Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination

Abstract

Do Glaciers Listen?: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination. By Julie Cruikshank. (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2005; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. Pp. xii + 316, acknowledgments, introduction, maps, photographs, illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $25.00 paper) Do Glaciers Listen? The title's very question pulls the reader in. By the end, it is clear that the answer lies with the reader, with the environment itself, and with narratives yet untold. Author Julie Cruikshank weaves a complex and engaging work that explores the intersections of history, culture, science, environmental change, theory, and methodology. She introduces the work with narratives dating from the later stages of the Little Ice Age (which lasted roughly between 1550 and 1850) of individual and group relationships to and encounters with the glacial landscape of the St. Elias Range, which traverses the borders of the Yukon, British Columbia, and Alaska. Cruikshank expresses hope that her book will "contribute to literature about environmental change, local knowledge, and human encounters" (9) . Yet in its exploration of how narrative not only reflects who we are, but shapes our perspectives and influences our decisions as we relate to the landscapes in which we live, her book does much more. After the introduction, the book is divided into three parts. The first provides geological and historical background as well as glacier narratives from three female Native Alaskan elders, born between 1890 and 1902, with whom the author had worked since the 1970s. Here and throughout the book, Cruikshank propounds theories of oral history, ethnography, and anthropology that inform the stories and continue to influence their interpretation. This academic deliberation makes the book especially attractive to oral history practitioners and to workers in interdisciplinary academic fields concerned with the study of culture, narrative, and social memory, of which folklore is one. Part Two shifts to oral and written narratives about glacier exploration and cross-cultural encounters between indigenous peoples and among indigenous peoples, Europeans, and Americans. Cruikshank presents the evolution of emerging concepts of nature and culture by tracing the compartmentalization dividing nature from culture common among Westerners while simultaneously presenting native peoples' relationships to nature. Cruikshank speculates about transformative moments that have occurred and may continue to resonate in encounters between groups that have differing concepts of their relationship to nature. But in disentangling these moments, the author is careful neither to romanticize nor to polarize the groups. Part Two also examines, in light of current knowledge, John Muir's account of his Alaska expeditions (1879, 1880). Though hailed as a founding father of environmental preservation, Muir is here seen to have romanticized nature and to have been at times reckless, endangering himself on the glacier against the advice of indigenous helpers. …