Environmental Violence Statement
As a result of anthropogenic climate change, Inuit in the Arctic and island inhabitants in the Pacific Ocean both experience interrelated changes in their maritime environments. Global warming causes Arctic ice to melt, which leads to rising sea levels. As a result, local inhabitants in both regions experience the disappearance of their space (land and ice), paired with the arrival of new stakeholders with a diverse range of interests in the areas. As the inhabitants of the regions most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, Inuit and Pacific islanders have engaged in counter-mapping and counter-narrating their space that colonial powers have previously conceptualized as isolated, remote, and peripheral – a perspective rooted in the western understanding of the ocean as “mare nullius” (empty ocean) paired with a terrestrial bias toward the land over the ocean. In contrast, the maps of Inuit Nunangat and the Blue Pacific illustrate and tell the stories of transnational spaces that have been collectively shared and used since time immemorial. These counter-mapping and counter-narrative approaches shape a new perception of the regions. They directly engage with existing international regimes like the International Maritime Organization and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea to construct (potential) protected areas and fixed exclusive economic zones to protect and ensure sovereignty over larger maritime environments. Representing and speaking for a large geographic space consisting of land and water, both groups are amplifying their voices to address conditions caused by environmental violence (EV). This chapter contributes to conceptual development of EV by discussing case studies of counter-mapping and counter-narration in the Arctic and the Pacific Ocean – as locals’ responses to experiences of structural and cultural violence to overcome their vulnerability, to challenge power differentials, and to satisfy their human needs.Footnote 1
3.1 Introduction: Environmental Violence (EV) and Environmental Peace (EP)
The model proposed and illustrated by Marcantonio and Fuentes in this publication incorporates EV within a larger framework that illustrates conditions leading to EV, repercussions resulting from EV, as well as all their interconnections. Focusing on human-produced toxic and non-toxic pollution as the main cause of EV, the model helps explain how structural and cultural violence can facilitate EV, further exacerbating local vulnerability and leading to, but also caused by, unequal distribution of harm and power among those experiencing EV, which, in turn, further reinforces forms of structural and cultural violence. Referencing Johan Galtung, the model defines EV as “any avoidable insult to basic human needs,” lowering “the real level of needs satisfaction below what is potentially possible.” EV causes vulnerability – a determinant of human security – which is the “condition that exists when the vital core of human lives is protected and when people have the freedom and capacity to live with dignity. […] The vital core of human lives includes the universal and culturally specific, material and non-material elements necessary for people to act on behalf of their interests.” In his assessment of violence against nature, Galtung discusses how pollution, industrial depletion, and commercialization cause global warming with consequences that are invisible to the perpetrators. The underdogs – those experiencing the violent effects of global warming (first and worst, like Inuit and Pacific islanders) – are marginalized.
The impacts of anthropogenic climate change in the Arctic and the Pacific regions have been illustrated in depth elsewhere, outlining how structural and cultural violence have not only marginalized Inuit and Pacific islanders, but simultaneously exposed them to the forefront of experiencing EV caused by climate change. The Arctic is currently warming four times faster than the rest of the globe. One of the most obvious and serious effects of a warming Arctic is the melting of ice, resulting in a global sea level rise. In both areas, these changes have serious impacts on the lives of local inhabitants. In a 2005 petition submitted to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Inuit in the United States and Canada outlined how climate change–induced impacts effectively damage Inuit livelihoods and, thus, constitute a human rights violation:
Because Inuit culture is inseparable from the condition of their physical surroundings, the widespread environmental upheaval resulting from climate change violates Inuit’s rights to practice and enjoy their culture.
The petition also argued that we were being denied the right to use and enjoy our traditional lands, as the land was either changing or becoming inaccessible. The fact that we were unable to hunt as before for food and for hides and skins for clothing and that the loss of ice and snow was damaging our snow machines, our sleds and our other tools was a violation of our right to personal property. The Western store-bought diet we were being forced to adopt, the accidents caused by melting ice and snow, and our increasing exposure to UV radiation, among other things, meant that our rights to health and life were being severely constrained.
The petition also stated that our fundamental right to residence and movement was being violated as our homes were damaged and the land upon which many of our communities were built was being eroded by melting permafrost. And finally, Inuit’s fundamental right to their own means of subsistence was being denied as climate change was hurting almost every aspect of our hunting culture: the quantity and quality of wildlife, the length of the hunting season, methods of traveling and the ability of our Elders to pass on traditional knowledge.
