C.2.1 A Queer Qulleq: Conversion and the Intimacies of Colonial Inuit Design

• Bart Pushaw, University of Copenhagen

This paper speculates on the meanings embodied within an unusual qulleq, a stone oil lamp, created around 1762 in Kalaallit Nunaat. For centuries across the Circumpolar North, qullit were the hearth of Inuit homes. Providing light in the darkness and warmth in the cold, qullit symbolized community, familial bonds, and resilience. This particular qulleq, however, deviates from every tenet of Inuit customary design: the basin is deep rather than shallow, heart-shaped instead of ovular, and bears the rare addition of a handle. This talk posits that these design elements reflect the transformation of Inuit, particularly Kalaallit, culture under the global missionary mandates of Moravian conversion in the eighteenth century.

Active in the Arctic since the 1730s, Moravians promulgated a passionate flesh-and-wounds theology available to converts with a “warm” heart. This theology created what Derrick Miller has called the “queer familiarities” of kinship between Moravian neophytes in European contexts. As an object that invited intimacy, the heart-shaped qulleq manifests the extension of these queer familiarities onto colonial Inuit subjects. The lamp’s heart-shaped iconography recalls Inuit testimony about conversion that drew parallels of the similar function of the qulleq and Christ’s love to “enkindle others.” Moreover, the formal language of uummannaq, literally “heart-shaped,” also resonates with Kalaallit cosmologies of a particular mountain range and the nourishing potential of the stony landscape. Taken together, the multiplicity of meanings that coalesce in the heart-shaped qulleq invite a reconsideration of what new relations the qulleq enkindled under conditions of conversion and coloniality.

keywords: Inuit, Arctic, eighteenth century, colonialism, conversion

C.2.2 Victim or Foe: The Changing Context of the Polar Bear in Edwin Landseer’s Man Proposes, God Disposes (1864)

Margaryta Golovchenko, University of Oregon

In this paper, I focus on Edwin Henry Landseer’s 1864 painting Man Proposes, God Disposes, a work that I considered to be a reference to Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition of 1845 to locate the Northwest Passage. Focusing on the two polar bears, the sole living beings in the painting, I propose that Landseer’s work is an example of how a historical work of art acquires new significance as it moves forward in time. In this case, I argue that Man Proposes, God Disposes acquires a new urgency in light of the increasing threat of the present-day climate crisis. With this present-day context in mind, I argue that Landseer’s painting can longer be read simply as a manifestation of an unexplored environment that is hostile to European colonizers because to do so is to continue privileging such a reading. Instead, this paper combines the nineteenth century fascination with the Arctic, looking at accounts by Franklin, Isaac Hayes, Leopold McClintock, Lous Legrand Noble, and John Richardson, with contemporary Black and Indigenous theory from scholars like Stefanie K. Dunning, Billie Ray Belcourt, and Zoe Todd. By using this cross-temporal approach, I propose that the two polar bears are no longer simply agents of a hostile arctic climate. Rather, they can be read as beings fighting for their life in a world that has become hostile towards them.

keywords: ecocriticism, postcolonial, polar bears, Arctic exploration

C.2.3 Intervals of resonance: The DEW Line Project and glacial listening

Carmen Victor, York University

In 1977, when McLuhan claimed “a border is not a connection, but an interval of resonance,”he was describing aspects of the north in Canada as a utopian “anti-environment” that makes a hegemonic power (such as the US) intelligible to the rest of the world. Today, while we may question McLuhan’s utopian visioning, the idea that gaps within these intervals of resonance in subjective borders—still have some purchase. Exploring the aural sense (over the visual) is a form of reading circumpolar works against the grain, as the North is regularly depicted by settlers as a wide open, empty space requiring colonization and domination. Conceptual artists Charles Stankievech (Canada) & Katie Paterson (UK) have engaged in Arctic listening projects that—rather than surveying Arctic landscapes that generate a sense of awe or sublimity—emphasize listening as opposed to seeing, and transmitting as opposed to claiming. Stankievech’s The DEW Line Project Fieldwork (2009) consists of re-creations of Fullerian geodesic domes as remote listening stations that record the aural movements of underground aquifers and shifting ice floes via submerged microphones under the ice. The sounds were then transmitted to a radio station in Dawson City Yukon and simultaneously broadcast over the internet—in, what I am suggesting as, an aural gesture of remediation. Paterson embedded a microphone beneath an Icelandic glacier, in Vatnajökull (the sound of) (2007-8) and the sounds of moving ice and melting glaciers could be heard from anywhere in the world when audiences called in on a dedicated telephone line in a work that emphasizes hearing and listening as opposed to seeing (and thus viewing and owning). This paper discusses Stankievech’s The DEW Line Project and Paterson’s Vatnajökull vis-à-vis intersecting considerations of the futility of certain communication technologies and military spending, privileging listening over claiming, and non-linear time.

keywords: conceptual art, visual culture, audio works, the Arctic, glaciers, communication technologies, remediation

C.2.4 Art and Activism: Sámi Responses to Contemporary Environmental Violence

Haylee Glasel, Florida State University

Indigenous peoples all over the world are among the most highly impacted by climate change and environmental violence from nation states seeking resources via extractive processes. That is especially prevalent in the Arctic and Nordic countries where Sámi reindeer husbandry and salmon fishing are in immediate danger of disappearing in the coming decades because of several factors including colonial policies. Artists such as those in the group Mázejoavku were at the forefront of this fight since their formation in the 1970s and through the Alta Dam conflict in the 1980s. This legacy has continued into the present day, but no in-depth study has been done on art and environmental activism in Sápmi.

Using an interdisciplinary approach, this project examines instances of contemporary reactions and responses to colonial environmental violence impacting all parts of Sápmi through different mediums. This includes but is not limited to Niillas Holmberg, Jenni Laiti and Outi Pieski’s 2017–2018 installation Rájácummá—Kiss from the Border, Elle Márjá Eira’s 2019 Sámiin Leat Rievttit, Dáiddadállu’s 2020 EadnámetMaid, and Pauliina Feodoroff’s 2022 Matriarchy. These works of art challenge and bring awareness of the impacts of environmental violence and climate change to local and global audiences. I argue here for the use of Indigenous methodologies including relationality and traditional ecological knowledge as ways of situating Sámi concerns and world views about the land at the center of their fight against colonial violence to people and the environment. Doing this moves away from settler and colonial ways of thinking about the world and positions the Sámi worldview as the cornerstone for thinking about environmental violence in Sápmi and offers possible solutions to combat the changes.

keywords: climate change, activism, reindeer, land