Listening to the North

This post is a contribution to this week’s Polar Week activities.  Learn more here.  It is also a re-post from my blog about living in the Arctic–check that out here.

Justin Cardinal shuffles through the halls of Inuvik’s Sir Alexander Mackenzie School—his face tucked in the hood of a Volcom sweatshirt, his ears plugged with the buds of an mp3 player. His feet, like many youth in this northern town, are adorned with mukluks, traditional animal-skin boots that have been handcrafted by generations of aboriginal Canadians. Justin’s accessories may not clash in the fashion sense of pre-teens across the Territories, but they do represent a collision of cultures that is shaping the North of tomorrow.

This is a story about my year as a volunteer teacher in the Arctic and the stories shared with me by northerners—the same stories I’ve overheard told to students like Justin. From the classroom to the campfire, I’ve watched youth confront two powerful, yet seemingly conflicting messages. Remember your roots. Branch out with new technologies. What kids-these-days patch together from the internet, their iPods, their elders, and their ever-diversifying peers is being stitched into the fabric of their identities like beads on their footwear.[i]

How do they make sense of the noise? By analyzing three stories youth hear, we begin to learn about their task of braiding worlds of the past with the present.[ii] By listening to the North, northerners can take crucial steps to preserving culture in the face of modern challenges.

The land is our home. We can develop it, but we must also protect it..

Imperial Oil was in town this winter proposing plans to survey the Beaufort Sea for oil reserves. The company conducted meetings across the Delta to consult with natives about best management practices. Their study area intersected traditional whale harvesting grounds and hunters had expressed concerns over potential impacts left by research vessels. I prepared myself for a heated discussion that might take the chill out of the November air.

Things never got too hot to handle. Instead, opinions from the southern enterprise harmonized with those from the local Hunters and Trappers Committee. Biologists used graphs and charts to prove their point. Inuvik residents spoke from personal experiences and the wisdom of their ancestors. One lesson resonated through these different stories: take only what is needed from nature and no more—it is delicate, yet resilient, and must be treated with care.[iii] As I wandered home under the Aurora, I wondered how northern and southern perspectives had traveled to this common ground.

Perhaps the dialogue I heard in Ingamo Hall is a legacy of Thomas Berger and his landmark decision against the Mackenzie Pipeline in the 1970s.[iv] Perhaps visitors to today’s North bring with them respect for what is native to this land—the people, their traditions, and the wilderness. Wherever the origins may lie, agreements among aboriginal and non-aboriginal environmental groups are a symbol of the new North. Kids see the signs of these times—from classroom presentations about careers in environmental monitoring to Petroleum Show banners boasting sponsorships from the Inuvik Youth Centre and the Aboriginal Pipeline Group.

There is a cautious tone underlying today’s stories of resource development. It lingered in Ingamo Hall and it surfaced again on trips to Split Pingo, to Rock River for a caribou hunt, and to the Mackenzie Delta for a trapping program. While on-the-land with groups of 6th graders, I listened as park officials and elders warned of the consequences of mismanaging resources and abusing nature. “This land may be an economic opportunity now,” a local man advised, “but it is always our home. We can’t take from it forever. We have to protect our home.”

It seems as new paths for development open in the North, young northerners are being reminded to tread lightly.

The only constant is change.

“Mr. O’Donnell! You’re back!” This was the battle-cry as an army of 5th graders overtook a middle-aged man—who taught these students a few years ago, before he left town. He’s returned, but only for a visit. Teacher turnover in Inuvik is as common as flies in the summer and can be just as annoying. I’ve heard parents and peers echo concerns about the troubles of northern youth, linking many of these troubles with watching teachers come and go, year after year.

While worries about adolescent development hang like a cloud over the North, there is an important silver lining to point out. Students here understand that transience is a permanent feature of their landscape—a lesson that may have increasing value as their world endures changes their elders never experienced. With forces like climate change and international tourism touching down in the Territories, knowing how to learn—without getting attached to expert knowledge—will be essential to thriving, adaptive communities.

Culture is preserved and produced on a daily basis.

Northern heritage lives in Sir Alexander Mackenzie School. It’s in the beading projects displayed in Mrs. Ray’s Gwich’in language room. It’s in the sounds of drums beaten by young drummers and dancers rehearsing for the Christmas concert. It’s in the smell of cooked loche wafting through the first floor corridor. It’s inside the cover of a book stamped with Grollier Hall—a living memory of this building’s residential school days.

Like a journey that begins with a single step, maintaining culture over time depends on daily practice. If my observations in the past year as a volunteer in the North are any indication for its future, the task of preservation is in good hands. I’ve seen youth build their own jiggling sticks, compete in finger pulls, and twist their own rabbit snares—a hands-on education they have come to cherish and celebrate.

