What does Permafrost mean to you? Inuvialuit and Gwich’in Knowledge Holders’ Perceptions of a Thawing Relation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
While climate scholarship has detailed the biophysical impacts of Arctic permafrost thaw, less attention has been paid to how permafrost is perceived and lived with. Drawing on community-based research with Inuvialuit and Gwich’in knowledge holders in the Inuvialuit and Gwich’in Settlement Regions of the Western Canadian Arctic, we argue that permafrost is more than frozen ground: it sustains mobility, subsistence, and cultural continuity; and its degradation threatens these life-giving relations. Analyzing Indigenous land users’ narratives through the lenses of perception studies and infrastructure theory—and foregrounding critical Indigenous scholarship—we propose that permafrost can be understood as critical and alimentary infrastructure in a decolonial sense: an essential system and web of relations vital to societal functioning and a good life on the land. By exploring the meanings attributed to permafrost as a material, and how Indigenous land users engage with the ever-changing landscape and the acceleration of change in the Mackenzie Delta, our study highlights how permafrost thaw impacts perpetuate power imbalances of settler colonialism, as well as how Indigenous perspectives draw attention to permafrost as inseparable from land, kinship, and sustenance. This engagement expands infrastructural analysis through Indigenous epistemologies, producing new understandings of both infrastructure and environment in Arctic contexts.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".