Art (Click images below to enlarge)
Article by the Artist
by Subhankar Banerjee
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.
