ABSTRACT
Rising temperatures, transforming seasons, and extreme weather events have begun to seriously affect life in the Arctic. This chapter illustrates how in the Gwich’in and Inuvialuit Settlement Regions of Arctic Canada, climate change is not a radical break from a previously stable equilibrium. Dramatic fluctuations in ecological dimensions like animal populations, as well as in social and economic fields like work opportunities and relations between Indigenous and settler groups, have long characterized life in the region. The argument proposed follows Indigenous scholars who have demonstrated that current and future climate crises constitute a continuation of, rather than a rupture in, their colonial histories. Climate change – the newest instalment of developments produced elsewhere, with which Arctic people must struggle – is thereby just the newest wave of colonial violence and dispossession. Based on ethnographic material from the Mackenzie Delta, straddling the border of the Gwich’in and Inuvialuit Settlement Regions, the chapter shifts the focus from seeing climate change as impeding collapse to understanding, on the one hand, how exploitation and marginalization make climate change a colonial echo in the delta, and on the other, how delta inhabitants are re-building decent lives despite the echoing challenges.
