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Jen Rose Smith, "Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic" (Duke UP, 2025)
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B
It's welcome to the New Books Network.
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C
Hi Jen. Thanks for joining us.
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B
Hi, Crystal. Thanks for having me.
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C
How are you doing?
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B
Doing well. I'm so happy. It's like on right on the cusp of autumn and getting a little cooler. I know we have different sensibilities in that way, but it's feeling good to me.
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C
I'm more of a summer person. But I'm so happy to be able to discuss your book today. Welcome to the New Books Network and we are discussing Ice Geographies today, which is Jan Rose's new book that just came out last spring, right?
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B
It came out in May. Yeah.
- [02:18]
C
The one thing that I always notice about your book, I have a physical copy with me here is the gorgeous cover. How about you describe maybe the COVID for the listeners and tell us a bit more about why this is a cover of your book.
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B
Sure. I would be so happy to do that because I also love the COVID I've been saying that it's my favorite part of my book. So the part it really is, it's a beautiful piece. I have the book in front of me too because sometimes I was looking at some of the questions that you sent me in advance. And I. I'm like, what did I write again? What did I say? So I have a physical copy in front of me too, so I can remember. But the. The COVID is taken from. Borrowed from a print by an artist named Darcy Bernhardt. And the title of it is called Beluga Hunting. And they painted it in 2023. And there you can find them on Instagram. And they have a website that Darcy is spelled D A R C I E. And then Bernhardt is B E R N H A R D T. And then their Instagram handle is O U I Y A G H A S I A K. If you want to see more of their work and just learn about them, they're a super cool person and their artwork is just incredible. I came across their artwork first in Inuit Art Quarterly, which is a great magazine. And the title of that. That volume was An Inuit Granny Palettes An Inuit Sense of Color. And then one of the writers for this volume, Asuna Joch, I think is how you say their name, they wrote a piece called the Arctic is Not White. And I really loved that idea and that understanding. And it's part of what I'm also working to try to articulate in the book as well is that sort of normative, mainstream understandings of the Arctic think of the space as white in all of the terms that come up. Right. Whiteness in all of the ways. And so this volume, Inuit Art Quarterly, was so lovely. And this one writer brought together a bunch of pieces that really emblematized and embodied that idea of the Arctic is not white. And one of Darcy's pieces is in there. Not this one that's on my cover, but one called Picking Akpics. I think you make sure that's, yeah, picking Octopics. And so that's a type of berry, and it's this really vibrant, sort of like fiery colors of, but very abstracted idea of what maybe a berry picking might look like. And so I went and looked at their other work and I found the beluga hunting piece on their Instagram, and I just fell in love with it. I think it's so awesome. It's so interesting. And it's also, again, pushing against these ideas of the Arctic being barren or empty or valueless in these kind of derogatory and very normative ways. So this piece is filled with life. It feels very abundant. And it's also about, know, hunting beluga and what that looks like for the peoples that live in the Arctic and do that kind of subsistence activity. So I just love it. Darcy's really great. I can't say enough good things about them.
- [06:17]
C
No, it's a beautiful cover. I'm really, like, struck by the, like, the pink, the blue, the white. Like, there's like a kind of vibrancy of colors that you wouldn't necessarily expect. And I think that's part of what you're trying to do, right, about defamiliarizing a sense of what ice looks like or what to expect with ice, and maybe moving away from the defamiliarizing first and going to more like familial memories. I'd love to hear more about where you're coming from in terms of your relationship with ice and that interest in ice.
- [06:55]
B
Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. I think. One more thing about the COVID I love it. I love it, too, because when I started writing my dissertation, the early iterations of this project were very much about Alaska more centrally and less so about ice as the kind of central, binding, analytic. So when I figured, okay, I'm going to write this book about more generally the Arctic, and that means my book will probably be blue. Is all books about the Arctic blue. And so when I, you know, when we finally had worked out that this was going to be the COVID I'm like, but this is the perfect version of, like, a blue Arctic book. So. And then one of my friends was like, oh, it's like, it's the trans flag colors too. And I'm like, yay. I'm so glad you all saw that in the COVID So it's. Yeah, it's just really special to me. Yeah. So thinking about where. So you asked me where some of the kernel ideas or original ideas of the book came from. Yeah.