Culture is created at the same pace it is preserved, and as students carry on age-old customs, they also produce new ones. I marvel at how these leaders, barely more than a decade old, balance the weights of tradition and modernity, of conservation and development, and of consistency and unpredictability. Stories of mukluks and iPods will be their legacies—their lessons in how to change and yet stay what you are.

[i] For an example of the continuing oral tradition in the Northwest Territories, see Above and Beyond’s feature on The Land is Our Storybook series (March/April 2008 edition). For an enlightening history of Yukon oral traditions, see Julie Cruikshank, Do Glaciers Listen? Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination, (UBC Press: Toronto, 2005).
[ii] Environmental historian William Cronon has written about the importance of narrative—or stories—in shaping societal values with respect to nature, culture, and history. See William Cronon, “A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” The Journal of American History, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Mar., 1992), pp. 1347-1376
[iii] For more on how scientific narratives can shape perceptions of northern environments, see Stephen Bocking, “Science and Spaces in a Northern Environment,” Environmental History, 12 (October 2007): 867-94.
[iv]There are many resources for learning more about the history of the Mackenzie Pipeline and Thomas Berger’s role in its development. A good introduction can be found in: Carolyn Swayze, Hard Choices: A Life of Tom Berger, (Douglas and McIntyre: Vancouver, 1987).

Flood/Fire/Flux

Glaciers crack in the July heat.  Every summer in the Alaskan Interior is hotter than the last.

Drips of mountain water form a sliver of a stream.  Streams thread into creeks; creeks feed the Chena.   The Chena’s banks cannot restrain the river.

The drip is a torrent now. Limbs are ripped from low-lying trees.  They float in the whipping current like a boxer badly beaten, staggering.  The mighty river slugs the bank. Wave upon wave until the bank divorces itself.  Silt cascades into deluge–The Chena looks like diluted chocolate milk.  Yohoo.

Sand and silt are part-time passengers in the Chena’s journey.  They and the woody debris are dumped off at various places, piling on top of one another to form logjams and new islands.  Their revenge on the river is to change its course every year.  The Chena is a tangle of Chena’s past, present, and future.

The Chena’s bottom becomes the floodplain’s top.  There, pioneering plants take advantage of the open playing field, sending their roots deep into the fresh sediment.  Take a walk from the river bank inland and you’ll walk into the past. Substitute space for time–this is the succession of plants as they colonize, mature, recruit, and compete.

Alder, willow, White Spruce, Black Spruce.  Blueberry, crowberry, labrador tea, rose hips.  Lichens, moss, permafrost.  Understory. Canopy.  Lowland forest mosaic.

The Alaskan summer burns on.  Thunderstorms are bad here.  2,000 lightning strikes will hit the ground in one storm.  Many of them will send sparks into the thirsty, dry forest.  Several sparks will ignite.  Few fires will catch, sending the forest into a glorious blaze.  And perhaps one or two fires will burn for years, smoldering under the winter snow, consuming hundreds of thousands of acres of vegetation.

The energy of the Chena, stored in those charred poles of spruce, are released into the Alaskan interior once more.

glacial melt, flood, bank erosion, silt deposition, river course change, woody debris floating, terracing, colonial species, alder, balsam poplar, white spruce, black spruce, lowland, fire

Fieldnotes

“At the same time, the needs of communities seem to be on a different scale than many of the climate models operate.  If the village of Anaktuvak Pass wants to know how permafrost composition will look around its surroundings in order to adjust for managing caribou and goose hunting, the outputs of certain models will overlook global and regional connectivity in pursuit of that information.  The cross-scalar issues seem like very wicked ones—and though they do no present any cause for “giving up” or avoiding planning—they certainly do make the job much harder.

I also was intrigued by the role that infrastructure and history has played in the spatial distribution of data monitoring locations.  In other words, it seems that there is a path dependence linking road formation in the WWII/Cold War era, siting of monitoring equipment, and the construction of pipelines in the 1970s.  It is probably much “easier” (less expensive, less time consuming) to collect the data if it exists on road networks.  But what geographic or ecological bias is given by placing monitoring locations along roads, or only along corridors where roads go? What role does infrastructure play in science, economic development, and politics?

Another tension that lurked in the background and foreground of many presentations today was the history of native-governmental relationships that have strained today’s native-governmental relationships. This was evident in one person’s talk as he described the means by which a federal agency monitors and models caribou populations.  He suggested that the agency uses satellite collars for many herds, including the Porcupine herd (which crosses the international border between the US and Canada).  He noted that the models also do not include hunting pressure in estimating the herd’s populations.  In both cases, it seemed that a native perspective—observations on populations, help with reporting hunting figures—would be useful to help manage the herd, maintain its population, and provide a viable population for harvest.  Yet, he seemed frustrated by the prospect of working with native communities.  Why is this so?”

