Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic

Creative visions of Arctic geography from Indigenous perspectives

Grounded in the spatiality of Indigenous existence, Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic is an innovatively foundational book about experiences and conceptions of geography in the circumpolar world. The book centers Arctic writers and artists as creators of space and disseminators of geographical knowledge emerging from Indigenous epistemologies. It collects newly commissioned poems, short stories, and essays that are accompanied by responses in the form of visual art--including paintings, photographs, and mixed media artworks--as well as brief academic reflections. Containing multiple languages--from English and Russian to North Sámi, Kalaallisut, and Sakha--as well as translations, the book is grounded in dialogues and conversations between creative practitioners from across the circumpolar North. Among others, they include Alutiiq, Eyak, Gwich’in, Innu, Inupiaq, Inuvialuk, Lingit, and Yup’ik writers and visual artists, alongside Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. Extending ＂geo-＂ beyond earth and ＂-graphy＂ beyond writing, the creative geographies of Circumpolar Connections powerfully expand the Arctic into manifold spaces imagined by a multiplicity of Indigenous stories and aesthetic forms. In doing so, they offer circumpolar conversations that speak to Arctic communities while reaching out to global audiences.

[Sample Text]

English language assimilation as a bite of sashimi

it is like I am eating my own tongue
cut precisely, a flesh triangle
cool red bloodless
and placed in my mouth
I cannot speak
it tastes like my own tongue
salt and flesh
I am eating my own tongue
the weight of it

LIISA-RÁVNA FINBOG is a Sámi scholar and a postdoctoral fellow in the Mediated Arctic Geographies project based at Tampere University. JOAN NAVIYUK KANE is Inupiaq and the author of many collections of poetry and prose. She is currently a visiting assistant professor and visiting poet at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. JOHANNES RIQUET is a professor of English literature at Tampere University and the Principal Investigator of the Mediated Arctic Geographies project (Academy of Finland, 2019- 2023).