In a regional security declaration, Pacific Island leaders confirmed that climate change is the “single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific.” Living in regions that are often perceived as peripheral and remote, both Inuit and Pacific islanders are already marginalized. Given climate change’s severe effects in the Arctic and the Pacific Ocean, both groups also experience a higher level of vulnerability as they are unequally harmed by climate change. These realities constitute conditions of EV, according to Marcantonio and Fuentes’ model. Negative climate change impacts in both regions (melting ice and rising sea levels) have become noticeable, while many other regions around the world experience much less severe effects. Inuit and Pacific islanders are highly vulnerable to climate change with a limited ability to resist. Broadly stated, the effects of climate change deprive Inuit and Pacific islanders of the fulfillment of their human rights, security and safety needs as well as their need for shelter and identity. While both groups are at the forefront of experiencing the most severe impacts of climate change, both also find themselves in the back seat of climate change policy-making, reflecting existing power differentials in international politics that are dominated by wealthy nation states, rather than transnational ethnic groups.
Counter-mapping and counter-narrating are two approaches chosen by Inuit and Pacific islanders to lower their vulnerability, and to overcome existing power differentials and conditions of structural and cultural violence. These are the encompassing and interconnected concepts that surround, facilitate, and mediate EV in Marcantonio and Fuentes’ holistic model. Looking at climate change in both regions as case studies, this chapter focuses on peoples’ ways of addressing and overcoming EV in the Arctic and the Pacific Ocean.
3.2 Colonial Conceptualization of Space: Terrestrial Bias and Terra/Mare Nullius
Metis scholar Adam Gaudry writes the following about the power of maps: “Cartography has long been an imperial enterprise used to claim territory and to imagine the geographic reach of empires. In its imperial usage, map-making is an instrument of Indigenous erasure.” Maps are powerful tools, as their makers can decide to either express or omit certain aspects, and “it matters whether you are on the map or not.” The arrival of colonizers often results in a region’s mapping through western cartography, guided by a “terrestrial bias” that clearly prioritizes land over water and, in doing so, clearly separates both. At the same time, colonizers were also driven by a belief in the emptiness of the land and water (terra/mare nullius). Here, oceans are perceived as “unpeopled and lawless space in between the terrestrial spaces that really matter.” Structural violence is caused by unequal distribution of power, and cultural violence’s teachings portray such inequality and repression as normal. Colonial maps are “powerful symbols that tell stories of an empty, remote, barren, uninhabited, and harsh Arctic,” ethnocentric effects of a power differential between the colonizer and the colonized.
Maps of the Arctic ignored and neglected Indigenous occupancy rights and simply show small and isolated Inuit settlements (which were established by the Canadian government) in an otherwise vastly unpopulated region. Arctic waters are portrayed as shipping corridors, failing to illustrate the many existing interconnections between the communities. While inhabitants of Arctic communities connect via planes or boat, conventional maps of Canada show only roads and rails – infrastructure indicating Western-style (historical) residence and land use. Looking at the other side of the globe, imagined geographies of the Pacific conceived the region in colonial maps as the South Seas, South Pacific, Indo-Pacific, or the Maritime Silk Road with the Pacific Islands as “small and isolated places, months of perilous sail away from Western capitals,” obscuring, neglecting, or ignoring the fact that Pacific islanders live in an interconnected “sea of islands with their inhabitants” – Oceania – with their own unique perspectives and concerns. Oceania was cut into tiny spaces, and its islanders were isolated from each other when colonial boundaries were drawn in the region. Cultural violence (land over water, center over periphery) served to justify acts of structural violence in the subjugation of local populations, and processes of marginalization kept the colonized on the outside and separated from each other.
European voyages of colonization in the Pacific Islands started in the sixteenth century, intensifying in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In what is today the Canadian Arctic, European traders, whalers, and explorers arrived in the late seventeenth century. At the end of the eighteenth century, the first missionaries established themselves among Inuit, followed by European whalers in the nineteenth century. Greenland became a Danish colony in 1721, marking the beginning of colonialism on the world’s largest island. Map-making was part of the colonizing process, and the Arctic region and the Pacific Islands have been stereotyped as empty frontier,Footnote 2 exposing local inhabitants to colonialism’s structural and cultural violence.
3.3 Inuit Nunangat
Most Inuit communities are located on coasts or waterways, reflecting the importance of the sea for the Inuit way of life. Inuit mobility systems essentially undermine the colonial belief in empty Arctic space and challenge the western bias toward terrestrial over maritime space. For Inuit, the Arctic is a place of connectivity and interdependence filled with history, stories, memories, resources, relationships:
Because of seasonal Inuit mobility and residence patterns before permanent settlements were established, the Arctic is filled with historically inhabited residence areas (camp sites) that are outside their present-day settlements and that acted as meeting points for Inuit from different neighboring regions. Home for Inuit communities was not associated with a single area but a geographic range within which people moved according to well-known seasonal events. Such a sense of home is still observed today, even after generations of living in permanent settlements.
