Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination

Joan A. Lovisek, Ph.D., is a consulting anthropologist and
ethnohistorian in British Columbia.

Cruikshank has written extensively and authoritatively about oral
history, particularly of Alaskan Native women. In this book, she reaches
beyond oral history into environmental knowledge, specifically
glaciation and global warming. Adopting Simon Schama’s theme that
landscapes provide a kind of archive for social memory, she directs her
focus at glaciers and the Little Ice Age that occurred circa
1550–1850. Using a multi-layered approach, she attempts to demonstrate
how glaciation is culturally conceived, and how environmental knowledge
becomes authorized in various contexts.

Cruikshank argues that these themes can be investigated retrospectively
through “narrative traces” of local stories. The stories demonstrate
not only traditional beliefs but also how colonial encounters are
grafted onto environmental change. The diverse perceptions of glaciers
between the colonist, who has been influenced by Enlightenment
categories like nature and culture, and the Native Alaskan conceptions
of glaciers, which are grounded within spatial and social relationships,
are at the heart of the misunderstandings between the two groups about
environmentalism, biodiversity, global climate change, and indigenous
rights. Eighteenth-century Europeans attempted through science to pry
nature from culture, whereas Native cultures consider culture embedded
within nature. However, in working within the polemic of the scientific
European and environmental Native, Cruikshank privileges science and
denies aesthetic or conceptions of cultural landscape to Enlightenment
thinkers.

Cruikshank draws large associations between the Little Ice Age,
encounters with Native peoples, and European contact and exploration.
She makes the important observation that first-contact narratives
resonate more with European imaginings than with local indigenous
traditions (although there are important contact narratives with other
Native groups). She also recognizes the pioneering work of Canadian
economist Harold Innis, who is better known for economic staple theory
than for being at the forefront of oral history.

There is no doubt about the extensive research undertaken for this
book. However, Cruikshank’s enthusiasm for the various themes is
somewhat overreaching. It is not clear how narratives, which she admits
may be more about imaginative possibilities, are grounded in a reality
such as global warming or glaciation.