We have mounting evidence that the environment is in crisis\u200a\u2014\u200aobvious examples being species extinction threatening our Earth\u2019s biodiversity, and the dire consequences of anthropogenic global warming.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5C, International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 2018; IPBES Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, Intergovernmental Science-Policy on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 2019; Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene<\/em> (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016).<\/span> These concerns have not gone unnoticed in the art world, where exhibitions dedicated to the \u201canthropocene\u201d proliferate amongst international and sometimes wasteful biennales.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Hettie Judah, \u201cThere\u2019s a Flood of Climate Change-Related Art at the Venice Biennale. Can It Make a Difference\u200a\u2014\u200aOr Is It Adding to the Problem?\u201d Artnet News<\/em>, May 6, 2019, https:\/\/news.artnet.com\/art-world\/climate-change-venice-biennale-1532290.<\/span> Beyond the aesthetic spectacle of environmental destruction, or the intellectual nihilism of pondering our correlated demise, is a disdain for the environment. How did we humans come to perceive ourselves as so removed from nature that we exploit it to the point of extinction, and what does work dedicated to recovering these bonds look like? Of course the Global North\u2019s view of this relationship changed as a result of settler colonialism, resource extraction, industrialization, and petro-capitalism. These contemporary issues have reached a breaking point in the Arctic Circle, where Indigenous knowledge, misunderstanding, Eurocentric perceptions, and the consequences of our eco-denial are hardest felt. The climate crisis isn\u2019t the only reason we are becoming aware of the importance of an \u201cenvironmental art history.\u201d Inuit perspectives are making their debut at the 2019 Venice Biennale\u2019s Canada Pavilion, with a project by Isuma, an artist collective that continues the difficult work of representing their land and ways of life to outsiders on their own terms.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - asinnajaq, \u201cIsuma Is a Cumulative Effort,\u201d Canadian Art<\/em>, April 22, 2019, https:\/\/canadianart.ca\/features\/isuma-is-a-cumulative-effort\/.<\/span><\/pre>\n\n\n\n

For many of us \u201csoutherners\u201d or Qallunaat, we imagine the Arctic lands as a barren snowscape. American artist Subhankar Banerjee\u2019s Land-As-Home: Arctic<\/em> series (2000\u2013ongoing) has worked to challenge this dominant discourse, representing the region as a vibrant ecosystem rather than a \u201cflat, white nothingness.\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Thomas J. Demos, Decolonzing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology<\/em> (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2016), 95.<\/span> At the historic roots of this common perception is the visual culture associated with Arctic exploration, which represented the land as an icy obstacle, devoid of its diverse flora. Navigators deliberately erased iconic tundra plants\u200a\u2014\u200aLabrador tea, cottongrass, and wildflowers\u200a\u2014\u200ato bolster their own stories of conquest and to excuse historic examples of resource extraction such as whaling, fishing, and fur trapping. But even with this cultural construction of a vast and seemingly empty land, which Robert G. David equates to an Arctic \u201cOrientalism,\u201d5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Robert G. David, The Arctic in the British Imagination<\/em>, 1818\u20131914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 28\u201329.<\/span> explorers constantly relied on Indigenous technologies for their survival. In 1853, Sir John Richardson advised crews departing to search for Sir John Franklin that their European leather boots would prove useless in the Arctic. Instead, he recommended trading for sealskin kamik boots and learning how to use other technologies such as Inuit snow goggles.6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - MG12-ADM7 microfilm B-5333\/801, \u201cArctic Exploration: Correspondence, Reports, etc.\u201d Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, Ontario.<\/span> Understanding how non-Indigenous people imagined the Arctic throughout history helps us comprehend perceptions of it today, which is crucial since climate change renders the polar region increasingly important in Qallunaat-settler geopolitics. Just as explorers required Inuit knowledge in the past, understanding and respecting Indigenous knowledges today could play an important part in mitigating the climate crisis and creating a future free of fossil fuels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Support for Indigenous community organizing that focuses on land and water protection has steadily grown along with the international attention given to Indigenous artists and circum\u00adpolar ways of life. Indigenous peoples in the Arctic have been\u200a\u2014\u200aand remain\u200a\u2014\u200acultural as well as territorial stewards of their lands since time immemorial. Outi Pieski is one such example. Her most recent work LAVDNEGOAHTI II | Turf Hut II<\/em> (2017), extends her series of landscape paintings framed with Sami handicraft elements such as textiles and fringes, to animate a deep relationship with the land. In response to this body of work, art critic Jan-Erik Lundstr\u00f6m suggests, \u201cLandscape is not a noun, an object or a thing, but always a verb, an activity, an event. The landscapes of Outi Pieski are acted, experienced, laboured\u2026 Inhabited, but not domesticated; lived, but not owned; dwelled in but not occupied.\u201d7<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 7 <\/a> - Jan-Erik Lundstr\u00f6m, \u201cInhabited Lands,\u201d text written in 2014 and published on Outi Pieski\u2019s website, www.outipieski.com\/about\/texts\/.<\/span> Pieski\u2019s pieces encompass and consume viewers, challenging their preconceived ideas for a glimpse into a Sami worldview and way of being with the land.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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