'Like Ice Floes': Iñupiaq Sovereignty and Settler Migration on Alaska's North Slope ...

• Main Author: Walsh, Elizabeth
• Format: Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: Apollo - University of Cambridge Repository 2022
• Subjects: Alaska; environment; labour relations; Native studies; settler colonialism; north slope; Prudhoe Bay
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.17863/cam.95794; https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/348370

My dissertation examines relations between Iñupiat in the village of Utqiaġvik on Alaska’s North Slope and a number of non-Iñupiat transient workers who, enticed by generous salaries, have temporarily relocated there. A focus of my study is the North Slope Borough, founded by Iñupiat to preserve their political autonomy and funded by taxes collected on the nearby Prudhoe Bay oil fields. My research tests and refines theoretical frameworks concerning settler colonialism. I draw on political, economic, and environmental literatures in sociocultural anthropology, as well as Native American and Indigenous studies and interdisciplinary settler colonial studies, to show how Iñupiat and non-Iñupiat village residents engage in day-to-day interactions guided by differing economic motivations and different understandings of community, place, and value. By working in an Indigenous community with both Iñupiat and non-Iñupiat, my research adds contemporary, on-the-ground, ethnographic insight into the ways in which ...