Dr. Jen Rose Smith is a young academic who has dedicated her early career to studying Arctic ice through the critical race theory lens of colonialism, white privilege and racism.
On Aug. 30, the publicly-funded University of Alaska Southeast (UAS) hosted Smith for its prestigious Egan Fall Lecture Series, where Smith will pontificate on her forthcoming book, “Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity.”
Like many emerging critical race theorists on the cultural left, Smith holds to the belief that racism, colonialism and white privilege lurk hidden in myriad corners of Western civilization, both past and present – even in our understanding of ice and kelp.
According to a notice about the event, Smith is a UAS graduate and Alaska Native who currently works as an assistant professor of geography at the University of Washington. Her work “explores the social and political contexts of ice and kelp, highlighting indigenous knowledge and its relationship to coloniality and race.”
In a 2022 interview about her new book she claimed, “On a general scale, I’m thinking about how ice has been wielded as a tool and a terrain for furthering multiple forms of white supremacy.”
She went on to criticize Western civilizations for failing to respect ice as an entity that “has agency” and “moves and shapes and responds to the world.”
“We don’t just act upon ice, ice is also making decisions of its own accord,” she asserted. “In that sense, I’m thinking about what ice does offer, just by virtue of existing in all of its movements, shapes, and conditions, to thinkers, intellectuals, scholars, etc. for thinking about relations of power. I’m interested in critical analyses of race, and indigeneity, thinking about these constant struggles over territory and sovereignty, especially again, as ice is changing shape and moving, particularly in Arctic spaces.”
She casts a critical eye towards “some humans that are working so hard to try and control ice and understand ice and all of the possible dimensions that they can, but the truth of the matter is that ice is actually quite elusive. It eludes many of these sorts of dominant colonial formations of thought.”
Ultimately, Smith believes that a white – or Western – understandings of ice view it as either a tool or an obstacle to control indigenous people and their spaces by harnessing power and extending political might.
While enjoying the life of a paid academic in the halls of Western institutions, Smith openly attacks the belief that Western agricultural-based civilizations, which allow for leisure, are preferable to ones that are surrounded by ice and dependent on a hunter-gatherer society.
At one point in the 2022 interview, she was asked about her thought on LANDBACK, a leftist political and cultural movement intent on giving land to indigenous groups that claim ancient ownership over large swaths of modern America. This philosophy is closely associated with dogmas promoted by Black Lives Matter and neo-Marxist philosophy.
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According to LANDBACK.org, the overall movement strives to dismantle national parks, including closing Mount Rushmore, and returning public lands to indigenous tribes.
LANDBACK.org claims that Mount Rushmore is “an international symbol of white supremacy and colonization. To truly dismantle white supremacy and systems of oppression, we have to go back to the roots. Which, for us, is putting Indigenous Lands back in Indigenous hands.”
“It is a political framework that allows us to deepen our relationships across the field of organizing movements working towards true collective liberation,” the website adds. “It allows us to envision a world where Black, Indigenous & POC liberation co-exists. It is our political, organizing and narrative framework from which we do the work.”
Smith echoes many of these talking points, and claimes that Natives believe Alaska “isn’t’ actually U.S. land, because the land was never ceded.”
“For me, LANDBACK looks like literal land back, like in acres, for those of us who have been dispossessed, and continue to be dispossessed,” she said in the 2022 interview. “But I think it also means control and management over industry, jobs, markets, housing, and resources, and specifically an Indigenous management network of those resources. So, it’s about the literal land itself, but also a control over resources and the management of resources. In addition to that, it also looks like Native folks having complete and unfettered access to their homelands, to the management of those lands.”
In announcing Smith’s talk in Juneau, UAS Chancellor Aparna Palmer said it was “an opportunity for all of us to delve into the many worlds of knowledge that exist around us” in order to “engage and inspire minds and hearts.”
17 Comments
Well at least this one is kinda cute. Brainwashed, but cute.
OK, so what happens to those of us white folks born in this country? Are we now to be dispossessed and sent back to Europe? And living ice? What happened to physical geology? In fact, what has happened to science in general? Geography used to be the means to get to know other civilizations. This looks more like a special discourse on history, using the CRT to discount everything but native contributions. While I am in favor of “telling it like it was”, I am not in favor of blanket condemnation of any race.