“Home” describes a transnational space for Inuit that goes well beyond a single location, including terrestrial and maritime space which continues to be used by Inuit. Names of places are remembered and often mark wind directions, the presence of animals, landing places, lakes, landmarks, or refer to harvesting locations. To understand the concept of Inuit homeland means moving away from static concepts of place and of communities located in certain fixed locations. As a semi-nomadic culture, Inuit lives have been determined by changes in the environment (e.g., the condition of snow and ice) and the animals’ seasonal movements. In order to survive, Inuit have developed intricate knowledge about their maritime environment, which includes knowledge about animals, the weather, hunting practices, and the topography.
Inuk storyteller Michael Kusugak explains that the Inuktitut term for map is nunannguag – “representation of land.” Contrary to western definitions of land, the sea ice and open waters in the Arctic are also essential parts of the circumpolar topography for Inuit. As a maritime people, Inuit lives and cultures are closely connected with the sea and its animals, and Inuit “have used the ocean in all seasons and in all states, from open water to solid sea ice.” In fact, the very act of differentiating between land and maritime areas in the Arctic can be tricky, given that sea ice can function as an extension of the terrestrial space. This means that shores and the floe edge (the area between landfast ice and open water) are actually not dividers between land and sea, but rather serve as connectors between both. The floe edge is a particularly special and dynamic space with substantial ice movement and an abundance of marine animals.
The circumpolar north has been the home of Inuit for thousands of years. As a result of colonialism, the space inhabited by Inuit was divided among four nation states: Canada, Denmark (Greenland), the US (Alaska), and Russia (Chukotka). Today, Inuit in the circumpolar north are citizens of these nation states, but they continue to perceive themselves as a transnational people – an imagined community – across terrestrial and maritime national borders. In 2009, the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (ITK), the Canadian national Inuit organization, adopted the term “Inuit Nunangat” for the Inuit homeland. ITK’s map of Inuit Nunangat in Canada shows a common territorial and cultural space, and it is meant to replace the more generalized concept of the “Arctic” or the “North.” This term, Inuit Nunangat, shaped by Canadian Inuit, is inclusive of land, water, and ice, and it will be used in this chapter to describe the entire transnational Inuit space spanning four nation states.
Inuit maritime navigation relied on the trained eye and good memory which helped with locating and remembering landmarks. Remembering old placenames used by ancestors, combined with traditional knowledge of the stars, wind, sun, and ridges in snow, and understanding the messages communicated by Inukshuit, Inuit were able to deduct their traveling direction and confidently journey across great distances. Inuit are transnational travelers in the Arctic Ocean. Aporta and Watt explain how winter sled trails are first trodden by experienced hunters, using their memory, followed by others either in the same tracks or in slightly different tracks, “due to seasonal conditions and personal preferences.” Very well-trodden trails are like highways that allow for faster travel. These trails visualize the seasonality of Inuit life in the Arctic. Aporta calls these trails “arteries through which news, goods, and people have traveled, seasonally, for centuries.”
3.4 Counter-Mapping and Counter-Narrating Space
Maps are tools of storytelling, and they can be used as a means of emancipation and to advance processes of self-determination. Counter-maps bring to the forefront stories of those that other cartography has marginalized and made invisible, creating “alternative representations of territory and the practices in it.” Counter-mapping is a critical cartography approach that looks closely at the role of power in the creation of maps and calls for alternative representations. As storytelling tools, maps can be employed in counter-story work – to tell about the experiences of the marginalized that are often silenced, and to strengthen “traditions of social, political, and cultural survival and resistance.” As such, this approach is a decolonial strategy, an element of critical race methodology and theory that focuses on racially oppressed peoples’ rights and epistemologies.
“Counter-mapping challenges western-type appropriation of local peoples’ homes through the colonial enterprise, not just to reclaim resources and land, but imageries as well.” As a theory and method, counter-mapping pushes back against colonial powers, as it recognizes that “what does not exist is in fact actively produced as nonexistent.” This is a good example of the employment of cultural violence to justify other forms of violence. This process – termed the sociology of absences by the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos – is countered by the sociology of emergences. Counter-mapping of colonialized space can also be an activity of empowerment and reconciliation, as it helps visualize previously invisible Inuit mobility and residence patterns to recognize the “historical presence of Inuit in the Arctic lands and waters”. Moreover, such approaches can help generate a more accurate representation of space use, to create a framework for understanding Inuit ontologies “but also the entire sociological system and the seasonality of resources.” A similar argument can be made for the Pacific islanders. In the words of Gaudry:
Indigenous peoples also use maps to re-inscribe older ways of understanding geographic spaces, to replace the lines of nation-states, provinces and other boundaries with borderlines and edges of our own. Mapping our spaces, in both contemporary and historical practice, protects Indigenous peoples from imperial erasure. Map-making is therefore a deeply political process, as it is a process of world-creation. Whether it is creating a world that hides Indigenous conceptions of space, place and territory, or one that establishes a world of ongoing Indigenous nationhood, how we draw maps goes hand-in-hand with how we understand the world we live in. […] Today, re-mapping (and perhaps also de-mapping) the places now claimed by Canada allows us to assert ongoing Indigenous presence in our homelands. But beyond this, by re-inscribing ourselves onto our landscapes, we can also envision a different world – a world built on Indigenous persistence and political rebirth. By displacing the taken-for-granted representations most of us learned from the maps that hung on our elementary school blackboard, we can also dislodge the permanency of the political world in which we live.
