Land-as-Home versus Environmental and Political Imperialism in the American North
The United States Government is in a great rush to develop the land
and seas of the American Arctic for oil and gas, yet what do we know
about the American North and its inhabitants?
Romans called the Arctic terra incognita (Cone). Such ideas of
unknown land lured American polar explorers, biologists, land
conservationists, and resource developers to the far North. In 1956
famed biologist Olaus Murie along with his wife Margaret Murie led a
legendary biological expedition in the Sheenjek River valley in the
northeastern corner of Alaska. On December 6, 1960 Fred A. Seaton,
United States Secretary of Interior signed the Public Land Order 2214
establishing the Arctic National Wildlife Range "[f]or the purpose of
preserving unique wildlife, wilderness and recreational values . . ." (Seaton).
Nowhere in this document do we find names of the Gwich'in and Inupiat
communities who inhabited this region for many millennia, thereby
continuing a long tradition of environmental imperialism that started
with the establishment in 1872 of the Yellowstone National Park (Jacoby).
After oil was discovered in the Alaskan North slope in 1968, the United
States Government signed into law the Alaska Native Claims Settlement
Act (ANCSA) in 1971, carving up Alaska into twelve regional native
corporations and disbursing (in partnership with the oil companies) $963
million in exchange for the native communities giving up their aboriginal
claims to land. This exchange was enacted at a time when profit based
corporate governance was not a way of life of the indigenous
communities. It is difficult to asses the complexity of the full impact
of ANCSA, but a major study conducted by The Juneau Empire nearly
thirty years later, found that despite the financial success that came
to the cities and larger communities, Natives struggled within the new
regimes of capital, and that:
". . . ANCSA has had little effect on their lives and they
struggle to retain important aspects of their traditions, languages and
cultures in a world that seems to spin faster all the time.
Unemployment, social problems and Third World sanitation conditions
continue to plague villages across the state. Education of the young and
preservation of Native culture are also ongoing challenges for Native
communities." (Winters)
Was ANCSA a deliberate act of political imperialism or was it an instance of good
intention gone wrong? This history of imperialism informs my
ongoing work in the Alaskan Arctic as the U.S. Government continues to
push hard for opening up the entire American Arctic for oil and gas
development. Environmental organizations continue to oppose
these development projects in order to preserve critical ecological areas, and
indigenous human rights organizations struggle to establish their
presence, create collaborations (Lear), and push on their own terms for
preservation of the land and animals on which they depend (Matthiessen 2006 and 2007).
For the past eight years I have focused all my creative energy on the
natural and cultural ecologies of the Arctic: Alaska, Canadian Yukon,
and most recently Siberia. I am fascinated by how we imagine the
Northern land and its seas. What is land? "It's just home. To us, it's
home," says Robert Thompson, my Inupiat friend from Kaktovik, Alaska.
"It's a beautiful landscape," says the tourist. "It's a pristine
wilderness, untouched by man," says the conservationist. "It's a barren
wasteland," says the pro-development politician. From early ideas of
terra incognita, to male white explorers' fantasies discussed by
Lisa Bloom in Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar
Expeditions, and to a present political landscape in which
native presence and philosophies toward the land are more important than
ever (if only inconsistently and partially attended to by nationalist
interests outside individual communities like Robert Thompson's), the
Arctic today contains all these histories. It is within this
contestation that my photography has taken shape.
In late 2000, when I started planning for my Arctic journey, my main
motivation was to go to a place untrammeled by tourism or industry, a
so-called pristine wilderness or "last American frontier." After nearly
eight years of intense engagement with the Arctic land and animals, its
people, and its issues, I now think about the Arctic very differently. I
no longer see the Arctic as "the last frontier" (Dunaway); instead I see it as
the most connected land on Earth. Hundreds of millions of birds migrate
from every continent, thousands of miles away, to the Arctic each spring
to nest and rear their young, a celebration of epic scale that connects
the Arctic perhaps to every land and ocean on the planet (Banerjee, Brown). In human
activity, resource wars over oil, natural gas, coal, and mineral
development, climate change, and migrations of toxins have connected the
lives of Northern people and animals to the lives of people in far away
lands in a rather tragic manner. My project thus brings the Arctic into
the sights of the rest of the earth on terms and in a visual language I
hope will help viewers rethink ideas of wilderness and development, both
from the vantage of the less understood land-as-home (Banerjee catalogs).
