Cartographies of Kinship: Mapping Arctic Indigenous solidarities across marine mammal lifeworlds

Abstract

This paper theorizes futures of abundant solidarities among Arctic Indigenous peoples through mapping our lands and waters across marine mammal lifeworlds. Marine more-than-human bodies swim across our waters and languages, leaving ripples throughout our languages and cultures, and connecting Arctic peoples across their diasporas and among nations of peoples. By superimposing marine mammal life worlds onto a map of Indigenous languages, I show how navigating our trans-Indigenous relations through marine mammal relations, rather than through conventional mappings of Indigenous space, allows us to see not the borders but to weave solidarities that support abundant Indigenous futures. To do so, I read the 2019 Arctic Council Indigenous Peoples’ Secretariat’s circumpolar working map of Indigenous languages alongside representations of marine mammal lifeworlds. I focus specifically on the n’orpat, our world’s only freshwater ringed seals, of Karjala (Karelia), who are endangered due to decades of destructive legal policies and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land and more-than-human kinships. I stack these multiple mappings together to visually materialize and theorize how Indigenous animal relationalities can offer alternative Indigenous internationalisms that need not be mediated by recognition from hegemonic nation-states. Against the often-imposed backdrop of recognition by hegemonic nation-states, I attend to the violences of the Finland-Russia nation-state border, which separates the n’orpat of Karjala. I read how these borders render our more-than-human kin under occupation into two particular legal subjectivities under differing environmental protections, legal mechanisms, and rules around human engagement.