Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
"The Earth is faster now"
Arctic Intelligence: Q&A with Dr. Igor Krupnick(Krupnick curates the Arctic Studies Center at the Smithsonian.)
Q. You often refer to “the earth is faster now” and “a friend acting strangely”. Can you please elaborate?
A. Both are translations of the sayings of Arctic native people. ‘The earth is faster now’ was said by that very woman (pointing to the photograph), Mabel Toolie, an Arctic native who lived to be 98 or 99. She said in her early years, the weather, the winds and the ice were SLOW. You could get the weather for a week or more. Today, it is only a few days and everything changes as if the world was faster. It was recorded by one of the local people, and I asked if we could use it for the title of a book. The Earth is Faster Now: Indigenous Observations of Arctic Environmental Change is a collection of papers that was originally written in 2002. It was reprinted in 2010 because it was actually very popular and became very widely known, and I am very pleased to say that it is the most cited of all my publications so far. As for ‘a friend acting strangely’…for indigenous people, the Arctic is their friend. It is behaving unpredictably, it is behaving strangely, it’s not like it used to be. But, more often than not, people believe that they know their friend and that their friend won’t let them down.
Q. What were the indicators of climate change for the Natives?
A. Well, they are not going there (places on the ice) anymore. The ice is now so thin that “we are not going there any more” which means that they used to go and then there were a few years they found it too risky and in a few years, they decided not to go anymore. So, we are talking at least in terms of several seasons for them to change their behavior and places where they hunt. The example that I personally heard many, many times from people in St. Lawrence is something that everybody says, “Kulusiit stopped coming”. Floating chunks of ice, they stopped coming and that was very strange because if it normally happens and then suddenly it doesn’t happen…that was a signal. The major fall type of ice that “used to come like a wall to us is not coming any more”. That was the second signal. “It is not the Arctic ice that is coming”. “It is not the real ice”. “It is not the TRUE ice”. What they are seeing is not the main multi-year hearty pack ice but broken young ice.
Q. I was surprised to learn that there are at least 110 terminologies for sea ice. Why?
A. And there are more and there were even many more. What is important besides the large number of terms that have been documented is to document the specific types of local ice that people know…the most abstract types of ice. And it is not only in terms of age, thickness or formation but where it comes from. People can distinguish ice by its origin and they can tell you that this ice came from that place or from another place. I am now writing yet another book that will be published later this year. It is called Our Ice, Snow and Winds and it will be a collection of materials, sea ice dictionaries, native observations, and interpretations of Arctic people as to what is happening to them and their environment.
...
Q. Is there generational knowledge that is not being passed on?
A. Icescape is a concept that I introduced to talk about sea ice in the context of indigenous people. Icescape, very much like landscape. Icescape includes not only the material and physical elements of sea ice; it also includes the intellectual, spiritual, and historical. A hunter must come back and tell his peers, his elders, his children where he has been, what he has seen, how was the ice. It has to be given in specific words that everybody understands, telling his story in full. How did you walk, what kind of ice did you see, how you passed this and that, and if you are a spiritual person, you may talk about your thoughts, your dreams, about the stories that you heard, about experiences, other people you recalled at that place or another place. The journey to the ice may be a long and beautiful narrative whether you kill your seal or not. If a hunter doesn’t have his words, his placement, he cannot explain where he has been in that mass of ice. He is not a messenger anymore. In a camp of 50 people, morning started at five a.m. when kids were sent outdoors to check the weather. I have heard this story from men and women. Boys, age five, trembling in pants and frozen and the father would say, just go out and tell me – which way is the wind blowing, where are the stars? It was training. That’s how they used to start for a boy of five. Go out almost naked and check the weather. Kicked out at age five, they would have to go around the house three times and look – what is up north, where is the wind from – there was an element of harshness, deliberate harshness so that kids became trained. That’s how the vocabulary starts coming, that’s where you get the fine-tuning and calibration for what you look for. So a lot of traditional pedagogy was there. It’s not like that any more.
A. Both are translations of the sayings of Arctic native people. ‘The earth is faster now’ was said by that very woman (pointing to the photograph), Mabel Toolie, an Arctic native who lived to be 98 or 99. She said in her early years, the weather, the winds and the ice were SLOW. You could get the weather for a week or more. Today, it is only a few days and everything changes as if the world was faster. It was recorded by one of the local people, and I asked if we could use it for the title of a book. The Earth is Faster Now: Indigenous Observations of Arctic Environmental Change is a collection of papers that was originally written in 2002. It was reprinted in 2010 because it was actually very popular and became very widely known, and I am very pleased to say that it is the most cited of all my publications so far. As for ‘a friend acting strangely’…for indigenous people, the Arctic is their friend. It is behaving unpredictably, it is behaving strangely, it’s not like it used to be. But, more often than not, people believe that they know their friend and that their friend won’t let them down.
Q. What were the indicators of climate change for the Natives?
A. Well, they are not going there (places on the ice) anymore. The ice is now so thin that “we are not going there any more” which means that they used to go and then there were a few years they found it too risky and in a few years, they decided not to go anymore. So, we are talking at least in terms of several seasons for them to change their behavior and places where they hunt. The example that I personally heard many, many times from people in St. Lawrence is something that everybody says, “Kulusiit stopped coming”. Floating chunks of ice, they stopped coming and that was very strange because if it normally happens and then suddenly it doesn’t happen…that was a signal. The major fall type of ice that “used to come like a wall to us is not coming any more”. That was the second signal. “It is not the Arctic ice that is coming”. “It is not the real ice”. “It is not the TRUE ice”. What they are seeing is not the main multi-year hearty pack ice but broken young ice.
Q. I was surprised to learn that there are at least 110 terminologies for sea ice. Why?
A. And there are more and there were even many more. What is important besides the large number of terms that have been documented is to document the specific types of local ice that people know…the most abstract types of ice. And it is not only in terms of age, thickness or formation but where it comes from. People can distinguish ice by its origin and they can tell you that this ice came from that place or from another place. I am now writing yet another book that will be published later this year. It is called Our Ice, Snow and Winds and it will be a collection of materials, sea ice dictionaries, native observations, and interpretations of Arctic people as to what is happening to them and their environment.
...
Q. Is there generational knowledge that is not being passed on?
A. Icescape is a concept that I introduced to talk about sea ice in the context of indigenous people. Icescape, very much like landscape. Icescape includes not only the material and physical elements of sea ice; it also includes the intellectual, spiritual, and historical. A hunter must come back and tell his peers, his elders, his children where he has been, what he has seen, how was the ice. It has to be given in specific words that everybody understands, telling his story in full. How did you walk, what kind of ice did you see, how you passed this and that, and if you are a spiritual person, you may talk about your thoughts, your dreams, about the stories that you heard, about experiences, other people you recalled at that place or another place. The journey to the ice may be a long and beautiful narrative whether you kill your seal or not. If a hunter doesn’t have his words, his placement, he cannot explain where he has been in that mass of ice. He is not a messenger anymore. In a camp of 50 people, morning started at five a.m. when kids were sent outdoors to check the weather. I have heard this story from men and women. Boys, age five, trembling in pants and frozen and the father would say, just go out and tell me – which way is the wind blowing, where are the stars? It was training. That’s how they used to start for a boy of five. Go out almost naked and check the weather. Kicked out at age five, they would have to go around the house three times and look – what is up north, where is the wind from – there was an element of harshness, deliberate harshness so that kids became trained. That’s how the vocabulary starts coming, that’s where you get the fine-tuning and calibration for what you look for. So a lot of traditional pedagogy was there. It’s not like that any more.
This whole interview is fascinating.
1 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