Such “taken-for-granted representations” are signposts of cultural violence that normalizes repression. Re-mapping or de-mapping both challenge the notion of Western-based printed map-making. Before the term “counter-mapping” even existed, Inuit map-making and map-keeping (and related stories) took place orally and relied on remembering. More recently, Inuit have started creating printed maps to illustrate their traditional use of the sea ice. These efforts of “counter-mapping” include information from community-led or community-sponsored participatory projects to “create representations of the Arctic that have not been reflected in public or official maps.” Aporta and Watt argue that Inuit mobility systems (and maps of these trails) can help visualize Inuit connections between communities, shaping our understanding of Inuit use of their marine and terrestrial environment. In doing so, the mapping of trails can help illustrate the social life of an Arctic inhabited by Inuit, the deep contemporary and historic connections Inuit have with each other across communities, regions and national borders, and they help visualize that “Inuit knowledge and occupancy is tied to both marine and land areas.” Inuit routes in the Arctic are real, have been used over generations, and are remembered by Inuit. These routes consisting of walking trails, sled trails, and boat routes – used since time immemorial – seamlessly connect terrestrial and maritime spaces. Such “cartographic representations of trails are unique in illustrating the spatial and […] temporal dimensions of this relationship,” and they highlight how marine areas in the Arctic constitute an essential part of Inuit Nunangat.
Starting in the 1970s, Inuit modern treaty negotiations with the Canadian government were based on Inuit land use and occupancy studies. These counter-mapping efforts relied on the methodology of map biographies, composed of individual “recollections of activities on and memories on the land,” collected through interviews with Inuit in multiple communities. Individual contributions were then merged and compiled into a map. This process that mixed Inuit oral tradition with Western mapping helped generate important evidence of Inuit land use and tenure.
The transnational nature of Inuit mobility systems can also be understood as political statements recognizing the Inuit homeland as spanning across or beyond national jurisdictions. Since its creation in the 1970s, the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC), a transnational Indigenous non-governmental organization that represents the voice of all circumpolar Inuit on the national and international levels, has worked to foster Inuit transnationalism through circumpolar cooperation among Inuit and with Arctic governments. Of specific importance are three recent landmark studies and participatory mapping efforts to promote counter-mapping and counter-narrating processes – forms of protest against a mainstream narrative using documentary resistance: a 2008 study of the sea ice, and two 2017 studies on the Northwest Passage and the Northwater Polynya – all transnational spaces used by Inuit.
3.4.1 The Sea Ice Is Our Highway
The 2008 report The Sea Ice is Our Highway was issued by the ICC to provide an “Inuit perspective on the human dimension of shipping” by investigating Inuit sea ice use. The report emphasizes that Inuit life, culture, and identity rest, not only on terrestrial movement, but also on free movement on the ice for food consumption as well as obtaining resources and supplies for making art and clothing to keep their cultural heritage alive. Inuit continue to hunt and harvest traditional foods, requiring them to travel great distances to find animals, which are constantly on the move. More specifically, Inuit venture out to hunt different migratory animals at specific times during a season when the animals move through their areas. The floe edge – the area where the sea ice ends and the open water starts – is a particularly good place to hunt sea mammals. Depending on a community’s location, the floe edge could be close or several hours away.
Hunting and being on the land are important elements of Inuit culture as they connect the present with the past.Footnote 3 Importantly, the sea ice and open sea are seasonal variations of the same “highway,” which has important repercussions for the Inuit understanding of “land”:
When defining our “land,” Inuit do not distinguish between the ground upon which our communities are built and the sea ice upon which we travel, hunt, and build igloos as temporary camps. Land is anywhere our feet, dog teams, or snowmobiles can take us.
The sea – liquid or frozen – constitutes an important constant in the everyday lives of Inuit in the circumpolar north. The sea has traditionally been used for general travel and transportation, but also for hunting and harvesting. The effects of climate change have impacted the migration routes of land and sea animals. Due to their dependency on sea ice, many animals have to move further out to find ice, forcing Inuit hunters to travel further than before to find and hunt polar bears, seals, or walruses.Footnote 4 For Inuit, their own long-distance travel requirements for cultural and subsistence purposes necessitate free movement over the sea and land, and climate change is adding increased urgency to advocate for it. Additionally, climate change has also increased the attractiveness of the Arctic waterways for newcomers driven by economic and touristic interests. The arrival of these new agents in Inuit Nunangat is often accompanied and directed by externally driven agendas and ways of doing with little interest in consulting with Inuit or acknowledging Inuit preferences. Tourists visiting Inuit communities often avoid spending money locally (for example to purchase handmade art or eat local food) and often visit locations like the local church and museum that are reminiscent of the history of colonialism in the region. Inuit are vulnerable to EV caused by climate change. This vulnerability is noticeable when hunters need to travel longer distances to find animals, but also when undertones of cultural violence seem to normalize – and help explain – the lack of visitors’ engagement with local Inuit.
