Narrating Indigeneity in the Arctic: Scripts of Disaster Resilience Versus the Poetics of Autonomy

Abstract

The capacity to inhabit and cope with living in disastrous environments is what social scientists widely label resilience. It is a capacity that peoples inhabiting the Arctic are especially renown for, and one that is attributed in particular to indigenous peoples living here. Indeed policy makers, concerned as they currently are with attempting to formulate policies designed to help people cope with the coming era of disasters portended by climate change, are attracted to indigenous peoples of the Arctic on account of their perceived abilities to live in a state of permanent disaster. The ability to adapt to disastrous events is seen to be the key component of the life-worlds of the indigenous peoples of the Arctic, such as the Eurasian Sámi people, which inhabits Arctic Russia, Finland, Sweden, and Norway, and the resilience of the Sámi is said to be a living testimony of their strength. Within the Academy, anthropologists are currently being mobilised to provide ethnographic studies of the practices and forms of knowledge that enable the Sámi to do so. As such the Sámi are held to be a model for the rest of humanity, faced as it is with a coming era of climate disasters and global ecological catastrophe. Rather than join in with the chorus of celebration concerning Sámi resilience in the Arctic, this chapter will critique the strategic and colonial rationalities shaping it. Knowledge around resilience, concerned as it might seem to be with promoting the rights and empowerment of the Sámi, is constitutive of processes for the production and disciplining of their indigeneity, rather than being simply a deep ethnographic description. This disciplining of the Sámi, as well as every other target population in the Arctic, by proponents of resilience, forces them into accepting the necessity of a future laden by disastrous events. As such this chapter urges critical thinkers and practitioners concerned with indigenous politics in the Arctic to be more circumspect when confronting claims about the inherent resilience of indigenous peoples living here. It argues for the necessity of examining resilience as an element within a narrative strategy for the scripting of the Arctic and the life-worlds of indigenous peoples inhabiting it, rather than an expression of the agency of indigenous peoples as such.