Continuing our discussions...

In an effort to continue the conversations begun in Whitehorse we've come up with four discussion questions that build upon themes and topics raised during our workshop. You are all welcome to comment on these questions, or raise your own as you see fit.
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Nature and the North

Does non-human nature have a more active social life in the North? Did it historically?

Interdisciplinarity and Northern Research

With representatives from history, geography, social work, science studies, environmental studies, and anthropology, as well as from northern communities, we were a rather interdisciplinary group. Does studying the North demand interdisciplinarity? What did we gain from these conversations, and what might a single disciplinary workshop have yielded?

The State and Storytelling

In her ethnographic work on the Yukon, Julie Cruikshank observed that “insistent local story-telling subverts administrative ambition” (1998: xiii). In the course of our workshop we had multiple opportunities to consider the role of the state in the North’s past and present (when it failed to meet the public health needs at Arviat, sought to assert “soft sovereignty” through the Arctic Waters Pollution Act, or arbitrarily drew bounding lines in the Tlicho Land Claim Settlement). While local stories may subvert state objectives, do the stories that non-locals tell (such as the tales of harsh environments described by Karen Routledge, or the accounts of the Bloody Falls massacre) primarily serve to reinforce “administrative ambition”?

Considering Place

Tina Loo commented in our discussions that “environmental history is the history of social relationships as mediated by place.” In the context of this workshop the place that was doing the mediating was most broadly the North, but at various points, through our field trips, our evening at the fish camp, or Loo’s public talk in Whitehorse we were also very much situated in the specific place that is the southern Yukon. Did it matter that we met in the Yukon? Can you relate the place(s) in which we gathered to our papers and discussions?