Canada Seminar

Against Cryo Nullius: Icy Materialities and Nunatsiavummiut Refusal of the Settler State

Emma Gilheany, William Lyon Mackenzie King Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead Canada Program, and Affiliate, Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP)

Chair: Mindy Jewell Price, William Lyon Mackenzie King Postdoctoral Fellow, Weatherhead Canada Program

Please register here to attend. A light lunch will be available.

In this talk, I explore an analytic I have developed called cryo nullius—where icy scapes are perceived by settlers as spectacular, vast, and un-peopled. This perception allows for the conditions of infrastructural violence to manifest in the circumpolar north. I focus in particular on Cold War-era US Air Force radar bases that spanned the circumpolar north as well as present-day Inuit environmental practices to avoid toxicity that has seeped into the land and water from these ruins of technological excess. I argue that Nunatsiavummiut reject this colonial perception of and violence on their sovereign land through the specific materiality of the sub-Arctic. This work is a highly collaborative multi-modal anthropology that engages evidence including archaeological survey, ethnographic research, Inuit oral histories, and archives produced by Inuit governments, missionaries, and the USAF. This project foregrounds Nunatsiavummiut future-making to critique erasures of Indigenous politics and specific environmental harms in discourses of the climate crisis and Anthropocene.

Emma Gilheany is an environmental anthropologist and archaeologist of the contemporary who examines how imperialism and settler colonialism are refused, resisted and circumvented in the circumpolar north. She is particularly interested in using anthropological epistemologies to intersect with and serve Nunatsiavut sovereignty. At Harvard, she is working on a book manuscript about the relationship between northern materialities and Inuit politics.