The Tempo of Solid Fluids: On River Ice,Permafrost,and Other Melting Matter in the Mackenzie Delta

Introduction

As I walk towards the main road in the hamlet of Aklavik on this bright morning in early March 2018, I notice the gravel right away. In the snow-covered landscape, this material stands out, not only visually as dark spots on the glaring ground, but also tangibly: the snow cover on the road has become extremely slippery through the combination of warm sun, freezing air and the wear of braking and accelerating vehicle tyres. The patches where gravel has been applied, in contrast, provide a reliable stability under my steps, while the plastic sled, in which I am pulling my children, moves over them only with a lot of effort. Later, one of my friends tells me that the hamlet administration spreads this gravel on the roads every spring to maintain road safety. I remember that a large pile of this gravel had been growing in the past few weeks on ‘the Point’, a mud spit at the edge of the settlement, accumulating as truckload after truckload arrives on the ice road that connects Aklavik to the national road network during the winter. My friend believes that this gravel is one of the many things that are going fundamentally wrong in Aklavik. He explains that it comes from the hills on the far side of the delta, and is mostly limestone. It is hard only in the very beginning, he claims, but will soon dissolve on contact with water. In his opinion, the gravel from the hills on our side of the delta is much better, being composed of a mix of different rocks, most of which stay intact longer when wet. One of my friend’s many visions for improving life in Aklavik is the establishment of a local gravel business, owned by the Aklavik Indian Band, and selling gravel throughout the region.

In this article, I discuss some of my observations of people dealing with transforming ice, snow, mud and gravel in and around Aklavik. I begin by highlighting the importance of mobility for these people’s lives, and continue by setting their engagement with these materials into the context of theories of rhythm, tempo and transformation. I then provide examples from travelling, trail making and road construction to illustrate my main argument: while the ever-transforming delta landscape can be regarded as a solid fluid – rather than a combination of solids and fluids – the relative tempo of this solid fluid, by which I mean the pace of its transformation in relation to people’s activities and to other materials, remains crucial to delta inhabitants. Whether a material is experienced as solid or fluid emerges in the tangling of different tempos of humans, technologies and materials. Solidity and fluidity are therefore not fixed states, but vectors of transformation which are crucial for many practices of Mackenzie Delta inhabitants, most of all perhaps for their mobility.

This argument puts my observations and experiences in conversation with Indigenous scholars and activists who have written about ice, temperature and ecology, as well as with European theorists interested in transformation and temporality. The former insist that the landscape they inhabit is alive, and that what is called ‘the land’ (Watts, 2013) in North America, or ‘country’ (Bawaka Country et al., 2015) in Australia, is an ever-transforming and fundamentally relational whole. Its elements attend and respond to each other and to human practices, and humans must respectfully attend and respond to them. Together, these relations of attention and response add up to an ‘ecology’ that includes, but is not centred on, human beings (e.g. Rose, 2005). TallBear (2017), for example, argues along these lines, for a wider understanding of life beyond that enshrined in the Western tradition. Echoing other Indigenous scholars including Deloria (2001) and Watts (2013), she emphasizes that life encompasses what to Western observers appear as inanimate materials like rock, or as supernatural beings like spirits. Placing the depletion and conservation of landscapes alongside the colonization of Indigenous people and the cryopreservation of their DNA, TallBear shows that the urge to fix and conserve people and places is part of the same colonizing logic that is responsible for the violent alteration and destruction of these same people and places. Freezing people’s blood while contributing to their demise, or conserving a particular landscape in acknowledgement of its sanctity while licensing exploitation and destruction elsewhere, amounts to a complete abrogation of Indigenous ideas about life, which are concerned not with fixing what exists, but with respectfully moving forward.

Other Indigenous scholars and activists have considered more specifically the role of melting ice and thawing permafrost in their changing lifeworlds. Watt-Cloutier’s (2005) famous petition for ‘the right to be cold’ at the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights, and her subsequent book by that title (Watt-Cloutier, 2015), emphasize the importance of ice and cold for Inuit livelihoods, and hold those who have caused global warming responsible for endangering these livelihoods. Other Inuit writers are similarly concerned with a melting Arctic, but some differ in their judgement. Greenlandic politician Motzfeld, for example, has stated: ‘In the way we look at climate changes we have a saying that “nothing is so bad that it is not good for something else”’ (2008, cited in Nuttall, 2009: 295). I take this tension to be less about cultural difference among Inuit than about political positionality. While Motzfeld speaks for a Home-Rule Government enthusiastic to forge its own future, Watt-Cloutier’s argument is framed by ongoing struggles between Inuit and settler-dominated governments in North America.

