐colonial epistemologies, more‐than‐human ontologies, Anthropogenic change such as acidification and elemental state‐change, and finally a turn towards more explicitly immersive and volumetric conceptions of space that emphasise depth, height, forces and composition (see the essays in Billé, 2020).…”

Technologies of Quiescence: Measuring Biodiversity, “Intactness,” and Extractive Industry in Canada

“…Many Indigenous scholars' interventions into this body of work demonstrate the need to analyze metrics and instruments in the context of colonial relations (Liboiron 2021;McGregor 2018;Murphy 2006;Palmer 2020;Rodriguez-Lonebear 2021;Smith 2021;TallBear 2013;Walter and Carroll 2021). Among the crucial contributions made by these authors is the anti-deterministic insight that such technologies do not inevitably produce data in the interests of colonial reproduction.…”

On and beyond traumatic fallout: unsettling political ecology in practice and scholarship

“…Following Eve Tuck's call for a moratorium on damage-centered scholarship within settler colonial studies -which "operates, even benevolently, from a theory of change that establishes harm or injury in order to achieve reparation" (2009: 413) -we see a need for a turn to a desire-centered approach to political ecology scholarship, which rather "accounts for the loss and despair, but also the hope, the visions, the wisdom of lived lives and communities" (2009: 417). In recent years, several Indigenous geographers have demonstrated these principles by discussing Indigenous movements for food and water sovereignty (Daigle 2016(Daigle , 2018, refusals of settler autopsies (Smiles 2018), narrations of ice (Smith 2020) and re-articulations of climate change (Whyte 2017) as sites that nurture relations of accountability, kinship, and Indigenous futurity.…”