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C
I guess I was really struck by your prologue and how you're situating the book in relation to childhood memories. And I wanted to hear more about your positionality as someone from Alaska and your relationship to ice before it became even an analytic.
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B
Yes, totally. So, yeah. So my. So I grew up in a small town, like, right on the coast of south central Alaska, which, you know, technically is not like the iciest place, like, when you're. And I, I, I try to be upfront about that in the text too, that, you know, I'm sort of like sub Arctic is where, you know, that's how certain cartographers might categorize my position in relation to, like, the Arctic Circle and like, true. Icy. Icy places of the high north. But, you know, part of, part of what I found in doing the research for the book, the writing for the book is that sort of my positionality as an Alaska Native person, as someone who grew up hailed by that category and put in that category of Alaska Native person, part of that is still shaped and determined by these ideas of ice, again, these sort of normative ideas of ice and how that comes to shape particular, particularly like the racial of Alaska Native peoples historically. And so I did grow up in proximity to glaciers, and those are part of glaciers. The movement of glaciers over time are definitely part of my people. The, our migration stories and how we were separated from each other at certain points when we were moving across space and where we came to live. Ice really shaped a lot of those questions for us at certain moments in history. So ice is like part of it. It's been part of our story for a while, but also in these more violent ways. The ways that Alaska Native peoples have been racialized historically by federal and state governments or non state actors like geographers or early anthropologists or race scientists trying to categorize people of the globe based on where they were living, where they called home. In Alaska, the idea of Alaska was very much shaped by some of those early like racial hierarchies. So in, in multiple ways I feel that my positionality has been shaped by imaginaries of ice and also like the material, physical geographies of ice as it's shaped landscape.
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C
So in your book you have this kind of multidimensional approach to ice, thinking about it as an analytic, as data, as an imaginary, as terrain. And we'll explore each of these dimensions. But for listeners and myself who might not be as familiar with the geographies of Alaska and its kind of geopolitical context, maybe if you could situate one, what makes this territory specific in histories of indigeneity in the region, both in relation to US Settler colonialism, but also in relation to, I would say a larger western colonial, Cold War ramifications of that colonial project. What makes that territory specific?
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B
Oh my gosh, such a good question. And I could. Yeah, that's like the topic of another probably two hour podcast. It's such a rich question. Yeah, I mean, that's also what makes Alaska a very interesting space, especially in, you know, part of what the book tries to do is treat Alaska as a center, you know, and so if we do that, we see Alaska as part of all of its own. Like Alaska as a Native place is extremely diverse. You know, there's over 228 federally recognized tribes that live in Alaska that have their own distinct quality, their own understanding of history, space, dynamics, relationship. So it's huge. It's vast, right? And very diverse. And then if we think about it in relation to the rest of the globe, Alaska is part of the circumpolar north, it's part of the Pacific. It has this proximity to what's now called Russia, but in more ancient times was thought of as part of Asia. It's proximate to what's now called Canada. It was a part of the imperial space of both Russia and the US Now. So it's quite a rich place. And that's only naming kind of a few ways. So in that sense, there's so many ways to think about how Alaska has shaped and come to be shaped by those kinds of histories and those relationships. And so in the book, part of, part of what I'm trying to articulate, one is a relationship to the United States, certainly, because that's who we're currently occupied by. But also, you know, my field of my disciplines are, you know, Native American and Indigenous studies, which is at this point, you know, very U.S. canada based. And the histories of racialization in particular that I was interested in tracking out that have to do with the relationship to ICE were made in large part through a kind of American understanding, in American concretization of those racial hierarchies. And sometimes a lack, like a neglect to an inability to see where Alaska Native peoples actually should be placed. So one of those examples in one of the chapters, I can't remember which now, which it's two or three, but what I focus on is the particular Alaska Native racialization that happened in ways that tried to situate Alaska Native