Editor’s Note: This is the introductory post to Part IV of the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North series edited by Isabelle Gapp and guest edited by Jonathan Peyton.
Returning for the fourth part in the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North series, we wanted to turn our attention to the expansiveness of the term “extraction.” How might work at the intersection of environmental history and visual culture engage the tensions at the heart of Arctic extractions?
“I’ve been intrigued for quite a long time really by that incredible tapestry of tundra and taiga country, as they call it, which constitute the Arctic and subarctic of Canada. I’ve read about it, written about it occasionally, and even pulled up my parka once and gone there. Like all but a few Canadians I guess I’ve had no direct confrontation with the northern third of our country. I’ve remained of necessity an outsider and the North has remained for me a convenient place to dream about, spin tall tales about sometimes and, in the end, avoid.”
These are the first words uttered by Glenn Gould in his 1967 radio and TV documentary series, The Idea of North. Gould’s North was polyphonic, arresting, strange and sublime – a place of the imagination or, more properly, a place where an emerging national imaginary of possibility and progress could find pure expression in the land that spread out over the horizon. A vast Northern realm that offered more than enough space for the ideas, fancies, anxieties, and embellishments of a great mid-century polymath, searching for meaning during the nation’s centennial anniversary. The Idea of North was precisely that – an idea or even a concept, not born of any prolonged experience, or any significant time spent in the ground or in northern communities. In fact, he had visited only once, having taken the “Muskeg Express” train journey from Winnipeg to Churchill a few years before. Gould’s conceit in producing the documentary is jarring to contemporary sensibilities, but it is useful to highlight a set of tensions in how non-northerners have represented northern spaces, peoples and landscapes, how they have extracted meaning from northern encounters, and how the North must also be a site of contestation for a broader set of social, political, economic, and environmental relations.
It is also jarring how quickly Canadian documentary film moves from the chimerical textures of Gould’s Idea, to another set of imaginaries, one that framed the North as a place of extractive potential, of untapped resource wealth waiting to be harnessed. As the Arctic began to register as a place hydrocarbon and mineral wealth, National Film Board of Canada films like Search Into White Space (1970) took Gould’s imaginary and overwrote it with the giddy excesses of resource dreams. These contributed to produce what Warren Bernauer has called an “extractive hegemony” in Arctic lands and water. Films like BIOS: The Baffin Island Oil Spill Project (1981) and Beyond the Frontier (1983) solidified this discourse – one framing cold water oil spill science as benign interventions designed to protect against the inevitable future damage of extraction, the other promoting the heroic labour and engineering nous required to extract value from a foreboding and far-away landscape. Visual cultures has been, and remains, central to producing and promoting an Arctic extractive imaginary.
It is an exciting time to be working on questions of Arctic extraction. This work owes a huge debt to an expanded interest in global extractivisms, a term meant to enlist a set of economic and social relations that link development, social mobilities, and political futures to the project of resource mobilization. The conditions of extractivism will vary from place to place, always signalling an intention to link the political and economic effects of resource production and export to the sociomaterial realities of those doing the work and living its legacies. Crucially, extractivism is, as Thea Riofrancos (2023) reminds us, a “capacious concept,” imperative for understanding the contemporary politics of such diverse activities as nascent mining economies, Global South development regimes, the logics of big data, or the dynamics of Indigenous-settler relations (see Pasternak et al 2023). Part IV of the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North Series aims to broaden this even further, by inviting contributions at the convergence of extraction and visual cultures.
Northern extractivisms can also be placed within an exciting and growing body of research. A very partial (and admittedly biased) list might begin with the work of Arn Keeling, John Sandlos and their students on mining, communities, and remediation (see, for starters, Keeling and Sandlos 2015). Work on anti-uranium activism and resilience (Scottie et al. 2023) can be read alongside work on precarious labour and social reproduction in diamond mines (Hall 2021) and analyses of mines as sites of “welfare making” and the politics of improvement (Boutet 2024). Work on Arctic hydrocarbon economies has proliferated in recent years (too many to mention here – see Wilt 2023; Stuhl 2024; Farish and Fusco 2024). Northern landscapes have been enriched by work on photography, see for example the work of Lorene Squire for the HBC magazine The Beaver, (Dunaway 2021; Johnston Hurst 2016; Inkpen 2023), film as “cinemas of extraction” (Jekanowski 2019), stories and narrative (Cameron 2015), painting and other visual media (O’Dochartaigh 2022; Bloom 2022; Gapp 2024). More recent work considers how to engage with the materiality of ice (Dodds and Sörlin 2022; forthcoming work from Ruiz, Schönach and Shields, 2024), permafrost (Chu 2021; Wrigley 2023), and protected areas (Bernauer and Roth 2021). Analyses of Arctic extractivisms are capacious indeed.
The authors of Part IV, whose contributions we will read over the next five weeks, are researchers and artists who are thinking about the histories and contemporary repercussions of Arctic extraction. Topics of extraction range from the mining and militarization of Arctic environments to the historical relocation and displacement of Indigenous Peoples, and to the effects of anthropogenic climate change. Orientated around a variety of visual media, from book illustrations to photographic prints, these essays encourage us to think about and engage more critically with the wider, visual remit of extraction. They urge us to reflect on the ways we have historically exploited the Arctic and how our actions continue to impact not only Arctic lands and communities but also our collective relationship with our global environment.
