Arctic enclosures and agrarian agency in the age of climate change

Abstract

Two competing narratives dominate the icy landscape of Arctic agriculture. The first, a colonial narrative, sees Arctic ice as “the anti-agriculture,” antithetical to cultivation and therefore to civilization (Smith, 2021). The second, a scientific imaginary, predicts an emerging “climate-driven agricultural frontier” enabled by warming temperatures and melting ice (Hannah et al. 2020). Both narratives are generated by powers at a distance, abstracted by tools of science, and fail to capture the embodied, affective, and relational understanding of local and Indigenous Arctic peoples under climate and agrarian change. Drawing on 13 months of ethnographic research in the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada, this paper examines the Arctic as a space of agrarian struggle. Unlike the often-discussed frontiers of agrarian change in the tropics, there has been no large-scale land transformation for commodity agriculture in NWT. Neither investment companies nor tyrannical officials are enclosing land for agriculture. Instead, the universal, material forces of climate change are enclosing Arctic land and food systems through fire and flood. In this paper, I show through ethnographic description how rural and Indigenous peoples in the NWT exert agency as agricultural producers under these material enclosures, in surprising and sometimes contradictory ways.