Ice Geographies: The Colonial Politics of Race and Indigeneity in the Arctic

by Jen Rose Smith

Ice animates the look and feel of climate change. It is melting faster than ever before, causing social upheaval among northern coastal communities and disrupting a more southern, temperate world as sea levels rise. Economic, academic, and activist stakeholders are increasingly focused on the unsettling potential of ice as they plan for a future shaped by rapid transformation. Yet, in Ice Geographies, Jen Rose Smith demonstrates that ice has always been at the center of making sense of the world. Ice as homeland is often at the heart of Arctic and sub-Arctic ontologies, cosmologies, and Native politics. Reflections on ice have also long been a constitutive element of Western political thought, but it often privileges a pristine or empty “nature” stripped of power relations. Smith centers ice to study race and indigeneity by investigating ice relations as sites and sources of analysis that are bound up with colonial and racial formations as well as ice geographies beyond those formations. Smith asks, How is ice a racialized geography and imaginary, and how does it also exceed those frameworks?

248 pages, Paperback

Published May 16, 2025

About the author

With a longtime home base in Vermont, Jen Rose Smith writes about travel, adventure, and food. When she's not writing, she spends her time exploring the Green Mountains, inventing new cocktails, and poring over maps.

Reviews

[Josh Reid · Rating 5 out of 5]

An outstanding book to think with — appreciated the interdisciplinary approach

[Hannah Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

Innovative, creative, and important. Thank you Jen Rose Smith--this is brilliant and inspiring work.