The Arctic is often imagined as a scene of unprecedented environmental and social transformations. Such conceptions conceal historical legacies that precede climate change and globalization in the far north. This book addresses this issue by treating one hundred years of scientific practice in the North American Arctic as colonial and environmental history. Between 1881 and 1984, science provided a vector by which Canada and the United States each established colonial relationships with Inuit lands in Alaska, Yukon Territory, and the Northwest Territories. These relationships changed over time ... More

The Arctic is often imagined as a scene of unprecedented environmental and social transformations. Such conceptions conceal historical legacies that precede climate change and globalization in the far north. This book addresses this issue by treating one hundred years of scientific practice in the North American Arctic as colonial and environmental history. Between 1881 and 1984, science provided a vector by which Canada and the United States each established colonial relationships with Inuit lands in Alaska, Yukon Territory, and the Northwest Territories. These relationships changed over time, involved diverse disciplines and extractive industries, and induced a variety of ecological transformations. The contours of these relationships are traced through scientists’ published and unpublished works, archival materials from federal governments and Inuit organizations, and twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork in Inuvik, Northwest Territories. Each chapter analyzes a set of historical events using a scientific idea of the Arctic that guided interactions among Euro-Americans, Inuit, and northern nature. The chronological narrative thus weaves together distinct episodes in a transnational Arctic history, providing a richer understanding of interconnected social and environmental change than is often available in the media. The book ends with a charge to scientists, policy-makers, historians, and concerned citizens to loosen fixed notions of the Arctic as a place without a past and shift the focus of climate action from the circumpolar basin to the sites where most fossil fuels are burned.