![\"Photo:](\"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/files\/2023\/12\/Catherine-West-on-Chirikof-Island.jpg\")
Peoples of the Arctic, CAS AR291\/AN291, taught by Catherine West<\/a>, a CAS research associate professor of archaeology and of anthropology, will look at the \u201cdiverse and thriving communities\u201d of the region, using archaeological, oral history, historic, and ethnographic data, exploring how the past can be used to highlight contemporary issues in the region. (Both courses fill departmental and BU Hub requirements.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEveryone is connected to the Arctic,\u201d Craciun says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n She should know. She\u2019s been there several times for her research, most recently this fall when she traveled to Svalbard<\/a>, a Norwegian archipelago above the Arctic Circle. As she puts it: go to the top of Norway and turn right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt was terra nullius<\/a> for a very long time, until the 1920s,\u201d she says. \u201cThat meant it had no native population. So anyone in the world could basically go out there and start mining or hunting or whatever. So it was this international, very Wild West kind of frontier place.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Svalbard Treaty went into effect in 1925 and made the archipelago part of Norway, but with unusual provisions, so that any nation that signs the treaty (even today) can establish a scientific base there or conduct business. \u201cNow there is intensifying international attention because of climate change,\u201d Craciun says, with a significant Russian presence as well as scientists from many nations. Things have been a little less neighborly up there since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, she notes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Temperatures in Svalbard in October reached 15 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit\u2014\u201cunusually warm,\u201d Craciun says. She stayed in the largest town in the archipelago, Longyearbyen, on the coast of the island of Spitsbergen, where there are some nice small hotels and restaurants and cruise ships stop. But it\u2019s not Comm Ave.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe famous thing people say about it is that it has more polar bears than people, which is true,\u201d she says. \u201cYou can\u2019t leave town without an armed bear guide.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n You may have heard of the Norway-owned Svalbard Global Seed Vault<\/a>, on the island of Spitsbergen, which holds more than 1.2 million seed samples as a genetic backup for biodiversity and the world\u2019s food supply in case of global catastrophe. Beyond the doomsday-bunker entrance is a subterranean vault, buried inside a mountain under permafrost and rock, in which the seeds are frozen at -18\u00b0C.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The vault is opened only three times a year, when it takes deposits of seeds from all over the world. On a previous visit during a deposit week, Craciun was able to go inside with vault scientists, but after some flooding a few years ago, access has been even more restricted. So in October, she met with the director and other scientists in Svalbard, as well as visiting the vault\u2019s headquarters in Sweden.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Craciun is writing a book about how scientists and ordinary people have been fascinated by the abilities of plants and seeds to survive for extreme periods of time, longer than the lives of individual humans and even of civilizations, potentially reaching a state labeled as \u201cimmortality.\u201d Her project focuses on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as our own current iteration of this much older scientific and humanistic project, reaching back to the Scientific Revolution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Scientists in the 1700s and 1800s devised experiments to explore the limits of seed longevity, but their scientific interest was always inseparable from a larger cultural and specifically religious inquiry into the mysterious powers of seeds to remain dormant and awaken, with a socially meaningful and often religious component.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cSeeing the Seed Vault as part of this much older Enlightenment tradition, not just as a creature of 20th-century genetic resource research or our climate crisis,\u201d she says, \u201cis crucial if we are to understand\u201d the intense public focus and attachment to it.<\/p>\n\n\n The class, however, will take a wider, interdisciplinary look at the region, she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI\u2019m hoping people will be interested, in that there\u2019s a geopolitical dimension, there\u2019s a historical, anthropological dimension to the Arctic as a whole,\u201d she says. A lot of the class will focus on the North American, Arctic, and the pan-Arctic Inuit culture, including literature, songs and poems, art, and films by young Inuit filmmakers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Craciun also organizes the Arctic Environmental Humanities Workshop Series<\/a> for the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future and the Scott Polar Research Institute<\/a> at the University of Cambridge. The series\u2019 next virtual symposium is December 12. (Find details below.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Normally when you read about the Arctic in the news, she says, it\u2019s always about sea ice loss or another bad climate change milestone. \u201cIt is warming faster, at least four times faster than the rest of the world, which is just a number. But when you go there, it\u2019s so apparent, the changes are happening so quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cBut it\u2019s not just a climate lab for us here in the south to worry about or to think about. It\u2019s important to populate it with histories and layers of meaning and multiple kinds of living beings.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s also the goal of West, whose Peoples of the Arctic class will teach students to look beyond the common images of the Arctic as either a wasteland or a rarified, mystical place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIn fact, it\u2019s got this deep human history, people are well adapted to live there, people still thrive there today,\u201d West says. \u201cIt is a space that has a deep, deep indigenous history. And we\u2019re also going to look at its paleoenvironmental records, what did it look like 40,000 years ago, 10,000 years ago, 1,000 years ago, when there were huge changes in climate.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The class will also examine cultural change through the Alutiiq people of the Kodiak Archipelago, who\u2019ve lived there for almost 8,000 years, and their salmon fishery; whaling along the North Slope of Alaska, its cultural and biological significance; and places in Greenland where the archaeological record is being seriously threatened by rising sea levels, literally crumbling into the ocean.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s [the Arctic] not just a climate lab for us here in the south to worry about or to think about.Adriana Craciun<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIndigenous people have suffered terribly under colonization and climate change threats and industrialization,\u201d West says. \u201cAnd yet they continue to thrive and adapt.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n She also wants her students to understand the diversity of evidence used to understand this long trajectory, including historical documents, oral history, and archaeological evidence, like artifacts and bones and plants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n West\u2019s research now focuses on how these animal bones and their reflection of the local environment can be used to inform contemporary environmental questions. So how has warming or cooling affected specific animal species like Pacific cod and Pacific salmon, which today are struggling as marine heat waves increase in frequency in the Gulf of Alaska and here in the Gulf of Maine?<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cIt\u2019s pretty straightforward to connect these long-term records to contemporary questions,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The environment has been part of West\u2019s connection to the Arctic from the beginning. She first visited the far north when one of her professors in college got funding to excavate sites in the Aleutian Islands after the Exxon Valdez<\/em> oil spill and asked if any students wanted to join the monthlong summer dig.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cI thought, this is pretty fun. I want to do this again,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The latest event in the <\/em>Arctic Environmental Humanities Workshop Series<\/em><\/a> is a virtual symposium, Svalbard: Four Times Faster, an interdisciplinary conversation exploring the social, geopolitical, and cultural forces transforming this unique and cosmopolitan place in the face of climate change. It will be held Tuesday, December 12, from 9 to 10:30 am, and is free and open to the public. Register <\/em>here<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What happens in the Arctic doesn\u2019t stay in the Arctic. Rapid global warming, extractive capitalism, threats to wildlife, ecotourism, indigenous rights disputes, even a bit of international friction\u2014it\u2019s all happening above roughly 66\u00b0 34\u2032 north latitude\u2014aka the Arctic Circle. Four…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1133,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-habitat"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcticwatch.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcticwatch.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcticwatch.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcticwatch.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcticwatch.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1130"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/arcticwatch.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1130\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1131,"href":"https:\/\/arcticwatch.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1130\/revisions\/1131"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcticwatch.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1133"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/arcticwatch.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcticwatch.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/arcticwatch.info\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Photo:](\"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/files\/2023\/12\/Svalbard-Global-Seed-Vault.jpg\")
State of \u201cimmortality\u201d<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
![\"Photo:](\"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/files\/2023\/12\/Arctic-Reindeer-scaled.jpg\")
A rarified, mystical place?<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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