Grounded in the spatiality of Indigenous existence, Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Geographies of the Arctic is an innovatively foundational book about experiences and conceptions of geography in the circumpolar world. The book centers Arctic writers and artists as creators of space and disseminators of geographical knowledge emerging from Indigenous epistemologies. It collects newly commissioned poems, short stories, and essays that are accompanied by responses in the form of visual art-including paintings, photographs, and mixed media artworks-as well as brief academic reflections. Containing multiple languages-from English and Russian to North Sámi, Kalaallisut, and Sakha-as well as translations, the book is grounded in dialogues and conversations between creative practitioners from across the circumpolar North. Among others, they include Alutiiq, Eyak, Gwich'in, Innu, Inupiaq, Inuvialuk, Lingit, and Yup'ik writers and visual artists, alongside Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars. Extending "geo-" beyond earth and "-graphy" beyond writing, the creative geographies of Circumpolar Connections powerfully expand the Arctic into manifold spaces imagined by a multiplicity of Indigenous stories and aesthetic forms. In doing so, they offer circumpolar conversations that speak to Arctic communities while reaching out to global audiences. [Sample Text]
English language assimilation as a bite of sashimi it is like I am eating my own tongue
"How lovely to encounter maps that acknowledge that the Indigenous people of the Arctic and their art are 'inextricable from the lands and waters of the circumpolar North.' (92)... Circumpolar Connections encourages the reader to imagine how each image and section of text resonates with the material surrounding it. What emerges is a layered mapping of how language and image manifest the relationsh
Annie Wenstrup, author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories
