Indigenous Matters: Cultures, Technologies, Mediations
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MediaTropes eJournal Vol VII, No 1 (2017): i–xx ISSN 1913-6005 EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION INDIGENOUS MATTERS: CULTURES, TECHNOLOGIES, MEDIATIONS TAD LEMIEUX Consider a photograph of a skinny polar bear taken on Baffin Island, Nunavut, in late August 2017.1 The photo was released by National Geographic (NatGeo) in early December 2017, accompanied by a video overlaid with somber piano music and text that read in part: “This is what climate change looks like.” The photo depicted an emaciated bear dragging its hind legs on an “iceless land,” its head down, its bones protruding, “staggering” toward an “abandoned fishing camp” to eat a piece of foam from a snowmobile seat.2 The photo and video have since been viewed and shared millions of times across a range of social and traditional media platforms. While a post made on Instagram by NatGeo admitted that the cause of the bear’s emaciation could not be gleaned from the photo, it still named the photo the #FaceOfClimateChange. On the same day, in a post geolocated from Beijing, Canadian Environment Minister Catherine McKenna wrote on Twitter: “THIS is what climate change looks like. Climate change is real. As are its impacts. Time to stand up for our polar bears and our planet.”3 1 The photo was taken by National Geographic photographer Paul Nicklen, along with documentarians from the conservation group Sea Legacy, which is “on a mission to create healthy and abundant oceans” by sending “the world’s best photographers and filmmakers on expedition [to] capture the beauty below the surface of our oceans and the threats to its survival” (https://act.sealegacy.org/tide). 2 The camp acted as the observation point for the photographers and documentarians. The post continued: “We didn’t have a weapon and we didn’t have any food. There literally was nothing we could do for him as we were hundreds of miles from the nearest Inuit community. What could we have done? What we did do was push through our tears knowing that this footage was going to help connect a global audience to the biggest issue facing us as a species today.” See https://www.instagram.com/p/BceylHujELW/, 9 December 2017. 3 See https://twitter.com/cathmckenna/status/939601028567191553, 9 December 2017. Emphasis mine. www.mediatropes.com MediaTropes Vol VII, No 1 (2017) Tad Lemieux / ii But this story, like so many stories, is also an echo.4 Two years earlier, in 2015, Nicklen released a photograph of another skinny polar bear,5 another ostensible effect of melting sea ice, another victim of the reality of climate change. And as with the bear in 2017, the claim issuing a clear climate-related consequence on Arctic animals was of little consequence in its contentiousness. Then, as now,6 it didn’t actually matter if the bear was skinny because of climate change or because it was injured—the future was there already in its protruding bones, atrophied limbs, and the global affect it inspired. If, as George Wenzel put it in an interview on Isuma TV in 2010, the “iconic image of a polar bear standing on a little piece of ice” has since at least the 1980s threatened to displace the relations—rhetorical, cultural, material, economic— present in the Arctic between Inuit peoples and the polar bear, the new iconography is perhaps the failed predator in a brown, not white, Arctic.7 Enter now the shambling skinny polar bear, a “face” of climate change regardless of whether or not its empty stomach has anything to do with the climate or change. Public discussions about the photographs and video have been principally concerned, if predictably, with questions of legitimacy and 4 If the language of “our polar bears,” coupled with “our planet,” delocalizes the polar bear and the Arctic variously into the state and the planetary, this too is familiar to Arctic peoples in the Inuit Nunangat (Inuit Homeland). The Harper government’s (2009) mandate for the future of Arctic governance, in a report titled Canada’s Northern Strategy: Our North, Our Heritage, Our Future, used a similar language to describe Inuit peoples, whose “longstanding presence … [is] fundamental to our history” (3, emphasis mine). http://www.northernstrategy.gc.ca/cns/cns- eng.asp. 5 Again in partnership with Sea Legacy and NatGeo. See https://www.instagram.com/p/7TRP7WlsKm/. The same year, only months prior, a similar photograph taken by Kerstin Langenberger sparked further controversy. See http://www.cbc.ca/news/trending/thin-bear-photo-kerstin-1.3232725. 6 In a comment made to CBC radio program As It Happens, Sea Legacy co-founder Christina Mittermeier argued that it didn’t matter what happened to this individual bear. Rather: “The point is that it was starving…. As we lose sea ice in the Arctic, polar bears will starve.” As It Happens, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, 11 December 2017. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-monday-edition-1.4442887/viral-video-of- emaciated-polar-bear-may-not-be-what-it-seems-nunavut-bear-monitor-says-1.4442892. 