The Map Is Not the Territory: Indigenous Climate Sovereignty in the Age of Apocalypse
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis grapples with two distinct but interrelated issues: Indigenous climate sovereignty and the imagination of climate apocalypse. It is particularly concerned with how these two themes intersect in the High North, a landscape continually constructed as a periphery and frontier. In the pages that follow, I explore the misalignments between colonial projections of the land and its people, and the lived experiences of climate change and colonialism as I encountered them in two Alaska Native villages. This thesis is rooted in a multisited ethnography in Norton Sound, in Western Alaska. The ethnographic object of this study is not Alaska Native communities, but rather the forms of politics that connect rural Indigenous governments to colonial centres of power in the United States Federal government. In that sense, the research presented here is as much a political ethnography as it is an environmental one. The conclusions presented in this thesis are fourfold. 1) Marginalised Alaska Native communities face a neo-colonial pressure whereby, in order to receive assistance, they are required to adopt the bureaucratic forms and logic of their colonisers; 2) the manner in which the Arctic has been enlisted to support popular apocalyptic climate discourse echoes the modernist role the region played in 19th- and 20th-century constructions, as a mirror for urban humanity; 3) social scientists and humanities scholars have broadly neglected the importance of situating knowledge about climate change and ecological futures, and instead resort to sweeping, planetary gestures; and 4) urban narratives of climate apocalypse offer a potent antidote to political alienation.
abstract: This thesis grapples with two distinct but interrelated issues: Indigenous climate sovereignty and the imagination of climate apocalypse. It is particularly concerned with how these two themes intersect in the High North, a landscape continually constructed as a periphery and frontier. In the pages that follow, I explore the misalignments between colonial projections of the land and its people, and the lived experiences of climate change and colonialism as I encountered them in two Alaska Native villages. This thesis is rooted in a multisited ethnography in Norton Sound, in Western Alaska. The ethnographic object of this study is not Alaska Native communities, but rather the forms of politics that connect rural Indigenous governments to colonial centres of power in the United States Federal government. In that sense, the research presented here is as much a political ethnography as it is an environmental one. The conclusions presented in this thesis are fourfold. 1) Marginalised Alaska Native communities face a neo-colonial pressure whereby, in order to receive assistance, they are required to adopt the bureaucratic forms and logic of their colonisers; 2) the manner in which the Arctic has been enlisted to support popular apocalyptic climate discourse echoes the modernist role the region played in 19th- and 20th-century constructions, as a mirror for urban humanity; 3) social scientists and humanities scholars have broadly neglected the importance of situating knowledge about climate change and ecological futures, and instead resort to sweeping, planetary gestures; and 4) urban narratives of climate apocalypse offer a potent antidote to political alienation.
author: Lezak, Stephen
language: eng
keywords: Climate change, Alaska, Indigenous, Adaptation, Apocalypse, Governance, Bureaucracy, Colonial
license: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/5c16a5bf-387f-4497-a280-994c72389544/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2024-05-10
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:23:54Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.114245