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

Ice and the Anthropocene

While interest in ice has erupted in a current moment of rapid climate change, ice—and Arctic ice in particular—has long been a focal point of study for scientific knowledge production and has held a key foothold in imperial Western cultural imagination (Blum, 2019; Dodds, 2018; Wilson, 2003). Scholars have critiqued representation and reportage of ice as blank, barren, and empty, or ice as essentially ahistorical and disconnected from ongoing socialities (Bravo, 2018; Davidson, 2005; Grace, 2001). A range of work has intervened to rewrite the Arctic as an important ecological ecosystem (Bravo and Rees, 2006), as a space where white masculinity and nationalism is tested (Bloom, 1993; Robinson, 2006), either verified or foiled (Craciun, 2016), and as a geopolitical zone that defies bureaucratic clarity as neither land nor water (Steinberg et al., 2015).

The Arctic has also been writ as a space of historical human activity, in particular in regard to archaeological research that aims to evidence large-scale theories of human migrations through the Arctic to other climes, largely in exit from Africa or East Asia (Graf and Buvit, 2017; Turnbull, 2010). Material scientific data have long been extracted from the Arctic (Bravo and Sorlin, 2002), and continues in contemporary forms such as through ice-core technologies (Antonello and Carey, 2017; Elzinga, 2017), as well as drone imagery and satellite data that track ice melt. While much Arctic scholarship attends to Western presences, more recent work offers a fuller inclusion of longstanding Indigenous histories and ongoing politics (Banerjee, 2012; Cameron, 2015; Cruikshank, 2006; Huntington et al., 2019; Routledge, 2018; Stuhl, 2016). Often these contributions arrive in the form of assessing traditional ecological knowledge, Indigenous mapping, or examining literary narrations (Aporta et al., 2014; Bennett et al., 2016; Kollin, 2001; Krupnik et al., 2010).

These transdisciplinary contributions of ice-analytics offer a characterization of ice as a materiality that is uneasily categorized by perceptions of the colonial or theoretical: ice does not produce agriculture, it does not give root, it does not generate arborescence, it is not rhizomatic. Ice is a conundrum across academic disciplines; it confounds an aesthetic determinacy through lens or by brush. Immensity of glacier and icefield remains an artistic puzzle and representational bane (Balog, 2012; Bloom and Glasberg, 2011). Ice is slow and plodding as it shifts, breaks, melts, and hardens, though scholars and artists often dramatize its precarity. Within dominant conversations of the Anthropocene, ice is made a focal point as its melting is a danger to a temperate world.

The crisis of climate change animating Anthropocene discourse is explicit and straightforward: human-made environmental destruction is immediately identifiable. Yet, many analytical offerings of the Anthropocene are inadequate as they authorize a universal truth of how the Arctic must be known, depicted, and managed. Dominant Anthropocene discussions are constituted by three overlapping formations. First, as a Science that works to “save humanity” from a self-induced catastrophic crisis (Chakrabarty, 2009). Second, as a bureaucracy that works to attend fully to claims of sovereignty by primarily colonial nation-states and secondarily, if at all, to Indigenous polities (Shadian, 2014; Zellen, 2008, 2009). And third, through a liberal multiculturalism that allows for multi-dimensional aesthetic portrayals of the Arctic to exist simultaneously and equally. Within the latter is a niche narration of Indigenous peoples as apolitical and often ahistorical, repeating tropes that herald alternative qualities of uninterrupted Indigenous lifeways within Arctic spaces. This inclusion of “the alternative” articulates Arctic Indigenous peoples not as so many autonomous sovereign polities, but as a potential resource of land-based knowledges that can recover a global “we” from self-inflicted destruction. Within this capitulation, the death of a white, temperate planet might be salvaged by an orchestrated return of a set of once subjugated knowledges.

