Essay

When asked to consider the topic “Teaching Arctic Environments,” I opted to take the prompt in a literal sense. How do I teach The Arctic in my classes, how do I push on the bounds of what is normatively considered the Arctic environmentally, socially, cartographically, and who are the scholars and writers that I turn to who help constitute a critical Arctic I’m most interested in teaching, imagining, and living? The long form answers to those questions might be considered by the authors also asked to write for the TAE project, and many others who I admire within my fields of Native studies and human geography, as well as the writers and intellectuals practicing their craft especially in Arctic communities.

In finding a route into this essay, then, I begin with how I start most of the classes I teach: with maps. As a faculty member at the University of Washington, I employ maps and narratives of campus that illustrate Native places, as well as the more than forty independent nations and over twenty languages and dialects in Coast Salish territories. While my classes may not be focused entirely on Coast Salish peoples and their ongoing histories, I am still teaching from a particular place and students are learning from a specific social-political-historical context and bringing their own experiences to this land and their work. When teaching the Arctic, we are always somewhere distinct in Indigenous place that holds its own ways of understanding and being in relation with the world. To do this kind of situating in class, next come the maps of the lands of the twenty-nine federally recognized tribes in Washington state. To show students that Native lands are everywhere, constituting every space we move within, from the classroom we learn in on campus outward, I also ask them to interact with the Native Land Digital map that works to represent Indigenous territories in and outside of North America.

As a human geographer and a Native person, I understand that maps are problematic. Maps can never fully represent the multidimensional practices of land and relation Native peoples have with the kin, and the practice of cartography has also actively been used to dispossess Indigenous peoples of their homelands. I’m also aware of the rich history of countermapping strategically deployed by Indigenous peoples. I believe that maps can be great starting place and pedagogical tool, especially for students who might have little to no understanding of Indigenous peoples, their politics, and relationships to place which is unfortunately often the case. Students are often interested in how the territorial boundaries of the Native Lands map overlap. They ask questions about how Indigenous homelands have expanded and contracted over time before colonial contact, they tell me that Indigenous understandings of territory are made through practice and through relation with neighboring Native nations. They ask how these maps came to define boundaries and borders, how their makers came to the information to draw these lines, include and omit some information, and how the data changes depending on who is asked.

As I’m starting to dream up an “Introduction to Alaska Native studies” course, I thought about how I might start the course in the context of Alaska. To those familiar, the Alaska Native languages map, originally created by Michael Krauss in 1974 and later revised and made digital by Gary Holton, Jim Kerr, and Colin T. West, is an obvious starting point. Much like the maps I show in class to illustrate the diversity of Native peoples in Coast Salish territories, in the state of Washington, across the U.S. and beyond, the Alaska Native languages map demonstrates the abundance of life and diversity in Alaska in a foundational way.

This map is one useful and successful demonstration of how Alaska Native peoples and cultures are multiple, diverse, broad and ranging across the geographical container of “Alaska.” This map is one route toward understanding that there are many languages, histories, and landscapes across the state—a state that is twice as large as the second largest state in the U.S. These are points that must be iteratively stressed, as a mainstream or normative understanding of Alaska and Alaska Native peoples often underestimates the geographical size of the state and misunderstands the many different Indigenous cultures and peoples across our spaces, sometimes lumping us into just one homogenous group.  

There are twenty-three distinct Alaska Native languages. Of the 574 federally recognized tribes in the United States, Alaska lands are home to 228. The state has one of the highest Native populations in the country with 15% of the overall population. I offer these statistics as a starting point not to reinforce the power of demography, the colonial boundaries of the United States or Alaska nor any ongoing settler occupations therein, or to further centralize the U.S. as the only or best analytical node, but to counter some of the misinformation about who we are, how we are, and how we are known as Alaska Native peoples. This also threads together with an undermining of an idea that the Alaskan Arctic is empty and without sociality, vibrancy, and vitality—it is full with a plenitude of relations, histories, and futures. 

Those Native futures can and will take many forms, and the facts stated above are just one starting place for imagining the shapes those futures might take. I am not entirely convinced by the refrain that there is “strength in numbers,” or that we need to constantly upend a description of “Arctic emptiness” when we, as Native people(s), know what’s true. Community need not always look like how many people can be counted. Instead, community might be measured by strength of connection among people and across drawn community lines. As dAXunhyuu/Eyak I feel this both personally and politically. If many of my recent ancestors measured strength as something only statistical, I’m not sure where they would have found the courage to practice their intellectual and political forms of activisms that ensured our futures. Alaska Native futures, then, must not only be a rehearsal of vitality in numbers. In my own work and life, I’m most interested in creative knowledge production by Alaska Native women, a term for me that encapsulates all women who find this a useful descriptor, many of whom live in their home communities and many who are also in diaspora. This is who and what constitutes the Arctic that I love to teach most. Is there a way to get there from beginning with this map?  

In the way the Alaska Native languages map is useful and helpful as a great starting place especially for students who might understand “Alaska Native” to be just one thing, it also doesn’t and can’t capture everything. What the map can’t show, and indeed it would be an impossibility to attempt it, are relationships among and between distinct peoples; shared languages, phrases, words; trade routes; nodes of combat and compromise; and change over time in all directions. Of course, the maps also cannot capture colonial histories of land dispossession. I would need to locate and search many other maps to find, for instance, who claims ownership over many of these lands now? Alaska Native corporations, the state government, the federal government, or is it now private property? Are these lands in deep red, burnt yellow, light blue—colors signifying the Ahtna language, Lingít, and Inupiaq—corporation lands, a national park, a wildlife refuge, a location for mining or oil exploration? How many overlays of maps would I need on this language map to answer all these questions to the point that all points of orientation become muddy and unclear once again? Some of the obvious questions to ask of any map are: what do we learn, and what is missing, what is not and cannot be shown, what and whose relations are not and cannot be captured?  

In this surface and brief engagement with the Alaska Native languages map, I must acknowledge that I am indebted to the work that linguist and map creator Michael Krauss did for and with Alaska Native languages, especially my own, dAXunhyuuga’/the Eyak language. His work with Eyak elders in the 1960’s and 70’s endures and animates our language work now. I have heard through conversation that he was uncomfortable producing this original map, as he understood the limitations I have expressed above and further worried that it would calcify borders not his own that might prove challenging to dispute legally in future moments if necessary. In the early 1970’s the need for an Alaska Native languages map coincided with the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971. Leading up to this settlement, Alaska Native peoples across the state were asked to evidence their indigeneity and longstanding claims to land. The colonial history of Alaska left most Alaska Native polities without treaties and treaty rights as many Native nations in the contiguous U.S. reference and practice as supreme law of the land. This land claims settlement also followed Alaska statehood of 1959 which had carved up Alaska Native lands before Indigenous claims could be made. In this historicization, I think about the ways that the Alaska Native lands acquired by Alaska Native corporations through ANCSA line up with the borders of the Alaska Native languages map. In teaching about Arctic environments, I will wonder along with my students, what are the relations not only between peoples, polities, and land on the ground that create territories but also the relations between maps. What are the relationships between the various maps that try to represent how territories might be practiced and upheld?