I have been photographing several ecologically and culturally
significant areas of the American Arctic, including Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge, Teshekpuk Lake Wetland, Utukok River Upland, and the
Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. These lands and oceans are being considered
for oil, natural gas, and coal development. Several large caribou herds,
including Porcupine River, Western Arctic, Teshekpuk Lake, and the
Central Arctic migrate throughout this northern region. Similarly, large
pods of Bowhead and Beluga Whales migrate throughout the northern
waters. Indigenous people, including the Gwich'in, Inupiat, Yupik and
Athabascan, have inhabited these lands for many millennia and have
depended on the caribou herds and whale pods for subsistence, as well as
cultural, and spiritual identities.
Seeing the Arctic through the perspective of land-as-home has
led me to restructure my perception of my own life in relation to where
I come from—specifically in terms of my homeland, my family,
and the creatures we lived with and consumed
for subsistence. When I was growing up as a child in India, my father
would go to the local market for vegetables, fish and other groceries.
We could afford meat only once a week. I used to be horrified when the
chicken would be butchered right in front of me. "Break the neck first,
the rest is easy," I was told. Looking at the skinned goat hanging I
thought, "blood in my meat." I came to the United States and felt relieved
that for the first time in my life I could buy my chicken or beef or lamb
neatly packaged in Styrofoam covered with plastic—no blood—and I
never had to know where it came from. As years passed, my friends started
telling me things like, "chickens are fed antibiotics," and, "chickens are fed their own
waste." I got a job in Seattle and escaped all that by
shopping for organic foods. The food was organic, but there was still no blood
in my meat.
Years later, I went to the Arctic where I participated in killing, butchering and eating
caribou, moose, sheep, and whale. I saw where the food came from and I
again saw blood in my meat and this time understood more deeply my
responsibility to and for that blood (Bulliett). My dear friend and renowned
Gwich'in activist Sarah James wrote:
"We are the ones who have everything to lose. Maybe there are too few
of us to matter. Maybe people think Indians are not important enough to
consider in making their energy decisions. But it's my people who are
threatened by this development. We are the ones who have everything to
lose. We are the caribou people. Caribou are not just what we eat; they
are who we are. They are in our stories and songs and the whole way we
see the world. Caribou are our life. Without caribou we wouldn't exist."
Indigenous peoples all across the American Arctic feel seriously
threatened by proposals to open up the entire Arctic land and sea to oil
development and more recently coal development (Matthiessen 2006 and 2007). For these
indigenous communities, fuel resource development conflicts with food
resources, thus becoming a human rights issue (Gwich'in Steering Committee).
My engagement with the Arctic and its people and wildlife is to create a
visual culture of the often mystified, obscured, unrepresented
connections that make land-as-home.
The integrity and future of the land that I photograph is threatened by
the global need for inexpensive fossil fuels. Petroleum and
coal are the two key contributors to global climate change. In addition,
coal burning power plants and oil refineries in the United States and
around the world are among the key contributors to toxins, known as
Persistent Organic Pollutants (POP) that are ending up in the Arctic
ecology at an alarming scale. These toxic compounds bio-accumulate and
bio-magnify in the animals—from polar bears, fish, seals, and whales,
to women's breast milk. Marla Cone in her book, Silent Snow: Slow
Poisoning of the Arctic, details how the breast milk of high
Arctic women in Greenland and northern Canada has become contaminated to
the point of being considered hazardous, and how the Arctic,
traditionally thought of as the last great unspoiled territory on Earth,
has become home to some of the most contaminated people and animals on
the planet.
When I started my Arctic photography nearly eight years ago, I never
would have imagined that my photographs would be used on the United
States Senate floor to argue against oil drilling in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge (Dunaway), or that I would be called a liar by an influential
United States Senator, or that my first exhibition would be marginalized
at the Smithsonian Institution and that it would become the topic of a
Senate hearing (All Things Considered, NPR)
and later a Senate investigation. Neither could I have
imagined that fear of deportation would contribute to my decision to
take up a United States citizenship. I had not imagined that explanatory
text on ecology and culture depicted in the images would warrant
censorship—but that is exactly what the Smithsonian Institution did when
they expunged all explanatory text, leaving behind the photographs as the kind of
"pictures of beauty" that we regularly find in calendars and other media.
Perhaps this approach was thought to be benign both for the viewers as
well as for powerful pro-development politicians who control funding for
the Smithsonian. My essentially documentary work has resonated quite
distinctly among government institutions, academia, and the art world.