The Anthropocene as the (unofficial) latest geologic epoch (Crutzen, 2002) has been roundly problematized (Baldwin and Erickson, 2020; Fagan, 2019; Ojeda et al., 2020; Simpson, 2020; Tsing et al., 2017; Tuana, 2019; Verges, 2017; Yusoff, 2019). Scholars critique the colonial, racist foundations of the Anthropocene discourse and call for careful interrogations of which sets of humanity must be held accountable for capitalist activities that contribute most to a changing climate. Françiose Verges (2017) puts it most succinctly writing that the Anthropocene is an easy story to tell, “because it does not challenge the naturalized inequalities, alienation, and violence inscribed in modernity’s strategic relations of power and production.” Bringing attention to the white supremacist and anti-black underpinnings of the Anthropocene, Verges invokes a more apt term “racial capitalocene” to assess the current state of the world.

Similarly, Zoe Todd and Heather Davis argue that extractive logics of climate change must be read as emerging from within conditions of longue durée coloniality. They write that, “Indigenous philosophies and processes of Indigenous self-governance as a necessary political corrective, alongside the self-determination of other communities and societies violently impacted by white supremacists, colonial, and capitalist logics instantiated in the origins of the Anthropocene” (Davis and Todd, 2017: 763). In addition to accounting for the violences intrinsic to capitalist relations, scholars also draw attention to more-than-human kinships that have long animated Indigenous socialities despite capitalist interventions (Davis and Todd, 2017; Pulido, 2018; TallBear, 2017; Todd, 2015; Whyte, 2017). One method of undermining a universal humanist position inherent within dominant Anthropocene scholarship is to cultivate practices that serve and attend to particularities and distinct historicities of relations and coloniality embedded in place. Such practices disallow a managerial Science from maintaining authority and require an adherence to the sovereignties of Indigenous polities, however they take shape. One such practice, offered here, is an attendance to poetic imaginings and articulations of space and sociality sidelined in favor of more “legible” climate data.

Within Anthropocene conversations, ice in particular gets de-linked from the social histories of its origins and is made to serve as evidence of a shared global crisis. As often as one might see a melting glacier divorced from its socio-political context, so too are many floating theories or critiques of the Anthropocene unmoored from material stakes. In the following section, I analyze 18th century Natural History descriptions of ice as a materiality and geography to demonstrate how ice has been weaponized to produce a subject that is categorized as racially inferior and pathologically in transit. This transit is due to the extreme nature of ice-landscapes and spatial proximity to a landform that is thought by some to have once bridged continents.

Temperate-normativity: Environmental determinism and stories of universal transit

Before the rise of scientific racism in the mid-19th century, which biologized race as something measured through supposedly innate characteristics of the body, philosophers attributed human difference to geography and climate, referred to now as environmental determinism. The rise of environmental determinism is often attributed to work by Ellen C. Semple in the early 20th century (Frankel, 1992), which drew on Friedrich Ratzel’s Anthropogeographie (1882 and 1891). Here Ratzel influentially analyzed “the geographical distribution of societies, the relation between migration and the physical environment, and…the influence of environments upon societies” (Peake, 2017: 1). Yet, environmental determinism, while not a unitary theory agreed upon across thinkers, was a common theme that trafficked across multiple conversations long before Ratzel.

For instance, Georg W. Hegel (2001 [1837]) writes in “Geographical Basis of History” that “Groups who lived in certain climatic zones should not be considered as historical actors … In the Frigid and in the Torrid zone the locality of World-historical peoples cannot be found.” For Hegel, inhabitants of the “frigid” and “torrid” locales of the globe should not be considered as actors in the History of the World. Yet, Hegel’s characterization of appropriate historical actors emerging from particular geographies was not created in a vacuum—his influences were many.

Those influences constitute a genealogy that can be traced back further still; the set of quotes that follow are not exhaustive, but demonstrate the discursive proliferation of linking climate and geography to racialized bodily characteristics. One common dimension of such thinking was that peoples of Arctic environments were the strongest example of environmental determinism resulting in an inferior intelligence. For instance, Georges-Louis Leclerc, also known as the Comte de Buffon (1749), wrote that

nothing can afford a stronger example of the influence of climate than this race of Laplanders, who are situated, along the whole polar circle…the breadth of which is limited by nothing but excessive cold; for that race totally disappears whenever the climate becomes a little temperate. (286)