The Place Where You Go To Listen

What does a connection with nature sound like? This room in the Museum of the North in Fairbanks, Alaska may give you the answer.

The room, called The Place Where You Go To Listen, was designed by John Luther Adams to represent the sum total of interactions among physical, biological, and cultural life in Alaska.  The movement of the sun, the flow of the rivers, the migrations of the caribou, the dancing of the people–all is captured in the thumping bass lines, swirling lights, and shifting harmonies resounding in this corner of the museum.

So what kind of music do humans make with their environment?  Watch and listen.

Today’s first step of the two-week journey involved much listening. I listened to the fourteen other students introduce themselves, their backgrounds, and their research interests in accents that harkened New York suburbs, Stockholm neighborhoods, and the Alaskan interior. I heard the importance of thinking about the environment in its ecological and human dimensions, and trying to identify the ways in which these socio-ecological systems are vulnerable, resilient, adaptive, and transformable.  I paid attention to the specific challenges that face Alaskan natives, polar bears, sea ice, and the oil industry–changing climates, changing markets, changing governments, changing cultures.

It’s not only that things are changing–things have changed for thousands of years and many societies have adapted.  The real issue is that the nature of change is changing.  It’s getting drier in some places, wetter in others.  The ground is thawing out in places we don’t expect, while trees are moving north.  Caribou populations are dropping off and moose are becoming more widespread.  More and more of Alaska is changing faster and faster–in ways that challenge local knowledge and western science.

What kind of sound would changing change make?  Perhaps I’ll hear it in the coming days.

Chasing the Midnight Sun

In the coming two weeks, I’ll be traveling around northern Alaska.   And I won’t see darkness the entire time.

The midnight sun.  It’s an anomaly to us southerners who chop up each 24-hour period into “day” and “night.”  In Wisconsin, the sun sets everyday–we’re used to this in the temperate zone, so what we experience there is what we deem normal. But to those who live north of sixty, a clear and well-lit 3:00am is a regular summer tradition.   One’s view of the midnight sun depends on whether you see the Arctic as a frontier or a homeland.

This is the line that divides the Arctic. It’s a line that’s tread-well by tourists–how do we see the places we visit for what they are while reconciling that our vision is shaded by our experiences in where we come from? It’s a tight line.  It’s a tricky line.  I still don’t understand how to walk it.

I’ve come north because I’m enrolled in a two-week summer field course hosted by the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.  The objective of the course is gain a richer appreciation for the relationships among Arctic plant, animal, and human communities–all of which have experienced dramatic change over the last fifty years:  the increased frequency of wildfire and the northern march of the tree line; the well-publicized plight of the polar bear; and the encounters among native villages and non-native scientists–some of which have been cooperative, others not so much.

Along with fourteen other students and three faculty, I’ll be visiting research stations, Alaskan villages, and even the oilfields of Prudhoe Bay in hopes of looking at northern Alaska with a new perspective.  At times I’ll be on the “insider” side of the line–at other times, I’ll be standing across it as an outsider.

What will I see?  I hope to update the blog with stories and photos from the trip.  The journey and the course start tomorrow.  Below I’ve included our itinerary, so you can keep track of where we are and what we’re up to.

Feel free to send along questions and comments–and I’ll do my best to respond.

July 6
Students arrive to Fairbanks

July 7
Quick introductions
Overview of the course
Objectives, expectations, syllabus

July 8
All Day Seminar  – 30 minutes lectures by guests with 15 of questions and answers

July 9
Chena Pump Campground: Long Term Ecological Research field studies on Tanana River

July 10
Drive to Toolik
Stop at Coldfoot NPS Visitors center
Visit NPS visitor center
Spend night at Toolik Field Station

July 11
Toolik work with researchers
Spend night at Toolik

July 12
Drive to Deadhorse
Lodging at Arctic Caribou Inn (Deadhorse)

July 13
Oilfield tour
Drive from Deadhorse to Toolik
Spend night at Toolik

July 14
8:30 Drive from Toolik to Coldfoot
1:00 Fly from Coldfoot to Anaktuvuk Pass (spending the night at the school classroom)

July 15
Anaktuvuk Pass (spending the night at the school classroom)

July 16
Morning at Anaktuvuk Pass
Afternoon commercial flight Anaktuvik to Fairbanks

July 17
Free day

July 18
Presentations and wrap-up

July 19
Depart