Stuhl, Andrew. 2016. Unfreezing the Arctic: Science, Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

In the summer of 1987, Gary Adams, an archaeologist, and I were assigned to complete a preliminary cultural resources survey of what was then known as North Yukon National Park (renamed Ivvavik National Park in 1992). With our pilot, we choppered back and forth across the park—guided by previous regional archival and archaeological research—seeking the tangible traces of human activity of both Indigenous and newcomer. I was immediately impressed by the rugged vitality of the place. The deep canyon of the Firth River with its thrashing waters and the run of Arctic char in the upper river, so densely packed it seemed we could walk across the river on their backs, were impressive. In early August, we began to see small groups of caribou escaping biting flies on the Firth Valley aufice. A week later, we flew over the origin valley of the Babbage River (the park’s eastern boundary) and were overwhelmed by tens of thousands of the Porcupine caribou herd filling the whole bowl. The human world was also fascinating. We walked the trails and studied the camps of both hunters and prospectors, followed seismic lines and photographed caribou runs, visited the ancient lookout of Engigstcak, the three-hundred-metre knob where the Firth River leaves the hills, and went for coffee at the long-eyed dome and antennas of the Distant Early Warning Line radar station at Komakuk Beach. Later, we crafted chronologically organized accounts of the human use and presence on the land in the new park, highlighting the features and management issues related to their preservation, investigation, or clean-up. In the last days of our survey, we flew to Herschel Island, just off shore, to visit the archaeology crew working at the Yukon territorial heritage site. Victor Allen, an Inuvialuit Elder then working as a heritage steward, took me for a hike around Pauline Cove, past the buildings of the whaling station, the underground permafrost cold stores, and the cemetery. As we walked, Victor spoke about the importance of working together to meet the objectives of the Inuvialuit Final Agreement. Victor described his efforts to build understanding with the archaeologists and planners visiting Herschel Island. As he continued his first-person narrative of guiding and learning, I gradually realized he was speaking metaphorically; “his experiences” described events covering somewhat more than a century—the Mounted Police stationed on the island in the 1950s, the fur traders of the 1920s and 1930s, and the whalers who overwintered in Pauline Cove in the 1890s. The passage of calendar time, the basis of history as a chronological, causal chain of events, was only incidental to his purpose. Victor’s story organized the past as a series of object lessons on relationships among family members, place, neighbours, and newcomers. And these relationships all focused on the enhancement of Inuvialuit identity and interests. The Western ordering of progressive material culture and the incremental application of science to bring order to place had no presence in Victor’s history of the region. The importance of the ongoing dynamic work of negotiating, practicing, and maintaining of positive relations between all elements—some old, some new, but all embraced—in the Inuvialuit lands created a different understanding of this place. Andrew Stuhl’s Unfreezing the Arctic neatly brings together these different ways of understanding of place, chronology, and relationships. In an introductory “call to arms” (13) and five descriptive chapters, he charts the dynamic character of the relationships between Inuvialuit and the “scientists” that exploited, tested, and analyzed their lands in pursuit of profit, national sovereignty, “civilization,” defence, and environmental protection. His perceptive analysis of western Arctic “knowledge production” as a “human rights issue” …