Advancing tourism’s moral morphology: Relational metaphors for just and sustainable arctic tourism

Introduction

The challenge of creating just and sustainable tourism is perhaps nowhere better represented than in the Arctic. Rapid change associated with a warming planet threatens supply side tourism resources and drives demand, pushing a ‘see it while you can’ mentality among nature, cultural and adventure tourism markets (Lemelin et al., 2010; Snyder and Stonehouse, 2007) and producing uncertain regional benefits (Grenier and Müller, 2011). Moreover, Arctic tourism is situated within fields of power that, historically, operate to favour certain knowledges, practices and values, while disenfranchising others (O’Hara, 2001; Pritchard and Morgan, 2000; Smith, 1999). Such imbalance is implicated in the colonial domination of the Canadian Arctic and its First Nation, Inuit, and Métis inhabitants (Coates, 1985; Lemelin and Blangy, 2009; Simpson, 2001). This legacy – with traces to the fur trade, Franklin’s infamous search for the Northwest Passage and policies of cultural assimilation, federal sovereignty and wildlife management (Coates, 1985; Fumoleau, 2004; Kulchyski and Tester, 2007; Milligan and McCreary, 2011) – lingers in visions of the Arctic as spatially remote ‘resource frontier’ and/or ‘wilderness’, or, as Saul (2008) describes, as a place to be travelled across rather than inhabited. Clearly, as Stewart et al. (2011) note, Arctic tourism ‘cannot be understood in isolation from the wider influences of history and culture’ (p. 47).

Amid trajectories of change, uncertainty and injustice, should tourism development persist in the Arctic, it ‘needs to proceed with the current views and future aspirations of local people, along with environmental considerations, as the foundations’ (Johnston, 2011: 23). Enhancing stakeholder cooperation is imperative to such a vision of sustainability (Enzenbacher, 2011; Hull, 2011; Stewart et al., 2005). Cooperation in tourism has been defined ‘as a form of voluntary joint actions in which autonomous stakeholders engage in an interactive process, using shared rules, norms and structures, to act and decide on issues related to tourism development in the region’ (Czernek, 2013: 84). Arctic tourism literature tends to emphasize the importance of enhanced intergovernmental and inter-institutional cooperation for coordinated and effective governance across the circumpolar north (Maher et al., 2011; Mason et al., 2000; Stewart and Draper, 2006). However, research also suggests the need for improved cooperation at interactional scales. For instance, Stewart et al. (2011) report some residents of Pond Inlet, an Inuit community in Nunavut, feeling annoyed by visiting cruise tourists and sensitive to their opinions of subsistence activities. Also from Nunavut, Buckley’s (2005) account of an Inuit hunt illustrates how ecotourists’ non-consumptive ideals can vilify local and adaptive cultural traditions. Smith (1989), Hinch (1998), Dressler et al. (2001), and Johnston (2006) discuss similar incompatibilities between tourism and Aboriginal communities within a broader context.

This article takes the position that cooperation in Arctic tourism is impeded by ‘modern’, ‘Western-centric’ or ‘colonial’ discourses that normalize and value ‘nature’ as a divisive, deterministic and essential ontological category (Braun, 2002). More than a decade ago, Franklin and Crang (2001) observed that in much tourism research, nature ‘is uncritically confused or conflated with “environment”’ (p. 16) and that ‘both the object of “nature” and the desire for “nature” are given quite unproblematically and uncritically’ (p. 16). These tendencies in tourism studies mirror broader conventions and popular thought that situate nature as something purely distinct from, and external to, social and/or cultural realities (Castree, 2001). ‘Empty wilderness’ is perhaps the most extreme expression of this Cartesian split between nature and society insofar as it has justified appropriation of Indigenous lands for preservation, disregard for humanity’s everyday ecological connectivity and excessive resource extraction in neighbouring regions (Cronon, 1995a). Indeed, as contributors to this journal have helped to illuminate (see, for example, Franklin, 2004; Markwell, 2001; Olafsdottir, 2013; Reis, 2012), nature is contested political terrain, both spatially and ideologically (see also Castree and Braun, 2001; Cronon, 1995b; Macnaghten and Urry, 1998). But with direction from the likes of Latour (1993), Haraway (1991) and Thrift (1999), among others, and at the spurring of Franklin and Crang (2001), several recent accounts in tourism studies fashion nature–society in non-dualitistic, or relational, terms. In particular, tourism scholars are engaging metaphors – dwelling, hybridity, performance, multiplicity, networks, to name a few – that articulate tourism natures in terms of emergent activity and creative possibility rather than as a distinct, primordial ontological domain (see Cloke and Perkins, 2005; Grimwood and Doubleday, 2013a; Mullins, 2009; Pons, 2003; Reis and Shelton, 2011; Van der Duim et al., 2013; Waitt and Cook, 2007). To borrow from Waitt and Cook (2007), these linguistic projects emphasize ‘how the human and the non-human worlds are always open to transformation, or in other words, an ontology of always being in a mode of becoming’ (pp. 536–37). Tourism spaces – including those staged as nature – are increasingly understood as ‘derived relationally through people’s own preconceived ideas, motivations, their companions, and, above all, the experiences derived from the bodily imperatives of touring the human and non-human worlds’ (Waitt and Cook, 2007: 536).