According to these men, Indigenous peoples of the Arctic suffer from their surrounding Northern climes, and by contrast temperate zones have an opposite influence. Immanuel Kant’s (2015 [1802]) lectures from 1750s to 1790s reveal this quote, “in the hot countries the human being matures in all aspects earlier, but does not, however, reach the perfection of those in the temperate zones. Humanity is at its greatest perfection in the race of the whites” (576). Comte de Buffon (1749) agrees, stating “the most temperate climate…produces the most handsome and beautiful men. It is from this climate that the ideas of the genuine colour of mankind, and of the various degrees of beauty, ought to be derived” (286). Hegel (2001 [1837]) again concurs and summarizes these trains of thought when he wrote that “the true theatre of History is therefore the temperate zone” (97). These excerpts demonstrate the perceived superiority of whiteness brought about by the geographies of a temperate zone, and a supposed nongenerativity and inferiority of both frozen ice-scapes and peoples of a “frigid zone” or “polar circle.”

I call this phenomenon temperate-normativity, which is the supposed nongenerative features of ice as understood in relation to a Western ideal of civilization in temperate climes. Temperate-normativity arises in part from a dependence upon forms of agriculture, a practice that is meant to act as both a civilizational and government-making activity, which consequentially renders spaces of ice and those who move through them as aberrant and pathological. Ice is maligned because it does not adhere to a temperate-normative requirement measured by agricultural fertility that engenders stasis. For instance, James Scott (2017) writes that the dominant version of “human prehistory” that most people learn is one in which “fixed-field crops…were the origin and guarantor of the settled life, of form religion, of society, and of government by laws” and that “those who refused to take up agriculture did so out of ignorance or a refusal to adapt” (7). David Turnbull (2010) accords, writing that “fixity in space and place has become the foundation stone of Western rationality and epistemology…movement is equated with wandering, irrationality, and the primitive, something that needs to be controlled and set in logical, linear order” (77). Ice acts as the anti-agriculture that disturbs the very roots of the West. Movement, migration, and transit relatedly act as a counter to fixity and settlement which constitutes the literal ground from which Western culture emerges.

Temperate-normativity is constituted in part by the idea that those who inhabit geographies of ice are racially inferior, and also that these same Indigenous peoples are constitutively rendered peoples of pathological transit. As Jodi Byrd (2011) writes, to be in transit “is to be in motion, to exist liminally in the ungrievable spaces of suspicion and unintelligibility. To be in transit is to be made to move” (xv). In this case, Arctic Indigenous peoples become invariably unintelligible as geographies of ice supposedly force constant and pathologized movement. Ice as an historically racialized geography produces inferior human beings and, in its rootless materiality, presupposes a coerced movement. This conjuring of aberrant migrancy is implicated within other narratives of transit, namely human migrations across and out of geographies of ice toward settlement in temperate locales. Natural Historians of the 18th century were equally interested in the influences of climate upon the body as they were in tracing human origins and their migrations.

The racialization of Arctic ice, and the constant transit it supposedly requires, then, is also entwined with concerns of origins, in that temperate-normativity is not only about the superiority of temperate landscapes but hinges upon the necessary narratives of migration across and away from ice to temperate zones. For example, in Kant’s (2007 [1775]) piece “On the Different Races of Man,” he hypothesized that the race “displaced into the arctic zone” is not only of “smaller stature” due to the risk from cold, but also that “most of the now-known inhabitants of the arctic zone seemingly are but late arrivals there … and have taken up their present seat only since the emigration from the eastern part of Asia” (91). Kant’s musings illuminate entangled concerns about the nature of human migrations and temperate-normative notions of livable landscape. Further, his argument renders Indigenous Arctic peoples’ relationships to land as recent and unsettled.

Temperate-normativity also assumes that typical and logical human migrations occurred through the move out of undesirable cold climates and into preferable temperate climes, and those who “remained” in Arctic spaces were deviant and illegible. For instance, Thomas Jefferson (1999 [1785]) in his 1787 Notes on the State of Virginia wrote,

[d]iscoveries, long ago made, were sufficient to shew that a passage from Europe to America was always practicable, even to the imperfect navigation of ancient times … discoveries of Captain Cook … have proved that, if the two continents of Asia and America be separated at all, it is only by a narrow streight [sic]. So that from this side also, inhabitants have passed into America: and the resemblance between the Indians of America and the Eastern inhabitants of Asia, would induce us to conjecture, that the former are the descendants of the latter, or the latter of the former. … (107)