In Canada, work on extraction owes a historiographical debt to the Staples tradition. Yet even here we see tensions in political economic orientation. Harold Innis should quite rightly be read as a critic of the material legacies of extractive practices and, perhaps more importantly, as someone whose work motivated subsequent generations of scholars following the paths of northern extractive economies (see, for instance, Bradbury and St. Martin 1983, Keeling 2010, Thistle 2014). But, as Matthew Evenden has shown, Innis was also a keen proponent of resource exploitation as a harbinger of modernity in the North. It was Innis’ “northern vision,” his very own Idea of North, that heralded Arctic lands as “a frontier for industrialism and binding agent for national unity” (Evenden 2013, 74). Both Innis and Gould linked extraction to nation, again reproducing that great Canadian nostrum about “hewers of wood, and drawers of water” in Arctic climes. We ask readers of Part IV to encounter extractivisms in the Arctic through other modes of engagement, representation and meaning-making – through the visual cultures of mining, militarism, climate, and Indigenous-state relations.
Notes
Bloom, Lisa. Climate Change and the New Polar Aesthetics: Artists Reimagine the Arctic and Antarctic. Duke University Press, 2022.
Bernauer, Warren. ““Regulatory capture” and “extractive hegemony”: the relevance of Nicos Poulantzas’ theory of the state to contemporary environmental politics in Canada.” Human Geography 13, no. 2 (2020): 160-173.
Bernauer, Warren, and Robin Roth. “Protected areas and extractive hegemony: A case study of marine protected areas in the Qikiqtani (Baffin Island) region of Nunavut, Canada.” Geoforum 120 (2021): 208-217.
Bradbury, John H., and Isabelle St‐Martin. “Winding down in a Quebec mining town: A case study of Schefferville.” Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien 27, no. 2 (1983): 128-144.
Boutet, Jean-Sebastien, “Welfare Mines: Extraction and Development in Postwar Northern Canada” PhD Dissertation, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, 2024.
Cameron, Emilie. Far off Metal River: Inuit lands, settler stories, and the making of the contemporary Arctic. UBC Press, 2015.
Chu, Pey-Yi. Life of permafrost: a history of frozen earth in Russian and Soviet science. University of Toronto Press, 2021.
Dodds, Klaus and Sverker Sörlin, eds. Ice humanities: Living, working, and thinking in a melting world. Manchester University Press, 2022.
Dunaway, Finis. Defending the Arctic Refuge: A photographer, an indigenous nation, and a fight for environmental justice. UNC Press Books, 2021.
Evenden, Matthew, “The Northern Vision of Harold Innis” in Buxton, William J. Harold Innis and the north: Appraisals and contestations. McGill-Queen’s Press-MQUP, 2013, 73-99.
Farish, Matthew, and Leah Fusco. “The path to Panarctic: The emergence of an extractive frontier in Arctic Canada, 1948–1958.” The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadienne (2024).
Gapp, Isabelle. A Circumpolar Landscape: Art and Environment in Scandinavia and North America, 1890-1930. Lund Humphries, 2024.
Hall, Rebecca Jane. Refracted economies: Diamond mining and social reproduction in the North. University of Toronto Press, 2021.
Inkpen, Dani. Capturing Glaciers: A History of Repeat Photography and Global Warming. University of Washington Press, 2023.
Jekanowski, Rachel Webb. “Scientific visions: Resource extraction and the colonial impulse in Canadian popular science films.” Canadian Journal of Film Studies 28, no. 1 (2019): 1-24.
Hurst, Rachel Alpha Johnston. “Lorene Squire’s Psychical Landscapes of Colonial/Modern Gender in the Canadian North.” History of Photography 40, no. 4 (2016): 413-431.
Keeling, Arn. “‘Born in an atomic test tube’: landscapes of cyclonic development at Uranium City, Saskatchewan.” The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien 54, no. 2 (2010): 228-252.
Pasternak, Shiri, Deborah Cowen, Robert Clifford, Tiffany Joseph, Dayna Nadine Scott, Anne Spice, and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark. “Infrastructure, jurisdiction, extractivism: keywords for decolonizing geographies.” Political Geography 101 (2023): 102763.
O’Dochartaigh, Eavan. Visual Culture and Arctic Voyages: Personal and Public Art and Literature of the Franklin Search Expeditions. Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Ruiz, Rafico, Paula Schönach, and Rob Shields, eds. After Ice: Cold Humanities for a Warming World. The University of Chicago Press, 2024.
Riofrancos, Thea. November 11, 2020. “Extractivism and Extractivismo.” Global South Studies: A Collective Publication with The Global South. Accessed October 9, 2024.
Sandlos, John, and Arn Keeling. Mining and communities in Northern Canada: History, politics, and memory. University of Calgary Press, 2015.
Scottie, Joan, Warren Bernauer, and Jack Hicks. I Will Live for Both of Us: A History of Colonialism, Uranium Mining, and Inuit Resistance. Vol. 9. Univ. of Manitoba Press, 2022.
Stuhl, Andrew. “Ignorance and Environmental History: The Opening of an Arctic Offshore Oil Frontier, 1968–1976.” Environment and History (2024): 1-29.
Thistle, John. “Forgoing full value? Iron ore mining in Newfoundland and Labrador, 1954–2014.” The extractive industries and society 3, no. 1 (2016): 103-116.
Wilt, James. “All that is Frozen Melts into the Sea: Arctic Gas, Science, and Capitalist Natures.” Capitalism Nature Socialism 34, no. 3 (2023): 76-93.
Wrigley, Charlotte. Earth, ice, bone, blood: Permafrost and extinction in the Russian Arctic. U of Minnesota Press, 2023.
Feature image: Borg Mesch, View of Kirunavaara for LKAB, 1902. Photo: Borg Mesch/Tekniska Museet, Stockholm.
Jonathan Peyton
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