Channeling Arctic Indigenous Peoples’ Knowledge Into an Arctic Region Security Architecture

by Olin Strader and Alison Weisburger Recently one of my colleagues aptly suggested that an Arctic Coast Guard Forum is needed to enhance Arctic security and cooperation. Her comment was made in response to my article calling for an Arctic Council Security Agreement. I couldn’t agree with her more. But I would also suggest that both of these concepts must leverage Arctic indigenous peoples’, indigenous knowledge. This article will focus on channeling indigenous knowledge and political organization into a comprehensive security architecture.

In Tasmaniaʼs capital city Hobart, a plaque in the town square memorializes Sir John Franklin in a poem written by Lord Alfred Tennyson. The poem reads:

Not here! The white north hath thy bones and thou 
Heroic sailor soul 
Art passing on thine happier voyage now 
Toward no earthly pole

What caused the 1846 Franklin expedition to fail and the 1903-1906 Amundsen expedition to succeed? While it is true Amundsen utilized a unique ship design, the primary answer was a reliance on indigenous knowledge. Sir John Franklin’s 1846 Arctic expedition ended in disaster.[1] Arctic archeologists and historians continue to scour the Arctic for clues to the disappearance of Sir John Franklin’s expedition. However, Roald Amundsen is lauded as the man who conquered the North.[2] Both men had extensive Arctic experience. Franklin had taken part in three previous Arctic expeditions, while Amundsen had wintered over in Antarctica prior to successfully navigating the Northwest Passage. Today, those who live below the Arctic Circle are generally ill-equipped to operate and survive in the Arctic without leveraging expertise of Arctic indigenous peoples.

Canada has a model for incorporating Arctic indigenous peoples’ knowledge into their Arctic operations. The Canadian Rangers are a locally and regionally based, Arctic indigenous peoples’ security force who “provide patrols and detachments for employment on national-security and public-safety missions in those sparsely settled northern, coastal and isolated areas of Canada which can not conveniently or economically be covered by other elements or components of the Canadian Forces.”[3] The importance of the Canadian Rangers capability is their potential to access areas not conveniently or economically covered by southern-based Canadian Forces. It is the Canadian Rangers ability to employ traditional and modern means in one of the planets harshest environments to provide safety and security in Canada’s North that makes them invaluable.

The authors of this article believe the Canadian Rangers represent a model that should be replicated around the Arctic basin; a model that could serve to strengthen political and ancestral bonds of nations such as the Inuit, Aleuts, Yupiks, the Samii, Laplanders, the Kalaallit and others around the region, while providing forward security for a rapidly changing Arctic. By encouraging Arctic indigenous peoples to take the lead in securing their traditional lands as partners with their Arctic state security services, they can have a stake in how security is provided. Alternately, as the Arctic changes, Arctic indigenous peoples can assist southerners in making sense of changes in the environment and the accompanying hazards. All around the Arctic Circle indigenous peoples, employing indigenous knowledge could provide forward security and safety from Russia, to the United States, Canada to Greenland, Norway to Sweden and Finland and back to Russia.

The means by which Arctic indigenous peoples’ voices are heard today in international affairs is through political organization. Indigenous peoples of the Arctic have self-organized politically as the Permanent Participants to the Arctic Council, the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC), the Samii Council, the Russian Association of Indigenous Peoples of the North (RAIPON) and other circumpolar organizations. Today, these same politically-empowered, Arctic indigenous people account for one-eighth of the Arctic’s population of approximately 4 million, a sizable population by any calculation.[5]

The Arctic indigenous peoples of the region have over generations acquired specific traditional knowledge that allows them, despite the harsh climate of the Arctic, to call the region home. This same knowledge, knowledge that helped Amundsen and his crew survive the Arctic’s harsh winters and helps the Canadian Forces today, could be useful to Arctic states’ Coast Guards and defense establishments. As an Alaska-based Coast Guard colleague once suggested to this author, the North Slope Inupaiq could be organized into a Coast Guard auxiliary in support of the Coast Guard’s maritime security and safety missions. A North Slope Coast Guard Auxiliary could then link in with the Canadian Rangers, and the Rangers could link in with the Kalaallit of Greenland. The North Slope Coast Guard Auxiliary could theoretically link in with their Serbian Yupik and Aleut relatives, were they to be employed by the Federal Security Bureau’s, Border Guards. The whole Arctic could, in theory, be ringed by Arctic indigenous peoples providing forward security and safety in the Arctic.

