Sammendrag
Advancing new Arctic voices from old historical sources
Our digital poster presents the international project Arctic Voices. Analysing texts and images on the Arctic produced by Arctic and Western individuals in the long nineteenth century, our project attempts a rewriting of Arctic history that foregrounds the presence and agency of Arctic Indigenous individuals and animals at the height of Euro-American imperialism in this region.
Arctic Voices acknowledges the impact of nineteenth-century knowledge production about the Arctic on our current understanding of the region and its history. This tradition has been the subject of critical deconstructions of white, male narratives revealing underlying ideologies and stereotypes relating to gender, race and nationality. Arctic Voices proceeds beyond such deconstructions towards a rewriting of Arctic history that foregrounds the perspectives and lives of Indigenous individuals and Arctic animals subject to European colonialism. In doing so, we recognize the danger of repeating a form of colonial dynamics that place Western academics in charge of knowledge production and leaves the subaltern silenced yet again (Spivak 1988; Haraway 2010).
Our digital poster discusses how we employ a combination of indigenous methodologies, postcolonial, ecocritical and material feminist theories in order to provide contextualized, reflexive and respectful ways of recovering instances of indigenous and animal agency and knowledge production from the gaps and omissions of history. We provide three examples of how such ‘other voices’ find their expression and what they have to convey:
1) An analysis of ‘the Case of Qualasirssuaq,’ a young Inughuit who involuntarily was brought back to England from Qaanaaq (Northwest Greenland) with H.T. Austin’s expedition in 1851. Taking a portrait of him as starting point, Ingeborg Høvik follows a trail of Indigenous and European sources to uncover the nature and terms of Qalasirssuaq’s stay in British society.
2) An account of the ecology and thought of Sámi artist and author Johan Turi (1854-1936). Svein Aamold explains how Turi’s holistic understanding of Sámi lives constitute a fundamental critique of modernization – with relevance to current issues of extractivism and climate change the Arctic.
3) An alternative reading of Samuel Hearne’s Journey to the Northern Ocean (1792). Sigfrid Kjeldaas shows us the blindspots of critical analyses that reduce the natural environment of this ‘early contact narrative’ to a mere tool in colonialist inscriptions of the Canadian Arctic as empty space.
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