Circumpolar Connections: Creative Indigenous Cartographies of the Arctic (2025), edited by Liisa-Rávná Finbog, Joan Naviyuk Kane and Johannes Riquet, collects artwork, essays, poems, photographs and mixed-media works that gesture toward the multiplicity of ways that Arctic Indigenous peoples conceptualize place. The volume, a hardcover text, printed in full colour on glossy paper, is both an art book, a scholarly text and a collection of creative writing by artists like Julie Edel Hardenberg, Sunna Kitti and Carrie Ayagduk Ojanen.
The diversity of forms included in Circumpolar Connections results in a cartography that is more expansive than a traditional map featuring two-dimensional representations of the distance between geographic features. Instead, the text emphasizes emotional, physical and spiritual aspects of understanding how to orient the self to the more-than-human world. This is the most powerful aspect of Circumpolar Connections, when the editors allow southern frameworks and narratives about the Arctic to fall away and invite the audience to witness and listen to how Arctic peoples define their homeplace. In southern cartography, mapmakers must choose a singular point of view—what aspect of geography they’ll centre, and then grapple with how the chosen perspective distorts the representation of features furthest from the centre. Often, it’s the Arctic and Antarctic that become the haziest outlines in these maps, left unpopulated and poorly signified.
The challenge for a text like this, whose introduction poses the question, “if, aside from the mere act of mapping, our survey of the land we live on were expanded beyond academic traditions, what would be revealed?” is in translating land-based practices into a two-dimensional form. The challenge is two-fold: first, to represent the different Arctics and peoples who live within them, and second, to navigate legibility for southern readers while still centring Arctic voices and art. For clarity, the text employs a legend of landmarks that guides interaction with the work. The seven landmarks—language, memory, healing, sovereignties, land-based practices, ancestral knowledge, and community—emerged from a series of conversations between the editors and contributors and from a recognition that those themes are intrinsic to the geographies represented in the text. Each landmark heading is accompanied by a brief epigraph and short introduction that highlights thematic ideas for the reader. The epigraphs ensure that the sections are framed by singular Arctic voices, while the introductions offer editorial insights on each topic. This is not a mimetic shoehorning of Arctic Indigenous values into a southern indexical structure. Instead, the editors offer it as textual inuksuit. By providing conceptual rather than geographical markers, the editors emphasize that the landmarks facilitate how the audience orients itself to the collection, rather than a prescriptive naming of place and people.
Inga Anna H Fossli Golden (2024), mixed media, acrylic painting & ink markers on aquarelle paper, 29.7 cm x 42 cm © THE ARTIST
As a Dena’ina Athabascan woman living in Fairbanks, Alaska—someone who is Arctic-adjacent, but not of the Arctic—I found the approach helpful. At the beginning of the “Language” landmark, there’s a suite of untitled, concrete poems by the artist collective sata taas, who originally hail from the Sakha Republic in Russia. The words in each poem fill a particular shape on the page—the first a circle, next a diamond, then a poem that reminds me of the trim on parkas. Each poem series is offered twice, first in English and then in Sakha. Before encountering text, I’m drawn to the recognizable shape on the page and curious about how the artists chose language to inhabit the shape. The poems’ experimentation with form and the text’s conscious presentation of language invite me to note what is known to me and what I might know, while asking me to encounter the new. The juxtaposition of known and unknown encourages engagement and makes it difficult to passively ingest the text. The arrangement also prompts me to ask: what knowledge do I have access to versus what am I invited to witness?
The question of access and witness is helpful when reading the English versions of the poems. The first poem of the suite, shaped like a circle, offers a great deal of access. In a collective, first-person plural voice, the speaker details the experience of embodiment and belonging to the land. The poem opens with the statement, “we close/ our eyes and start to breathe.” It’s a generous act on the speaker’s part, placing the reader as a participant in the poem’s unfolding. As the poem progresses, the speaker states, “our feet become the feet of the earth.” The doubling of the poem’s speaker and the audience is reflected in the offered image of the speaker(s) body as linked to the earth’s body. Then the poem details the transmutation of the human body, first into geographic features (“veins to streams”) and then describes how the body’s communion with the more-than-human world results in altered perceptions, stating “we fly.” The speaker’s change in visual perspective, from the ground to the sky, marks a shift in their orientation to the land. The poem’s speaker then offers a rationale for how the view changes, “here/in alaas spatial and temporal dimensions exist in their own way.” In offering the statement, the poem affirms its own experience of the world, while also offering insight to its audience.
The poem’s inclusion of a Sakha word, alaas, which is left untranslated in the text, offers another level of shared meaning for Sakha speakers and readers. For non-Sakha speakers, the invocation of alaas requires the reader to reexamine how they are related to the “we” referenced at the beginning of the poem. It’s a moment in the collection that reiterates that understanding the landscape requires coordination and attunement to relationship. As the poem continues, the word alaas appears multiple times, increasing in frequency and accruing additional meaning. In its most haunting iteration, alaas appears when the speaker describes how colonizers displaced them from their land and how the displacement affected subsequent generations, “our generation hears scattered fragments of stories and mournings for the lost/ worlds. alaas, alaas, alaas.”
Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich Naniqtuaq (2023) photograph ©THE ARTIST
And then, transformed, it appears again when invoking the communal, “alaas. Here/ we meet each other and look at our hands.” The returned moment of wholeness to alaas and relationship is marked by a return to the body and a shared doubling of its image, the hands.
The poem functions as an ars poetica for the book’s project. It charts its speakers’ relationship to place and values the speakers’ ways of being in the world. The poem notes, but does not centre, how colonization and land dispossession sought to rupture Indigenous connection to place.
No one text can do more than point towards what the editors term the “Indigenous positioning” of self, but the works gathered in Circumpolar Connection provide a rich starting point for audiences unfamiliar with the Arctic. At the same time, the collection places Indigenous experiences of the Arctic at the centre of cartography. How lovely to encounter maps that acknowledge that the Indigenous people of the Arctic and their art are “inextricable from the lands and waters of the circumpolar North.” (92). The editors’ vision of cartographic wholeness, where Indigenous maps emphasize how the more-than-human world is intra-connected and intra-relational, fulfills the same purpose that sata taas’s untitled poems do; it foregrounds Arctic geographies as generative sites for Indigenous Arctic Peoples’ culture.
Circumpolar Connections encourages the reader to imagine how each image and section of text resonates with the material surrounding it. What emerges is a layered mapping of how language and image manifest the relationship between circumpolar Indigenous communities and place.
Annie Wenstrup (Dena’ina) is a poet living in Fairbanks, Alaska where she serves as a coordinator for Indigenous Nations Poets. She is the author of The Museum of Unnatural Histories (2025) and the recipient of a 2025 Whiting Award.