Julie Cruikshank’s book on the connections between glaciers and human history and imagination could not be more timely, after years of denial by the Bush administration of the scientific facts of global warming, and at a time when federal scientists are forbidden by the US government to even speak of melting ice or polar bear populations at an international conference on climate change. As scientists predict that arctic ecosystems will be among the hardest hit by global warming, it is reasonable to wonder whether future generations will know anything of glaciers. The question of how humans might ameliorate the threat of global warming, a situation partially created by human activity, has become urgent. Such questions would be familiar to the aboriginal cultures that have interacted with glaciers for centuries, and understand them as responsive to human behavior.
Cruikshank, an anthropologist emerita at the University of British Columbia, has spent years collecting oral traditions among Athapaskan and Tlingit elders in Yukon Territory. Her book centers on local knowledge of the shifting, surging, and retreating ice fields in recent history, along the frozen Saint Elias mountain ranges where Alaska, British Columbia, and Yukon Territory meet. Focusing on the interactions between European colonists’ accounts and aboriginal oral traditions over about 300 years, Cruikshank studies the collision of their respective interpretations of glaciers. Athapaskan and Tlingit speakers attributed sentience to the ever-changing glaciers, imagining that the ice, so familiar to them over generations, had the ability to hear, observe, and respond to human activities.
A striking series of coincidences and conflicts in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, illuminated by Cruikshank’s sensitive and rigorous approach, reveals the variety of human encounters with the glacial environment. It was during the period of colder-than-normal climate change known as the "Little Ice Age" (1550 to 1850) that Europeans began exploring the ice fields of northwestern North America. Cruikshank draws on literary, historical, and scientific European sources to describe the investigations and capture the awe inspired by glacial phenomena. Meanwhile, the aboriginal inhabitants were experiencing not only the natural disruptions of their familiar landscape and climate, but they were also undergoing social upheavals brought about by colonization. The local people personified the glaciers as appeasable, anthropomorphic entities, residing in human-defined space, while the Europeans saw the glaciers as inanimate, threatening forces, static objects to be scientifically studied and controlled.
Indigenous knowledge and cultural practices are too often regarded as fixed and unchanging. But as Cruikshank makes clear, despite--and perhaps because of--the clash of the conflicting Native and European interpretations of glaciers, each group was evolving its respective views and practices under mutual influence. The tribes engaged in complicated relationships with personified glaciers, in ways that allow Cruikshank to trace the deep history of humans’ encounters with nature. Her book is a vital contribution to today’s scientific and popular debates about how best to respect nature and preserve wilderness.
The book is organized into three parts. The first looks at how aboriginal oral traditions about glaciers contribute to current understandings of local knowledge. Chapter 1 presents evocative memories drawn from oral and written sources during the end of the Little Ice Age, as both aboriginal people and Europeans were discovering newly habitable territories. Chapter 2 introduces three Yukon elders, indigenous women born in the Yukon Territory at the turn of the twentieth century. Cruikshank describes the context of their lives and stories, in preparation for Chapter 3, which presents their intriguing glacier narratives. The book’s middle section has three chapters on pivotal glacier expeditions by three European glacier explorers (Perouse in 1786, John Muir in 1879-80, and Glave in 1890-91). Here Cruikshank shows how these scientific investigators’ encounters with Yukon cultures influenced Euro-American concepts of glaciers and at the same time revised the local knowledge (sometimes detrimentally). The final section, “Scientific Research in Sentient Places,” concerns the impact of boundary impositions and the new narratives that they evoke among aboriginal peoples. Surveyors’ accounts of mapping international borders is the topic of Chapter 7. Chapter 8 concludes with a compelling overview of contemporary controversies and current issues, such as land claim disputes, nature reserves, and newly emerging archaeological and anthropological evidence revealed by melting glaciers.
One of the most affecting episodes in the last chapter is the discovery in 1999 of “Long-Ago Person Found” (Kwaday Dan Ts’inchi), well-preserved remains of a young male hunter who died traversing a glacial “highway” over the mountains between the coast of British Columbia and the interior, in about 1415-1445. His squirrel fur cloak and hat of finely woven spruce roots, and his tools and food supplies, confirm aboriginal oral traditions about trade routes and treacherous travel between inland valleys and the coast over rugged mountain ranges, by following the edges of glaciers. Cruikshank details the close cooperation between the scientists and the First Nations people, with a ceremonial burial and potlatch following the scientific evaluations as a model for listening to such messengers from the past. Similar discoveries are bound to occur as the glaciers retreat and melt in both hemispheres.
Reading Do Glaciers Listen? is a thrilling and sobering experience. Cruikshank combines splendid scholarship and majestic descriptions in a cross-disciplinary tour-de-force. Readers will come away with a new appreciation of the meaning of glaciers.
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[Review length: 870 words • Review posted on April 19, 2007]