TallBear’s (2017) critique of the idea of freezing life in order to preserve it is not only a political statement, but also a sophisticated theoretical treatment of temporality. Cryopreservation casts Indigenous people – and, by extension, landscapes – as belonging to the past, unfit to survive the present. Freezing means slowing down and stalling the prospects of current Indigenous people, activists and scholars. Yet, as Ingold (2006) has pointed out, Indigenous lifeworlds hinge on more-than-human movements and their correspondences; fixing or ‘freezing’ these movements, conceptually, politically or materially, does violence to these lifeworlds. This approach also finds an echo in the writings of certain European theorists of a vitalist persuasion, who have argued for a more dynamic understanding of social and material ‘ecologies’ than those that mainstream Western science has to offer. Bergson (1911: ix–x), for example, noted that the logic of Western science, ‘formed on the model of solids … is incapable of presenting the true nature of life.’ Subsequently, Bachelard (1983) would go on to propose an ‘imagination of matter’ that de-objectifies images and deforms forms by focusing on watery flows and transformations. In the same vein is Serres’s (2000) reading of the Lucretian proposition that the world is constituted by turbulences in a stream of ever-moving atoms. Elsewhere, Serres (1994: 49–84) models the volatility, uncertainty and discontinuity of living processes by comparing them to flames. To explain this ‘fiery’ model, he has recourse to ideas of tempo and temperature. What appear as solid objects, according to Serres, are ‘frozen flames’, turbulent phenomena that only look fixed from the vantage point of our particular human temporality.

Another theorist to have drawn on the notion of ‘tempo’ to differentiate relatively stable from relatively fleeting phenomena in an ever-transforming world is Lefebvre (2004). For Lefebvre, ‘everywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and an expenditure of energy, there is rhythm’ (p. 15). The world, in this view, is comprised of innumerable rhythms that variably resonate with and cut across one another, and their respective tempos are key to these correspondences. For the aspiring rhythmanalyst, as Lefebvre (p. 20) declared:

… nothing is immobile. He [sic] hears the wind, the rain, storms; but if he considers a stone, a wall, a trunk, he understands their slowness, their interminable rhythm. This object is not inert; time is not set aside for the subject. It is only slow in relation to our time, to our body, the measure of rhythms.

Looking at melting matter in this light, I argue, opens up an understanding of solidity and fluidity as relational attributes rather than distinct categories. A rhythm-inspired view on solid fluids in the Mackenzie Delta seems appropriate because it chimes with Indigenous notions of spatiotemporal dynamics, and highlights how different volatile dynamics intersect in the delta inhabitants’ lives (Krause, 2021). Across the Circumpolar North, a rhythmic ecology – in the sense defined above, as a relational ensemble animated by attention and response – is key to people’s lives (e.g. Krause, 2013). In such an ecology, the role of water is pivotal, as evident in the North where seasonal variations of freezing, melting, flooding and running dry intersect with those of temperature, daylight, public holidays and fishing practices (Krause, 2017). In every case, the tempo at which processes take place shapes their correspondences with other rhythmic processes, and it is this tempo that lies at the heart of living with solid fluids in the Mackenzie Delta.

Mobility in the Mackenzie Delta

Aklavik is a hamlet of around 600 inhabitants in the Mackenzie Delta (Ehdiitat in Gwich’in; lit. ‘among the timber stands’; Umaq in Inuvialuktun) in the Canadian Northwest Territories. Its inhabitants belong to two Indigenous groups: the Gwich’in, a northern Athabascan First Nation (Heine et al., 2007; Loovers, 2019); and the Inuvialuit, the Inuit of Western Canada (Alunik et al., 2003; Lyons, 2009). In the late 20th century, both groups have successfully negotiated land claims with the Canadian government. The border between their respective settlement areas cuts the delta into a northern, Inuvialuit, and a southern, Gwich’in, section. Located right on this border, Aklavik (lit. ‘place of the grizzly bear’ in Inuvialuktun) is just over 100 years old. Since 1911, it has been a fur-trading post to which mission churches, hospitals and schools were successively added, together with a police detachment and, as its role as the commercial and administrative centre of the Western Canadian Arctic grew, hotels and other amenities, services and businesses.

For the Inuvialuit and the Gwich’in, the Mackenzie Delta had not been a permanent place of residence prior to the establishment of Aklavik. Rather, the Gwich’in lived in mobile bands on the rivers and lakes to the east, south and west of the delta, while the Inuvialuit lived equally mobile lives along the coast to the north (Slobodin, 1962; Usher, 1971). The delta had long been a contact zone and ‘no man’s land’ between the two groups, with reported hostilities especially during the early decades of the fur trade (Krech, 1979; Slobodin, 1960). Even by the time many skilful Indigenous hunters and trappers had converged on the delta in the early 20th century, they did not make Aklavik their home, but maintained independent camps across the delta and beyond, from which they would occasionally congregate for trading, celebrating and other occasions in Aklavik (Wolforth, 1971). This pattern did change during the second half of the 20th century, when a combination of factors including the availability of wage employment, government housing and compulsory residential schooling motivated increasing numbers of families to move ‘to town’.

