The Storied North: Reimagining Climate Fiction Through Indigenous Narrative and Knowledge
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper argues that Northern Indigenous climate fiction reframes both the Arctic region and the climate crisis, challenging settler-colonial narratives that depict the North as barren, empty, or doomed. Drawing on close readings of Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s The Right to Be Cold (2015), Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth (2018), and Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018), I argue that these works position the North as both a literal and symbolic barometer for climate change – an inhabited, storied, and relational space where survival is collective, intergenerational, and culturally grounded. I place these texts in dialogue with dominant, often Euro-American, climate fiction (cli-fi), which reproduces colonial tropes of the Arctic as hostile and unknowable, demonstrating how these narratives advance a counter-vision rooted in Indigenous epistemologies and lived experiences. My analysis foregrounds how Indigenous temporal frameworks – particularly spiralic and cyclical understandings of time – offer a crucial pedagogical intervention, disrupting linear, progress-oriented Western models of crisis and futurity. In Split Tooth, Tagaq’s portrayal of nuna (land) as kin collapses the human–nature divide, while Moon of the Crusted Snow reframes “apocalypse” as a recurrent historical condition rooted in colonization. Both works resist speculative depictions of survival as exceptional or futuristic, instead grounding resilience in ancestral knowledge, ecological reciprocity, and everyday acts of care – while restoring narrative authority to Indigenous communities. This paper draws on scholarship on Indigenous futurisms, decolonial environmental humanities, and the politics of genre, offering a model for reading cli-fi through place-based, Indigenous epistemologies. Ultimately, I argue that by centring Indigenous voices, Northern cli-fi not only challenges extractive and dehumanizing portrayals of the North but also redefines cli-fi itself as a genre of survivance, relational ethics, and collective futurity – offering critical lessons for climate education and conversation today.
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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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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".