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Visions of Consent Nunavummiut Against the Exploitation of “Resource Frontiers”
Abstract
Despite a long history of colonial, military, and extractive industry imposition on the land, waters, and people of Inuit Nunangat, resistance to such efforts is thriving. Through highlighting the work of The Place Names Program and Arnait Video Productions, I show how Nunavummiut (the people living in Nunavut) employ visual media to publicly wage their place-based knowledge as a mode of creative intervention against military and extractive forces, and the ways in which such forces have permeated Inuit bodies, lands, and waters. So successful are these visual acts of resistance that they compel southerners to reevaluate their approaches to northern development so drastically that projects are abandoned or no longer seen as viable. In putting these strategies into practice, Inuit engage with state-sanctioned systems of law and governance, but ultimately reshape these structures to better suit their own needs and the needs of the Arctic land and sea. The maps produced by the Place Names Program and films produced by Arnait Video Productions resist visions of the Arctic as a wasteland and of Inuit bodies as pollutable, instead putting forward visions of consent and reciprocity. Ultimately, I argue that seeing the Arctic in ways that challenge military and extractive representations and center Inuit epistemologies and voices, plays a significant role in halting the continued molecular and chemical colonization of Inuit lands and bodies. In other words, visual media is a tool for resisting unwanted extractive and military bodily intimacies, and insisting on consent before entry of these toxic presences.