7 At the time, Wenzel was speaking on the terms of representation and misrepresentation of the seal and polar bear hunts in the context of a changing Arctic environment. Rather than sound the alarm of adaptability, and capacity for adaptation—an all too common scholarly activity in contemporary scholarship of Indigenous communities—Wenzel was more concerned about the representational politics of animals like the polar bear to intervene and sweep away the economic, food, or cultural, and what can be called rhetorical relations Inuit have constituted. For more on these relations, see Wenzel, Sometimes Hunting Can Seem Like Business: Polar Bear Sport Hunting in Nunavut (Calgary: University of Alberta Press, 2008). www.mediatropes.com MediaTropes Vol VII, No 1 (2017) Tad Lemieux / iii certainties about the end of the Arctic.8 Inuit peoples responded in turn with a counter-narrative9 on social media sites like Twitter and Facebook. In part, they have repeated and stressed the necessity to listen to and consult with Inuit on questions concerning their home—whether climate, animals, or health.10 But if dominant framing narratives (re)mediate the Arctic within the familiar tropic terrains of the Anthropocene, the crisis, the catastrophe, not to mention the pristine and the open, these fail to reckon with how, when Inuit remain “unconvinced,” they remediate Arctic mediations.11 8 Whether through the end of the Arctic or the end of the world, the Anthropocene or the capitalocene (Jason Moore, “The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis,” Journal of Peasant Studies 44, no. 3 [2017]: 594–630), the membrane of Canadian Arctic sovereignty is shatter-thin—an exigency that could be thought of as the “outside” in the way Agamben traced its line: the thyrathen, the threshold, or fores, door: the passage that grants access. Still today the Northwest Passage persists internationally as an imminent question of granting for shipping routes, seismic surveys, oil spills, and catastrophic collapse. See Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, translated by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 68. 9 In a tweet posted on 9 December 2017, mayor of Iqaluit, Nunavut, Madeleine Redfern wrote: “Important to ask Inuit elders/polar bear hunters—they are the true experts regarding polar bears (demography),” and, in a separate tweet on the same day: “Ideally all stories about polar bears would automatically include Inuit from the start—not just biologists.” See https://twitter.com/madinuk/status/939680115398758400. Many other Inuit peoples responded on Facebook and Twitter, challenging the claims by NatGeo and Sea Legacy. In an interview with As It Happens, Leo Ikakhik, a polar bear patroller in Arviat, Nunavut—a part of a joint polar bear patrol partnership with World Wildlife Foundation Canada—told Carol Off that the bear was likely sick, that he’s seen various animals in such a condition, and: “Since I’m from the north, like I would really fall for the video that it’s going to affect every polar bear. It’s like it’s kind of hard to explain, but I’m pretty positive with that the polar bears are not decreasing, and the climate change is not really killing them” (emphasis mine). 10 Arctic Indigenous peoples do not deny climate change, of course. In a recent publication from Nunavut Arctic College, Inuit elders from across the Inuit Nunangat have spoken on the changes wrought by a changing climate. Indeed, the robins in Kangiqsujuaq, tall willows in Umiujaq, grass in Kugluktuk, dandelions in Pangnirtung, new wind in Pond Inlet, new trees in Nain, skinny caribou around Baker Lake, and thin ice in Kangiqsualujjuaq are stark reminders that mediation is geo-tropic. See “The Caribou Taste Different Now”: Inuit Elders Observe Climate Change, edited by José Gérin-Lajoie, Alain Cuerrier, and Laura Siegwart Collier (Iqaluit: Nunavut Arctic College, 2017). Also see Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change (2011), dir. Zacharias Kunuk and Ian Mauro, Igloolik Isuma Productions and Kunuk Kohn Productions. http://www.isuma.tv/inuit-knowledge-and-climate-change/movie-noss. 11 One way to read this might be through what Audra Simpson has variously named refusal, “distantiation,” or “disaffiliation” (16)—a refusal of settler or state recognition, but also a positional distance from being recognized through or as difference, tethered forever to the acquiescences and chronologies of the colonial mutare. Indeed, for Simpson, distantiation from difference imposes a “territorial and semiotic imperative” (186) that, ultimately, rejects translation. See Mohawk Interuptus: Political Life across the Borders of Settler States (Durham, www.mediatropes.com MediaTropes Vol VII, No 1 (2017) Tad Lemieux / iv But Inuit response is also mediated by broadband Internet access.12 As Erin Yunes writes, “One challenge to the growth of Inuit spaces online is that residents of the Arctic are underserved in Internet access, especially when compared with Canadians in urban centres.