Doctoral Dissertation Research: "The sea is our garden": Inupiaq subsistence, indigenous knowledge, and the 'politics of nature' in the context of Arctic offshore development

博士论文研究：“海洋是我们的花园”：因纽特人的生存、土著知识以及北极近海开发背景下的“自然政治”

• 批准号: 1303991
• 负责人: Hilda Kurtz
• 金额: $ 4.02万
• 依托单位: University of Georgia Research Foundation Inc
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-08-15 至 2014-07-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1303991&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; sea; our

Recent trends suggest that a new era of industrialization is dawning in the Alaskan Arctic. These processes will likely require the Iñupiat of the North Slope to increasingly balance their concerns for their traditional practices and subsistence lifestyles against both the promises as well as the challenges of economic growth and development. Yet the decision-making structures surrounding projects like the Arctic offshore drilling program are now largely dominated by the western values and perspectives held by outside authorities and business interests. This research will explore how the Indigenous Knowledge (IK) of the Iñupiat can and should be used to ensure that regional management outcomes are culturally sensitive to the realities of Alaskan Native existence today.Contemporary Native scholars insist that the IK of any tribal peoples cannot be correctly understood without an equal willingness by westerners to explore the unique worldviews and lifeways that inform Native knowledge systems. Geographic interest in the notion of nature as a social construct also suggests that culturally constituted notions of nature may provide the necessary interpretative framework that allows for a much more comprehensive understanding of indigenous knowledge. The theoretical impetus for these efforts is found in the environmental justice concept of cultural misrecognition, which proposes that a refusal to explore the complexities of indigenous knowledge systems is a profound act of dismissal that often perpetuates a cycle of social and environmental inequity. This research will use a variety of qualitative research methods to investigate how coastal Iñupiat communities in the Alaskan Arctic think about and relate to nature, in order to better understand how these views have shaped their traditional knowledge and beliefs. This research also seeks to identify what aspects of their worldviews and IK that Iñupiat community members themselves consider to be important for non-Natives to know about and understand. In addition, this project engages with the subsistence concerns and IK of the Iñupiat within the context of the complex political, economic, and cultural issues that many Native communities throughout Alaska now face. The findings of this research will ideally inform the debate currently shaping the trajectory of development in the Arctic by highlighting both the practical challenges as well as the epistemic promise that an exploration of Native understandings of nature offers to contemporary resource management practices. This research further examines how such knowledge held by the Iñupiat could greatly enhance the offshore drilling decision-making process, which is at present driven mainly by technological considerations. The ultimate goal is to establish a template for development in the Far North that can promote both regional economic growth as well as the subsistence lifestyles of Alaskan Natives. In this way, it may become possible to manage a changing Arctic in a socially equitable and environmentally just manner.

最近的趋势表明，在阿拉斯加北极的一个新时代，这些过程要求他们越来越多地倾向于他们的传统实践和生活方式，而不是经济增长和发展的诺言。钻探的钻探是由外部当局和企业利益所拥有的西方价值观和观点所涉及的。西方人的厌恶意愿探索iNowledge系统的独特世界观和生命之道。建议拒绝土著人的复杂性。这项研究还旨在确定他们的世界观和ikupiat社区成员本身，以便在复杂的政治，经济和文化的背景下了解和ik。现在，阿拉斯加的许多本地人面临着目前的辩论。 iñupiat构成了越野钻探决策过程，主要是由技术考虑的，最终的目标是建立一个在远北的发展模板，可以促进阿拉斯加人的无用的经济增长。