Today, mobility through the delta continues to be important for hunting, fishing and trapping, and for visiting, work and shopping. But its direction is reversed: people spend most of their time in Aklavik and take trips out from there to their camps and traplines, or to other settlements around the delta. No one in Aklavik maintains a dog team for getting around anymore, but most residents have cars or trucks, many have snowmobiles and some have boats. With these vehicles, they cover ever longer distances in ever shorter times throughout the delta and beyond. The few kilometres of road in Aklavik are well maintained throughout the year, which is quite a feat given the seasonal variations between soaking mud in late spring, dry dust in summer and all possible combinations of snow and ice during autumn, winter and early spring. The roads are also well used, as Aklavik vehicle owners tend to drive even small distances, and two taxi companies cater to those who do not own a functional car or truck. This means that, even in a compact settlement like Aklavik, there is a noticeable ‘rush hour’, for instance just before noon when people drive home for lunch. And many people enjoy going for detours and rides through the hamlet in order to look around for what is new. The route between Aklavik and Inuvik (lit. ‘place of humans’ in Inuvialuktun), the ‘modern’ government-planned town built on dry ground at the edge of the delta, is well-used throughout the year – by ice road, boat or plane, depending on the season. Aklavik inhabitants frequently travel much further afield for shopping, visiting family and friends, or doing business, not only to other settlements around the delta, but also to the territorial capital Yellowknife, Whitehorse in the Yukon, Edmonton in Alberta, and other places throughout North America.

Solid Fluid Grounds

Following some Mackenzie Delta inhabitants on their journeys in and around Aklavik, this article focuses particularly on the ground (see Ingold, 2004), on and in which many of these journeys unfold. It explores what it means for Aklavik people that the ground in the Mackenzie Delta is a solid fluid, a question that has gained prominence in the context of climate change discussions, where a central topic is the increasing fluidity of previously solid substrates (cf. Bremner and Cook, 2020). More directly, this question has been inspired by Simonetti and Ingold’s (2018) observation that the scientific practice of presenting fluidity and solidity as opposed qualities lies at the root of many debates and misunderstandings in the study and use of ice and concrete, and their call for an alternative approach to matter, ‘in which fluidity and solidity are not mutually incompatible properties’ (p. 28). I will argue that, for Mackenzie Delta inhabitants, solidity and fluidity are relational attributes that emerge in the context of tempo, and that they can therefore be best understood as temporal properties. Nevertheless, distinguishing relative solidity from relative fluidity remains crucial for people’s lives in and around Aklavik.

The liquefying of Arctic landscapes – through thawing permafrost or melting sea ice – in the context of a changing climate has preoccupied many researchers over past decades, anthropologists among them (e.g. Crate, 2013; Hastrup, 2013a; Nuttall, 2012; Tejsner, 2013). For example, between 2014 and 2016, the International Permafrost Association maintained a ‘Permafrost and Culture’ action group, which has investigated the relationship between permafrost dynamics and Indigenous land use. This and related initiatives have revealed, among other things, how permafrost thaw and associated phenomena – like the appearance and disappearance of water bodies, or the reliability of hard tundra surfaces – are recognized by the inhabitants of Arctic landscapes, such as Siberian reindeer herders or cattle breeders, and their effects on land use and livelihoods, often to the detriment of their inhabitants (e.g. Crate et al., 2017; Istomin and Habeck, 2016). Moreover, across the Arctic, archaeologists are scrambling to record and salvage the sites and artefacts that are being exposed by permafrost thaw and increased coastal erosion (Andrews et al., 2016; Friesen, 2015; Hollesen et al., 2018). The respective tempos that have facilitated the emergence of reindeer herding and archaeology, where the ground is relatively solid and the people and animals moving across and digging into it are relatively mobile, have been changing. The acceleration of the ground’s liquefaction, in turn, seems to necessitate an acceleration of human activities, too, where archaeological missions must work faster to save Arctic heritage, and reindeer herders must change their pastures more frequently.

