The Colonial Politics of Arctic Landscapes: A Conversation with Jen Rose Smith

In this wide-ranging and critical conversation, I speak with Jen Rose Smith about her new book, Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race & Indigeneity in the Arctic (Duke University Press, 2025). In it, she reflects on the political stakes of writing about Alaska as an Eyak scholar, Indigenous studies methodologies and its relationship to ethnic studies and Black studies, and “careful guessing” as an ethical approach to scholarship on the environment.

Dr. Smith, in troubling the normative assumptions about ice and the far North, shows us what ice geographies hold—as imaginary, as reality, and as possibility—for thinking about Indigenous politics. A truly interdisciplinary study, Dr. Smith reminds us that sometimes understanding a geography and a people’s relationship to it might require us to think and read promiscuously.

Stream or download our conversation here.

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Interview Highlights

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Hi’ilei Julia Hobart: Thank you for letting me interview you about your beautiful new book, Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic, published by Duke University Press. What is the book about for somebody who maybe hasn’t picked it up yet?

Jen Rose Smith: Part of the goal of writing the book was really to think about ice—glaciers, snow, snowflakes—in material ways, scientific ways, cultural ways. I wanted to approach ice through a critical lens that puts the politics of race and indigeneity and the violence of dispossession and racialization at the center. How can we think of ice and ice geographies as racialized spaces and places? What does that do for the study of ice, or the way we think about ice, or how ice is represented in cultural objects?

HJH: I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about what the stakes of the book are.

JRS: For me, with all of the writing that I do, it’s never really possible for me to bracket the political. I don’t know if any of my writing doesn’t have stakes in it, because it’s really the only way that I find the energy to write.

I grew up in South Central Coastal Alaska, in Eyak territory, which might not come to mind immediately when thinking about ice geographies. It’s not high north; it’s not part of the Arctic Circle. But I did grow up around glaciers and cold and the colonial sensibilities that make those categories. By virtue of this, I understand that identity necessarily includes and is shaped by the colonial histories of ice geographies. Writing as an Alaska Native person, I think that that’s always part of the stakes. Part of the politics is that ice and the ideas of cold come to shape how people see you and how people have categorized Alaska Native people and indigenous people of the Arctic.

HJH: I think one of the most important interventions that this book makes is a methodological one—the method that you name as “careful guessing” or “careful guesswork.” I think it’s really brilliant. I was hoping you could talk a little bit about what careful guessing looks like to you, and what do you think it pushes against?

JRS: I think writing about careful guessing and finding the blurry edges of it as a methodology helped me write the various chapters. It didn’t feel particularly new to me. That is, I’m not saying anything that many other, especially Native studies, scholars don’t already practice or haven’t written about. In that sense, I think it’s important to name because it’s helpful to others trying to see how one crafts an argument ethically and politically. I’m not doing things perfectly, but I did put a lot of thought behind how I wrote the book and the choices that I make.

Native studies, Black studies, and ethnic studies scholarship is about how to be in the best kinds of relations you can be with your interlocutors. In my case, that means thinking carefully about ice, a non-human materiality, agent, and worker in the world. And so, I tried to think about how all of these things I have learned and read can apply to something like ice.

How do I be in good relation with poetry? I tried to do that through this idea of careful guessing. That is my attempt to center slowness and consent and really trusting the gut. As researchers, we’re conditioned to ignore something that doesn’t feel good, but really trusting that intuition is an insight I’ve gained largely from poetry, especially Joy Harjo’s work. So, careful guessing is really about thinking not just about what is the best question I can ask, but all of the conditions that shape those questions that you are able to ask in this particular political moment in time. Those conditions don’t emerge from nowhere; they’re shaped and created. Giving time and space to consider those, really mess with the foundation of our thought to ask those questions.

HJH: Can talk about which piece of the project you first wrote and which piece of the project you last wrote? And, are there any kind of Easter eggs hidden in the book that we can look for in order to track how your thinking was developing over time?

JRS: Yeah, I love that question. My dissertation was more centered on Alaska Native politics, in particular. There was a moment in trying to answer some of those questions about Alaska that this other project about ice emerged.

I was about trying to figure out why Alaska Native peoples and polities have the particular political history that we do—and how that is distinct from a lot of Native studies scholarship and Native American history. Some of that is about the timing of colonial and imperial violence and dispossession. But, some of it is about the ways that Alaska was understood as this ice box: It was imagined and materially documented as a space of ice. And that shaped how Alaska Native people were racialized—the ideas about who these people were and where they fit or didn’t within the hierarchies of race at the time.

Finding those moments in the archival materials were how I came to learn about environmental determinism and how these things were working in other spaces of the globe. Those are some of the early moments of the book: finding out why the idea of cold shapes who and how I can move as an Alaska Native person today.

HJH: In the center of the book, you have lovely full-color reproductions of contemporary art pieces by the artist Lorna Simpson. Can talk a little bit about what these works look like and how they fold into the argument that you’re making in that chapter?

JRS: This was a really fun chapter to write. It feels like a big lit review of all of my favorite writers and thinkers. And then, at the end of the chapter, I work to bring in examples of these thoughts cohering in artwork and in creative knowledge production.

Lorna Simpson is painting these big canvases of icebergs and blue, deep blue, blue landscapes of ice. In interviews, folks ask her things like, “Okay, you have these big canvases of melting icebergs. Certainly what you must be thinking about and giving us political, social commentary about is climate change and melting ice.” And her answers on these interviews have always been along the lines of, “No, this is not about climate change. These pieces are not about the environment. These paintings are about racism.”

There’s this compulsion to make ice into this generalized representation of all kinds of environmental loss. The melting ice is one of the most spectacular visuals of environmental destruction—and one that is supposed to belong to all humans equally. And so, Simpson is like, “Yeah, that’s what you might see. That’s what you might imagine immediately. But in fact, these paintings are about violence—racial violence.

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Featured image: A close-up of ice in Ho Chunk territory. Photo by Jen Rose Smith, 2025.

Podcast music: “Gloves” by Julian Lynch. Used with permission. 

Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu) is an Assistant Professor of Geography and American Indian Studies at the University of Washington. Her first book, Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic, was published with Duke University Press in 2025. Website. Contact.

Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart (Kanaka Maoli) is Assistant Professor of Native and Indigenous Studies at Yale University. An interdisciplinary scholar, she researches and teaches on issues of settler colonialism, environment, and Indigenous sovereignty. Website. Contact.

Previously on the Edge Effects podcast, Jen Rose Smith interviewed Hi’ilei Julia Hobart about her book, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment (Duke University Press, 2022). You can listen to that conversation here or wherever you get your podcasts.

Special thank you to Rudy Molinek for organizing and guest editing this episode after his tenure with Edge Effects.