peoples not as indigenous, but, but as actually of Asian descent or this kind of like migrant subject position of a body that comes from Asia that is not, that is actually kind of a settler or an immigrant figure. And in using that kind of lack of legal category in 1867 into the 1900s, Alaska Native people were not, did not have the kind of resource, legal resources at their disposal to make land claims arguments or even, you know, voting rights kind of arguments. So there was all of this kind of, you know, this confusion and argument about who were Alaska Native peoples racially. Were they of Asian descent? Were they, did they migrate up from the Pacific? There were even ideas of like, are these folks part of the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel? Like all of these very, you know, wild, confusing, very violent, you know, racist ways of thinking about Alaska Native peoples and always as non Indigenous So that sort of legal categorization didn't come until much later, and it wasn't until, you know, the mid-1900s that we were able to actually make land claims to. To this. To. To our homelands. So that's what one of the ways I'm most interested in, in kind of following how the specific racialization of Alaska Native peoples happened and how that shapes our politics now.
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C
Thank you. That's super rich. Just to clarify. So am I correct in understanding that you have this kind of, like, history of, like, treaties, contested or not, in. Just with the. Like with the settlers for other indigenous groups in the US but you have a kind of, like, different trajectory for Alaska Native people that does not go through this kind of, like, legal mechanism, even if it's, like, a very contested.
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B
Like, it's a very imperfect.
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C
Yeah, there's a lot of issues around treaties, but, like, you don't even have that mechanism in the case of.
- [17:50]
B
Okay, no, yeah, that's exactly right. So in the US this sort of, like, you know, kind of piecemeal coloniality that was happening as, you know, imperial and colonial forces were moving west, moving north, moving Russia, even came from all the way down, you know, through Washington, Oregon and California. You have all of these different, you know, Spanish, Danish, you know, you name it. Everybody's working in colonial ways. But many of the like, as you pointed out, many of those relationships are codified in law. Right. So many tribes of the, especially the contiguous US have treaties with the federal government that, again, as you said, these are imperfect relationships. Right. But they do, in a sense, at least set up some sort of precedent for rights. Yeah. And so Alaska was actually purchased wholesale by the United States from Russia. So there was no kind of, like, more granular interface with Alaska Native polities and tribes on the ground level to make sure there was, like, mutual recognition, nation to nation, in that way, in the way that. That happened in a lot of the contiguous c. Thank you.
- [19:25]
C
And you kind of already touched a bit on that. But maybe we can go a bit more into the kind of. The core of the book's argument about racialization and eyes. But if you could explain to us how Like Eyes has been mobilized in different ways as a mechanism for racialization.
- [19:47]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, we've talked some about the particular, like, the historical ways that got written into the archives around the purchase of Alaska and how Alaska Native peoples in particular, were dispossessed of ability to claim rights and rights to land. So that's one of the ways and Then sort of, you know, each chapter I'm also trying to open up opportunities for there to be more than just kind of a read of violence. And this is the only way that ice comes to matter. But those were some of the animating questions at first. What is really happening here with how ice is being weaponized and deployed to the dispossess and racialize? So that is a part of every chapter. And also ice is not only doing that singular kind of work is also what the book hopefully argues. But so some of the other ways that I take it up in terms of the aspects of violence and the ways that ice is used to meet certain ends are how ice comes to matter in kind of like the more modern moment of climate change and becomes this kind of symbol and unmoored signifier for the loss of a human planet, human being, capital H, which belongs to a particular set of people. And so in those moments, ice is made to do a lot of work toward what needs to happen in these kind of generated, both invented and, in a certain sense, accurate moments of crisis and urgency around environment, right, and destruction. So in that sense, questions of race difference, gender oppression are all built in to those understandings of ice in particular. But somehow ice gets kind of made vacant of those politics along the way. And so this book is working to kind of show some of those contexts that get emptied in the name of crisis or the name of urgency around, like planet death.