Nevertheless, destination Arctic remains tethered to its representation as a last great wilderness. According to Johnston (2011),

A strong theme in Arctic tourism, used by operators and sought by tourists, is the social construction of a polar or northern wilderness that combines a temperate bias in beliefs about the Arctic environment and images of the region as symbolically meaningful … The Arctic is a place of beauty, challenge, pristine but vulnerable nature, and difference permeates much of the promotional material for tourism. (p. 17)

As inferred already, and stipulated by De la Barre (2013), perceptions and representations of ‘pristine’ Arctic nature rely on obscuring, if not erasing, the historical and contemporary presence of Aboriginal inhabitants. Touristic representations of the Thelon River in Arctic Canada – the context for research reported herein – are particularly effective at venerating a romanticized ‘past primitive’ that conceals contemporary Aboriginal livelihoods. Such slippage occurs in two Thelon River trip advertisements in the Canadian magazine Canoeroots. The first reads, ‘Though the area is now empty of people, signs of ancient human life are everywhere’ (Finklestein, 2007: 23, emphasis added). After 3 years, the following occurred: ‘Once a veritable highway for nomadic Inuit hunters, the legendary Thelon travels 900 portage-free kilometers from Whitefish Lake, NWT, to Baker Lake, NU’ (No Author, 2011: 18, emphasis added). Curiously, ignored in both instances are the living realities in Baker Lake, Nunavut, an inland Inuit settlement located at the Thelon’s eastern terminus, and Lutsel K’e, a Dene First Nation located near the Thelon’s headwater lakes. For these communities, the Thelon is hunting and fishing territory, and a consistent source of drinking water, social bonding, traditional knowledge and cultural memory (Raffan, 1992). An effect of the Canoeroots trip descriptions is the reification of the Canadian North as peripheral wilderness, landscape of loss and place to cross but not reside (Braun, 2002; Shields, 1991). They do this by privileging a particular, largely exogenous version of nature, along with its attendant socio-cultural rules, norms and structures, to mask or erase contemporary Aboriginal livelihoods within the landscape. To what extent is cooperation possible when stakeholders with the most to lose or gain from tourism in their territories are marginalized within Arctic tourism’s discursive field?

This article aims to illuminate relational, value-based metaphors that may nurture cooperative spaces for just and sustainable Arctic tourism. As elaborated in the subsequent section, these metaphors are intended to align with perspectives that identify ‘relations’ as the fundamental basis of reality, knowledge and value. The article draws on case study research of the Thelon River and, specifically, the productive tensions and affiliations expressed through diverse practices of canoe tourists and Inuit residents of Baker Lake, observed and documented using mobile ethnography during a series of experiential river journeys. This empirical substance is interpreted against a backdrop of geographical and anthropological literatures to flesh out emplacement, wayfaring and gathering as relational metaphors of becoming; that is, in their fluidity, hybridity and indeterminacy, they refuse absolute, universal or divisive expressions of value. These metaphors intend to disrupt the ‘nature’ of Arctic tourism and create opportunities to understand, debate and craft tourism’s intellectual terminology (Belhassen and Caton, 2009).

Theoretical relations

Awareness of tourism and tourism studies as relational and transformative endeavours has amplified in recent years by the field’s critical and moral turns (Ateljevic et al., 2007; Caton, 2012). This literature engages diverse epistemologies to yield methodological innovation and degrees of philosophical maturation (Pritchard et al., 2011). Consistent with Belhassen and Caton (2009), many of these epistemological moments view knowledge as a ‘social product, created by communities of scholars that are governed by particular norms and traditions, and that notions of truth cannot be disentangled from the broader realm of human interactions and power’ (p. 336) (see also Tribe, 2006). Such a provocative contrast to positivist attempts to purge the imprint of our humanness from knowing the world has several far-reaching implications, two of which were especially important in foregrounding the present study. First, producing tourism knowledge is understood to have ‘real world’ effects. As Hollinshead (2007) argues, tourism research is active in ‘worldmaking’ – what we know about tourism and how we access this knowledge are implicated in constituting tourism worlds. For better or worse, and at differing spatial and temporal degrees, our research activities stir transformation and are therefore political. Second, values-engaged scholarship is increasingly accepted within the field. Because knowledge production has effects and is always value-laden (Higgins-Desbiolles and Powys Whyte, 2013), many researchers regard ‘moral and ethical obligations as intrinsic to enquiry’ (Pritchard et al., 2011: 947) and actively question how their efforts ‘can better be a part of the solution to global problems’ (Caton, 2012: 1907). In other words, there is a palpable shift to balance the worldmaking capacity of doing research with reflexive, values-led scholarship to enact futures of positive possibility.

