Nature's State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier / Edition 1

by Susan Kollin

Overview

An engaging blend of environmental theory and literary studies, Nature's State looks behind the myth of Alaska as America's "last frontier," a pristine and wild place on the fringes of our geographical imagination. Susan Kollin traces how this seemingly marginal space in American culture has in fact functioned to alleviate larger social anxieties about nature, ethnicity, and national identity.

Kollin pays special attention to the ways in which concerns for the environment not only shaped understandings of Alaska, but also aided U.S. nation-building projects in the Far North from the late nineteenth century to the present era. Beginning in 1867, the year the United States purchased Alaska, a variety of literary and cultural texts helped position the region as a crucial staging ground for territorial struggles between native peoples, Russians, Canadians, and Americans. In showing how Alaska has functioned as a contested geography in the nation's spatial imagination, Kollin addresses writings by a wide range of figures, including early naturalists John Muir and Robert Marshall, contemporary nature writers Margaret Murie, John McPhee, and Barry Lopez, adventure writers Jack London and Jon Krakauer, and native authors Nora Dauenhauer, Robert Davis, and Mary TallMountain.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807849743
Publisher:	The University of North Carolina Press
Publication date:	11/05/2001
Series:	Cultural Studies of the United States
Edition description:	1
Pages:	248
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.55(d)

About the Author

Susan Kollin is associate professor of English at Montana State University in Bozeman.

Read an Excerpt

Inventing the Last Frontier

[O]ur powerful images of country and city have been ways of responding to a whole social development. This is why, in the end, we must not limit ourselves to their contrast but go on to see their interrelations and through these the real shape of the underlying crisis. —Raymond Williams, The Country and the City

[L]andscape is an object of nostalgia in a postcolonial and postmodern era, reflecting a time when metropolitan cultures could imagine their destiny in an unbounded "prospect" of endless appropriation and conquest. —W. J. T. Mitchell, "Imperial Landscapes"

After the Exxon Valdez tanker spilled eleven million gallons of crude oil into Alaska's Prince William Sound during the spring of 1989, a great public outcry arose as the nation witnessed images of dying wildlife, oil-drenched beaches, and polluted seas on nightly television and front pages of newspapers. Considered one of the world's only remaining wilderness areas and one of its most popular tourist destinations, Alaska has been widely regarded as the "Last Frontier," a region whose history has yet to be written and whose "virgin lands" have yet to be explored. The oil spill threatened to disrupt Alaska's wilderness status, however, as Prince William Sound came to signify the profound environmental catastrophes facing the United States at the end of the twentieth century. According to many news reports, the Exxon Valdez disaster was most tragic because it took place in an area whose natural beauty was thought to surpass all others. If the region was a relatively unknown location for many Americans before the disaster, in the weeks and months after the spill, the media ensured that Prince William Sound became a household name through stories tracing its decline from a formerly pristine ecosystem into a place of extreme pollution.

Over the past two hundred years, however, intensive land and resource use in the form of mining, whaling, logging, and fox farming had altered this seemingly pristine region in rather dramatic ways. Even though forests in a secluded bay in Prince William Sound had been logged out by 1927 and second-growth timber had already been harvested by the time of the spill, the mainstream media nevertheless used images of this same bay to portray the sound as a once untrammeled but now endangered wilderness region.[1] While few reports questioned the accuracy of these depictions, a look at the oil industry's own record of operations in Alaska also indicates that the Exxon Valdez spill was just one of many environmental disasters taking place in the history of Prince William Sound's industrial development. The 1989 disaster, for instance, marked the four hundredth spill in the region since oil began to be transported from the North Slope in Prudhoe Bay to the port of Valdez in Prince William Sound. Even when production in the North Slope began to decrease in the late 1980s, six hundred Alaskan spills were being reported each year, prompting the EPA to name several locations in the area as severely contaminated.[2] In the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez disaster, however, most mainstream news reports ignored the history of the region's economic development, and instead produced stories lamenting the destruction of one of the world's last remaining wilderness areas.

I highlight these points not because I wish to suggest that the oil spill was a small mishap that should be quickly brushed aside or that a strong public outcry was somehow unjustified; rather, I draw attention to these points in order to foreground the ways Alaska was shaped in the weeks, months, and years after the disaster. When we consider the rhetoric of the outcry following the spill, it becomes apparent that something else was at stake in discussions of the Alaskan landscape for, in addition to destroying populations of wildlife and polluting vast areas of sea and land, the disaster also threatened the meanings and values assigned to Alaska in the popular national imagination, understandings that were not necessarily shared by indigenous populations across the state. Patrick Daley has examined the media coverage of the spill, comparing the ways Alaska Native and nonnative newspapers defined the event. He argues that for the most part, mainstream reports relied on conventions of the disaster narrative, seeking to lessen confusion and assure the public that the danger was contained. Later, these news reports began concentrating on the human-interest aspect, voicing the frustrations of local residents who were disillusioned with the oil industry, and with state and federal governments. The people who predominantly figured in this coverage were white commercial fishermen from Valdez and Cordova, cities located between twenty-eight and fifty miles from the spill.