While most studies of permafrost thaw focus on its effects on urban and industrial infrastructure, especially in relation to the hydrocarbon industry (e.g. Hjort et al., 2018), rather than regarding Indigenous land use, anthropologists and other social scientists have consistently opposed the systematic exclusion of inhabitants from research on the Arctic (e.g. Nuttall, 1992). Nevertheless, recent work in Arctic social and cultural research has also foregrounded non-human presences, notably ice (Hastrup, 2013b; Yusoff, 2011) and snow (Du Plessis, 2020; Rautio and Vladimirova, 2017). Snow, for example, has been understood as a ‘companion’ of both research and everyday life in the Arctic, which participates in the formation both of people’s subjectivities and of researchers’ data. In Hastrup’s (2013b: 51) analysis, ice ‘is its own argument; it is not for us to argue its case’: the presence and dynamics of ice in the Arctic have inserted themselves, physically and imaginatively, into apprehensions of the sublime, narratives of livelihoods and change, and relations between inhabitants and scientists coming from outside. In the Mackenzie Delta, snow and ice are indeed ubiquitous and significant, but rather than massive glaciers, icebergs or sea ice, they are most often part of a wider, watery landscape and occur in the form of permafrost and seasonally frozen rivers, lakes and ground. It is not ice and snow per se that seem to matter most in the delta, but the often seasonal processes of forming and disintegrating solid and fluid forms and substrates, of freezing and thawing water and ground. In this sense, I treat freezing water and thawing permafrost as active participants in what Clark and Yusoff (2017) have called ‘geosocial formations’.

A look into the history of the term ‘permafrost’ indicates that, from its inception, geologists and others have considered the implied permanence of the solidly frozen state to be more relative than absolute. Geologist Siemon W. Muller, who is credited with having coined the word ‘permafrost’ in English in 1943, found differentiating between ‘permanently’ and ‘perennially’ unnecessary, ‘for after all, what on this earth is actually “eternal” or “permanent”?’ (Muller, 2008: xxvii). Muller’s understanding of permafrost, and even his coining of the term, were based on Russian research literature on the phenomenon, which has a much longer history (Kabakchi and Butters, 1989). The original Russian term, literally translated as ‘eternally frozen ground’, had been championed, since the 1920s, by the Soviet scientist Mikhail Sumgin. Not only did Sumgin consider ‘eternal’ more evocative and catchy than ‘perennial and uninterrupted’ (Chu, 2015) but he also defended ‘eternal’ from the criticism of his geologically more precise adversaries because he thought it politically and culturally suited to the accelerating pace of industrialization in an age of revolution: ‘in order to keep up with this pace, the study of frozen earth had to operate not according to geologic time, but to engineering time’ (p. 402).

In the context of Stalinist progress and development, ‘eternal’ had simply meant ‘longer than seasonal’. In North America, interest in permafrost only grew strong enough to make it an object of scientific inquiry during the Second World War, as resource exploration and territorial sovereignty drew the government’s interests northward. When Muller was commissioned to lay the foundations for US American permafrost science, the timeframe of Soviet engineering fitted these geopolitical interests very well. Accordingly, any ground that maintained a below-zero temperature for at least two years was officially designated as permafrost. Of course, in many places, grounds have remained frozen for much longer periods, but absolute permanence is not the key to permafrost. The Russian definition of permafrost involves only slightly more permanence, requiring the ground not to thaw for three consecutive years (Permafrost Subcommittee, 1988: 63). In most cases, the top ground level does thaw during the summer and is referred to as the ‘active layer’. Its depth varies according to seasonal and climatic factors, including temperature, precipitation, snow cover and shade. When summertime thaw extends the active layer deeper into the ground than wintertime cold re-freezes, the permafrost underneath shrinks and destabilizes.

During my fieldwork in Aklavik, I never came across an Indigenous term for permafrost, either in Inuvialuktun or in Gwich’in language. Of course, delta inhabitants are well aware of the phenomenon and have long used it strategically, such as for storing food. They are equally aware of the increasing instability of frozen grounds, which they witness, among other things, in accelerating erosion and collapsing slopes (see Andrews et al., 2016). Ample research activity in and around the Mackenzie Delta, often initiated by and in collaboration with Indigenous groups, has made scientific understandings of permafrost and its thaw widely known in Aklavik. Nevertheless, I doubt that the categorical distinction between seasonally and perennially frozen ground is of great concern to delta inhabitants. The modern idea of permafrost has been, from the outset, an engineering problem (Muller, 2008) and has become, more recently, a scientific, climate-change problem (e.g. Schuur and Abbott, 2011). But these engineering and scientific categories are less significant among Gwich’in and Inuvialuit people. As will become clear in what follows, relative solidity and fluidity are indeed crucial for life in the delta, and people keenly observe landscape transformations triggered by thawing permafrost, which worry many. But it is not a problem of losing an alleged permanence in the world, since the cultural, economic and hydrological relations in the delta have long been unstable and volatile (Krause, 2021).

