Animal Oil, Animal Blood: Energy, Metabolism, and Protecting the Seal Hunt in the North American Arctic as an Act of Colonial Resistance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Interrogating dominant conceptions of energy is an important practice in diversifying the field of the energy humanities. By including various understandings and definitions of energy in the field’s discussions, we can strive to reach a more culturally inclusive understanding of energy. This article proposes that emphasizing a singular conception of energy (petroleum) is socially harmful and leads to inconsistent policies surrounding the trade of energy sources. Specifically, the essay examines the 2009 European Union trade ban on seal products, which continues to adversely affect Inuit communities in the Canadian Arctic by limiting the financial viability of the subsistence seal hunt. The ban occurs while the potential of oil development in the waters surrounding Nunavut is consistently reviewed and examined by the Canadian government, demonstrating bias in which voices are amplified in discussions of energy-related policy during the early twenty-first century. To fully demonstrate the connection between subsistence sealing and oil development, the essay interrogates dominant conceptions of energy and reframes energy narratives. This reframing is compared to historical formations of energetic sources that proved more fluid and less centered on a single source. The discussion identifies Alethea Arnaquq-Baril’s 2016 film Angry Inuk as a central activist text that supports a reinsertion of Inuit perspectives into policy decisions regarding the seal hunt. Furthermore, the film aids in understanding the impact of unilateral energy formations by contesting the 2009 seal trade ban and discussing the subsequent cultural harm. Throughout the essay, the reader is asked to consider in what forms energy appears, as well as the importance of acknowledging the many forms through which energy arises. This leads us to understand that energy formations are reflective of the culture in which they are built, and that restricting the trade of energy is harmful to cultures and communities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".