In addition to engaging these epistemological, ontological and axiological relations, this study approached the Thelon field site as moral terrain. This geographic metaphor has been applied elsewhere for thinking across nature/culture and contextualizing ethics as everyday, corporeal and lived (Figueroa and Waitt, 2008). According to Figueroa and Waitt (2008), moral terrains represent

the web of values layered over places through discourses that establish normative practices and socio-environmental belonging. At the same time, moral terrains are inscribed onto bodies through affective responses to touring … Bodily affects are understood as living, performative emotions that enable people to come to know and build or negate relationships with other human body-selves as well as non-human entities. (p. 328)

Whereas values typically refer to principles and standards informing ideas and beliefs of individuals or groups, Figueroa and Waitt situate them within observable realms of practice, embodiment, encounter and place performance. Hence, values are not simply in and of the mind, but are inscribed upon landscapes, brought-into-being by bodies and embedded in the ‘spinning relations’ (Haldrup, 2004) people enact with landscape features, objects and subjects.

Kulchyski (2006) wrote specifically about ‘the expression and embodiment of values’ (p. 158) observed in the Inuit settlement of Pangnirtung, Nunavut. Deviating from traditional anthropological attention to culture as exotic other communicated through artefacts, Kulchyski explained culture as modalities of embodied practice in which values are circulated, ‘written’ and made visible. He exemplified, by illuminating egalitarianism, trust and community in the performance of Inuit gestures, signals of resistance to hegemonic and endogenous social orders. Maintaining the view that values are expressed in and through cultural practices, but slipping from Kulchyski’s emancipatory objective, this study’s conceptual/theoretical intention was to jar totalizing systems of value (i.e. dominant narratives of nature) with indeterminate, permeable and collective alternatives.

Mobile methodology

Mobile ethnography

Research informing this article occurred between 2008 and 2011. It is part of ongoing case study research designed to provide theoretical insights based on a particular context and to achieve analytical generalizations (Stake, 2000; Yin, 2009). The intrinsic purpose (Stake, 2000) has been to engage with Thelon tourists and inhabitants in cultivating enhanced understanding of, and responsible relationships to, a special place within contexts of social–ecological–cultural change. Community-based, participatory and visual methods orient this broader case study (Grimwood, Doubleday, Laidler, Donaldson, and Blangy, 2012).

Central to this article, however, is an instrumental purpose (Stake, 2000) – that is, as noted above, to illuminate relational metaphors that may nurture cooperative spaces for just and sustainable Arctic tourism – investigated through the application of mobile ethnography during a series of experiential Thelon River journeys. Following Watts and Urry (2008), the mobile ethnography involved ‘traveling with people and things, participating in their continual shift through time, place, and relations with others’ (p. 867). Whereas movement between locations is central to several styles of ethnography, the ethnographic ‘field site’ for this study was the river movements themselves (Watts, 2008; Watts and Urry, 2008). In other words, the mobile ethnography entailed living the shifting relations, events and encounters that construct the field as a place on-the-move; it literally ‘draws researchers into a multitude of mobile, material, embodied practices of making distinctions, relations and places’ (Büscher and Urry, 2009: 105).

The germination of mobile ethnography coincided with the emergence of mobility studies, the ‘broad project of establishing a “movement-driven” social science in which movement, potential movement and blocked movement, as well as voluntary/temporary immobilities, practices of dwelling and “nomadic” place-making are all conceptualized as constitutive of economic, social and political relations’ (Büscher and Urry, 2009: 100). Mobilities research examines associations between dynamic modes of social, material and technological movement; ways people on-the-move perceive and confer meaning upon places; and how mobile practices constitute space, identity, value and sustainability (Adey, 2010; Haldrup, 2004; Lund-Durlacher and Dimanche, 2013). As Adey (2010) underscores, mobility is an effect of relations – a provisional outcome that always involves some other kind of (im)mobility. For Hannam (2009), tourism research benefits by situating itself within the social theoretical debates, empirical relations and approaches to inquiry afforded by mobilities. Positioning Arctic tourism in this light enables opportunities to analyse it alongside other lifestyle mobilities constituting the Arctic but which tend to be viewed as tourism externalities.