The conditions (see Krause, 2020) of the melting and freezing ice, snow and permafrost play an important role in facilitating and inhibiting movement throughout the delta and beyond. On the one hand, Aklavik inhabitants note that, while these conditions have never been stable or predictable, they seem more recently to have become ever more volatile. On the other hand, uncertain ice conditions and permafrost erosion are only among the most recent major transformations in the Mackenzie Delta. Earlier, delta inhabitants have had to negotiate colonial rule, different boom and bust economies, and the de- and re-valuation of Indigenous identity, among other radical changes (Krause, 2021). Transformations are part of people’s lives, and mud and water – temporarily solid as permafrost and ice, but periodically, and increasingly, fluid – can be regarded as quintessentially solid fluids that epitomize the unity of change and stability in the delta.

In what follows, I will describe in more detail how some of the ostensibly solid fluids of the Mackenzie Delta matter in the lives of its inhabitants. Approaching the relations between people and solid fluids in terms of their relative tempo, in a world that is suspended in movement, I suggest that relative solidity and fluidity are important for delta inhabitants and their practices.

Frozen Travel Routes

Water, both liquid and solid, is omnipresent in the Mackenzie Delta. According to Emmerton et al. (2007), of the delta’s surface of 13,135 km ² , roughly half is watery (25% lakes, 13% river channels, 12% wetlands) and half is dry floodplain. This distribution varies considerably over the course of the year, with a typical minimum of water extent in September, and a maximum in early June, after snowmelt. Then, on average two-thirds of the delta is inundated and, during the notable 2006 floods, even 85 percent of the delta was covered in water (Normandin et al., 2018: 1550). An equally significant, if not more fundamental, variation occurs in relation to freezing and thawing. When the lakes, river channels and wetlands of the delta are frozen in winter and covered by a continuous snow layer, a smooth cover facilitates travel and transport in an otherwise discontinuous landscape of open water, wetlands and dry ground.

Ice and snow cover are crucial for mobility and livelihoods in the delta. This is true for hunting, trapping and fishing as much as for hauling bulk and heavy material. As soon as the rivers and lakes begin to freeze over in late autumn, people begin using their snowmobiles for rides that go much smoother, faster and further than summertime travel on water and land. A common topic in conversations I had in mid-October 2017, when first the lakes, then the smaller channels, and finally the larger rivers in the delta began to form a dependable ice crust, concerned the delay in this process. It used to freeze up in September, many people assured me, and now it is a month later. Additionally, the freezing-up process, from the first ice to its supporting a snowmobile, took longer than it should, according to some Aklavik residents. They agreed that this was due in part to mild autumn temperatures, and in part to snow having covered the thin ice right after its first forming, thus insulating it from the cold air and inhibiting its thickening.

People eagerly observed not only snow and ice conditions, but also the fresh snowmobile tracks in the landscape, and exchanged stories about who had been able – and bold enough – to cross a water body, in what place, or where, alternatively, they had broken through the ice. Snowmobile drivers agreed that it was best to speed across thin ice; going too slowly increases the likelihood of breaking through weak spots. For example in Aklavik, directly downstream from ‘the Point’, a snowmobile track formed already fairly early on in the season. Once the first daring people had driven their snowmobiles across, others followed, and it became the main thoroughfare to all destinations across the river. Only a few weeks later did people also cross the river upstream from ‘the Point’, where water turbulence delayed the formation of a reliable ice cover. This new route significantly shortened the trip to a popular fishing spot, the mouth of Jackfish Creek. With the thickening of the ice, the snowmobiling season developed, and people extended their traplines and frequented ever more distant winter hunting grounds and fishing spots.

Delta inhabitants know where they are likely to encounter weak ice, for instance around confluences of different channels, or on smaller creeks that run dry during the winter. Other places are prone to overflow, which occurs when deep snow weighs the ice down and pushes water on top. This can seep into the snow to create a treacherous slush, invisible from the snow surface, which can stall snowmobiles. Once trapped in the overflow, travellers can only extract themselves with much effort and usually soaked snow pants. I once became stuck with a snowmobile in the infamous overflow of a long and narrow channel known for its susceptibility to this phenomenon. After my companions had helped me to drive out from the slush and back onto dry snow, and as our boots and snow pants were drying next to a wood stove in a cabin, they explained to me that the only way to drive through overflow is to go as fast as possible, ‘skipping’ across it, as they call it. When we returned along the same river channel later that night, I was prepared to speed through the slush, which worked well. The next time I drove through this stretch was almost a month later, and the slush had frozen solid from all the snowmobile traffic that had passed by since, which made for an extremely hard and bumpy, but no longer dangerous, trail.

As the snow begins to melt under the intensifying spring sun in April and May, it accumulates along the edges of water bodies and in depressions, thus complicating the wintertime trails. In time, the meltwater along the edges of rivers and lakes causes the ice underneath to decay so that many water bodies are lined with stretches of open water, while their centres are still safe for snowmobile travel. This requires speeding across the open water between ice and land, a technique that people also called ‘skipping’. Many hunters and trappers dismantle their traplines and avoid longer hunting trips during this period. However, the annual goose migration also passes through the delta then, and many people are eager to access popular resting spots for goose-hunting. Therefore, while some travelling ceases, other trips increase in frequency. ‘Skipping’, navigating slushy snow and getting wet become commonplace.