The essential point of all this is leveraging the power of the personal, familial and political ties of Arctic indigenous peoples. Arctic indigenous peoples could represent a critical component of Arctic security because of their personal and political investment in its future. The key component to this arrangement is the benefit it represents to Arctic indigenous communities, providing a meaningful way for them to strengthen their own communities and protect the natural habitat. It provides more positive leadership and role modeling opportunities at home for the next generation of indigenous leaders.

The presence of an indigenous circumpolar security force would foster a much greater sense of cooperation in the Arctic than the ever-present sense that there is the potential for conflict (whether realistic or not) that seems to plague nation-state cooperation in the region. It is worth bearing out that Arctic indigenous peoples are not subject to many of the political pressures, complex patterns of interaction, complicated multi-faceted relationships faced by Arctic states. Organizationally, it is much easier for the ICC and RAIPON to cooperate than it is for, say, Arctic states.

It is a logical next step for the Arctic Council to serve as a vehicle to foster indigenous knowledge and address security challenges. Search and rescue could be something an indigenous peoples' force could excel at, given the right parameters and resources. It would seem logical to combine Arctic Council priorities of indigenous peoples’ participation and search & rescue into one very effective program. Additionally, Arctic indigenous peoples could also play a key role in spill response. Indigenous communities along the coast of Alaska are reported to be regularly trained and equipped by the US Coast Guard to employ spill response capabilities. Would it not be advisable to equip all Arctic indigenous communities with this type of capability?

In conclusion, Arctic indigenous peoples are best suited to serve as forward security and safety in the Arctic. When connected by their political and ancestral ties they represent a powerfully connected community of interest. Because of these powerful bonds, Arctic Council member states should strongly consider ways to leverage Arctic indigenous peoples’ indigenous knowledge and channel it into a comprehensive Arctic security and safety architecture.

Sources:

[1] Wikipedia, “John Franklin”, accessed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Franklin

[2] Wikipedia, “Roald Amundsen”, accessed at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Amundsen

[3] Canadian National Defence and the Canadian Forces, “Canadian Rangers”, accessed at: http://www.army.forces.gc.ca/land-terre/cr-rc/index-eng.asp

[4] Norwegian Polar Institute, “Permanent Representatives of the Arctic Council Map”, accessed at: http://www.polarconservation.org/education/arctic-peoples/arctic-council/permanent-representatives-of-the- arctic-council-map/image_view_fullscreen

[5] The Arctic Council, “Permanent Representatives”, access at: http://www.arctic-council.org/index.php/en/ about-us/permanentparticipants

[6] National Defence, “Canadian Rangers Photos”, accessed at: http://www.army.forces.gc.ca/land-terre/ images/reserve/rangers/gallery/intigloo_b.jpg

The Shadow of Historic Polar Exploration on Contemporary Arctic Affairs

by Alison Weisburger As December 14th marked the hundredth anniversary of Roald Amundsen’s achievement as the first man to reach the South Pole, there have been many articles in various popular news sources  for example in The New York Times and in The Independent, about this accomplishment in the context of the “heroic age” of polar exploration. This period, ranging from around the middle of the 19th century until the early 1920s, encompasses not only the first successful expeditions to both the South and North Poles, but also a litany of famous explorers alongside Amundsen whose stories have lived on in the public imagination: Robert Falcon Scott, Robert E. Peary, Frederick A. Cook, Ernest Shackleton, Knud Rasmussen, Adolphus Greely, and many more too numerous to name. 

