Witness, Adventure, and Competing Discourses of the North

Abstract

To examine the trend of “witness tours” that travel to the North American Arctic to experience, document, and then advocate on behalf of environmental issues in the North. These tours are presented as part of a colonial legacy that has long witnessed the North as a space of potential investment from the South. Especially in their reliance upon suffering as a narrative practice to justify their experience, these tours repeat patterns that reduce the agency of Northern communities and peoples to address changes they are facing. The chapter also provides best practices for such excursions and compares their approach to Northern-based expeditions that also advocate for environmental conservation and protection.

In the first part of the chapter, the history of colonialism and exploration sets the foundation for understanding the recent trend in witness tours. These tours are then examined through a discourse analysis of their narratives to highlight their connection with colonial approaches to the North. The final section of the chapter presents three necessary steps to reduce the reliance upon colonial legacies for these tours.

The witness tours examined are heavily dependent upon using their resilience of the travels to travel through harsh landscapes to make their case for caring about these landscapes. Far from being an innocent narrative strategy, this reliance upon suffering provides a level of elitism to these narratives at the same time as it reproduces colonial patterns. The chapter suggests three steps to avoid these problems: (1) Recognize the stories of people who live in the North; (2) Do not present the Arctic as a timeless wilderness landscape; and (3) Understand our limited perspective on the North as outsiders.

The chapter suggests that witness tours need to be understood within the context of a history of colonial exploration in the Arctic as well as the agency of Northern peoples to address both environmental change and colonialism.

Citation

Erickson, B. (2020), "Witness, Adventure, and Competing Discourses of the North", Wilson, B. and Millington, B. (Ed.) Sport and the Environment (Research in the Sociology of Sport, Vol. 13), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 67-83. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1476-285420200000013004