What was, is, and might be: Cartography on Arctic Shores

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At the mouth of one of Canada's largest watersheds, past the Arctic Circle, another late summer storm churns swelling waves from murky waters. Relentlessly, the shoreline is battered and hundreds of meters of permafrost slump into a warming sea. The climate crisis is being felt deeply in the MacKenzie Delta and intense attention - scientific, political, and otherwise - can be witnessed in the communities there. The pingos and tundra crawl with all manner of scientists and researchers, busily measuring, mapping, and documenting a landscape that is quite literally washing away. How do scientists armed with seismometers and drones, indigenous elders, and traditional knowledge holders, (re)construct the world both descriptively and culturally, both past and future? Cartography is necessarily representative, and the process of making a map is laden with the complications that entails. Each mapmaker carries with them, intentionally or not, their biases and assumptions. These then become the representations used in a myriad of ways, shaping policy, opinions, and conceptions of a place many who consume the map will never visit. This project, in the aim of better conceptualizing the power of cartography and its relation to place, will have as its mission the investigation of each of these layers of meaning. Working with contacts developed during my Master's research in the Northwest Territories, this project will be conducted through the exploration of the (re)mapping of this region of the Arctic and the consequences of such intensely localized cartographic inquiry. To do so, I will connect with a long term permafrost mapping project in the area surrounding Tuktoyaktuk. Building off these contacts, I will integrate myself with different experts mapping and measuring the region, as well as the locals who often assist them and map the land in their own ways. The intention is to begin this project with those who take the creation of cartographic objects the most scientifically, and to move outwards towards those who engage in more mundane processes of map-making. Through the dual lenses of participant observation and documentary photography, I will "study-up" to reverse the assumed value of scientifically sanctioned accounts (Nader, 1972). Without valuing one cartographic epistemology over another, exploring how multiple representations of a specific place are created will provide valuable insight into the reductive and creative elements of maps as well as the unique consequences of different epistemologies.