Travelling by small boats during this part of the year used to be a common practice in the delta throughout the 20th century, and some continue it today. Hunters navigate the boat along the stretches of open water on the sides of rivers and lakes, and drag it across remaining sections of ice or portages between water bodies. When Aklavik had been ice-free for 10 days, I joined a boat trip to the lower delta, where we delivered some building material to an elder’s camp, and looked around for late geese and early caribou. While the boaters did get some geese, it turned out to be impossible to access the places where they had hoped to find caribou. The downstream river channels were still covered in ice, and the comfortable large boat with a heavy 115 horsepower engine was not the kind that we could have dragged along. Here, the ice that had facilitated hunting trips by snowmobile only a week or so before, now hampered our movement.

Constructing Trails and Ice Roads

While the accumulation and decay of snow and ice thus fundamentally influence the affordances and limits for travel and transport in the delta, people do not helplessly depend on them, but actively shape them to their needs. What is called ‘trail-making’ is a case in point. This refers to practices intended to ease future travelling, including the cutting of vegetation encroaching on existing trails or in order to break new trails, the marking of a trail by various means, the construction of ramps on steep slopes and river banks, and the first trip in the winter season or after heavy snowfall along a particular path. In just a few days, the snow on a fresh trail hardens considerably and makes for much easier and faster riding compared to the undisturbed snow around. I have often noticed how cumbersome and dangerous a snowmobile journey can be without an existing trail, when it is possible to sink into a snowdrift, hit rocks or logs hidden in the snow, or slide down steep riverbanks. Some people were only comfortable to take me along on a trip after they had made a trail beforehand, while one elder asked me to accompany him explicitly because he had not visited his trapline since a heavy snowstorm, and needed someone to assist him in trail-making. Over the course of my fieldwork, I learned that the art of trail-making included the ability to judge where trails should run on water and land, how to link them through portages, under what weather conditions to make them, and the skill to judge the quality of existing trails.

As the snowmobiling season wore on, Aklavik’s main construction company was planning to haul gravel from the hills on the Aklavik side of the delta. In order to get its heavy machinery – caterpillars, loaders and trucks – to the gravel pit, the company had to build its own road through the delta into the hills. The company cleared the snow from the river stretch where the road was to begin, allowing direct contact between the ice and the air in order to thicken the crust. In March, it built a snow ramp up the riverbank and soaked it in water pumped from the river, so that it would harden. Then, it cleared the snow from the remainder of the planned road and repeatedly coated it in water, which would build up on freezing to create a hard and level road cover. Taking advantage of the same malleability and solidity of water that allows for smooth snowmobile rides on frozen watercourses, the company built a heavy-duty road by effectively extending the river into the hills. On the river itself, the company used a grader and snowploughs to keep the ice road in a condition not unlike that of a paved highway. A leader in the field, the same company was also in charge of building and maintaining the ice road that connected Aklavik to Inuvik and the rest of the country between December and April, a road that is temporarily part of the official Canadian national road network, which may be astonishing to incidental visitors from the south (see Vannini and Taggart, 2016), but is considered an ordinary part of infrastructure by Aklavik inhabitants.

Constructing the gravel-hauling ice road was not without its challenges. One of the lakes through which it was to pass had drained considerably during the preceding years and retained water, and thus ice, in only some small patches. The company’s owner explained to me that running an ice road on a muddy lake bottom is a risky business because it becomes unstable in the spring, unlike lake and river ice. He later took me for a ride in a snowcat as he was ploughing a route through the drained lake along the few remaining ice patches, carefully avoiding the frozen mud.

The road soon became the busiest route around Aklavik as the company was hauling gravel day and night in order to secure enough of it before the ice would weaken in later spring. The truck drivers were paid by the load in order to speed them up. On trips accompanying one of them, I was struck by how the road had transformed this formerly quiet part of the delta, overlaying the comparatively tiny snowmobile trails. Truck traffic on this road was so dense that the drivers were supposed to inform each other by radio when they passed particular points, in order to avoid collisions. And once the planned amount of gravel had been hauled, the road became a popular route among Aklavik people for family trips, picnics and barbecues in the hills.

