Roundtable on Stuhl

H-Environment Roundtable Reviews Volume 9, No. 1 (2019) Publication date: January 23, 2019 https://networks.h-net.org/h- Roundtable Review Editor: environment Christopher F. Jones Andrew Stuhl, Unfreezing the Arctic: Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). ISBN: 9780226416649 Contents Introduction by Christopher F. Jones, Arizona State University 2 Comments by Tina Adcock, Simon Fraser University 4 Comments by Sverker Sörlin, KTH Royal Institute of Technology 11 Comments by Stephen Bocking, Trent University 19 Comments by Andy Bruno, Northern Illinois University 25 Response by Andrew Stuhl, Bucknell University 30 About the Contributors 38 Copyright © 2019 H-Net: HuManities and Social Sciences Online H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, H-Environment, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. H-Environment Roundtable Reviews, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2019) 2 Introduction by Christopher F. Jones, Arizona State University olar studies represent one of the most dynamic topics of research within environmental history. It is with great pleasure, therefore, that I introduce P this roundtable on Andrew Stuhl’s compelling and gracefully written new book, Unfreezing the Arctic. As the comments of the reviewers and his response note, the Arctic North (not to mention the Antarctic South) can too easily be ignored by scholars of temperate zones. Simplistic images of retreating glaciers or underfed polar bears that circulate widely fail to grapple with why polar regions matter, how they change over time, and what we can learn from studying them. Hence this is an overdue roundtable, one that will hopefully spur broader conversations among environmental historians about the regions we prioritize. The focus on “unfreezing” in Stuhl’s title is intended to push readers beyond thinking about the shrinking ice that has become the dominant narrative of the Arctic among outsiders. The problem, he notes, is that this view reeks of presentism. It is a view of the future of the Arctic that elides its past. In particular, it ignores the experiences, struggles, achievements, and adaptations of native residents of Arctic regions, a story he traces through more than a century of interactions with western colonizers. The Arctic was not frozen in time before anthropogenic climate change began, and when residents of industrialized nations concerned with a warming planet only read about shifting volumes of ice, they perpetuate a long and problematic pattern of marginalizing local populations. To study the Arctic without studying humans is a grave error. Focused on the period from roughly the 1880s to the 1980s, Stuhl’s book has a particular focus on the influence of western scientists as agents of empire. As he notes, their quests for knowledge were entangled with efforts of their national governments to extend territorial control and conjoined with the interests of multinational companies eyeing the Arctic’s resources. Science and colonialism were frequent bedfellows, a haunting image that should give contemporary readers pause given the flood of interest in the region from today’s climate scientists. Solving global warming, he cautions, cannot simply be about adjusting atmospheric chemistry; it must also involve acknowledging and rectifying colonial legacies of environmental transformation that have roots in western scientific practice. It is a sign of a vibrant and supportive subfield that when arranging this roundtable, I got quick and eager acceptances to participate from scholars whose own works could have just as easily been the subjects of their own roundtables. Tina Adcock opens the roundtable, noting just how much the field of northern studies has expanded in the last decade. She helps situate Stuhl’s work within this burgeoning literature while also asking about what regional scales of analysis are most appropriate for Arctic studies. Sverker Sörlin’s comments continue the discussion of the field’s growth, noting how the impressive accomplishments of Unfreezing the Arctic reflect and enhance new trends while also asking whether Stuhl’s insistence H-Environment Roundtable Reviews, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2019) 3 on bringing humans into Arctic history could be productively extended to include non-human agency as well. Next, Stephen Bocking raises critical questions of regional scale, how to define the Arctic within studies that study parts of the whole, and the ethics and pragmatics of working, as a historian, with local groups and questions of sustainable futures. Finally, Andy Bruno completes the commentaries, using four points of overlap and divergence between his and Stuhl’s recent books to probe more generally how Arctic historians should approach topics including national borders, political economy, and