UC Berkeley

Contested Icescapes is an ethnographic and historical study of climate and agrarian change in the Northwest Territories, Canada. This dissertation examines how and in what ways marginal Arctic land has become an imaginary and material frontier for agriculture and considers the implications of the new frontier for rural and Indigenous lands and livelihoods. Through archival and ethnographic research, I contribute a deeply situated analysis of agricultural development and broader food systems change in this cold-climate region. I trace the entangled histories of settler colonialism, agricultural development, and climate change, and I demonstrate how these forces (re)shape the subjectivities and class relations of rural peoples, as well as their relationships with the state, Indigenous governments, society, and the environment.

Throughout this dissertation, I develop the concept of “contested icescape,” which I use to analyze how various material, social, and political-economic forces assemble and reassemble to enable a Northwest Territories’ agricultural frontier at various historical moments. The contested icescape also refers to a discordance between frontier imaginary and frontier reality, and it is in this liminal space – shaped by local political contestations, increasingly uncertain ecological futures, and historical transformations in the regional political economy – that Northwest Territories’ agriculture continues to be characterized by smallholder family farmers and subsistence agriculture.

Despite deep historical and political tensions between commercial smallholder famers and Indigenous subsistence growers, I demonstrate that both groups have been dispossessed of land and livelihoods as a result of new climate enclosures. I argue that rural and Indigenous peoples are adapting to new conditions of production and social reproduction, yet these adaptive practices are mediated by long standing colonial inequalities and transformations in the regional political economy. This dissertation underscores the importance of Indigenous and local environmental governance in climate justice.