Table 1 outlines the experiential river journeys that I took during the study period. On all trips, I disclosed to participants my role as a researcher. Performing this cross-section of canoeist and Inuit routes was intended not to be comprehensive of all tourist and inhabitant experience within the Thelon riverscape. Nor was it intended to generate unequivocal or replicable results. Rather, I participated in these journeys as a critically reflexive and embedded approach whereby analytical insights could be interpreted, and crafted, even sensed, in relation to sharing travel practices with others (Reis, 2012). This is, as interpretivists and constructivists would suggest, about deeply situated and partial perspectives and the making of meaning (Schwandt, 2000). Such an approach is deemed consistent with the relational epistemological underpinnings noted above.

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Table 1.

Experiential journey descriptions.

Type	Date(s)	Mode of transportation	Locations	Distance (~km)	Guide; participants
Piloted journeys	04–05 July 2008	All-terrain vehicle	Anautalik’s cabin	24	Anautalik; 1 non-Inuk
	09 July 2008	All-terrain vehicle	Archaeological sites	20	Anautalik; 2 non-Inuit
	11 July 2008	Motorboat	Lower Thelon River	80	2 Inuit hunters
	15 July 2008	All-terrain vehicle	Prince River	33	N/A
Research journeys	08 May 2010	Snowmobile	Halfway Hills	73	Anautalik
	16 May 2010	Walking	Blueberry Hill	7	N/A
	10–20 July 2010	Canoe	Thelon Wildlife Sanctuary	270	Commercial Guide; 8 clients
	24 July 2010	Motorboat	Lower Kazan River	183	Anautalik, Anautalik’s husband; 3 Inuit family members
	25 July 2010	All-terrain vehicle	Prince River	33	3 non-Inuit
	27 July 2010	All-terrain vehicle	Anautalik’s Cabin	24	Anautalik; 1 non-Inuk
	27 November 2010	Snowmobile	Anautalik’s Cabin	20	Anautalik; 3 Inuit

Four piloted journeys occurred during a familiarization visit to Baker Lake in July 2008. These initial experiences provided important context for study design and implementation. Six research journeys departed from Baker Lake (Figure 1). These included travel by snowmobile and qamutiik (sled), motorboat, all-terrain vehicle (ATV) and foot, with routes and distances varying based on mode of travel. Anautalik, an Inuk Elder with rich family connections to the Thelon, organized, guided or recommended these journeys based on her interpretation of the study focus and as part of her role as local research coordinator. Other trip participants included Inuk and non-Inuk men and women of various ages and are included in the study as a convenience sample. It is important to note that Anautalik’s culturally informed travel practices adapt with local seasonal fluctuations. Her choice to journey the lower Kazan, for example, was related to water levels on surrounding rivers including the Thelon proper, caribou migration patterns and current camp locations of family and friends. Consequently, the Kazan journey did not fall outside the study scope but mirrored how the Thelon is performed by Inuit as part of a broader network of human and non-human trails (Aporta, 2009). And while circumstances did not allow for extended, multi-day journeys to distant camps, the journeys experienced are typical of proximate outings taken by Baker Lake residents and conducive to the temporal demands of participating in a wage economy.

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Figure 1.

Trails of journeys departing from Baker Lake, Nunavut.

The 11-day canoe journey traversed the Thelon Wildlife Sanctuary (Figure 2) and was outfitted and guided by a commercial operation established in 1974 and based in the NWT. Licensed to guide tours along the Thelon’s entire length, the operator caters to affluent North American and European tourists seeking a sense of isolation, adventure and inspiration. The July 2010 route was staged with moderate current, no portages, several heritage sites, biome transitions and possible encounters with wildlife. Typical of the operator’s other trips, the journey included nine clients (including myself), men and women, who convened just prior to boarding a chartered aircraft to the ‘put-in’. Our descent involved paddling 7 hours each day in tandem canoes, travelling with all equipment and food, constructing new campsites each night and taking meals prepared by our guide. According to the operator, the trip was atypical in several ways. Clients were older (only one client was below the age of 60 years), but more skilled as canoeists, than most tour groups, and thick summer heat and moderate wind intensified the presence of the tundra’s legendary insects. Moreover, while declining populations of caribou, wolf, muskoxen and grizzly bear within the Sanctuary had been observed, the operator noted our encounters with these mammals were particularly slight.

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Figure 2.

Trail of canoe journey.