Melting Mud

Whereas gravel can be found in the hills on the edge of the delta, most of the delta itself consists of mud, accumulated over millennia from the sediments deposited by the river (Hill et al., 2001). This mud is frozen solid in winter, and its upper layer thaws during the summer, allowing for plant growth, but also for soggy or dusty ground. Recently, Aklavik people have been observing that, just as a reliable ice cover forms later in the year and disappears earlier than before, the seasonally frozen ground and permafrost that used to keep the delta mud together are becoming unstable. Among a host of other, related factors, this is because the winters are not anymore long and cold enough to compensate for the thawing of the topsoil layers during the summer (Andrews et al., 2016; cf. Burn and Kokelj, 2009). Results include spectacular avalanches, where entire hillsides or coastlines collapse in what are called ‘slumps’, as the formerly solid mud reaches a critical level of fluidity.

Another effect is the accelerating rate of erosion of riverbanks and the concomitant siltation of some channels. The latter means that some boating routes have become shallower and difficult to access for boaters concerned about damaging the propellers of their outboard motors, or about getting stuck on a shoal. The more critical commentators among them note that this limitation is aggravated by the size of boats and engines currently in use. A heavy vessel with an outboard motor of 100 or more horsepower is much more likely to get stuck than a light canoe with a 4-horsepower engine. Sediments also displace fishing spots by filling holes in riverbeds where people had formerly set their nets. Some have told me that there is less water in the rivers than there used to be, but others have countered that the water level, with all its fluctuations, is the same as it has always been; only the river bottom has moved upwards.

Accelerated riverbank erosion also threatens many camps, which are often located along watercourses. In some of the older camps I visited, the owners remembered crossing a thicket of willows between the river and the camp when they were young; now their cabins are located very close to the bank. One elder showed me a cabin that he had built for his family in his younger days. Now, some of his children have their own cabins close by, and he has recently moved into a newer building further inland. They use the old cabin as a workshop, but its future is uncertain. The riverbank has moved so close to it that its extension, which the elder had built for his growing family, has already collapsed down the bank. The elder had winched the cabin away from the bank with a pulley and, two years later, his youngest son winched it back even further, in order to keep the building from following its former extension into the river.

When increased erosion makes a river move too close to a lake and the springtime floodwater finds its way across the ever-narrower land bridge, whole lakes can drain empty as the water level in lakes tends to be higher than in the summertime rivers. This can spell the end of very productive fisheries of certain highly appreciated species like lake whitefish. For delta inhabitants, the issue with solid-fluid mud is not that it can be both at the same time, in the course of a day or across the seasons. Rather, the problem seems to be that it is becoming more fluid, at more times and in more places than ever before.

The gravel, with which I began this article, has become perhaps the most conspicuous of all materials that speak of the liquefying ground in the Mackenzie Delta and people’s awareness of this process. It seems that the more unreliable the frozen mud becomes, the more inhabitants and decision-makers trust in gravel and its promise of stability. It has been used to raise and maintain the roads, it is applied copiously on plots designated for construction, and larger rocks have been deposited along the riverbank to curb erosion close to the hamlet. Of course, rocks may also be dislocated by the floods, limestone may dissolve in time, and gravel may be washed away. But all of this happens at a much slower rate than the melting of mud. Needless to say, the kinds of houses that have recently been constructed in Aklavik, and the kinds of vehicles that people use to cruise through the hamlet, seem to require ever more, thicker and better gravel than previous dwellings and means of transport.

Deltaic Transformations

Liquefying mud is not the same as hardening snow. While both are instances of solid fluids with changing tempo, and even of moments where critical thresholds in the relations between ground and land use are being crossed, freezing and thawing can be rather different phase changes. What difference does it make, for our understanding of dynamic solid fluids, whether we are dealing with things solidifying and congealing, or things flowing away and falling apart? My observations from the Mackenzie Delta suggest that, while these shifts in tempo are markedly seasonal, the trend towards an overall acceleration can be read as a gradual unmaking of certainties. When solid fluids slow down, as in ice road making, freezing and gravel coatings, people expect an increase in certainty but, as they accelerate, the opposite is the case: trails may or may not become dangerous, the pads under buildings must be checked and adjusted regularly, and a cabin is placed in jeopardy by a caving river bank.

