‘The Song of the Innuit’: Circulating Arctic ethnographic knowledge through verse

• Published in: cultural geographies
• Main Author: Martin, Peter R.
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: SAGE Publications 2024
• Subjects: Yupik; Alaska
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/14744740241269142; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/14744740241269142; https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full-xml/10.1177/14744740241269142

This article seeks to advance recent literatures exploring the important role of poetry in the production and circulation of geographical knowledge. It does this by critically analysing a poem that was written by the traveller and scholar Wiliam Healey Dall during the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition. This leisurely excursion travelled along the coastlines of Alaska and the Siberian peninsula, and involved a series of encounters with the indigenous Yupik/Yup’ik communities inhabiting this region. It was these encounters that provided the basis for Dall’s problematic poem. As the analysis presented demonstrates, this pseudo-ethnographic poem contained a range of ‘temperate normative’ descriptions of these indigenous Arctic peoples. This in turn perpetuated erroneous depictions of these peoples within the geographical imaginations of non-indigenous peoples across Europe and North America. The article therefore argues that geographers and other scholars must take poetry and other forms of verse seriously as a crucial means by which geographical knowledges pertaining to indigenous peoples were circulated during the long 19th century. This will in turn reveal their vital role in supporting and justifying troubling colonial interventions into the lives of indigenous peoples across the Arctic and beyond.