{"id":556,"date":"2020-09-22T04:35:49","date_gmt":"2020-09-22T04:35:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/?p=556"},"modified":"2022-04-13T20:51:11","modified_gmt":"2022-04-13T20:51:11","slug":"revisiting-arctic-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/arctic-relations\/revisiting-arctic-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Revisiting Arctic History"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Christian Drury<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Britain, you are never far from the legacy of empire. The recent protests as part of the wider Black Lives Matter movement have highlighted systemic inequalities in British society and the role of the British empire and slavery in forming them. This includes the prevalence of monuments to empire and imperialists in public space, with protestors symbolically dumping a statue<\/a> of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol Harbour.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile, educational institutions have continued work to decolonise curricula, with movements such as Rhodes Must Fall<\/a> connecting representations of imperialists to contemporary inequalities on campus. However, nostalgia and pride are often invoked in broader public discussions of empire in Britain. Empire remains embedded in many political debates, and discussions of the history itself are frequently reductive, framed around a balance sheet<\/a> of costs and benefits. Movements to decolonise institutions are vital, but shifting broader understandings of empire in popular discourse and culture still have a long way to go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This may not seem immediately applicable to the Arctic, particularly when considering the region from Britain and in relation to British history. The traditional narratives of polar exploration are ones of uncomplicated heroes whose success \u2013 or, often, failure \u2013 navigating extreme conditions reveals positive national traits. These explorers, almost exclusively white men, are presented as struggling against the sublime and hostile landscape of the Arctic, rather than acting as a vanguard for colonisation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, it is misleading to consider British exploration in the Arctic as removed from empire. British travel in the Arctic was deeply enmeshed with imperial institutions and motivations. The search for a Northwest Passage was linked to imperial trading; British success, or even just survival, in Arctic exploration was proof of national and imperial superiority. Seeing the Arctic as a \u201cblank space\u201d was itself rooted in colonial ways of thinking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contact with Indigenous Arctic people was often an unwanted complication for explorers, challenging the notion that the British were uniquely able to survive in Arctic conditions. However, contact was frequent and sometimes sought by Europeans for the purposes of research. Attempts to \u201cknow\u201d the Arctic desired familiarity with environments but also Arctic people. Ethnographic attempts to understand Indigenous communities were often rooted in race science and notions of \u201cbackwardness\u201d, with Inuit described as living as \u201cin a stone age\u201d by Clements Markham, secretary of the Royal Geographical Society. As such, the British explorers who studied them were usually more interested in imagined European pasts than learning about life in the Arctic. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In recent years, historians have looked to push back against these narratives of Arctic exploration, both by critiquing the idea of the Arctic as a \u201cblank space\u201d and by emphasising Indigenous presences and voices. These new narratives are still limited, often due to the scarcity of source materials, but critical readings of expedition accounts, as well as alternative sources, are an important step toward decolonising how we tell histories of the Arctic. By reading against the grain of explorers\u2019 texts and archives, we can reveal some of the \u201chidden histories<\/a>\u201d that have traditionally been overlooked. This can mean changing focus<\/a> from the explorer to the wider contact zone, as well as considering Indigenous accounts of Arctic history. Historians are increasingly prioritising accounts like that of Suersaq<\/a>, an Inuk who travelled with several British and American expeditions in the late nineteenth century. More broadly, projects like the Arctic Cultures research group<\/a> at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge are challenging the notion of the Arctic as a region defined by its environment, and instead prioritising the histories and cultures of the region. Similarly, interdisciplinary research projects, like the DurhamARCTIC project<\/a>, which I am part of at Durham University, are attempting to produce more rounded research on Arctic topics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Imperialism has of course been challenged outside the academy, especially by those facing settler colonialism. Whilst states have used the journeys of explorers to underpin sovereignty claims, as Canada has with the Franklin expedition<\/a>, Eurocentric narratives of Arctic history are increasingly seen as inadequate. The symbolic power of history is also visible beyond academic debates. The same wave of protests that have toppled and challenged statues of Colston and Rhodes have also been seen in the Arctic, with statues of the missionary Hans Egede graffitied in Nuuk and Copenhagen<\/a>, and debate over whether the statue in Nuuk should remain in place at all. <\/p>\n\n\n\n