Surveyor looking up a small tributary glacier, 141st Meridian, Kluane Glacier, Y.T. Credit: Canada. Dept. of Interior / Library and Archives Canada / PA-04465.
Laura Madokoro
In 2005, historical geographer Julie Cruikshank published her widely-acclaimed work, Do Glaciers Listen? : Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination (UBC Press) in which she explored the history of environmental change in the Pacific Northwest. She looked specifically at Athapaskan and Tlingit oral traditions to understand glaciers as actors, as sentient beings that “take action and respond to their surroundings.”[1] Her intention in doing so was to trace an environmental history of glaciers that took into consideration their encounters with humans, and vice versa, during the late 18th and early 19th centuries when the Little Ice Age and colonialism intersected. Cruikshank also wanted to highlight the tensions and connections between Indigenous and European ways of knowing, highlighting “struggles over conflicting meaning” and challenging notions of authority in the process.[2]
I have always found the title and the contents of Do Glaciers Listen? provocative, as if the onus was on the glaciers to do the listening. In my mind, I have always subtitled the work, And Can Humans Hear What They Have to Say? As societies around the world have wrestled with the potential scope and devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic, I find myself thinking about issues around hearing, listening and, in some sense, responsibility. And so I have returned to Cruikshank’s work in recent days. With this post, I hope to share both how some of how Cruikshank’s ideas connect to our present condition and how the COVID-19 pandemic might invite a revisiting, or visiting, of her work and broader issues around what we hear, how we listen and how we make sense of things.