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- [23:02]
C
That's fascinating, and I initially wanted to ask you a question around geographies of ice in relation to other geographies that have been read in similar ways as barren, empty, sterile, but for a kind of like, climate determinism or like environmental determinism that misconstruct ice geographies, but also deserts, forests, the equatorial forest being one emblematic example, et cetera. But as you're talking about urgency and the climate crisis, it's also striking to me how similarly the Amazon is being constructed in relation as this kind of ecosystem to protect in relation to ice. And so you have this double delegitation or devaluation of specific geographies and at the same time this over investment in conservation in those spaces. And I'm wondering if you could speak to how your work is in conversation with literature on those different geographies and climate determinism on the one hand, but also like climate change and the investment of those geographies as like space that are going to like save the planet to some extent.
- [24:29]
B
Oh my gosh, yes. Absolutely beautiful question. I think that all through writing the book, especially, you know, the chapter on temperate normativity, I wanted to like offer a concept that's not necessarily new. Like environmental determinism is pretty like close to what I was working to articulate intemperate normativity. But I wanted something that would travel in a way that shows not only like this idea that people are racialized and harm comes from that, like real material consequences come from that, but it's also an upholding of other kinds of spaces as well, that there are particular forms of spaces that are meant to produce a certain perfect body and mind, that it's not just that some spaces do like this kind of work in other spaces, like, no, it's a hierarchy that gets made in and through environmental determinism. Ideas is. And so in reading widely about how historically and philosophically those ideas came to be, many amazing scholars have already written about how that's happened in particularly hot places or desert places or places near the equator. And those early violent ideas were then used as evidence to treat certain people in certain ways, to make certain people into property, et cetera. And so that happened and unfolded and was enacted in particular ways in the Arctic that aren't the same as, you know, the torrid zone, so to speak, but the, the ways that environments and cold and hot and these sensibilities of what we think about temperature are used to very violent ends nonetheless. And so I felt a real like, kinship across these, These, for me, these spaces growing around how the desert is articulated around, you know, these hot places. Hot, hot places are articulated as imperfect and creating the less superior non white body. And to sort of your question makes me think of like, what are the ways that I could have maybe articulated that too in a more contemporary sense through these, the dominant narratives of climate change, that these ideas of environmental determinism are still, and temperate normativ are really still so ingrained in the way that we understand environments like the Arctic as the canary in the coal mine. That's showing us what we're doing. It's in a slightly more liberal sense, right? I mean, to even put climate change in what a research application at this point is a. No, no. But how these environments are still upheld in ways that are dangerous and problematic and make these spaces more precarious and again, empty them of the real relations and histories that they contain. Like the Amazon or the Arctic or these big. These big sort of. What is it like the charismatic landscapes, you know, that get made to are forced to do this kind of work for the salvation of all of humanity.
- [28:36]
C
Wow, your response is so rich and it's taking me in so many different directions. I love this. I do want to talk. Okay. I do want to talk about what makes perhaps ice specific in those imaginaries and this racial constructions of the environment. So my work, as you know, is focused on West Africa, specifically Nigeria. And Lagos was described as a kind of like white man's grave and kind of like settler literature. And there's this whole literature and discourse around malaria and specific pallidal environments that are not conducive to civilization in this kind of language, racializing language. And ice is coded in a very different way and both historically, but also like even in the present. And some like. There are like two examples I wanted to like ground our conversation, but that I came across is this TV series called Ice Vikings. And the description of the TV show is, look at this wild and dangerous world of commercial ice fishing on Lake Winnipeg where modern day Vikings set out on thin ice to stake their claim. Again, modern day Vikings. And then also something that I kept seeing and I think your book kind of like crystallized to me. Like what was so. Like some of the things that were bothering me a lot about this was all those get ready with me videos on social media, specifically on TikTok of Arctic scientists or people, some type of like tourism in the Arctics and trying to present what their daily lives look like, but in a very like, I'm this kind of like expedition lone adventurer out in the wild. And it's. Yeah, it's saying something about my bravery or the kind of like bravery of humankind, but also like the race coded uncoded. So if you could speak to like, these are other examples you might have of how white supremacy also understands ice in very particular ways.
- [31:10]
B
Yeah. Yes, absolutely. And thanks for. I didn't know that Lagos was described in that specific. It's unfortunately not surprising. Right. And it's boring. Right. Elsa. At this point. But this. But it also is like, I Think, in a way it's helpful because it binds. It's. It's binding our conversations and the sense of politics that we're invested in and invested in disrupting across the work. Right. And this is what I think is. I tried to do in, in the book too, is like to bring Pacific Studies and Black Studies together with Arctic Studies, like, you know, and this. It's not new. Right. Again, like many amazing people have already been saying these things and talking about these things, especially like where land and water meet, which is so helpful, like, to me in writing this book as well. And also I really wanted to put ice into that conversation too, because so many of us are talking about similar things and we. I think the real materialities that we're working with are asking us to be in conversation more. So thank you for doing that, too. Yeah. I think that Arctic representation, Arctic media is so wild. And if I were immediate, I do literary criticism and I look at some artwork too. But if I were a real bread and butter media studies person, I would have a job forever. You know, there's just so much wild stuff that gets made. And I didn't even know about the TikTok get ready with Me videos, but.
- [33:04]
C
I have to send you a few.
- [33:06]
B
Please do. Yeah. Yeah. Can you remind me of what the question that you asked at the end of that?
- [33:15]
C
Yeah, I think. I guess my question is to like, the kind of like, ambivalence of ice in relation to white supremacy, because there is a. White supremacy also uses ice in different ways, that it uses other types of environments. But I do think that your book is also pushing us to think about ice in ways that are way more complex than how it has been realized by white supremacy.
- [33:39]
B
Thank you. Yeah, right. That's the good question. I was forgetting. I think I take it up most explicitly in the last chapter about ice in outer space. And so really thinking about some of the historical ways that Nazis have taken up ice, especially in the Antarctic space, and the ways that ice in these kind of most problematic versions are made to be thought of as kind of like, as representative of some of the most testing materialities that masculinity can define itself against, or where it can thrive or where it can survive. And a white supremacist version of masculinity in particular. And so the Arctic and Antarctica have long been taken up to be these sort of stages where that kind of violence can be tested against. And it's not only a historic thing. Like, these things are happening in contemporary moments as well. And, you know, not all masculinity is like Nazi masculinity, of course, but. But there are still versions of this kind of violent way of being that gets set against Arctic spaces and its sterility and its ruggedness. I'm rereading Frankenstein, and it's so fascinating to me that Mary Shelley starts and ends with that test again, finishing in the Arctic. And I think it's a critical one. I think the first time that I read Frankenstein, I was less open to the idea. But now rereading it, I do think that she's making a comparison between Arctic exploration being very similar to the creation of Frankenstein's monster as a big moment of hubris and about what men need to do to prove themselves as thinkers. And that's a digression. But, yeah, I think that the ways in the last chapter, I'm thinking about it the most explicitly in the ways that ice gets taken up in that way. But I do think that critique is important. And also, as you said, I am trying to offer these other windows into thinking and relating to ice and the ways that especially native folks have thought about and are in relation to ice that isn't circumscribed by those kinds of weaponizations alone. Yeah.
- [36:51]
C
Maybe we can speak a bit about that as well. I think it's also in that last chapter, you're thinking about the kind of unruliness of eyes, the way we often think about it in those kind of white supremacist ways as this kind of rugged material. But you're offering instead this notion of the soft and cuteness as well. So I would love to hear both about those. The kind of, like, materiality of ice and its unruliness in this material sense, but also thinking about how you're mobilizing different types of archives to be able to make those claims.
- [37:37]
B
Thank you. Yeah, yeah. The conclusion of the book. So I would say that a lot of the book really does live in these big ideas of the universal. Right. And the generalized understandings of ice and ice geographies and sort of pushing back against those with truly, like, contemporary and historical ways that Native peoples are in relation to ice. And not as, like, the alternative, but as, you know, like a kind of cacophony of voices that, like, we've always been here, we've always been at work. And these other, bigger ideas are actually this kind of problem that's over here. So in. In. In doing that, though, and spending a lot of time critiquing, you know, the universal. By the. By the time I finished the book, I'm like, gosh, it would be really nice to have a moment to think about something small and as like a series of events presented itself. So I was given an opportunity to think with ice as it's in relation to a particular kind of fungus. And in trying to think about ice as small and ice as cute, I found myself falling into a trap that I had set for myself. I think of like, oh, this is good. This is like the small small and the cute and the soft are exactly what I need as antidote to the rest of this book being like hard, you know, forever hard, masculine, generalized, universal ice. And so I tried to live in the like, complications of that trap in the conclusion. Not to say that like soft, small, minor will fix everything, but that ice is also that. And what happens if all of that is true at the same time? Is it possible for us as complex thinkers to hold all of it at once? So I don't know the answer to that, like, spoiler. Sorry there's no easy, neat bow at the end of the book, but I.
- [40:06]
C
Did not appreciate every good book.
- [40:10]
B
Thank you. But yeah, I did appreciate the opportunity to work through like some of my own mess about, you know, that I was left to with writing this book about. This is not just this and really wanting, wanting something that made me feel better, you know, but like the painful hope that of which I think is also a problem that comes with urgency and comes with crisis is that people are also grasping for this idea of hope, which can be just as problematic as urgency itself, at any rate. Yeah, I think that I tried to give capacious ways of thinking about ice that push against an analysis that only offers criticism and only gives us like, oh, good, well, I'm glad someone else figured that out, you know. So I tried to resist doing that for readers too.
- [41:22]
C
Yeah, it's quite striking reading the book and reading those multiplicity of meanings that ice is being taken to signify. There is a sense of kind of over investment in ice in relation to those histories of settler colonialism, commercial fishing, oil extraction, tourism, climate change. It's everywhere, everyone. There's so much loaded interests. And I'm wondering if you could maybe tell us how you're navigating the kind of like scale and weight of those histories in relation to also giving weight and space to what a relationship to ice is for people who make lives in those territories instead of making lives money out of those territories, I guess, or making hope or like climate, a climate solution out of those territories.
- [42:31]
B
Right. Yeah. I mean, I wish That I, like, I could say, I think there are so many good people living their lives in the Arctic and doing it like doing the actual work of the everyday. And that is just not. That's not my life right now. And so, like, I wish I could say more. I wish I had more explicit like. But do is like, point, like, send afterward in an email a list of scholars and thinkers and artists and, you know, folks that, like, are doing the work, like, doing this. The. The true, like, lived vibrancy of Arctic life that I think is so important because it's true. I think the Arctic is made into so many things that it's really not.
- [43:27]
C
But one way that you try to, I guess also, I know we don't. I know the word resistance has a lot of weight right now, but one way that you try to push back against this overwhelming archive is also to think about other modalities. And I'm thinking about your use of, like, literature, but also, like, art, poetry. So we talked about the COVID but you also have those really beautiful images of exhibitions in the book. And you also train as a literature scholar and you're like, mobilizing poetry to think about eyes. So maybe if you could like, speak about those multiple ways of entering through this question of eyes.
- [44:20]
B
Yeah, yeah, I do. I mean, for me, I was trained as a, like a literary critic. And so for me, that came out of just like loving fiction and loving poetry and loving essay and reading very widely across those genres. And so for me, the most complex, I guess I should say not better, but the most complex, complicated, nuanced and accurate representation, if that's what we're gonna think about. What matters in academia, those. Those kinds of representations happen in literature. For me, like, I learn much more often from a novel than I do reading, you know, an academic article about maybe the exact same topic. And that's because there doesn't have to be like, one capital T truth that emerges from fiction or even from nonfiction. There can just be an extremely well written version of an experience that can speak to so many different minds. And so for me, that there's like a real important politic in that, that feels extremely important to presence, especially around a materiality like ice, which often is so. So frequently just considered a data point or something that can be processed into something meaningful. Right? Not meaningful in and of itself. And so that for me, like, one is like my own, like, propensity or inclination or skill of reading, you know, like literature writ large, but also like that. That to me is where the most realistic Versions of a true experience come about and are made and are offered. So what I have in the book, in terms of my evidence, my materials that I go to show and make my arguments, I think are under examined places for especially thinking about ice. But that's not like an argument that doesn't make something meaningful in and of itself. Like, no one's looked at this yet. Okay, so it's more than that. But I do think that the conversations that are had in literary and art worlds about where ice and race and indigeneity and political violence meet are most incisively put in those genres.
- [47:27]
C
For me personally, one set of images that was really striking to me was the Lorna Simpson Walk on Ice. And I was curious about how you're thinking about this work, this book in relation at this point of confluence that a lot of scholars have been trying to think with of Indigenous studies and Black studies. But yes, the various meanings of ice in relation to both of those groups.
- [48:05]
B
Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, it's a tricky one. I think a lot of people, a lot of scholars are. Are doing it and doing it well and doing it less well. Like, we're trying, right? We're trying to find the inroads. We're trying to find. It's. It's good and important work. And in my own writing of the book, again, it felt really important to presence those conversations that are already happening, you know, at the. At those intersections. And I learned about. Gosh, my brain is forgetting their name right now. But when I learned about the Lorna Simpson prints through a book of essays, I was so excited to go look at them. I'm going to. I'm going to send a link to the book of essays. My brain is just blanking right now because I definitely am, like, indebted and credit them to helping me learn about Lorna Simpson's work. I was so excited to see these because Lorna Simpson has been a working artist for decades. And I admired her work before, and I didn't know that she was incorporating, well, one, like painting canvases into her art practice. And then two, these. These art. These new sort of medium for her is like these big canvases of ice and kind of melting ice, morphing ice, tortured ice in a way. But they're all sort of pushed through with collaged images from Jet magazine and Ebony magazine, often black women. Whether it's like just pieces of their face, their eyes, parts of their body, like moving through and in these icebergs. And so it was so taken. It was so taken by these different exhibitions that she was having with, with these, these, these ideas and concepts meeting each other and, but. And simultaneously I was worried that they would be read as well. This is all part of the racial violence against black people is all part of the climate crisis. These are all just concepts that can be taken up and put together willy nilly. I was worried that that's how a kind of one reading might take it. And that is what happened in some of the interviews that get done that have been done with Lorna Simpson about like they ask point blank, well, these melting icebergs must be about climate change, right? It must be your commentary on environmental destruction. And she's very. As far as I can tell in the interviews, I haven't had the pleasure of speaking with Lorna Simpson myself yet, but as far as I can tell, she's very firm in saying no, this work is about violence and racial violence and racism in particular. And she's less interested in the kind of emblematic, unmoored representation of ice or an iceberg, meaning something else decides, explicit racism. And so for me, I was like, yes, absolutely. I'm with a thousand percent behind this vision. And it felt really also encouraging and empowering to be firm in my own writing practice in the ways that Lorna Simpson was in her art practice. So she's definitely like, whether she'll ever know it or not, like a mentor to me in that way. But yeah, I was very happy to be able to include them in the book in color. They're so beautiful.
- [52:24]
C
They are, definitely. I really love that one of the works is also called Unanswerable, which speaks also to some of those. That refusal that you were mentioning.
- [52:39]
B
Yes, absolutely.
- [52:43]
C
I don't want to take too much of your time. I do have, I guess, like two ending questions and you can either like answer both or like, pick one. But I'm, I'm wondering about the, like this relationship of the book in the field of Alaska studies and Indigenous studies more broadly. And one question that I have is around this idea of agency, or maybe we could call it unruliness. I'm not sure, like what term, what might work best. But thinking about how ice escapes some of our designs and has a kind of like and worthiness of its own in relation to broader debates in Indigenous studies. And then my second question, which is not really a question but more I can ask, is if you could read your favorite poem that you've worked with for this book as a way to introduce the readers to some of the literary elements of your argument.
- [53:56]
B
Wow. Really good questions and tough to choose between or answer both. Yeah, I love the. I love what you said about unruliness. And I think that that was what made this book most fun to write, I think, was that I could really riff and follow, just sort of like this spark of the writing as it unfolded. I just got to follow the things as they were coming to me. And that felt very in line with this slipperiness, this unruliness that ICE provides. So to me, it really did feel like a practice of being in conversation with ICE itself. That the book is also meandering and weird and moving and doesn't give clear answers. Maybe isn't like. Isn't helpful in the way that, like, texts are meant to be, but is helpful in other ways of, like, productive questioning, like adding more question marks, adding more potential ways to ask questions. And so that felt very, very much coming from, like, what ice does and what ice is and how ice moves. So I love that. Thank you for that. The unruliness is a really great way to put that. Let's see. A poem. I mean, it's hard because I love everything. I love all of the work that I was able to include, and a lot of it, too, is in close to full form. And so I got a lot of permission from poets and authors to include their work in this way. I could read a little bit from chapter one. Isis Analytic. There's this poem that I really love by Kathy Teknoch Rexford, who everyone also plays Internet Search her and the incredible work she's done as a poet and in addition, all of these other forms of creative work that she makes in the world. But she has this poem called Ecology of Subsistence, and I write about it on page 52 to 53. So she. I'll read the second part of the poem on 53. So it goes. Thickened pack ice cracking. A baleen fishing line pulls taut a silver dorsal fin of a round white fish. A slate blade knife slices along the grain of a caribou hindquarter. Ice cellar lined with willow branches is empty. Salt water suffuses into a flint quarry. Offshore, a thin layer of radiation glazes leathered walrus skin. Long sign shatters of a hummock. A marsh marigold flattens under the three black toes of the sandhill crane. A translucent sheep horn dipper skims a freshwater stream Underneath arctic char lay eggs of mercury kicked before the fall migration. Cloudberries drench in whale oil ferment in a seal skin poke a tundra swan nests inside a rusted steel drum she abandons her newborns hatched a deep crimson. So I love this poem for so many reasons, but I think it's actually nice because it loops back to kind of how we started this conversation with Darcy Bernhardt's piece about the kind of the depth and the volume and the vibrancy of arctic spaces and the non whiteness of it too. And so this poem, I think is really just demonstrative of all of the things that happen and can happen in arctic spaces that might go overlooked or underseen. And yeah, I think she just does a really great job of capturing again, in a way, what I was trying to do in the book. So all of these different muses I'm pointing to here at the end that I tried poorly to imitate, definitely not corly.
- [58:44]
C
I do think that's a beautiful place to land because it does speak to. I think what for me is a kind of breadth of the work because you're like mobilizing so many different archives and types of material. And that's a really also beautiful way to show students and readers how to bring all of those archives together, but also how to deal with complex questions without the need for one neat answer. Thank you for joining us.
- [59:17]
B
Thank you, Christel. Thank you for your incredible questions and talking so generously about my book. I really appreciate it.