Participant observation was used to document each river journey in situ. Voice-recorded memos and photography were effective for creating traces of events, circumstances, encounters and so forth, as they transpired. When weather and travel demands permitted, field notes were taken to flesh out journey details, to write critical and candid reflections and to initiate linkages between empirical observations and academic literatures. Global positioning system (GPS) data were recorded on a hand-held device to document and visually represent each journey. Anautalik also took photographs during the Halfway Hills and Lower Kazan journeys, which she coupled with other Thelon photographs from her personal collection to discuss post-trip to Halfway Hills. All data were digitized and entered into NVivo 8.0 qualitative analysis software, which was used to facilitate initial coding, for thematic and patterned grouping, and to look within and across sources for relational descriptions, understanding and meaning (Jackson, 2001). The data analysis process also emulated Kulchyski’s (2006) ‘ethics of reading’, a critical and situated engagement with social theory and community-oriented research praxis that aims to ‘give a sense’ of cultural alternatives to the logics of totalization (e.g. ‘nature’). This is about using my research, iterative interpretations and writing to draw attention to expressions of value that present positive possibilities for participating communities (Kulchyski, 2006). It was these commitments that marshalled illumination of three relational, value-based metaphors in and through tourist and Inuit riverscape practices. It is argued that these metaphors can be a starting point in crafting moral terrains that foster cooperation among Arctic tourism stakeholders.

Emplacement

While the Thelon is promptly represented as spatial abstraction (e.g. ‘wilderness’ or ‘frontier’) whereby human inhabitation is deemed out-of-place, practices of canoeists and Inuit reflect the value in and of emplacement; that is, the condition of being in place, performing and encountering place or becoming emplaced. Here, place is not conceptualized as space embedded with meaning (Tuan, 1977), nor as bounded political site of domination/resistance (Harvey, 1996). Rather, place is volatile and contingent, made and remade through various practices, including tourism-related ones. Inline with Massey (2005), emplacement occurred as an event of ‘throwntogetherness’ where distinct, multiple and performative trajectories were encountered and negotiated in the ‘here-and-now’. People, things, ideas, meanings, histories and landscapes converged to enact place via strategically planned and/or spontaneous encounters (Bærenholdt and Granås, 2008). Within the Thelon, emplacement was expressed as practices of imagination/representation, practices of the body and practices of return.

Practices of the body

Corresponding with current thinking in tourism geography, canoeists and inhabitants expressed emplacement via embodied practices – sensuous, corporeal acts implicated in the construction of space and place (Crouch et al., 2001; Williams, 2009). The turbulence of riding a qamutiik or ATV reverberates in bones and muscles, the grip of hands easing with experience. Crisp summer swims cool the sting of tundra heat and bug bites, much like the chill that accompanies speeding in a motorboat. Sips of sweetened tea linger with conversation. Within the expansiveness of the tundra, one’s depth perception grows accustomed to spotting subtle movements within the landscape. The utility of such embodied practices is diverse. They create a range of pleasant and unpleasant sensations, both physical and affective. They enable social and material interactions, some becoming habitual (e.g. canoe paddling) and some supporting subsistence (e.g. locating prey). Safe navigation is facilitated, as is an awareness of environmental change. Embodied practices elicit memories, and mobilize knowledge and subsequent reflection.

Thinking again with Massey (2005), it is apparent that emplacement was expressed as canoeists and inhabitants used their bodies in the ‘here and now’ to sense the ‘then and there’. Going beyond a consumptive gaze, canoeists would run their fingers along the edges of stone arrowheads, or use the length of their bodies to size-up stone caches or distinguish a fox trap from gravesite. Kinaesthetic appreciation was obtained when one canoeist tried his hand at knapping stones. Such embodied practice has the effect of drawing past trajectories into the contemporary, perceptual manifolds of place.

Embodying heritage was also made clear in an event recalled by Anautalik. Figure 3 was taken over a decade ago during Anautalik’s first visit to a family camp on Beverly Lake. Anautalik is pointing up with the stands of black spruce, smiling not for the camera, but because she was immersed in sensations of her past:

I was really happy, so happy to see the trees. Smell the trees, the plants … It made me feel like at home where I came from with my parents. And when we burned the wood, I told my husband and my mother-in-law ‘come and smell the trees!’ … ‘smell the smoke!’ … Oh that was home! Like way back from where I came from … My goodness I was a little girl again … It was good to be back home. In this picture I’m old. In my heart I was young. (Anautalik, 11 May 2010)

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Figure 3.

Embodying family heritage.

Anautalik encountered family heritage in the smells of spruce and campfire. In a similar fashion, Inuit cultural heritage becomes embodied along Thelon trails each time kidney from a freshly harvested caribou is tasted; young hunters pile stones to cache meat; or a motorboat is steered by a driver alert to directions contained in an inuksuit on shore.

