| dc.description.abstract | Our view of antiquity is not objective. From the eighteenth century on, the same actors and institutions involved in colonizing the Arctic shaped understandings of its deep past. Commercial whalers erected outposts on the Arctic Ocean’s edges; miners stripped tundra; trading companies raised forts. The demands of these projects complicated the Western imperial fiction of an Arctic without a past. Grappling with Arctic terrain, foreigners were confronted by a landscape inhabited not only by people and animals but by time and temporal imaginations that long preceded European colonization. They encountered contemporary Indigenous settlements coexisting with ancestral houses, fossil animals, the ruins of earlier colonial ventures, and ancient routes of exchange. This dissertation, centered on the Bering Sea and its adjacent geographies of eastern Siberia and Arctic North America, tells the story of how imperial upheaval and the rooting of colonial projects in the ground sparked a deliberate historiographic project to write the Arctic’s deep past. At the heart of this project was a conflict of different cultural views of time. Who had the right to narrate history in these northernmost borderlands? In episodes spanning two centuries, from the Russian empire’s claim to the Bering Sea to the rise of modern decolonial movements, this dissertation traces the central role of diverse Native architectures and technologies. Iñupiaq houses built from great whale skeletons, Unangax watercraft hewn from circulating driftwood, and Chukchi ice cellars carved into permafrost were both prisms for temporal explanations and sites driving change. Russian colonial administrators, British geologists, US ethnographers, Orthodox priests, and Soviet engineers co-opted them to the lineal, geological, eschatological, and paleolithic time that scaffolded imperial projects. Simultaneously, these material practices were vital sites for reinvention and identity, where Native nations built futures out of rupture. Illuminating how the ecological and epistemic limits to empire-building spurred new theories of Arctic time, this project shows history-making to be a crucial tool different states adopted to justify and naturalize their possessions of Native lands. At stake was not static historical truth but how politically situated temporalities structured their present-day actions. The ethical dimensions of deep time, imagined from the Bering Strait’s modern lands and seas, empowered empire’s practical work. How the past was conceived in different intellectual traditions informed whether animals and plants were exploitable resources or ancestors giving their bodies to architecture. This project contends that how people understood themselves as being in time was a decisive fulcrum ordering collective beliefs in what was owed to a larger, nonhuman world. Taking time as an analytical lens, this dissertation identifies repeated efforts to cleave the Arctic’s human history from nature’s past. Used to justify a wide range of colonial hierarchies and violence in the long nineteenth century, it underlies a contemporary bias toward seeing the Arctic as a region of deep naturalism. Viewed as a place where an “extreme” climate dominates manifold other historicities, the past so circumscribed continues to shape future possibilities. | |