As this abridged genealogy demonstrates, Arctic environments, as spaces of pathological transit, are dismissed as incapable of generating agricultural settlement and Arctic peoples are denigrated as racially non-white and inferior. Consequentially, Indigenous peoples living in the Arctic are interpreted as migrant peoples having recently arrived from elsewhere and always-already ex-situ. This perpetual transit has less to do with actual historical or contemporary movements of Indigenous Arctic peoples across space or their intricate relations across polities and more-than-human kin; rather, this transit made aberrant is a consequence of human migration origin stories that rely on the racialization of Indigenous peoples in Arctic spaces. The history of ice-racialization is constitutive of the Bering Land Bridge Theory and discussions of the Anthropocene. Much Anthropocene scholarship doesn’t attend to either race or the material qualities of ice, even though the latter is a popular symbol for representing climate change. The use of Arctic ice to make claims about humanity is iterative: in the racialization of Arctic Indigenous peoples that naturalizes temperate-normativity, in the human migration narratives across Beringia into temperate lands, and in the Anthropocene discussions of melting ice as climate crisis.

Bering Land Bridge: Across and out

The Bering Land Bridge origin story offers human history as linear, narrated in chronological “waves” of migrants that moved across a landform that casts Siberia-and-Alaska as once temporarily connected. Below is an example of how the Bering Land Bridge Theory is narrated:

Through decades of collected archaeological evidence, and by the support of most of archaeologists and academics, the Bering Land Bridge theory hypothesizes that more than 10,000 years ago people travelled from East Asia to North America. These people travelled across plains that were exposed when sea levels began to drop as water was frozen in glaciers during the latter parts of the Ice Age in the Pleistocene Epoch about 1.75 million years ago. These plains connected Asia to North America; people then, inadvertently, followed plants and animals across these plains—and there remained. As the Ice Age ended, Beringia became submerged except for multiple islands in the Bering Sea (National Park Service).

An obscured dimension of such supporting “evidence” is that much of this material was and continues to be procured through violent means of disturbing, extracting, and continued ownership over thousands of human remains of Native Americans. In addition to being dependent upon well documented histories of theft, migration theories also work in an adversarial positioning against a multitude of Native peoples’ distinct creation stories that narrate a range of geographically and socially specific emergences, transits, and arrivals. Beringia’s human migration story undermines the complexities and textures of Indigenous histories and continuing practices, as well as the material and psychic conditions of ongoing coloniality. Yet, while there are consistently emerging disruptions and new archaeological discoveries that bring this origin story into question (Deloria, 1997; Kaplan, 2018; McGhee, 1989; Nash, 2012; Watson, 2017) the continued normalization of the Bering Land Bridge as fact persists.

Beringia also threatens Indigenous claims to land. As Byrd (2011) writes, the Bering Land Bridge Theory, “provide[s] a means to question aboriginal title to lands—if they were prior migrants from Asia, they had no aboriginal rights at all” (200). While transit is embedded within many distinct Indigenous creation stories, the concept can often be at odds with legal structures of land claims settlements that require a bureaucratic essentialism of stasis in space, tethered to concerns of property (Palmer, 2020). As Turnbull (2010) writes, “highlighting the role of movement … destabilizes the dominant narrative of the journey out of Africa culminating in the sedentary civilization of Western Europe,” and yet, movement acts as a “social technology of kinship—a network of relatedness, bonding, and obligations” (84). Similarly, Joy Harjo (2001) writes that

The Bering Strait Theory assumes that a land bridge was marked one way. The logic of that notion is so faulty as to be preposterous. There is no such thing as one-way land bridge. People, creatures and other life will naturally travel back and forth. Just as we will naturally intermarry, travel up and down rivers, cross oceans, fly from Los Angeles to Oklahoma for a powwow. (38)

Below, I analyze Joan Naviyuk Kane’s poem “Exceeding Beringia” to disrupt such universal narrations. Kane’s poem is attentive to ongoing discursive and material coloniality in Arctic spaces. While holding colonial actors accountable she simultaneously reinforces and centers a poetics of kinship against what others might call a Beringia landscape. Moreover, Kane’s work also demonstrates the need for a range of experiential and imaginary geographies of Arctic spaces that eclipse dominant forms of scientific archaeological and climate data that dominate the policy and academic analyses of Arctic spaces.

