Author-Meets-Readers - Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic by Jen Rose Smith (HYBRID)

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable responds to Jen Rose Smith’s new book Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic (Duke University Press, 2025). We bring together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to engage with the book’s key contributions to the fields of American studies, Native American and Indigenous studies, Geography, and Science and Technology studies. The roundtable will feature Andrew Curley (University of Arizona), Michelle Daigle (University of Toronto), Elspeth Iralu (University of New Mexico), Dian Million (University of Washington), and Ashton Wesner (Colby College), with author Jen Rose Smith (University of Washington) as respondent.

Ice animates the look and feel of climate change. It is melting faster than ever before, causing social upheaval among northern coastal communities and disrupting a more southern, temperate world as sea levels rise. Economic, academic, and activist stakeholders are increasingly focused on the unsettling potential of ice as they plan for a future shaped by rapid transformation. Yet, in Ice Geographies, Jen Rose Smith demonstrates that ice has always been at the center of making sense of the world. Ice as homeland is often at the heart of Arctic and sub-Arctic ontologies, cosmologies, and Native politics. Reflections on ice have also long been a constitutive element of Western political thought, but it often privileges a pristine or empty “nature” stripped of power relations. Smith centers ice to study race and indigeneity by investigating ice relations as sites and sources of analysis that are bound up with colonial and racial formations as well as ice geographies beyond those formations. Smith asks, How is ice a racialized geography and imaginary, and how does it also exceed those frameworks?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Elspeth Iralu, University of New Mexico

Panelists

• Dian L Million, University of Washington Seattle

• Andrew Curley, University of Arizona

• Michelle Daigle, University of Toronto

• Ashton Wesner, Colby College

Virtual Accommodation Commentator

• Jen Rose Smith, University of Washington

Biographical Information

Jen Rose Smith is a dAXunhyuu (Eyak, Alaska Native) geographer interested in the intersections of coloniality, race, and indigeneity as read through aesthetic and literary contributions, archival evidences, and experiential embodied knowledges. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in Comparative Ethnic Studies and her Master's Degree from the same department, and holds a BA in English Literature and the Environment from the University of Alaska, Southeast. Her book Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic is forthcoming from Duke University Press in May 2025. She has published in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Vogue Magazine, and The Geographical Journal.

Andrew Curley (Diné) is an associate professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona. Curley’s research focuses on the everyday incorporation of Indigenous nations into colonial economies. Building on ethnographic research, his publications speak to how Indigenous communities understand coal, energy, land, water, infrastructure, and development in an era of energy transition and climate change.

Michelle Daigle is Mushkegowuk (Cree), a member of Constance Lake First Nation in Treaty 9, and of French ancestry. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography & Planning and the Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. Her research examines colonial-capitalist dispossession and violence, as well as Indigenous resurgence and freedom. Her current research examines state-sanctioned environmental violence reproduced through mining extraction in Mushkegowuk territory. Over the past several years, she has also collaborated with Dr. Magie Ramirez, in an effort to build grounded theorizations of decolonial geographies.

Elspeth Iralu (Angami Naga) is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Planning at the University of New Mexico, where her research and teaching focus on Indigenous methodologies, Indigenous space, place, and mapping, and violence and visual culture. Her scholarly writing has appeared in Antipode: A Journal of Radical Geography, Political Geography, ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, The New Americanist, Dialogues in Popular Culture and Pedagogy, Asian Diasporic Visual Culture and the Americas, and American Quarterly. She serves as an editor on the Editorial Collective of the open access journal ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies.

Dian Million (Athabascan) is Associate Professor in American Indian Studies and Affiliated Faculty in Canadian Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She holds a BA in interdisciplinary studies from Fairhaven College, Western Washington University and a Masters and Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California at Berkeley. Dian Million’s most recent research explores the politics of mental and physical health with attention to affect as it intersects with race, class, and gender in Indian Country. She is the author of Therapeutic Nations: Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human Rights (University of Arizona Press, Critical Issues in Indigenous Studies Series, 2013) as well as numerous articles, chapters, and poems. Therapeutic Nations is a discussion of trauma as a political narrative in the struggle for Indigenous self-determination in an era of global neoliberalism. Reading unprecedented violence against Indigenous women and all women as more than a byproduct of global contention, Therapeutic Nations makes an argument for the constitutive role violence takes in the now quicksilver transmutations of capitalist development. She teaches courses on Indigenous politics, literatures, feminisms and social issues.

Ashton Wesner is an Assistant Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Colby College. Her work intersects the fields of queer feminist science and technology studies, political ecology, critical environmental history, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. Her recent publications can be found in The American Naturalist, on the history of coloniality, data, and power in the natural sciences, and in Women’s Studies, on researchers’ gendered slippages in their investigation of jumping spider mating behavior and the possibilities for queer STS frameworks to disrupt heteropatriarchy in the scientific study of animals. Ashton is a collaborator (with Meg Perret) on Queer Climate Futures, a digital archive of oral history interviews with climate justice activists. She also co-chairs the Critical Indigenous Studies Initiative and the Environmental Humanities Faculty Forum at Colby. Ashton completed her Ph.D. in Society & Environment at UC Berkeley (2019) and is a birder.