Telling a Story (Map): Indigenous Peoples and the Arctic Council

By GRID-Arendal

May 10^th, 2016

Showing human experience in maps has always been a cartographic challenge. Mainly because it is so complex that it calls for simplification, especially when displaying the story of not one but millions of individuals.

That’s the challenge with a new Story Map project GRID-Arendal is developing for the 20th anniversary of the Arctic Council. Called 20 Years of Action: Indigenous Peoples at the Arctic Council, the project looks at the role the region’s original inhabitants have played in the development of the council. The Arctic Council is unique in global politics because it brings together six Indigenous Peoples Organizations (called Permanent Participants) with the eight Arctic states.

Telling a Story (Map): Indigenous Peoples and the Arctic Council

John Crump and Levi Westerveld presenting the Indigenous Peoples Story Map project to the Indigenous Peoples Secretariat in Fairbanks, Alaska, in March, 2016.

It’s a complex story. To help tell it GRID-Arendal is developing a new series of four story maps to be released later this year to celebrate the Arctic Council 20th year anniversary. The stories will focus on the history of Indigenous Peoples in the Arctic and how have they shaped the work of the Arctic Council. While the council has been around since 1996, the story goes back further than that. The story maps look at who the Indigenous Peoples are, where they live, and what challenges they’ve faced. They also focus on the influence they’ve had on global environmental politics and look to the future.

Still from a video interview with Chief Michael Stickman of the Nulato Tribal Council in Alaska and International Chairperson of the Arctic Athabaskan Council. “I like to have the natural resources … I am a fisherman so I catch fish, and we smoke it in our smoking house. It won‘t spoil, it is finished product. This is the kind of life I live, [and] that is why I put so much emphasis on the renewable resources, because it has to come back year after year.”

This project is different from GRID-Arendal’s previous story maps. Rather than building a narrative around key environmental elements, it focuses on the cultural, social, and political history of Indigenous Peoples in the Arctic. Although the environment of the Artic is crucial to understand Indigenous Peoples in this remote region of our planet, it’s the human story that drives the narrative.

Opening page to the website that will host links to the four Story Maps as well as a video library featuring more than 20 full length video interviews produced for this project.

There are more than 40 different groups of Indigenous Peoples in the Arctic and their histories and experiences are as diverse as anywhere else in the world. The story maps are able to avoid over simplification and use interactive story telling to include many elements beyond the map such as text with links, photos, and videos. These media give us an opportunity to show how events played out at different scales: across the Arctic region, and for single individuals.

Example of a page from “Indigenous Peoples of the Arctic“ showing which territories the six Permanent Participants at the Arctic Council live.

The video interviews of Indigenous Peoples, especially those that have played a role as delegates to the Arctic Council, convey the human aspect and experiences of this story. What does it mean to be Indigenous and living in the Arctic in the 21st Century? In these personal narratives, interviewees discuss the history of their people as well as personal experiences.

These stories bring life to the map, allowing the reader to develop an awareness of the great variety of human culture in the Arctic. They highlight how it has been a homeland for millennia for people whose memories and experiences are engraved on its astounding landscape.

Karen Pletnikoff, originally from the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea, discusses the history of the Aleut people and why it is important to include traditional Indigenous knowledge in research projects in the Aleutian Islands.