Ice as Imaginary

Chapter 3, “Ice as Imaginary,” demonstrates how ice geographies of the Arctic were weaponized by Enlightenment philosophers through concepts of environmental determinism, the myth of the Bering Land Bridge, and what the author calls temperate-normativity, which encapsulates both. Within these spatialized narrations of ice and peoples, “extreme” environments of ice geographies supposedly rendered Indigenous peoples inferior, defined in distinction to white men inhabiting what were understood as temperate zones of the globe. Pushing against these enduring histories as totalizing and universalizing, the chapter analyzes poetry by Joan Naviyuk Kane (Inupiaq).