3.4.2 The Nilliajut 2 Report
Nilliajut 2 is a document issued in 2017 by the Inuit Qaujisarvingat (Inuit Knowledge Center) at the ITK in Canada. In English, the publication translates into “to speak up, speak out,” and it consists of written contributions of 10 Inuit from Canada and Greenland who shared their unique perspectives on the Northwest Passage, shipping, and marine issues in the Arctic. Highlighting that the Inuit homeland consists of land, water, and ice, the report leaves no question about the Northwest Passage being a part of the Inuit homeland. Thus, the Northwest Passage is understood as an extension of the land and considered one of many travel “highways” in the Arctic.
In the first essay, Greenlandic Inuk leader Aqqaluk Lynge illustrates the many cultural commonalities shared by Inuit across national borders: stories, legends, language, way of life, and history. These connections were interrupted by the creation of national borders: Inuit “are a small nation who occupies the vast territory of human kind. It is only the national states formed some 300 years ago that divide us.” Lynge also uses the term “highway” to describe the ice bridges connecting the Inuit world. In another essay, Nancy Karetak-Lindell writes about the role of the Northwest Passage as a route that connects the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans “along the coasts and islands used and occupied by Inuit since time immemorial,” regions that are still connected by Inuit. Not only is there a growing interest in an ice-free Northwest Passage for resource exploration and tourism, but she also cautions of the danger stemming from unannounced and unanticipated vessels showing up in the waterway and in communities while Inuit who have been traveling across the waterway since time immemorial are now required to carry passports when journeying between Canada and Greenland. While some in more powerful positions find ways to enter the Arctic unannounced, Inuit who have been living in the region for thousands of years are now faced with additional challenges to meet each other. The colonization of the Arctic and the resulting creation of national borders dividing Inuit Nunangat between four different states and modern-day passport requirements for transnational travel reflect the existing power differentials between colonizer and the colonized. These decisions made in far-away capital cities have real-life impacts in Inuit everyday realities.
Despite the Northwest Passage’s benefits for Inuit as an opportunity for cultural exchange and mutual learning when tourists are visiting, and as a transportation route that provides communities with food and other necessities at comparably more affordable prices than flown-in items, the opening of the waterway is also perceived with caution, due to the many resulting challenges. Okalik Eegeesiak is concerned about encroaching cruise tourism, northward movement of animals upon which Inuit depend, seismic testing for resource exploration, and commercial fishing interests. Additional concerns voiced in workshops focused on dangers stemming from oil spills and resulting long-term repercussions, waste dumping, tourists’ lack of interest in local products and local culture, unregulated traveling through the passage, arrival of new invasive species, lack of control over Inuit cultural sites, illegal activities, disturbance of animal migration, lacking emergency response mechanisms, and acceleration of climate change effects as a result of icebreaker activity. Given the interconnections between different elements like ice conditions, animal life, and Inuit culture, Eegeesiak and others call for a holistic approach to conflicts in the area.
Most Inuit, unlike many Arctic tourists, have never traveled the whole Northwest Passage. However, the passage was described as an extension of the land that is important for Inuit culture and survival, and Inuit who lived in one area of the passage could relate to the realities of their fellow Inuit living in other areas along the waterway; all Inuit are impacted by it. These connections can have very serious repercussions if, for example, an oil spill occurs. Northwest Passage corridors are becoming more easily navigable due to the melting sea ice, which has raised concerns among Inuit, pointing out that greater involvement in the protection of the waterway was needed. In addition to protection, Inuit also ask for “the continued connection and unification of Inuit communities” through increased inter-community communication, establishment of regional working groups, and regular collective meetings for knowledge-sharing across Inuit Nunangat.
3.4.3 The Pikialasorsuaq Report
Pikialasorsuaq is the Greenlandic term for the Northwater polynya (meaning “great upwelling”), located between the northern parts of Greenland and Canada. A polynya is an area of open water that remains free of ice, even in winter, due to currents in the ocean and air. The health of the polynya has a direct impact on the health of Inuit communities in the region as it is central for Inuit hunting and harvesting activities. The Pikialasorsuaq covers about 20 000 square kilometers, but it can grow to up to 80 000 square kilometers in summer. About 7000 Inuit in adjacent communities live in close interaction with the Pikialasorsuaq, which is not only the largest polynya in the northern hemisphere, but also the “most biologically productive region north of the Arctic Circle.” The polynya is an area of interconnectedness of weather, ice, food, animals, and culture, and it impacts an area that goes much beyond its physical boundaries (Figure 3.1).
