Climate Change Totems and Discursive Hegemony Over the Arctic

Chui-Ling Tam,Suzanne Chew,Anabela Carvalho,Julie Doyle

doi:10.3389/fcomm.2021.518759

Chui-Ling Tam, Suzanne Chew + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3389/fcomm.2021.518759

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Abstract

The Arctic and its animals figure prominently as icons of climate change in Western imaginaries. Persuasive storytelling centred on compelling animal icons, like the polar bear, is a powerful strategy to frame environmental challenges, mobilizing collective global efforts to resist environmental degradation and species endangerment. The power of the polar bear in Western climate imagery is in part derived from the perceived “environmental sacredness” of the animal that has gained a totem-like status. In dominant “global” discourses, this connotation often works to the detriment of Indigenous peoples, for whom animals signify complex socio-ecological relations and cultural histories. This Perspective article offers a reflexive analysis on the symbolic power of the polar bear totem and the discursive exclusion of Indigenous peoples, informed by attendance during 2015–2017 at annual global climate change negotiations and research during 2016–2018 in Canada’s Nunavut Territory. The polar bear’s totem-like status in Western imaginaries exposes three discursive tensions that infuse climate change perception, activism, representation and Indigenous citizenship. The first tension concerns the global climate crisis, and its perceived threat to ecologically significant or sacred species, contrasted with locally lived realities. The second tension concerns a perceived sacred Arctic that is global, pristine, fragile and “contemplated,” but simultaneously local, hazardous, sustaining and lived. The third tension concerns Indigenization, distorted under a global climate gaze that reimagines the role of Indigenous peoples. Current discursive hegemony over the Arctic serves to place Indigenous peoples in stasis and restricts the space for Arctic Indigenous engagement and voice.

Highlights

At Norway’s Arctic Ocean Tipping Points side event at the 23rd Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2017, the lone Inuk panelist and -chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) lamented that polar bears and seals are presented as Arctic icons, noting humans inhabit the region but are often forgotten
The third tension concerns Indigenization, distorted under a global climate gaze that reimagines the role of Indigenous peoples among sacred species and spaces; in effect, “sacred” Arctic totems are conscripted into a discursive environmental politics that reproduces Indigenous exclusion
The reimagined polar bear totem cannot capture Arctic peoples’ reality. It captures the perceived reality of an imagined Arctic free of people. It is a Western construction of a sacred species in a sacred space, moored in biological uniqueness and fragility

Summary

INTRODUCTION

At Norway’s Arctic Ocean Tipping Points side event at the 23rd Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2017, the lone Inuk panelist and -chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC) lamented that polar bears and seals are presented as Arctic icons, noting humans inhabit the region but are often forgotten. She attended three COP meetings during 2015–2017 as a member of the International Environmental Communication Association She identified a disconnect between the global icon of the polar bear (Slocum, 2004) and local lived experience of an animal of cultural, spiritual and practical significance. Local respondents do routinely talk about their animals, hunting and being “on the Land,” focused on locally available country foods such as caribou and muskox and summer fishing for Arctic char This Perspective article does not arise from polar bear-focused research; it emerges from a climate communication study that required the first author’s attendance at three COPs during 2015–2017, three field seasons comprising four months in the communities of Cambridge Bay and Kugluktuk in the western Kitikmeot region of Nunavut, during 2016–2018, and over 60 semi-structured interviews conducted by the first author and two graduate students: Suzanne Chew (second author) and Rebecca Segal. Climate change activists contemplating a global Arctic with benign polar bears are wrestling for discursive control with Indigenous circumpolar peoples who live viscerally with a local Arctic. The latter, like development narratives, are often used to license the intervention of experts in debates about resource management and conservation.”

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