The Arctic offshore issue can be framed in terms of the opportunities and challenges facing the region’s indigenous peoples. The position of indigenous peoples represents a scalar curiosity: with the meaning of ‘indigenous’ malleable and indistinct, scale-frames of ‘Arctic indigeneity’ take on varied forms. Firstly, there is an association with ‘local’, with indigenous groups situated on the frontline of development. Here, terms like 'local communities' and 'indigenous groups' are either bundled up together or used synonymously, with little distinction made between them. The words of one speaker representing the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami at the Arctic Energy Summit 2013 encapsulate this:
‘All the indigenous people that live around the circumpolar world, this home to us and we live with the frontline effects of development. We have in the past and we will continue to do so. Our common responsibility is to continually strive to tip the balance in favour of local people’36.
35 Speaker, Brookings Institute, Arctic Circle Assembly 2013, Arctic Energy Cooperation session, October 2013
36 Speaker, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, Arctic Energy Summit 2013, Sustainable Development and Traditional Ways of Living session, October 2013
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Furthermore, Traditional Ecological Knowledge (or ‘Traditional Knowledge’) is often referred to in discussions around Arctic offshore and indigenous peoples. With its onus on contextual, specific and cultural knowledge related to locality, traditional knowledge positions indigenous peoples as local experts and symbolises Arctic indigeneity’s affiliation with the community level.
Secondly, Arctic indigeneity is framed in a way that brings together disparate indigenous groups under a common identity. Their traditional lifestyles and relationship with resources and landscape are the commonalties that bind people of the Arctic together. Terms like ‘Arctic Peoples’ project the region’s indigenous groups as a homogenous entity spread across a vast land mass. In doing so, an Arctic indigenous level is projected, albeit a geographically ill-defined one, based around abstract notions of a homeland. This is indigenousness expressed in a more generalised sense than family and kinship found at a community level. Instead, it emphasises the societal and trans-societal connections across an Arctic space. This amalgamation of a diverse collection of indigenous groups as ‘peoples of the Arctic’ has governance impacts, magnifying their voice to be heard at a global level and reiterating the Arctic as a ‘homeland’ for those whose livelihoods and traditions are connected to the landscape in a certain way. Organisations such as the ICC and the Sami Council embody this imagining of the Arctic. A member of the Sami Parliament articulates this Arctic indigenous connection:
‘There are a couple of indigenous peoples that we say are related to us in terms of culture and tradition: especially, the Inuit in the west and also the Nunaat to the east. However, the indigenous people in the Arctic have at least one basic thing in common: our lives and cultures are closely tied to the gathering and removal of resources. I mean things like fishing, hunting, trapping and reindeer herding. Our identities, individually and collectively, are closely connected to how we make use of and connect ourselves to the resources and landscape’37. Arctic Peoples scale challenges involve cross-scale, cross-level interactions between jurisdictional and network scales. An Arctic indigeneity in which indigenous groups might identify themselves is difficult to pin down. Declarations like the ICC’s
37 Political Advisor, Sami Parliament, House of Lords’ Select Committee on the Arctic, September 2014
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Resource Development Principles, referred to by several indigenous speakers at Arctic conferences, can be viewed as attempts at making the abstract nature of Arctic indigeneity into something more tangible (Koivurova 2010) and thus more applicable in terms of natural resource governance. As one indigenous representative explains,
‘the declaration allowed the Inuit of the four countries to get together to talk about this critical issue’38. Nevertheless, relating more with network scale categorisation (family, kin, society, trans-society) than jurisdictional (localities, provincial, national, international), the alignment of indigeneity's nebulousness with traditional governance levels creates a scale challenge. For example, an abstract Arctic homeland, where the differentiation between land and sea is not as explicit, can contrast markedly with conventional notions of marine sovereignty. This disparity can lead to frustrations as seen in the remarks of one Point Hope resident at a public hearing on offshore oil development in the Chukchi Sea: ‘You guys are making this decision for us. We have no jurisdiction in these federal waters even though we have been here for thousands of years’39. This sentiment is expressed by an Inupiat leader when he discusses potential offshore oil development and questions who uses the sea and who ‘owns’ the resources and how ‘perhaps it is time for indigenous people, including my fellow Inupiat, to ponder a challenge to the current status quo of how do we share in the resources that are taking place in our homeland’40.
The conflation of ‘indigenous’ with ‘local’ risks bundling together two quite separate elements of natural resource governance. This synonymy between indigenous and local can prove problematic, such as the case with oil and gas development in Sakhalin, Russia, where a desire from foreign investors to meet World Bank standards on indigenous peoples’ engagement suffered problems as only a small percentage of the local population were indigenous peoples. As one academic explained to House of Lords’ Select Committee on the Arctic, ‘the local issues were much more complicated and were not actually related to a very small indigenous population’41. The indigenous-local conflation muddles culture, ethnicity and geography in such a way that what is
38 Speaker, Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, Arctic Energy Summit 2013, Sustainable Development and Traditional Ways of Living session, October 2013
39 Point Hope resident, Public Hearing for 193 Remand - Chukchi Sea Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, November 2014
40 Speaker, U.S. Arctic Research Commission, Arctic Circle Assembly 2013, Polar Law: The Rights of Indigenous Peoples session, October 2013
41 Academic, Statoil, House of Lords’ Select Committee on the Arctic, October 2014
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meant by statements such as ‘Arctic peoples should be at the heart of decision-making in the far north’42 become difficult to decipher.
Ultimately, the scale challenge here revolves around negotiating the malleability of the term ‘indigenous’: its dual meaning of association with jurisdictional locality near sites of offshore extraction and with broader themes of regional identity and culture.