Shifting tempos of solid fluids are pertinent not only in the Mackenzie Delta, but for the inhabitants of river deltas around the world. Krause and Harris (2021) see deltas as ‘real-life laboratories for studying social, material and semiotic transformations’ due to their pronounced hydrosocial dynamics. Where permafrost and ice play a pivotal role in the Arctic, people living in temperate river deltas experience solid fluids, for example, in the gradual ‘terrestrialization’ of a former ‘town on water’ in the Danube Delta (Richardson, 2019), or through infrastructural politics in the production of wetlands, agriculture, industry and urban space in the Turkish Gediz Delta (Scaramelli, 2019). The highly contentious movements and selective accretion and erosion of sediments also matter in many tropical deltas, where land is a scarce, solid-fluid resource, as in La Mojana, Colombia (Camargo, 2017), the Ayeyarwady Delta, Myanmar (Ivars, 2020) and the Bengal Delta (Lafaye de Micheaux et al., 2018). In addition, the tempo of solid fluids is not limited to the relative stability of the ground, but manifests also in salinity levels and sand movement (e.g. Horisberger, 2021; Simon, 2021). Morita and Jensen (2017) even detect two opposing ontologies at work in the infrastructures of the Thai Chao Phraya Delta, focusing on either the solid (‘terrestrial’) or the fluid (‘amphibious’) aspects of the landscape. They argue that the modern, terrestrial infrastructure has made the delta, including the Thai capital Bangkok in its midst, an increasingly vulnerable place, especially to more frequent flooding. Throughout these discussions, accelerating the tempo of solid fluids translates into uncertainty and increased work for delta inhabitants, while deceleration implies certainties, for better or for worse.

Conclusion

Across the Arctic, people have been noting that ‘the earth is faster now’ (Krupnik and Jolly, 2002), as the tempo of phenomena that have always been solid-fluid has accelerated, and their reliability and predictability have declined. Inspired by Indigenous theories of an ever-transforming, living ‘land’ (e.g. TallBear, 2017; Watts, 2013) and Serres’s (2000) reading of a Lucretian world where even gravel is liquid, I have argued that temporality is key to understanding solid fluids. Lefebvre’s (2004) notion of the ‘tempo’ of rhythmic intersections has helped me to see solid fluids as slower and faster in relation to specific human activities and projects, and to understand liquefaction as acceleration. The juxtaposition of temporality and melting matter reminds us that the words temperature, tempo and temperament might all be derived from the Latin root tempus, meaning ‘extent, measure’.² While this etymological commonality remains contentious, ³ the case of solid fluids shows just how closely they can be associated in experience. As Ingold (2010: S133) has observed, ‘the verb to temper captures perfectly the way the fluxes of the medium comprise the ever-present undercurrent for our actions as we go along in the world.’ The tempo at which we move through the world, and at which it moves around us, is a key aspect of this perpetual mixing and attuning. People may tamper with some of these fluxes, by making trails or applying gravel, for instance. Faster vehicles with stronger engines may offer local solutions to arrhythmia, only to create problems elsewhere, for instance when they get stuck on shoals or in snow drifts.

This understanding of solid fluids questions the received opposition between the slow and stable processes of geology and climate, and the fast and fleeting dynamics of human lives. Simonetti (2019) has argued that this contrast, often considered a key conundrum of the climate crisis, dissolves when considering Indigenous concepts and even modern geologists’ practices. Indigenous people are unlikely to distinguish between long-term climate and short-term weather (Ingold and Kurttila, 2000) because their profound knowledge of the world is not reducible to numerical abstractions or assumptions about solidity and its decay. Instead, their storied insights can make us reconsider our own mainstream ideas, for instance about freezing and thawing (Cruikshank, 2012). Simonetti and Ingold’s (2018) reflections on ice and concrete as solid fluids resonate with Indigenous concepts like the Inuit sila that encompasses ideas of weather, climate, intelligence and the breath of life.

My material from the Mackenzie Delta suggests that Gwich’in and Inuvialuit people experience water/ice and mud/permafrost as relative and rhythmic solid fluids that embody the temporality and relationality of solidity and fluidity. The relative tempo of solid fluids vis-à-vis human lives is key. Economic cycles, political climate, sociocultural dynamics and physical transformations can all be experienced as both solid and fluid, slow and fast, depending on the degree to which they resonate with what people seek to do or explain. In a world where everything seems to be changed and changing, solidity and fluidity may best be seen as indications of gradual differences in tempo: the ice crust does not form soon enough or hold long enough for hunters and construction companies; river channel movement proceeds faster than the social life of camps; one lost fishery from a drained lake can be compensated, but multiple drained lakes over a short period of time can be catastrophic; and, while snowmobiles can skip across occasional overflow and openings, they also need reliable trails. Sometimes faster modes of travelling, with big boats and strong snowmobiles, can be a response to the increasing tempo of other delta processes; but, at other times, slower means, like using a light canoe to navigate the discontinuities of ice and open water, might be the way forward.

What I have learned from people in the Mackenzie Delta supports this understanding of solid fluids as temporal, drawing – among other sources – on Indigenous knowledge about an alive and relational ‘land’ (TallBear, 2017), and European philosophers who insist that the world transforms like a solid fluid (e.g. Bachelard, 1983; Bergson, 1911) or, in Serres’s (1995: 58) words, that ‘Time doesn’t flow; it percolates.’ Understanding solid fluids in terms of their tempo in relation to human practices may provide a useful approach for reconsidering the role of transforming materials in a changing world.