Exceeding Beringia

In this section, I analyze a single poem by one poet in order to privilege singularity, and to valorize the enunciation of detail, situatedness, and emplacedness. The argument in this article thus far has traced and critiqued broad assignments of race to Northern icy geographies, as well as universal narratives of the Anthropocene and the Bering Land Bridge Theory that desires to group all of humanity into one homogenous unit. Therefore, an attention to specificity and local social geography is an apt intentional methodological choice to contrast against the previously analyzed material. To read poetry carefully is to deny the notion of the statistical as superior.

Joan Naviyuk Kane is the author of seven poetry collections, all of which feature and elucidate Indigenous lands and lifeways in the Arctic in multiple dimensions. ² Kane’s oeuvre builds a poetic geographical imaginary of Arctic space, creating an intricate and intimate rendering of a political sociality experienced in Northern spaces by Inupiat. Her poem, “Exceeding Beringia” (2016) is set in Inupiat territory. The poem was commissioned by the Academy of American Poets and funded by the National Endowments for the Arts in partnership with the National Park Service (NPS) for the “Imagine Your Parks” grant. This partnership commissioned 50 poets in 50 states to write poems about a national park in their home state. Kane was asked to write a poem about Denali National Park, but elected to write instead about the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, a federal preserve that overlaps with the lands, communities, and histories to whom Kane is connected: Ugiuvak (King Island) and Mary’s Igloo. According to the narration of the Bering Land Bridge Theory in the previous section, Ugiuvak is a “remnant island of the Beringia landform.” Importantly, this is not the history that Kane articulates.

The Bering Land Bridge National Monument was first recognized in 1978 by presidential proclamation, and in 1980 the Alaska National Interest Land Conservation Act established the Preserve with allowances for subsistence practices, and sport hunting and trapping. In its several mutations of land ownership, Inupiat of this area have been extended little involvement in determining the ownership and management of their homelands. To address this sordid history, Kane (2016) leaves a remark in the “about this poem” section of the online interface:

Indigenous people continue to be dispossessed of our homelands through various policies (relocation, conservation, economic development and countless other paternalisms). As an Inupiaq woman, it can be a challenge to celebrate aspects of the problematic history of this country, especially ones that are so closely yoked to my identity: land and place. I wrote this poem to honor sites in the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve whose importance is impressed upon me by relatives and community members, though I haven’t yet been fortunate enough to spend time in all of these places. This poem also allowed me to draw upon the beautiful intricacies of rhetoric, observation, and sensibility embodied in the life work of Herbert Anungazuk (NPS Native Liaison) and contrast those with those of John Muir.

A crucial element that obligates both the red phalarope and Inupiat of this region to one another and to the land is communicated through the use of Inupiaq language, which punctuates “Exceeding Beringia” from the outset. The first words of the first stanza are in Inupiaq, “Nimiqtuumaruq aktunaamik” and are followed by “: bound with rope.” “Bound with rope” may be the direct translation of the preceding Inupiaq words, or it might be a related statement or description, an ambiguity heightened by the grammatical use of a colon. This intentional lack of clarity immediately censors this poem to non-Inupiaq readers, they are bound from the outset by the disruption of the English language. The very opening is closed; an orientation to space is obscured. This deliberate destabilization signals that the world offered here is not the world of the non-Inupiaq, this is not a familiar space of a shared universal human event. The speaker of the poem opens and closes spaces from the assumed universal English speaker-reader’s consumption and belonging. In this sense, the non-Inupiaq reader is bound with rope, captive by the choice of the speaker.