Figure 3.1 ‘The Great Upwelling’: Inuit Rely on its Biological Productivity, Pikialasorsuaq, North Water Polynya between Canada and Greenland.
As it became apparent that the Northwater polynya’s ecosystem was seriously threatened by the effects of climate change and globalization, causing the erosion of the ice bridge that protects the polynya and leading to increased shipping, tourism, and resource development in the region, the ICC established and mandated the Pikialasorsuaq Commission in 2016 to carry out consultations with communities in Greenland and Nunavut/Canada that are closely connected to the polynya. Participants spoke about their stewardship and customary trans-boundary use of the polynya and the Northwest Passage and how the polynya’s health directly connects with the well-being of Inuit. The commission’s report was published in November 2017.
The Pikialasorsuaq is an important habitat for animals like fish, birds, and marine mammals upon which Inuit depend for food security. The polynya is also important to Inuit for cultural and spiritual reasons, linking Inuit transnationally. It is also an important driver of weather systems that impact travel conditions on the ice. In the twentieth century, Inuit from Canada and Greenland traveled across the polynya for exchanges and community visits, either by dogsled or with airplanes that landed on the sea ice. With the increasing cost of plane tickets and after the 9/11 events, such travel became more complicated and expensive for Inuit, and traveling between the two sides of the polynya today requires customs clearance.
The local workshops in Inuit communities in Nunavut and Greenland revealed – among other recommendations – a strong desire among Inuit “for free movement, once again, across the Pikialasorsuaq and increased cooperation” for a “collective Inuit caretaking regime for the polynya.” This includes the establishment of an Inuit Management Authority (IMA), the creation of a protected area around the polynya that encompasses a larger management zone to reflect existing community connections, and a free travel zone for Inuit across the polynya. The commission also recommended the creation of an Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) to support these ideas.
Referencing several articles of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), the commission illustrates that “Inuit have the right to maintain and strengthen their distinctive spiritual relationship with their traditionally owned and otherwise occupied and used lands, territories, waters, and coastal seas, and other resources and to uphold these responsibilities to future generations in this regard (Article 25).” To protect these and related rights, the commission recommends considering international law instruments like the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).Footnote 5 The report discusses the IMO’s concept of a Particularly Sensitive Sea Area (PSSA). While the adoption of an area as a PSSA does not have legal consequences, “associated protective measures,” however, can come with legal consequences that could include “ship routing measures, reporting requirements, discharge restrictions, operational criteria, and prohibited activities.”
A recent study has predicted the decline of the Northwater ecosystem in the near future, due to a warming climate and changing conditions of sea ice: Ice-arches that stabilize the polynya could become instable in a warming climate, potentially leading to its eventual disappearance as a “globally unique ice-bounded open water ecosystem.” An unstable or disappearing polynya could increase food insecurity, further enhancing Inuit vulnerability to EV.
3.5 Large Ocean States in the Blue Pacific
In the Pacific Ocean, northeast of Australia, lies a large, culturally highly diverse, maritime region, that is home to 14 independent nation states and hundreds of societies. Islanders in the Pacific Ocean have also employed counter-mapping and counter-narration approaches to challenge colonial and Western notions of “small island (developing) states” as isolated, vulnerable, insignificant, and remote in a basically empty ocean (mare nullius), a perception that served to marginalize Pacific islanders’ realities in international politics. They have shaped a counter-narrative that rejects and challenges this notion of vulnerability and marginalization. Pointing out that “smallness is a state of mind,” the famous Pacific Islands scholar Hau‘ofa reminds his readers of Oceania’s vastness, and the oral traditions, myths, and legends that describe a region consisting of land and ocean. In pre-colonial times, islanders had existing social, transport, and trade networks that connected them between the islands, forming a “large exchange community in which wealth and people […] circulated endlessly.”
Different political leaders have recently started using the term “large ocean state” as a reminder that “considerable parts of the world’s oceans and living resources are under the jurisdiction of erstwhile small island states with tiny populations and landmasses.” The new term has been used by Palau’s president Remengesau Jr., the Foreign Minister of the Marshall Islands Tony de Brum, and it was also used in UN debates by Anote Tong, Kiribati’s former president. As noted by Chan, island states often reassert sovereign authority and national control by means of environmental protection, and they play an important role in the global trend of creating large marine protected areas (LMPAs). Contrary to a previous trend of creating marine protected areas along coasts and in shallow water areas, a more recent approach to marine conservation involves the creation of LMPAs in uninhabited ocean areas. The creation of LMPAs is often driven by environmental protection and stewardship interests, rather than by resource extraction interests. Climate change, marine pollution, fish management, and research are reasons for an increased urgency in advocacy for ocean protection.
