Ice as Terrain Available to Purchase

Chapter 4, “Ice as Terrain,” explores race, indigeneity, and ice in the context of mid-nineteenth-century Alaska. During this period, Alaska Native peoples were racialized as “of Asian descent” and therefore not Indigenous due to proximity to ice geographies. The chapter traces the narrative labor of ethnologists, lobbyists, and cartographers who worked to racialize Alaska Natives as non-Indigenous. This racialization was practiced through the creation and accumulation of scientific weather data like temperature and precipitation into climate tables. These tables and root vegetables were utilized as evidence of potential successful settlement of the territory of Alaska.