science and colonialism. Stuhl’s response engages these questions and more, offering a rich set of ideas for environmental historians to ponder. Before turning to the first set of comments, I would like to pause here and thank all the roundtable participants for taking part. In addition, I would like to remind readers that as an open-access forum, H-Environment Roundtable Reviews is available to scholars and non-scholars alike, around the world, free of charge. Please circulate. H-Environment Roundtable Reviews, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2019) 4 CoMMents by Tina Adcock, SiMon Fraser University n 2008, the Canadian historians Kenneth Coates and William Morrison surveyed the historiographical landscape of northern Canada and found it “largely barren, I with only small and occasional signs of life and activity.” Each book-length study, they continued, “appears like an Inukshuk, standing out in sharp contrast to the surrounding snow covered expanses, a beacon to those seeking to navigate the area’s history but also a stark reminder of how little there is to see at present.”1 A decade later, this intellectual landscape is significantly more populated. This is the case even if we narrow our parameters to scholars who, like Andrew Stuhl, have written book-length histories of human-environment relations in the North. Let us seat ourselves imaginatively at the cusp of the Beaufort Sea, where Stuhl’s narrative takes place, and look east along the Arctic shoreline of North America. We would first see Emilie Cameron’s work standing astride Kugluktuk and the Coppermine River. Farther afield, we would glimpse Karen Routledge’s work on American and Inuit whalers in Eastern Arctic waters, Peter Kulchyski and Frank Tester’s work on game management in Nunavut, and Caroline Desbiens’ and Hans Carlson’s studies of northern Quebec. Sweeping our gaze to the south in a clockwise direction, we would espy Liza Piper’s narrative of industrialization on northwestern Canada’s large lakes, John Sandlos’ study of conservation in the Northwest Territories, Paul Nadasdy’s work on human-animal relations in the southwestern Yukon, and Jonathan Peyton’s meditation on the “unbuilt environments” of northwestern British Columbia. Pivoting to the west, and allowing our gaze, like Stuhl’s, to transcend the borders of the nation-state, we would note Kathryn Morse’s work on the Klondike and Julie Cruikshank’s work on glaciers in Yukon and Alaska, as well as Ryan Tucker Jones’s work on the North Pacific Ocean and Bathsheba Demuth’s work on the Bering Strait. If we squint, we might just—just—be able to discern the hazy outlines of Pey-Yi Chu’s study of permafrost in eastern Siberia, and Andy Bruno’s environmental history of the Soviet North.2 If we further sharpened our gaze to search for smaller 1 Kenneth S. Coates and William R. Morrison, “The New North in Canadian History and Historiography,” History Compass 6, no. 2 (2008): 646-47. 2 Emilie Cameron, Far Off Metal River: Inuit Lands, Settler Stories, and the Making of the Contemporary Arctic (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2015); Karen Routledge, Do You See Ice? Inuit and Americans at Home and Away (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018); Peter Kulchyski and Frank Tester, Kiumajut (Talking Back): Game Management and Inuit Rights, 1950-70 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007); Caroline Desbiens, Power from the North: Territory, Identity, and the Culture of Hydroelectricity in Quebec (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2013); Hans M. Carlson, Home is the Hunter: The James Bay Cree and Their Land (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009); Liza Piper, The Industrial Transformation of Subarctic Canada (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2009); John Sandlos, Hunters at the Margin: Native People and Wildlife Conservation in the Northwest Territories (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2007); Paul Nadasdy, Hunters and Bureaucrats: Power, Knowledge, and Aboriginal-State Relations in in the Southwest Yukon (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2003); Jonathan Peyton, Unbuilt Environments: Tracing Postwar Development in Northwest British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2017); Kathryn Morse, The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003); Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2005); Ryan Tucker Jones, Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North H-Environment Roundtable Reviews, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2019) 5 edifices—the cairns of journal articles or book chapters, as well as the inuksuit of dissertations or monographs—the ground would be thick with material. In contrast to the “barren”

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