Wayfaring

Method, according to Serres (2009), traces a path of efficiency from point of departure to final destination. ‘Running between both these situations’, Serres (2009) explains, ‘the methodical line passes through the middle and is defined, and of course constrained, in terms of these extremes’. (p. 261) Methodical lines characterize what Ingold (2007) defined as ‘transport’: a modality of travel linked to projects of colonial occupation whereby lines connecting points of interest are established across a surface, and the ‘in-between’ holds little meaning or value. In this section, however, the storied lines of interest are those in-between the peripheral waypoints of method: mobile practices associated with an ‘exodus’ from point-to-point routes and submitting to fluctuations of living space (Serres, 2009). Specifically, three riverscape practices highlight the expression of wayfaring. Borrowing from Ingold (2007), wayfaring occurs when motion and perception are coupled, that is, the paths and pace of travel are responsive to sensuous, corporeal encounters with the environs. A wayfarer is a body in motion, ‘he is his movement’ (Ingold, 2007: 75) and knows as he goes. Whereas passengers are carried from place to place – their movement detached from perception – the wayfarer perceptually monitors and materially engages with the countryside as it opens up along his or her path.

Canoeists express wayfaring in certain paddling practices. To be sure, canoe routes are often constructed in relation to epochal methods of transport that shuttle canoeists to and from desired adventures. Even on river, the tendency is to craft methodical lines from campsite to campsite. To think, then, of paddling as an expression of wayfaring requires shifting focus to the mundane (Edensor, 2007). It is the commonplace micro-trajectories within which expressions of wayfaring are locatable. For instance, using paddles as extensions of arms, canoeists worked their bodies in tandem to position their canoe relative to the current or wind for preferred effect. When head winds picked up or river obstacles presented, bodies would shift into position for calculated and concentrated strokes. We would sit tall to survey ahead, or tuck our legs under the seat or against the hull to brace and balance. At Thelon Bluffs, where the river constricts and bends, we beached canoes and rambled the shoreline to scout the current’s concentration on river left. Standing waves, capable of swamping a canoe, were definite. Back upon the water, arms and paddles synchronized to angle canoes river right and propel forward. Crossing into an eddy’s upstream current, body weight tilted the canoe slightly to the right and a few quick ‘draw’ and ‘pry’ strokes turn and stabilize the vessel. Waves avoided, we carried on down river.

Mechanical practices may also fuse perception and motion, and be conducive to engaging deviations encountered on trail. Much like the practices of canoeing rapids, inhabitants demonstrated a union of watercraft-body movement and environmental perception while driving motorboats. Motorboats are used during summer and require driving against river currents and attaining powerful rapids to access caribou crossings and camps. While safe routes up rapids are inscribed into local knowledge systems, their everyday navigation demands an ability to identify deep-water channels, obstacles and micro-currents, and to manoeuvre the boat in response to features perceived. At the helm, the pilot tends to stand to scout the river, scan the shoreline for guidance in the form of inuksuit or watch the happenings of other vessels. It is a subtle but well-rehearsed skill of manipulating the steering wheel and applying appropriate throttle that enables effective and safe navigation. Precision, skill and awareness characterize this mechanical practice, and others common to inhabitants in different seasonal conditions.

Walking practices also expressed wayfaring. While the Thelon’s downstream current influenced the macro-trajectory of the canoe journey, time and space enabled us to ramble the landscape unguided. Oriented by river corridor and snaking eskers, and unfettered by extended hours of summer daylight, canoeists engaged daily in purposeful and aimless wanderings, individually or in small groups, and curious perhaps about some animal tracks sketched upon the beach or a glacial deposit standing incongruously upon a hill. Such micro-journeys, which typically occurred before breakfast or as the guide prepared evening meals, complemented guided hikes that retraced routes to wolf dens, waterfalls, points of elevation or historic sites, like Dene lithic scatters, former Inuit encampments or dilapidated cabins constructed by trappers and game wardens. The apparent order of guided walks did not deny us the physicality or sensations of manipulating our bodies in relation to different features encountered.

Walking is also an important summer time practice among Inuit. From July to September, when motorboats are the primary mode of travel, hunters often approach caribou on foot. Adapting traditional practices of using qajait (kayaks) to hunt caribou at water crossings, Inuit inhabitants scout migrating herds from, or along route to, land camps, and then walk within rifle range. A caribou harvested during the Kazan journey was spotted east of a hunter’s camp. Tracking the animal’s movements, the hunter walked to an elevated position with a good line of sight. A small group of us tramped through buggy muskeg to the kill, and hauled meat and skins back to camp. Figure 4 shows the weight that burdened the walk back.

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Figure 4.

Carrying harvest to camp.

Gathering

Gathering names the third metaphor expressed in practices of Thelon canoeists and inhabitants. Borrowing from Law (2004), gathering connotes a process of bundling, bringing together, picking, meeting or flowing together. It reflects an accumulation, much like a gathering storm or picking a bunch of flowers (Law, 2004). Gathering is engaged here as an alternative to personal development and social recognition goals implicated in much Arctic tourism (Grenier, 2004). In particular, practices of canoeists and Inuit revealed processes of social becoming, the gathering of social bonds or the crafting of community, where community stands not for the accumulation of autonomous individuals organized by shared patterns of consumption (Kulchyski, 2006), but for the ‘awakening of a communal subjectivity’ that emerges ‘from practices and feelings – of appreciation, generosity, desire to do and be with others, connecting with strangers … encountering and transforming oneself through that experience’ (Gibson-Graham, 2003: 68–69). Gathering is thus a relational endeavour in which social–material spaces, including intra and inter-cultural spaces, are configured.

