Doctoral Dissertation Research: "The sea is our garden": Inupiaq subsistence, indigenous knowledge, and the 'politics of nature' in the context of Arctic offshore development

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Recent trends suggest that a new era of industrialization is dawning in the Alaskan Arctic. These processes will likely require the Iñupiat of the North Slope to increasingly balance their concerns for their traditional practices and subsistence lifestyles against both the promises as well as the challenges of economic growth and development. Yet the decision-making structures surrounding projects like the Arctic offshore drilling program are now largely dominated by the western values and perspectives held by outside authorities and business interests. This research will explore how the Indigenous Knowledge (IK) of the Iñupiat can and should be used to ensure that regional management outcomes are culturally sensitive to the realities of Alaskan Native existence today.Contemporary Native scholars insist that the IK of any tribal peoples cannot be correctly understood without an equal willingness by westerners to explore the unique worldviews and lifeways that inform Native knowledge systems. Geographic interest in the notion of nature as a social construct also suggests that culturally constituted notions of nature may provide the necessary interpretative framework that allows for a much more comprehensive understanding of indigenous knowledge. The theoretical impetus for these efforts is found in the environmental justice concept of cultural misrecognition, which proposes that a refusal to explore the complexities of indigenous knowledge systems is a profound act of dismissal that often perpetuates a cycle of social and environmental inequity. This research will use a variety of qualitative research methods to investigate how coastal Iñupiat communities in the Alaskan Arctic think about and relate to nature, in order to better understand how these views have shaped their traditional knowledge and beliefs. This research also seeks to identify what aspects of their worldviews and IK that Iñupiat community members themselves consider to be important for non-Natives to know about and understand. In addition, this project engages with the subsistence concerns and IK of the Iñupiat within the context of the complex political, economic, and cultural issues that many Native communities throughout Alaska now face. The findings of this research will ideally inform the debate currently shaping the trajectory of development in the Arctic by highlighting both the practical challenges as well as the epistemic promise that an exploration of Native understandings of nature offers to contemporary resource management practices. This research further examines how such knowledge held by the Iñupiat could greatly enhance the offshore drilling decision-making process, which is at present driven mainly by technological considerations. The ultimate goal is to establish a template for development in the Far North that can promote both regional economic growth as well as the subsistence lifestyles of Alaskan Natives. In this way, it may become possible to manage a changing Arctic in a socially equitable and environmentally just manner.