The term “large ocean state,” as Chan continues to argue, addresses a realist concept of power in international politics according to which (territorial) size equals power. The UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has regulated that small island states have full sovereignty within a 12-nautical mile zone off their coasts, but their exclusive economic zones (EEZs) reach up to 200 nautical miles off the coast. Within this zone, island states have “sovereign rights for the purpose of exploring and exploiting, conserving, and managing natural resources.” As a result, small islands dispersed over a large marine area have rights over a large marine territory and control over substantial marine resources. The collective EEZ of all Pacific island states covers about 20% of the world’s ocean (Figure 3.2).
Figure 3.2 Pacific Island countries and territories
Palau, an island nation of 500 square kilometers and home to 25 000 inhabitants, established the Palau National Marine Sanctuary (PNMS) in 2015. As a result, 80% of Palau’s EEZ are closed to fishing activities. The PNMS – similar in size to the state of California – is one of the world’s largest marine protected areas (MPA). Kiribati – an island covering 800 square kilometers – established its Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) in 2008. PIPA covers 400 000 square kilometers, 11% of the country’s EEZ. Since 2015, this zone has been completely closed to commercial fishing.
Emerging counter-narrative and counter-mapping processes around large ocean states in the Pacific Ocean are examples of islanders’ collective diplomacy, based on shared cultural, political, and economic connections with and across the ocean. Pacific island leaders have started working together to shape the concept of the Blue Pacific, as “the latest iteration of a history of active and successful indigenous Pacific regionalism” through the pursuit of common interests. Island states have committed to a shared foreign policy and they developed a future strategy for the Blue Pacific. Pacific island states have started to collectively influence global ocean management, for example, when they successfully advocated for an ocean goal as one of the UN’s 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. Importantly, Blue Pacific states are advocating for permanent edges and fixed coordinates of their respective EEZ, a request that is a response to climate change–induced rising sea levels that threaten to decrease and ultimately eliminate their terrestrial space. Challenging UNCLOS’s EEZ framework is an interesting example of counter-mapping and counter-narrating, as the critique essentially targets the framework’s terrestrial bias. In its current form, UNCLOS’s formal regulations expose Pacific island states and their inhabitants to structural violence when rising sea levels constitute a risk of the islands and their respective EEZ completely disappearing, while other people around the globe continue to benefit from existing practices that enhance climate change. Taken together, structural and cultural violence generate EV by creating a legal framework for normalizing power differentials between those who create the (UNCLOS) rules and those who are excluded, effectively also increasing Pacific islanders’ vulnerability to EV.
Since 1991, Pacific island states have also been issuing a common regional position to the UN climate negotiations – another example of collective diplomacy. Counter-narratives of the Blue Pacific (or the Ocean Continent) also include poetry, song, performance, and other works created to “‘destabilize myths of island isolation’ and to assert a ‘transoceanic imaginary’ rooted in ocean voyaging and maritime kinship connections.”
3.6 Discussion
The maps and narratives shared by Inuit and Pacific Islanders are reflective of their agency, sovereignty, and resilience, and they illustrate creative approaches to conflict resolution. Both groups have also developed working relationships with each other to amplify their voice on the international political stage, for example in the Many Strong Voices project. In fall 2021, the ICC received provisional consultative status at the International Maritime Organization (IMO). This is a historic milestone as the ICC is the first Indigenous organization to receive such status.
Both the terrestrial bias (prioritizing land over water) and the mare nullius belief (of the ocean as empty) are examples of how cultural and structural violence has worked to disadvantage Inuit and Pacific islanders politically, but it also applies to maps. To challenge these perceptions of the Arctic and the Pacific Islands as peripheral, remote, and disconnected from the center, Inuit and Pacific islanders have engaged in processes of counter-mapping and counter-narrating their own space and identity. Both groups created new maps that more adequately portray their homeland. Importantly, these maps – based on narratives of cooperation, traditional use, and occupancy – equally consider land and water in its frozen or liquid form for the constitution of Inuit Nunangat and the Blue Pacific.
Inuit Nunangat and the Blue Pacific and their inhabitants are among the regions most vulnerable to the effects of anthropogenic climate change and EV. The impacts of global warming – caused mainly in the industrial centers far away from these two regions – are experienced first and worst in the Arctic where ice is melting, and in the Pacific Ocean where rising sea levels have started to eliminate island space. Climate change endangers the Inuit’s and Pacific Islanders’ cultural practices and knowledge sets, and it creates conditions of vulnerability, where the satisfaction of human needs for safety, security, identity, and shelter is threatened because space is disappearing. Thus, Inuit’s and Pacific islanders’ experiences of climate change can be termed environmental violence (EV) according to Marcantonio and Fuentes’ model. Keeping in mind the Inuit and Pacific islander’s definition of home and land as inclusive of terrestrial and sea space, it becomes clear that the effects of climate change actually wash away peoples’ homelands in both regions when ice is melting and coastal areas are disappearing. Illustrating the importance of the sea and the people who live in these maritime spaces, this perspective challenges the Western terrestrial bias. Additionally, the remapping of both regions has helped visualize the centrality of Inuit Nunangat and the Blue Pacific for Inuit and Pacific Islanders, but also for the climate change debate.
