pt. 1: Watery Abundance: Building Collective Action Through Food Landscapes

In 2001, Senator Frank Murkowski of Alaska stood on the floor of the Senate, arguing for arctic oil exploration by holding up a blank sheet of white paper and saying that this tabula rasa represents the vast, uninhabited resource-rich and “wild” arctic lands unoccupied by people. Ideas of untamed coldness, the wild, and the sublime were some of the most harmful preconceptions about the northern territories. Along these lines, foreign intervention and design concepts continued to think of Arctic urbanism as a typology requiring defense against the sublime cold, and completely ignored the embedded depth of connections Gwich’in had to the landscape. The importation of foreign structures, vertical food-growing mechanisms, and sunlight-saving machines have always been the status quo pioneered by foreigners attempting to ‘troubleshoot’ arctic food insecurity with “modern” technological advances. The Dempster Highway, which now cuts through the towns of Inuvik and Fort McPherson (Gwich’in First Nations lands) operates under this logic of infrastructural authority. Originally constructed to facilitate oil exploration and mining extraction activities, the shipping of groceries via truck was an afterthought, used as arsenal power to back their construction plans. This approach ignores abundant foodways that already exist on the land, overlooking traditional Gwich’in knowledge of local animal migratory patterns, seasonality, and climate.

The early to mid-20th century was characterized by large-scale planning schemes that sought to impose a shelter mindset onto Arctic lands. Architectural proposals and designs emphasized shielding against the harsh environment, completely ignoring the fact that Gwich’in has lived with climate for millennia. Those who argue that designing can ‘give agency’ to a community have definitely not been there. Two days and they (ourselves included) will certainly freeze, knowing nearly nothing about hunting for beavers and ptarmigans, or operating a snowmobile. The Gwich’in have lived in the Yukon and Northwest regions for millennia past, inventing food trapping devices, architecture insulating against cold weather, and rich histories and myths of cyclical time “filled with souls, beings of earth and sky and water that existed in active relationships with human persons. Some souls were animals or animals who were once people; others were giants, or spirits without bodies or rocks that spoke. All filled the world with action, leaving no neat cleavage between subjects who acted and the objects acted upon.”

Professional authority, particularly in architecture, must be destabilized. To paraphrase Bruno Latour, if we have never been ‘Arctic’, then why should we be compelled to subscribe to Arctic modernism today with its clichéd and wrongheaded polarities of traditional/modern, local/global, nature/culture, human/animal? It should perhaps come as no surprise that the professionalization of design ‘practice’, which was artificially constructed largely from the sphere of European urbanism, has little influence in places of such different latitudes and cultural/environmental contexts. Food sovereignty for the First Nations, as well as for current and future generations in the Northwest Territories of Canada, is directly related to land sovereignty and environmental adaptation. Matthew Jull articulates this point well when he wrote that “First Nations tribes traditionally located their settlements adjacent to water for ready access to boats used for hunting and fishing”, but today, “modernized towns reduced engagement with the natural environment, promoting greater reliance on food offered in the new town shops.” The urbanization of the Arctic might be better understood as a standardization of the arctic, or a process in which conventional forms and urban artifacts from cities were imposed onto northern lands. The process became more pronounced in the 1960s, coinciding with the ‘heady days’ of architecture and urban design experimentation of modernism. For some designers, the north was a ‘frontier’ site, a tabula rasa, ideal for testing and projecting their ideas on megastructures, modular systems, and insulated city buildings.