With this focus, however, the mainstream press ended up neglecting the disaster's impact on Prince William Sound's largest private landowners—the Alaska Natives. Particularly absent were the voices of the Aleut villagers of Tatilek who resided only six miles from the spill's origin. In contrast to mainstream reports that featured images of oil-drenched birds and damaged beaches, symbols of a once untrammeled nature now polluted, Alaska Native reports focused on other, less sentimental, concerns. Tundra Times, a weekly newspaper dedicated to the concerns of the state's indigenous population, primarily addressed the impact of the spill on subsistence issues; instead of featuring dramatic images of oil-soaked wildlife, Tundra Times told of villagers' attempts to cope with the crisis now facing a population for whom nearly 50 percent of its food is harvested from the sea and the land. I point to this study and its comparison of news coverage of the disaster for the ways it highlights competing responses to the oil spill and for the ways it foregrounds contested understandings of human relations with nonhuman nature.[3]

These different understandings may be noted in the way Alaska has been situated as a sublime wilderness area in the nation's spatial imagination.[4] Widely regarded as the Last Frontier, Alaska is positioned to encode the nation's future, serving to reopen the western American frontier that Frederick Jackson Turner declared closed in the 1890s. In this sense Alaska functions as a national salvation whose existence alleviates fears about the inevitable environmental doom the United States seems to face and, like previous American frontiers, promises to provide the nation with opportunities for renewal.[5] This notion of regeneration and renewal is not merely psychological but also involves an economic dimension. With its vast timber, fishing, oil, and mineral reserves, Alaska is thought of as a land endowed with great natural wealth, a terrain offering unlimited commercial opportunities. As a result, it is considered one of the few remaining areas where the United States may enact what Richard Slotkin calls "bonanza economics," the acquisition of abundant natural resources without equal inputs of labor and investment.[6]

During a time when discussions about the environment are repeatedly framed by what Alexander Wilson calls a discourse of "crisis and catastrophe," caring for wilderness areas such as Alaska becomes an increasingly urgent project.[7] I would contend, however, that this anxiety-laden rhetoric does not merely reflect concerns about nature but, more important, signals concerns about U.S. national identity.[8] The discursive construction of Alaska as the Last Frontier marks a yearning for undeveloped lands in a world whose surfaces are perceived to be fully mapped.[9] Because the urge to protect a Last Frontier points both to anxieties about the environment and to concerns about the nation's status and future, Alaska emerges as an object whose production is linked to the United States' identity and expansionist history.

Table of Contents

	Preface	xiii
	Introduction: Inventing the Last Frontier	1
Chapter 1	The Wild, Wild North: Nature Writing, National Ecologies, and Alaska	23
Chapter 2	Border Fictions: Frontier Adventure and the Literature of U.S. Expansion in Canada	59
Chapter 3	Domestic Ecologies and the Making of Wilderness: White Women, Nature Writing, and Alaska	91
Chapter 4	Beyond the Whiteness of Wilderness: Alaska Native Writers and Environmental Sovereignty	127
	Conclusion: Toward an Environmental Cultural Studies	161
	Notes	179
	Bibliography	199
	Index	215

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

A thoroughly researched and well-argued book on the role that Alaska has played in the national psyche. . . . Highly recommended for those wishing to build an understanding of the way Alaska and the concept of wilderness have influenced the American concept of self.—Choice

Kollin examines how accurate the meanings and values assigned to Alaska have been. . . . The literature of the American West, women's studies, environmental studies, and multicultural literature. All of those fields contribute to Nature's State, in which the approaches of environmental studies and cultural studies merge.—Chronicle of Higher Education

Kollin's well-organized study uses a wide array of literary and historical sources to explore the ways that Alaska was transformed from Seward's Folly into a 'fetishized' pristine nature that functions as an environmental safety valve for modern Americans. . . . An insightful and well-written book that raises important questions about environmentalism and national identity that transcend Alaska.—Journal of American History

Lively and well-written. . . . A welcome addition to the field of cultural studies, and overall an engaging and informative read.—Environmental History

Kollin's book shows how Alaska has been constituted as a natural object, leaving no doubt that the 'natural wonder' of Alaska is a deeply cultural phenomenon. Her analysis is careful and prudent, but it's also lively and persuasive. Nature's State should enter the genre as a leading example of cultural inquiry into natural contexts.—Bill Chaloupka, University of Montana, Missoula

Based on scholarship in a wide variety of fields, from postcolonial studies to the environmental justice movement, attentive to the concerns of Native writers, Nature's State is an eminently readable book. Kollin is particularly insightful in exploring both connections and disjunctions between the imaginary and the historical as she analyzes how popular imagery associated with Alaska generates larger meanings about the relationship between the myths of national identity formation and the 'reality' of how the United States has 'developed' its natural resources. With its focus on the rhetoric of nature advocacy and justifications for 'multiple uses' and its analysis of the formation of environmental policy, Nature's State is a particularly timely book as government officials push increased oil drilling in designated wilderness areas.—Melody Graulich, editor, Western American Literature

Editorial Reviews

Kollin examines how accurate the meanings and values assigned to Alaska have been. ("Chronicle of Higher Education")

With its focus on the rhetoric of nature advocacy and justifications for ?multiple uses? and its analysis of the formation of environmental policy, "Nature's State" is a particularly timely book as government officials push increased oil drilling in designated wilderness areas. (Melody Graulich, editor, "Western American Literature")

"Nature's State" should enter the genre as a leading example of cultural inquiry into natural contexts. (Bill Chaloupka, University of Montana, Missoula)

From the Publisher

Kollin examines how accurate the meanings and values assigned to Alaska have been.

Chronicle of Higher Education

Nature's State should enter the genre as a leading example of cultural inquiry into natural contexts.

Bill Chaloupka

With its focus on the rhetoric of nature advocacy and justifications for 'multiple uses' and its analysis of the formation of environmental policy, Nature's State is a particularly timely book as government officials push increased oil drilling in designated wilderness areas.

Melody Graulich