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Contribution short abstract:

How did understandings of permafrost emerge from settler colonial contexts? This paper traces the influence of Russian colonialism, Soviet industrialization, and US military development on the history of permafrost science to illuminate the coloniality of permafrost as a scientific idea.

Contribution long abstract:

My paper forms part of a roundtable exploring settler-colonial knowledge and practices in the United States and Siberia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Preston McBride probes the ways that American Indian boarding schools transformed Native North America by restricting Indigenous economies, altering migration patterns, and forcible relocating 250,000 Indigenous children. These schools were carceral and the children, who contracted lethal diseases, died in large numbers. McBride’s transdisciplinary research draws on epidemiology, history and Indigenous studies to expose the settler-colonial logics that led to Native American erasure. Char Miller finds these same logics manifest in botanist William L. Bray’s ambitious biogeographical surveying of Texas between 1897 and 1907. Bray’s cross-disciplinary engagements with biologists, foresters, geologists (even historians!) was revelatory of his generation’s uncritical acceptance of their academic expertise, and in Bray’s case, the settler-colonial initiatives to map, classify, and name species and ecozones to bolster western scientific ways of knowing—and the economic and political control that that knowledge generated. Pey-Yi Chu assesses the role that Soviet permafrost science played in Siberia’s industrialization, which entailed the eastward migration of Slavic workers. By developing solutions for mining and construction, Soviet permafrost scientists facilitated the transformation of frozen earth environments that sustained nomadic pastoralism to landscapes of extraction and urban development. Some permafrost scientists developed ideas about frozen earth that undergirded post-Soviet Russian scientific skepticism about anthropogenic global warming and bolstered ongoing hydrocarbon extraction in Siberia. By exploring the United States and Siberia together, this roundtable engages with cross-cultural and transnational perspectives.