Is this a benign or malicious binding? The next lines reveal potentially both. The first stanza can be read in two ways that may exist simultaneously. “This land with its laws that serve as wire/and root to draw us together. Sinew, snare,/the unseen growth of the green tree/many rivers south whose stump now shoals/into use.” These lines offer a multi-dimensional understanding of being bound, as the laws of the land fasten “us” together. The use of many verb–nouns such as wire, root, and snare suggests that the “us” in the poem is drawn together by materials that offer potentially incarcerating and fruitful circumstances. Wire and snare can be interpreted as materials that are meant to bind in ways that trap and fasten; root and sinew offer dimensions of binding that are generative and symbiotic. Therefore, “[t]his land with its laws that serve as wire/and root” offers both confined, enforced fixity and the promise of connectivity. Furthermore, the “us” drawn together of the poem is also imbricated with “the green tree many rivers south” whose assumed destruction, in that it is a stump, emerges into benefit. Perhaps, there is growth far off that is not immediate, or spatially proximal, but nonetheless behaves as a binding actant.

The non-Inupiaq reader is brought in to an “us” but also not given access to full comprehension. The “us” is bound together, but not equalized or universalized. Moreover, the “land with its laws that serve as wire/and root” can mean entirely different things for Inupiat and non-Inupiat. While contemporary non-Inupiat readers might interpret being bound to the land and to an “us” in a time of climate change as meaning that we are all at the mercy of potential destruction, an Inupiaq reader could interpret the laws of this land differently. Particularly in that Indigenous peoples might experience the “land with its laws” not as some new-fangled form of destruction or plight but as ongoing violence. Whether it be through processes of forced governmental relocation; incarcerating communities through bureaucratic land claims processes of dispossession; generating certificates demonstrating degrees of Indian blood; or legal regulations on hunting, fishing, and gathering, the conditions of legal coloniality continue to inform the daily lives of Native peoples. This is especially salient in Alaska as there are currently no legal protections for hunting and harvesting practices that mandate an Alaska Native priority (DiNovelli-Lang and Hébert, 2019), and through an unprecedented form of land claims in the State, Alaska Natives are not conventionally understood as autonomous sovereign polities (Huhndorf and Huhndorf, 2011). In particular to Kane’s poem and hunting birds, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act in Alaska in the 1960s–1970s prohibited and penalized Alaska Native peoples for migratory bird hunting and was not overturned until 1977 (Maxwell, 2018). The laws of the land here can be interpreted as policy actively work to dispossess and disenfranchise Native peoples.

One could also entertain a different reading of the “us” drawn together by the laws of the land. “Us” might mean the people to whom Herbert Anungazuk belongs and the red phalarope, and thus the laws of the land exceed the juridical, bureaucratic legal policies instituted from on high. In which case, the red phalarope is distinct from Inupiat, as Inupiat is distinct from the red phalarope, and it is their differences that make them accountable to the kinship they share. It is these very distinctions that obligate them to one another and to the “Beringia” geography. If Inupiat and the red phalarope are bound and drawn together by the laws of the land in both carceral and generative forms, the following stanzas can be read as a description of the shared space, histories, and present interface with a changing world.

What constitutes this shared geographic imaginary? This space is, at the very least, one that refuses transcendentalist renditions that curate land as vital nature and calls into question a geological time as universally applicable. The speaker of the poem in “Exceeding Beringia” delivers a characterization of landscape that works against normative formulations of geology and the romantic nature writing and the “sublime,” such as that deployed by Henry David Thoreau. The poem reads: “Through layer upon layer of land/submerged, of ice, of ash, through lakes that cannot be the eyes of the earth.” In Walden, Thoreau (2010) wrote, “A lake is a landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature” (128). The speaker of the poem informs the reader that the “us” is not bound through the vertical space of mineral layers and submerged ice and ash that correspond to a geologic form of memory-keeping, or to a masculine form of self-measure. These methods of relating exist, and may even be useful, but they are not universally applicable—they cannot be the eyes of the earth.

As the poem continues, the reader is pushed not to take sedimented landscape as an inherent indication of veracity, but to grapple with continual movement and the transit of the landscape itself. The ground moving beneath one’s feet through the “phreatomagmatic blue sprawl,” the eruption and movement of the earth as its expanse grows, although it is narrated by another colonially given name “Devil Mountain Maar.” The reader follows the Kuzitrun lake as it is “drained by inland veins scrawling tributaries/with name upon vanishing name.” The motion of the landscape here is linked to alteration—not by a changing climate but colonial forces of dispossession and processes of re-naming landscapes that drain Inupiat places of their fullness.