Both groups have used counter-mapping and counter-narration techniques to reduce their vulnerability and challenge existing power differentials to amplify their voices in climate change discussions to help create conditions for Inuit and Pacific islanders that provide human security and satisfy their human needs. The counter-maps both groups have created are based on stories and traditional land use and occupancy, which are employed in two important ways to address climate change.
First, these counter-maps visualize existing imagined communities: groups of people that have been deeply rooted in the customary use of the maritime space since time immemorial. Keeping alive and telling the stories of these intricate connections between the people and their land consisting of terrestrial space, as well as ocean space, is an empowering act of resilience. Inuit maps of land use and occupancy and Pacific Islanders’ visualization of a collective EEZ demand a new understanding of these areas as transnational spaces, visualizing and putting into perspective the vastness of space consisting of land and water that constitutes their homeland. To illustrate counter-mapping and counter-narrating processes in both regions, three reports, focusing on Inuit collective and transnational use of sea ice, the Northwest Passage, and the Northwater Polynya, were discussed. In Oceania, EEZs shape the notion of large island states of the Blue Pacific as a collective zone, and Pacific island nation states are supporting fixed EEZs to avoid losing land due to rising sea levels and, as a result, (maritime) sovereignty.
Second, acknowledging that size and representation on maps matter, Inuit and Pacific Islanders directly engage with the existing international political system through counter-mapping and counter-narration. Their maps tell the story of large spaces and the people calling these their home. Guided by a cultural mandate for environmental stewardship, local inhabitants are the best custodians of the ocean. Using existing international regulatory bodies like IMO, UNCLOS, and UNDRIP, Inuit and Pacific Islanders have successfully employed or are currently considering different mechanisms to make visible and protect Inuit Nunangat and the Blue Pacific. Examples discussed in this chapter described the concepts of an Indigenous Protected Area, Particularly Sensitive Sea Area, and a large marine protected area.
Importantly, for Inuit and Pacific islanders, realizing environmental protection means having sovereignty and decision-making authority to deal with climate change impacts. Pacific Islanders’ demands for fixed EEZs are a particularly interesting and powerful act of counter-mapping, given the still-existing terrestrial bias that continues to guide UNCLOS decision-making processes. Shared cultural connections across both maritime spaces predate European colonial presence in the regions. International regulatory bodies like UNCLOS and IMO and their frameworks offer ways to reinforce and institutionalize these existing connections. Inuit in Canada and Greenland call for visa-free travel between their countries, challenging existing political structures regulating international travel, while aiming at a creative bilateral solution. The need to protect their homeland from harmful forms of tourism and developing conditions for meaningful cultural exchange are additional challenges that are exacerbated by climate change in both regions. The creation of protected areas can increase space and enhance sovereignty for Inuit and Pacific Islanders – tools that can potentially also be used for tourism management.
3.7 Conclusion
Space is disappearing in the Arctic and the Pacific Ocean. Colonial map-making and narratives have marginalized inhabitants and their realities in both regions, dismissing their space as remote, isolated, and peripheral. More recently, space has also started to disappear as a result of global warming, resulting in the melting of Arctic ice, rising sea levels, and the (future) disappearance of Pacific islands, including their exclusive economic zones. While Inuit and Pacific islanders are not among the main contributors to climate change, they experience its most severe impacts. The framework developed by Marcantonio and Fuentes has helped illustrate the complex interplay of structural and cultural violence, vulnerability, and power differentials that end up (re-)creating EV experienced by Inuit in the Arctic and Pacific islanders in the face of climate change. Using the EV framework as a foundation, this chapter has illustrated how both Inuit and Pacific islanders have started opposing such developments through counter-mapping and counter-narrating processes.
Contributing their own maps and associated stories enhances Inuit and Pacific Islanders’ agency and allows both groups to speak with a stronger, collective voice to create conditions of human security, to satisfy their human needs, and to eliminate conditions of structural and cultural violence rooted in power differentials based on ethnocentric beliefs and practices of marginalization that have created and exacerbated their vulnerability. This also involves creative thinking to enhance regional protection, either through expanding the reach of existing frameworks like UNCLOS, or through the development of new entities like the Palau National Marine Sanctuary or the Phoenix Islands Protected Area. Portraying Inuit Nunangat and the Blue Pacific as large spaces where local inhabitants exert power challenges existing perspectives of these regions, and it helps visualize transnational collaboration based on traditional connections. Everyone is invited – youth, tourists, researchers, policy makers, and others – to have a look at these maps telling the stories of a different kind of highway that takes them right into the cultural centers in the Arctic and Pacific Ocean.
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