Support NiCHE’s Work, Contribute to our 2025 Fundraising Campaign Here.

Editor’s Note: This is the eighth post in Part V of the Visual Cultures of the Circumpolar North series edited by Isabelle Gapp and guest edited by Sarah Pickman.

In the early nineteenth century, when ukiuq (winter) sufficiently thickened the eastern Arctic’s sea ice, nations moved out onto that ice to build large seal-hunting settlements of igluvigait (igloos), an architecture made from snow and sometimes ice.¹ The igluvigaq, a diverse architecture built at different scales and easily modifiable with interlocking chambers and connecting passageways, was a way of managing a dynamic environment. People spoke of it as making the land into a tool. In form and concept, it related to the “vault of the sky.” “We would make a hole in the igluvigaq when it was dark and look out” to keep time by the stars and daylight, remembered Apphia Agalakti Awa from the Northern Foxe Basin region more recently.² The architecture’s compacted snow amplified sound so that people approaching could be heard long before they could be seen.³ For seal hunting, people scouted the densest, strongest sea ice as a foundation for their architecture, built at safe distances from the floe edge. This ice, squeezed free of air bubbles, diatoms, and salt, stabilized the architecture’s floors and tinted its interiors a radiant azure.

Despite the immediate ephemerality of its building materials, snow architecture had a deep timescale. Often rebuilt at the same sites year after year, the historicity of snow settlements was preserved in Inuit toponymic systems that stretched from coastlines to offshore ice and the open ocean. These place names memorialized the lands and waters of people’s homelands. North of Hudson’s Bay, an ice ridge named Agiuppiniq marked the site of an annual seal-hunting settlement; the ridge itself, which formed the structural foundation for constructing the settlement, was recreated seasonally by the compression of ice sheets.⁴ Holding the past in “one small word,” place names allowed “people to use points in space to talk about time.”⁵

This historical continuity was maintained and adapted through a fabric of social practices, including Inuit legal traditions that guided when and where snow settlements were built. Before moving onto sea ice to hunt seals, recounted Aupilaarjuk, a contemporary Inuk elder from Kangiqiniq (Rankin Inlet), “There was a piqujaq [‘thing that had to be done’] that the sewing of all caribou clothing had to be completed … only repairs could be done once we reached the sea.”⁶

Once built, the architecture supported renewal. In winter, inside the qaggiq, a celebratory, communal space and social institution that could be incarnated in different architectures, people told stories from long ago. When built of snow, the qaggiq was a large domed structure with interior diameters reaching upward of twenty feet. It was a vehicle for performing history through song, dance, and drumming. People crowded in to sit in rows around a central space illuminated by animal-fat lamps. They listened to throat singers voicing words that “came from the mouths of the ancients” and traded pisiit (songs) “record[ing] stories that can be told forever before a voice is forgotten.”⁷

The cyclical capacity of snow architecture—its seasonal renewal by builders—deepened a historical groove; it allowed for maintaining a robust historicity through the telling and retelling of stories. The kinds of stories told inside the winter qaggiq often dialogically linked human activities in the present with creation stories and environmental forces in the deep past. They explained how people established and claimed their homelands. Snow’s virtuosity as a building material, then, supported a mobile placemaking, one enduringly refreshed and reasserted across people’s homelands with each igluvigaq built.

***

Nineteenth-century Europeans who encountered the snow architecture of these seal-hunting settlements remarked on the “purity” of its building materials. They knew snow as a seasonal product of nature and not, thus, as belonging to historical time. History and the making of history, in nineteenth-century European thought, was a realm firmly separated from nature and produced by human agency only. This did not stop European explorers from making numerous drawings of the local architecture and recording the builders’ craft and process of construction. An 1823 British representation, liberally adapted by the engraver Edward Finden from a sketch by the Inuk interpreter Tatannuaq, reduces snow settlements to geometries of pure form.⁸ Shed of the surrounding landscape or any geographical information, snow architecture, transferred to the page, is converted into a Platonic ideal.

To the untrained European eye, snow architecture’s perennial rebuilding seemed to be undertaken anywhere and anytime. What in modern terms would be described as its anti-monumentality cut against Western ideas of duration and antiquity—and especially, of property. Friable blocks of snow were absent the fixity and durable materiality that made buildings “real” in British common law. Snow’s ephemerality, and its lack, from the perspective of Lockean property logics, of an enduring attachment to land, was transferred in British imaginations onto people themselves.⁹ “For the dwelling of to-day is not the dwelling of to-morrow,” declared an author, interpreting the architecture’s occupant as untethered from possession and free to abandon his home at any moment, “to roam whithersoever his fancy leads him.”¹⁰

These early nineteenth-century interpretations, deceptively directed at the architecture’s formal qualities, spun a much larger imagining of Arctic time. Snow architecture’s short durational time and the disappearance of its physical materials—snow melts—were seized on by Europeans to make broader claims to the shape of Inuit history. Using snow, they imposed a naturalized timeline on a place and people, one dominated by the temporalities of climate rather than human history. They drew divisions through Arctic time: who belonged to nature and who to history, who had agency and who did not. A vanishing snow architecture was made to vanish an Indigenous past and present, just as White Earth Ojibwe historian Jean O’Brien has shown that prosaic acts of history-writing inculcated a powerful ideological narrative of Indian extinction in nineteenth-century New England despite continuing Indigenous presence in the region.¹¹

In the nineteenth-century Arctic, eliding melting snow with an absence of history served to naturalize and consolidate ground for British imperial use. That is, a particular understanding of what counted as architecture, one invested in a proprietary and simplistically material idea of permanence and durability, spurred a broader imperial orientation. This not only treated snow architecture as unauthored and belonging to nature, but fed an ideology of the eastern Arctic as an architecturally unmarked, nonhuman landscape. It suppressed ancestral and modern Inuit histories of building, modifying, and managing Arctic terrain that were already deeply intercultural and sovereign.

