Pacing Climate Precarity: Food, Care and Sovereignty in Iñupiaq Alaska

ABSTRACT

At what pace do storytellers represent climate change in the “rapidly changing” Arctic? Popular and scholarly narratives of Indigenous vulnerability too often address climate change as a singular event that reorganizes local lifeworlds in unprecedented ways. On the ground however, contemporary climate impacts, such as “food insecurity,” are refracted through a range of simultaneous and cumulative ecological, social, and political structures that can precede and/or unfold slower than climate change. These factors include the intergenerational relations of care within communities, as well as multiple political challenges to their continuance. Throughout Iñupiaq Alaska, hunting is practiced as a form of care and sovereignty undergirding healthy, resilient, and collective Indigenous futures.

KEYWORDS:

• Iñupiaq/Inuit
• Arctic Alaska
• climate change
• food sovereignty
• Indigenous biopolitics
• subsistence hunting

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Sandra Hyde and Laurie Denyer Willis for organizing the “Balancing the Quotidian” panel at the 2016 American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting. Thanks as well to Sandra Hyde for her editorial attention to multiple drafts. Additional thanks are due to Ann Anagnost, Jean Dennison, Steve Harrell, and Devon Peña for their thoughtful engagement and critical comments throughout the writing process. Above all, the author expresses gratitude to Joe and Lona Swan, Janet Mitchell, Enoch Adams Jr., and Reppi and Dolly Swan for their contributions to this article, as well as many other people in Kivalina for their friendship and generosity over the years.

Notes

1. Throughout the article I use “Kivalina,” “Kivalina People,” and “People of Kivalina” to refer to the Iñupiaq community (and associated diaspora) who continue to use and occupy the traditional homeland territory of the Kivalliñiġmiut Nation (Burch 1998). Within this community today are several formal and informal institutions including two local governments: the City of Kivalina and the Native Village of Kivalina – a federally recognized tribe.

2. Out of respect for their contributions, and with permission, those friends and mentors with whom I have shared numerous conversations, meals, songs, and trips on the land over several years are identified by name throughout this article. For especially sensitive events or conversations, or as requested, names are omitted or pseudonyms are used.

3. VHF or “very high frequency” radio is a common handheld marine radio system. In Northwest Alaska it is used for intra-village communication between households and with, or between, hunters out on the land or sea.

4. See http://www.relocate-ak.org/.

5. For a broad overview of anthropological approaches to Arctic hunting see Wenzel 2013.

6. For a corrective, see Patrick Wolfe’s (2006) framing of settler-colonialism as “structure rather than event.”

7. The ICC is an international NGO and advocacy organization founded in 1977 to address issues of common concern among the culturally similar Indigenous peoples of Alaska, Canada, Greenland, and Siberia.

8. ICC-Alaska is the non-profit representing Alaskan Yup’ik and Iñupiaq communities within the ICC. In an international context these communities are included in the broader term “Inuit.”

9. For a comprehensive analysis of “food sovereignty” as a praxis of Indigenous resurgence throughout North America see Whyte 2017b.

10. Red Dog Mine is an open pit lead and zinc mine with operations inside Kivalina’s traditional territorial boundary. The mine opened in 1989 and discharges wastewater into a tributary of the Wulik River – Kivalina’s main fishery and drinking water source. It is located 46 miles inland and is connected to a port on the Chukchi Sea coast by a 52-mile haul road.

11. NANA is a Regional Alaska Native Corporation created by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) in 1971 and which owns much of Kivalina’s traditional territory, including the land on which Red Dog Mine operates through a partnership with Teck Alaska, Inc.

12. For a comprehensive analysis of ANCSA’s impacts, particularly the extinguishment of aboriginal property rights, on myriad Native Alaskan land-based practices see Anderson 2016.

13. For an insightful treatment of the complex motivations and contradictions of ANCSA see Huhndorf and Huhndorf 2011.

14. My use of “biopolitics” and “biopolitical” follows Lisa Stevenson (2014:3), who uses the concept to describe “a form of care and governance that is primarily concerned with the maintenance of life itself, and is directed at populations rather than individuals.” The logic of preserving life in minimal terms, she shows, has been a defining characteristic of colonial welfare regimes throughout the North American Arctic (see also Foucault 2003).

15. The domain of care has long been a terrain of social struggle in the experience of Indigenous communities navigating the double-edged promises of “welfare colonialism” in Arctic North America (Stevenson 2014; see also Paine 1977).

16. Following the 2015 incident, NANA representatives have visited Kivalina each fall to discuss the policies and protocols for continued hunting along the Port Road in anticipation of the annual caribou migration.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an academic fellowship from the Episcopal Church Foundation, Fellowship Partners Program.

Notes on contributors

P. Joshua Griffin

P. Joshua Griffin is an assistant professor of American Indian Studies and Marine and Environmental Affairs at the University of Washington. He is a co-curator of the transdisciplinary collective, Re-Locate (relocate-ak.org).