The extent of the South Pole centenary recognition in the press, and similar coverage during the centenary of Peary’s claimed successful North Pole expedition two years ago, seems to present evidence of the public’s continuing fascination with exciting tales from the age of heroic polar exploration. In turn, this has prompted me to consider the connections between historic polar exploration and contemporary polar politics. As the governance system of Antarctica was largely resolved in the 1961 Antarctic Treaty, I am going to focus my attention on how the legacy of the age of heroic polar exploration has greatly influenced the current perceptions, and therefore to some extent the current state of political affairs, in the Arctic.
While Kathrin Keil has already pointed out in a previous article for The Arctic Institute that the Arctic and Antarctic regions are quite distinct when it comes to “political, economic, military, institutional, social and cultural characteristics”, it is safe to say that an area in which they do share many similarities is in their stories of heroic age polar exploration that have emerged and flourished in collective memory. 

I would suggest that these historic expeditions are not only important as the concrete predecessors to further activities in the Polar Regions, but are also significant because they propagate a certain narrative about the Polar Regions that has actual implications for how the regions are understood and consequently utilized and governed today. In other words, when decision-makers, scholars, and the general public are unavoidably exposed to the pervasive history of heroic age of exploration, this influences the way that they construe contemporary politics in the Arctic.

Perhaps the most obvious specter of the heroic age of polar exploration on current perceptions of the Arctic is seen in the often repeated, although not necessarily substantiated, warning of a contemporary “race” for Arctic resources. It was during the heroic age of exploration that this notion of a race in the Polar Regions germinated: Would it be Scott or Amundsen to the South Pole first? Who really made it to the North Pole first – Peary, Cook, or neither man? 

Competition is so deeply ingrained in the Western history of the Polar Regions, that it is difficult for most people to comprehend activities in the Arctic without envisioning some sort of antagonism between the actors. Moreover, competition seems to be what makes stories about the Polar Regions appealing to the public – you rarely read a story about Amundsen without hearing about Scott, or Peary without Cook. The consequence of this, however, is that we will continue to see the now common characterizations of the contemporary situation in the Arctic as a “race” rather than as the generally cooperative, stable region that it has thus far proven to be.

Another depiction of the Polar Regions that has seemed to carry over from the heroic age of exploration is that of the Arctic and Antarctic as somehow beyond the limits and limitations of civilization. This notion is upheld by both historic and contemporary assertions that the Arctic landscape is blank, empty, null, and devoid. Paradoxically, this characterization has led to divergent movements in contemporary Arctic affairs. On the one hand, staunch environmentalists make the case that the “pristine” Arctic landscape should remain protected from the infringement of “civilization” (i.e. resource development, shipping, and the associated infrastructure). In contrast, proponents of development argue that the Arctic is the last great empty frontier for expansion and growth of “civilization”.

Building upon this characterization of the Arctic and Antarctic as uniquely undefined regions distinct from the rest of the globe, during the heroic age of Polar exploration explorers treated the Polar Regions as blank white stages on which they could prove something – be it their nation’s strength, their masculinity, or their personal pride. Today, it seems that the Arctic still plays this role of a stage on which nations try to prove themselves. Just as historic expeditions to the Polar Regions are interpreted as illustrations of the true character of various explorers, the contemporary activities of actors in the Arctic are likewise rendered as performances that reveal some underlying strength or weakness. Thus, each Arctic nation must validate its presence in the region through public displays or verbal testaments of their power.

In conclusion, I am not trying to argue that the legacy of the heroic age of polar exploration dominates everyone’s perceptions of the Arctic or the direction of Arctic politics. Still, I am convinced that it is critical to recognize the ways in which history casts its shadow on the present. While I did not have the space in this article to thoroughly elaborate on all of the connections between historic exploration and the contemporary Arctic, I hope I have made it clear that there are indeed linkages between the two that deserve further attention.

It is fantastic that the thrilling stories of Amundsen and other Polar explorers remain entertaining and popular even one hundred years later. However, the danger to contemporary Arctic affairs is that we like the narratives from the heroic age of polar exploration so well that we just keep telling ourselves the same old stories without looking more closely at the contemporary reality.