The consequences of imposing this tradition of architectural thought on the Indigenous Arctic are as numerous as they are clear in the later twentieth-century policies of the Canadian government. From targeting Inuit architecture as a space for invasive social reforms intended to destroy historical forms of kinship, to the military’s appropriation of snow construction for emergency shelters at midcentury, it turned snow architectures into a static and stereotypical “igloo.” A common thread to such imaginaries is their transformation of what is a regionally specific architecture—one built in the eastern Arctic—into a reductive metonym for the building cultures of a vast and highly diverse Indigenous circumpolar world.

The dominance of this stereotyped igloo, in its narrowing of the igluvigaq to its colonial double, has obscured other histories. One might ask instead how the historical architecture embodied a more capacious understanding of materials and time. The nineteenth-century igluvigaq and the robustness of its repeated, even ritualized acts of building and rebuilding reveal snow architecture for what it was: not an expedient technique for survival, but a powerful and spatially expansive claim to belonging and territory.

Notes

1. Igluvigait (igloos) is the plural noun; igluvigaq is the singular noun. On the cultural history of the stereotyped “igloo” as a vehicle for racializing people and place, see Shari Huhndorf, Going Native: Indians in the American Cultural Imagination (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 79-128. ↩︎
2. Nancy Wachowich, Apphia Agalakti Awa, Rhoda Kaujak Katsak, and Sandra Pikujak Katsak, Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 124. Louis-Jacques Dorais, Words of the Inuit: A Semantic Stroll through a Northern Culture (Winnipeg, MB: University of Manitoba Press, 2020), 149. ↩︎
3. George Agiaq Kappianaq in George Agiaq Kappianaq and Cornelius Nutaraq, Travelling and Surviving on Our Land, 2, eds. Jarich Oosten and Frédéric Laugrand (Iqaluit, NU: Nunavut Arctic College Media, 2001), 65. ↩︎
4. Claudio Aporta, “Shifting Perspectives on Shifting Ice: Documenting and Representing Inuit Use of the Sea Ice,” The Canadian Geographer/Le Géographe canadien 55, no. 1 (2011): 10. William Parry, Journal of a Second Voyage for the Discovery of a North-West Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific … (London: J. Murray, 1824), 423-424. ↩︎
5. Julie Cruikshank, Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 354. ↩︎
6. Mariano Aupilaarjuk, Marie Tulimaaq, Akisu Joamie, Émile lmaruittuq, and Lucassie Nutaraaluk, Inuit Laws: Tirigusuusiit, Piqujait, and Maligait, eds. Jarich Oosten, Frédéric Laugrand, and Willem Rasing (Iqaluit, NU: Nunavut Arctic College Media, 2017), 20. ↩︎
7. Margaret Uyauperk Aniksak and Donald Suluk in John Bennett and Susan Rowley eds., Uqalurait: An Oral History of Nunavut (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2004), 108, 108-109. This tradition is a vital part of present-day Inuit Nunangat, for example, Janet Tamalik McGrath, The Qaggiq Model: Toward a Theory of Inuktut Knowledge Renewal (Iqaluit, NU: Nunavut Arctic College Media, 2019). ↩︎
8. Tatannuaq was also known as Augustus. John Franklin, Narrative of a Journey to the Shores of the Polar Sea, vol. 2, 3rd edition (London: John Murray, 1824), 43-47. ↩︎
9. On property, see Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). For entanglements of race and the Arctic climate, see Jen Rose Smith, Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2025). ↩︎
10. Robert Huish, The Last Voyage of Capt. Sir John Ross R.N. to the Arctic Regions: For the Discovery of a North West Passage, Performed in the Years 1829-30-31-32 and 33 … (London: John Saunders, 1835), 381. ↩︎
11. Jean M. O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2010). ↩︎

Feature image: “Snow Cottages of the Boothians.” Engraved by W. Say after a sketch by John Ross, 1834. In John Ross, Narrative of a Second Voyage in Search of a North-West Passage … (London, A. W. Webster, 1835).

The following two tabs change content below.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Phoebe Springstubb

Phoebe Springstubb is an assistant professor in the Department of the History of Art at the University of Michigan and a postdoctoral scholar in the Michigan Society of Fellows. Her current book project, "The Inhabited Arctic: Time, Architecture, and the Making of the Deep Past in the Bering Strait," examines different cultural ideas of time and their architectural expressions in eastern Siberia and Arctic North America.

Latest posts by Phoebe Springstubb (see all)

• Building Anew: Ephemerality and the Igluvigaq (Igloo) - November 17, 2025