Even as I receive invitations from university departments of Native
American studies, art, biology, environmental and international studies,
and as galleries are selling my work at high prices, it is not enough to
cover my debt from years of living in the Arctic or to support my
ongoing project there. Yet my work continues to find uses outside the
art world; most recently I have become involved in writing supporting
declarations for environmental and human-rights lawsuits.
From a simple impulse to document a land I once thought at the
extreme edge of culture, I find these photographs connecting very
disparate and even conflicting interests and institutions. To give an
example, my caribou migration photograph is used by the Gwich'in
Steering Committee to argue for the preservation of the Gwich'in way of
life. The same image serves for an environmental organization to argue
for the preservation of a pristine land. While both are imagining
preservation of land for the future generation, there is an inherent
conflict in these two views. The Gwich'in want to insure that a hunter
and his family would still be able to go out to the land to hunt caribou
to bring back meat for the family, while the preservationist's view
would be that a future generation of tourists would still be able to
meet the caribou in the most primordial state. But what if the tourist
meets the hunter? What would they say to each other? The encounter
between Native and tourist versions of preservation may be trumped
should the political will of the United States Government prevail in
developing the entire American Arctic for fossil fuels.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to Elena Glasberg for her helpful suggestions
and thoughtful edits that resulted in this final artist statement, and
to Lisa Bloom for inviting me to contribute to this journal.
References
A Moral Choice for the United States: The Human Rights
Implications for the Gwich'in of Drilling in the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge, The
Gwich'in Steering Committee, 2005.
Banerjee, Subhankar. Seasons of Life and Land: Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge, The Mountaineers Books, 2003.
Bloom, Lisa. Gender on Ice: American Ideologies of Polar
Expeditions, University of Minnesota Press, 1993.
Brown, Stephen (ed.). Arctic Wings: Birds of the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge, The Mountaineers Books, 2006.
Bulliett, Richard W. Hunters, Herders and Hamburgers: The Past
and Future of Human-Animal Relationships, Columbia University
Press, 2005.
Cone, Marla. Silent Snow: The Slow Poisoning of the
Arctic, Grove Press, 2005.
Dunaway, Finis. "Reframing the Last Frontier: Subhankar Banerjee
and the Visual Politics of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge",
American Quarterly, Volume 58, Number 1, March 2006. A revised
version will be published in the forthcoming anthology A Kenner
Perception: Ecocritical Studies in American Art History, edited by
Alan C. Braddock and Christoph Irmscher, with foreword by Lawrence
Buell, University of Alabama Press, 2009.
Jacoby, Karl. Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers,
Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, University
of California Press, 2001.
Jacoby, Karl. "The Near North", essay to be published in Subhankar
Banerjee's monograph land-as-home: northern communities and
challenges, Artist-in-Residence Program, Dartmouth College, Hanover,
New Hampshire, January 2009.
James, Sarah. "We Are the Ones Who Have Everything to Lose", in
Arctic Refuge: A Circle of Testimony, Milkweed Editions,
2001.
Lear, Jonathan. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural
Devastation, Harvard University Press, 2006.
Matthiessen, Peter. "Alaska: Big Oil and the Inupiat-Americans",
The New York Review of Books, November 22, 2007. Photographs
Subhankar Banerjee.
Matthiessen, Peter. "Inside the Endangered Arctic Refuge",
The New York Review of Books, October 19, 2006. Photographs
Subhankar Banerjee.
Mitchell, C. Donald. Take My Land, Take My Life: The Story of
Congress' Historic Settlement of Alaska Native Land Claims,
1960-1971, University of Alaska Press, 2001.
Seaton, A. Fred.
"Public Land Order 2214",
Fairbanks, Alaska, 1960.
"Smithsonian Defends Move on ANWR Photos". All Things Considered,
National Public Radio, May 20, 2003.
"Subhankar Banerjee: Resource Wars", exhibition catalog with
introduction by Peter Matthiessen, essay by Kelley E. Wilder, and
extended text by Subhankar Banerjee, Sundaram Tagore Gallery, 2008.
"Subhankar Banerjee—Land-as-Home: Northern Communities and
Challenges", exhibition catalog with essay by Professor Karl Jacoby,
Dartmouth College Artist-in-Residence Program, January 2009.
Winters, John. "Between World:
How the Alaska Native Claims
Settlement Act reshaped the destinies of Alaska's Native people", The
Juneau Empire, 2001.
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