While the poem destabilizes universal narratives of Beringia that render Kane’s ancestral homelands its “remnants,” it is not a return to the unscathed. Kane does not offer a pristine, untouched space that conjures an idealized return to a pre-contact, rather, her work makes them constitutive to modernity. While the poem draws attention to Inupiaq language and place names that mark a history of sustained spatial relationships and practices, these relationships are not unmarred. In the fourth stanza the second line begins

Auksruaq, like the blood that seeps/across such hot and dim and strenuous/times where one still cannot be serene:/red phalarope, might we follow,/leaving the meadow wet with tears? From nest to fledge and then to move again/right out to sea, circling tight vortices/to upwell food. Let us lose our grief/in great rafts as we translate the renamed/straits.

Kane’s poem ends with a gesture to the most modern form of forced relocation experienced by both Inupiat and the red phalarope: “Our limbs, like yours, are burnt/and broken. Let us at last make noise/of this truth as we return together/to wear another furrow, to make portage,/to make our land our home anew.” Forced relocation historically and contemporaneously in the Arctic and specifically Alaska is particularly relevant. Kane’s own community was made to relocate from their homeland at Ugiuvak in 1959 by decree the federal government, which resulted in the community dispersing across Nome, Kotzebue, and Anchorage (Kingston and Marino, 2010). Many Alaska Native villages along the coast of Alaska have consistently faced the challenge of responding to rising seas near their homes. Villages such as Shishmaref, Newtok, and Kivalina have been pushed to consider relocating their villages with little to no economic assistance from either State or federal governments (Bronen, 2010; Marino and Lazrus, 2015; Shearer, 2012).

Kane’s poem does not offer climate Science as a solution to the problem of a changing landscape for the red phalarope and the Inupiat. The speaker of the poem suggests that the way forward is to “make noise/of this truth as we return together … to make our land our home anew.” The transits of Indigenous peoples are not new—both Inupiat and the red phalarope move through space without compromising their relations to one another or to the land, sea, ice, and air. Yet, a concerted effort of narrating experience is made necessary especially under these conditions of change and modern forced migrations and relocations.

Conclusion

In this article, I offered an analysis of Indigenous Arctic spaces as they have been enlisted to tell stories about universal human origins and precarious endings. I traced an abridged critical racial history of ice to illuminate how Arctic spaces and Arctic Indigenous peoples have been racialized and rendered migrant and perpetually in transit in order to create and maintain what I call temperate-normativity. Temperate-normativity is constituted by a bolstering of temperate landscapes and those who live there as superior based on foundational aspects of the West being rooted in settled agriculture. Temperate-normativity espouses sedentarism and settlement as the apex of humanity, and thus Arctic spaces of ice are denigrated and maligned, as are Indigenous peoples who call the Arctic home. Additionally, ice is also hinged to understandings of human migrations over a supposed Bering Land Bridge, where transit is meant to occur through and out of spaces of ice toward temperate locales. Therefore, in the Arctic, Indigenous peoples are subject to the racialization of environmental determinism and its link to problematic theories of original waves of human migrations. In this way, the Arctic, a vibrant and multiply rich space, is often reduced to a scientific dataset, an archaeological setting wherein human migrations, or a spectacular vision of melting ice that evidences an Anthropocentric crisis occur and are meaningful only in relation to an unsettled temperate material world and cultural imaginary.

To counteract this tendency, I offered an analysis of an Arctic geography as articulated through a poem by Joan Naviyuk Kane that acts as a counterpoint to an overwhelming scholarly focus on the Arctic largely rendered through dominant quantitative climate Science. Kane’s poem, and larger body of literary contributions, extends an Arctic geographic imaginary that exceeds dominant scientific and popular renderings of Arctic spaces. Her poem, “Exceeding Beringia,” in particular, delivers an articulation of transit, migration, and obligatory accountability between Inupiat and the red phalarope that exceeds an Anthropocentric “Beringia” landscape. As Beringia is exceeded, readers are given an opportunity to understand and experience the Arctic not as an icon of devastating climate change, but as a space of consistent historical, ongoing, and distinct socio-political relations. Moreover, not only is Beringia exceeded, but the poem also urges readers to bring their attention to contemporary forced transits and relocations that emerge under ongoing coloniality and late stage capitalism.