She says “ She casts a critical eye towards “some humans that are working so hard to try and control ice and understand ice and all of the possible dimensions that they can, but the truth of the matter is that ice is actually quite elusive. It eludes many of these sorts of dominant colonial formations of thought.” She says this in Juneau where right now they are trying to figure out how to control the jökulhlaup, which is the release of the glacial lake that forms on the Mendenhall glacier every year. I wonder how many of the Juneau Marxist league actually live in the houses destroyed by this year’s flooding event? I wonder if they would agree with this woman’s rhetoric?
So in her world view, do Natives who live next to ice outrank those who live in the desert, or maybe on the eastern seaboard? So difficult to keep track of the degrees of grievance assignments. Does she provide a chart?
It would also be interesting if she would present a chart depicting the migratory histories of her ancestors.. As they traveled from Asia.., and what we now call Russian territories, as well as from other countries.. And also, include the impact on preexisting cultures in the lower latitudes, (Clovis as only one example) as some of them migrated on down.
Agree. It’s like dimwitted folks like her just took a snapshot of history and ignored the rest. Real smart, this insanity.
From time immemorial, humans have moved and displaced other groups. Surely her ancestors did likewise, as you note. She never even notes this, much less explains why her recent snapshot governs.
And will she give up her vehicles, computers, phones, etc? If not, well, is that not hypocritical?
Lastly, since most so-called “natives” have European blood, would they even exist if the “white” man had never come?
Or is it all about power, truth be damned?
The Glacial Moraine Society is probably planning a riot in Anchorage this weekend. What next?
Lol
poop in the ice and your legacy will live on!
Someone chuck this idiot into the Chukchi.
You gotta give her credit: she does have some creative writing skills.
What a crock of crap! Do all so called academics think this way? Is it a requirement to blame all the world’s problems on white supremacy and colonialism because it’s convenient to do so?
An academic? Technically, yes. But her PhD is in “ethnic studies,” AKA a basket weaving degree. Has she ever even taken a college calculus course? I’m an engineer; calculus is like elementary to us. BUT methinks NO ONE should be able to get a college degree without taking a year or calculus and physics. Oh boy, would that ever weed out dimwits! Academia would be the better for it, I’m certain.
Oh dear. I have my BA in philosophy, graduated from a liberal arts college with a CGPA of 3.98, but I’ve never formally studied calculus or physics.
I’m sorry, but this woman is grasping. At what, I’m not certain. But I know for sure that her ideas are idiotic.
I just came back from her presentation at the Egan Library. Not only are her ideas idiotic, but it is also false and poorly connected. I commented to her that 20-25 years ago, the last speaker of the Eyak language passed away. It was well documented by Anchorage Daily News, Juneau Empire, etc. She was visibly offended by my comments, stating that it depends how I define a “speaker” of languages. I responded that speakers of languages communicate in full sentences and convey messages to each other in a fluent format; not just saying “hello” and “goodbye.”
At the end of her presentation, I argued that disappearance, revival and/or evolution of languages has only partially to do with politics of colonization. If languages of ethnic minorities are not institutionalized or contribute very little to socio-economic development of the dominant culture, then those languages will eventually decline or become a symbolic representation of a given ethnic group. It happened to native languages in Siberia, Alaska, Africa, etc. Yes, languages decline and disappear.
Israel’s revival of their original Hebrew language from 1948 and on resulted in a gradual disappearance of the Yiddish language (German dialect of Jews) spoken by many East European Jews.
Frankly, most people in the audience could not understand her concept of ice, open space and colonial politics. But new Chancellor Palmer of UAS was delighted by her presentation.
In her presentation, Jen Rose Smith argued that there are many speakers of Eyak language left in Alaska. Alaska Native Language Archive describes it differently. In short, this “Professor Jen Rose Smith“ is a new version of the far-left ideology.
Alaska Native Language Archive
“Eyak is not an Athabaskan language, but a coordinate sub-branch to Athabaskan in the Athabaskan-Eyak branch of the Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit language family. Eyak was spoken in the 19th century from Yakutat along the south-central Alaska coast to Eyak at the Copper River delta, but by the 20th century only at Eyak. It is now represented by about 50 people but no surviving fluent speakers. With the passing of Marie Smith Jones on January 21, 2008, Eyak became the first Alaska Native language to become extinct in recent history.”