Gathering is often first expressed through invitation, a generally positive verbal or non-verbal gesture encouraging someone to go somewhere or do something. It was a subtle invitation that facilitated inter-generational and inter-cultural knowledge sharing during the November 2010 snowmobile journey. As Anautalik and I readied snowmobiles, two young neighbours emerged from their house to offer assistance:

Anautalik quickly saw this as an opportunity to get youth on the land; or maybe she is just an inviting woman? In any case, Anautalik asked the youth to join us, and then invited one of their mothers to come along. (B. Grimwood’s field notes, 27 November 2010)

Mother and youth agreed. One youth was short on the necessary warm layers, so was outfitted by Anautalik with parka, caribou skin pants and kamiks. Once at her cabin, Anautalik led us to a wooden shed storing frozen meat, damaged by scavenging fox and wolverine. Their tracks identified them as the culprits. Anautalik proceeded to rig a snare and camouflage it with a thin layer of snow carved with a knife:

The point here is that the spontaneous invitation brought a group of us together to learn from Anautalik about fox, wolverine, snow, traps, food security … so you have environmental-cultural-social learning emerging from the spontaneous event of invitation. (B. Grimwood’s field notes, 27 November 2010)

Invitations were likewise commonplace during the canoe journey. Morning and evening walks, noted above, were often group affairs triggered by someone’s invitation to ramble together. Other invitations were non-verbal. Our calling to dinner each night was the sweet scent of fresh bannock drifting from the kitchen – our senses inviting us to gather for nourishment. On occasion, peoples’ actions served the invitation. Such was the case on a hot, windless day when one canoeist’s fully clothed swim inspired the entire group to follow suit to cool off. But as the above examples imply, the significance of invitation relates to how it is received. Meaning and substance is contained not only in the practice of invitation but also in the response elicited. In the contexts of gathering, practices of invitation and reception are co-constitutive.

Gathering was also expressed via practices of constructing camp. On the canoe journey, camp was re-established daily at different locations, thus requiring consistent showings of collective effort. Despite the tundra’s vastness, our seven nylon tents were never far removed from one another, which resulted in village-like familiarity, comfort and safety. On days with little wind, a mesh tent was assembled so meals could be taken in bug-free comfort. This had the effect of physically drawing our group closer, the comfort of which was reflected in the ease of casual conversation. Inuit encampments have greater degrees of permanency, both in terms of their physical construction and as sites of experience. Wood cabins or durable canvas tents are established at sites used by families across generations and in multiple seasons. Resonating with ancestral practices, Inuit continue to situate these encampments near prime hunting or fishing areas. Camps thus function as nodes of activity and stability in relation to various intersecting human, non-human and ancestral trails. They are a locus of social and cultural activity, hospitality and rest.

Perhaps the most clear expression of gathering transpired in practices of sharing food. These practices include food preparation, consumption and exchange, and are not simply about physical nourishment. Food sharing is also about nurturing social bonds and, in some cases, creating spaces for cultural understanding. Among canoeists, meals were a consistent incentive to convene as a group. At breakfast, people would ‘check-in’ after a night in tents, often to compare insect management strategies and discuss the day’s route ahead. Likewise, evening meals provided opportunities to reflect together on the day’s events, to continue learning from the guide about the Thelon’s natural history, and to converse about broader contemporary issues. Meals were indeed gregarious moments providing safe collective spaces for telling life stories and learning about travel companions.

Comparable social dimensions accompanied eating food along the river trails of Inuit. People congregated, conversed and told stories around hot tea, fresh and/or dried caribou, bannock and store-bought snacks. However, in contrast to canoeists, whose food sharing practices were structured by the guide’s solitary preparations, recurrent meal times and non-local fare, Inuit demonstrated more consistent and collective approaches to preparing, consuming and exchanging food. Indeed, the gathering of and for food is the principal intention of riverscape travel among Inuit, as food remains central to identity and culture (Collings, 2011). The vitality of food sharing networks was revealed when Anautalik’s brother-in-law harvested a bull caribou during the motorboat journey. This was a time for hunters to instruct youth (and visiting researcher) on skinning and butchering techniques. As a gesture of encouragement, the hunters presented the youth and I with first cuts of kidney, a traditional delicacy. To taste it, Anautalik mentioned, was to express our willingness to learn and gratitude for knowledge shared. Upon departing back to Baker Lake, Anautalik and her husband loaded the full harvest into their motorboat; the food was given to them because the brother-in-law was staying at camp another couple of days.

Conclusion

To realize just and sustainable tourism in the Arctic requires cooperation between stakeholder groups (Enzenbacher, 2011). Unfortunately, perceptions and representations of the Arctic as remote, pristine ‘nature’ – common in tourism discourses linked to colonialism and Western visions of modernity (Braun, 2002; Reis and Shelton, 2011) – conceal Aboriginal inhabitants: stakeholders who, arguably, have the most at stake in Canadian Arctic tourism contexts. When Arctic nature is scripted as peripheral object and desire for touristic consumption, contemporary livelihoods of Inuit and other first peoples tend to be romanticized as part of a primitive and threatened traditional past, or effectively erased from the perceived landscape (De la Barre, 2013). Clearly, this does little to foster cooperation. It is a probable source of what Stewart et al. (2011) observe among Inuit in Pond Inlet, Nunavut as a sense of powerlessness in relation to tourism development.

One path towards enhanced cooperation involves carving out new ways of speaking about the Arctic that are potentially more inclusive with respect to the plurality of voices and values layering the terrain. This is especially true if we accept language as having tangible consequences (Foucault, 1972). Drawing on the mobile ethnography of experiential journeys with Thelon River canoeists and Inuit inhabitants, interpreted in relation to theoretical and analytical insights from interdisciplinary literatures, this article has illuminated three relational, value-based metaphors that eschew ontologically pure and divisive categories like nature. These metaphors – emplacement, wayfaring and gathering – convey fluid, ambiguous processes of becoming, connection and participation.

It is perhaps an abstract and measured contribution these metaphors make in terms of cultivating moral terrains where cooperation among Arctic tourism stakeholders may thrive. As Viken (2013) observes, the Arctic remains very much a hybrid space despite tourism industry efforts to promote periphery nature and general willingness among public and academic figures to uncritically accept it. So whereas nature conjures up imaginations of primordial and people-less landscapes, the metaphors of emplacement, wayfaring and gathering convey multiple spatial practices and convergence of diverse social and material relations within a given context. In so doing, they advance tourism’s morphology. Following Belhassen and Caton (2009), this development and promotion of our linguistic toolkit is a political project since it orients those who study, live or enact the world of tourism with a sense of community and accepted principles. The intention herein has been to expound empirically and conceptually rich morsels for consideration as tourism enquiry negotiates a ‘story of hope’ (Pritchard et al., 2011) and interest in Arctic tourism (as experience and research agenda) intensifies (Hall and Saarinen, 2010).

To these ends, this article’s epistemological and axiological underpinnings have merit. Knowledge, and its production, is embraced as a social process always influenced by values. Accordingly, emplacement, wayfaring and gathering must be read not as universally accurate representations of reality, but as situated and partial perspectives that call for further conversation and critique within tourism’s discursive arenas. It is through such dialogue that innovative, reciprocal and trusted knowledge can be configured and realities of cooperation and shared responsibility crafted. If tourism researchers are committed to just and sustainable worldmaking, then prioritizing the synergies and complementary aspects of different knowledge systems – in the case reported here, those of Inuit and canoeists – will be fundamentally important. Additionally, the dialogue prompted by these relational metaphors may invite an ethics that relies less on essential identities/categories and more on a spatiality of care, connection and positive possibility enabled by questioning our present circumstances and responsibly exercising our agency in creating better social–ecological futures (Smith, 2009).

In terms of Arctic tourism literature specifically, this article provides a contextualized account of diverse uses, practices and relationships associated with a nationally celebrated destination (Raffan, 1992). Moreover, it locates Arctic tourism within broader spheres of human experience and mobility, and social science. Tourism is unmasked as an exotic enterprise of escape and re-positioned as an everyday performance that spins relations with other actors, mobilities and objects (Haldrup, 2004; Larsen, 2008). This helps demystify the Arctic as a primitive and authentic periphery, and engages Aboriginal inhabitants as active participants (i.e. they are travellers) rather than passive recipients of the tourism machine (Stewart et al., 2011) or subjectivities determined by visiting researchers and their needs (e.g. ‘host’ community). All told, this article responds to calls to advance theoretical sophistication in Arctic tourism research (Stewart et al., 2005).

Future studies that flesh out emplacement, wayfaring and gathering, and other relational metaphors in different empirical contexts, are clearly warranted. Articulating such linguistic devices will enrich our ability to understand, communicate and perform tourism as a relational and emergent endeavour, and may mobilize diverse capacities and interests in responding cooperatively to Arctic change. This latter possibility would necessitate educational, outreach, management and policy interventions informed by future applied research grounded, perhaps, in the kinds of value-based metaphors proposed. The invitation of this article will hopefully be received with such opportunities in mind.