Queer and Indigenous Art: Performing Ice Times in Climate Crisis

This essay takes up cryotemporalities, or "ice times," addressing climate anxiety and feeling regarding measuring, surviving, and anticipating climate crises. Buddies in Bad Times's production Kiinalik: These Sharp Tools (2017) grapples with changing climate, sexuality, colonization, whiteness, and the suppression of Inuit cultural practices in north and south. Studying performance and media works by Laakkuluk Williamson Bathory, Evalyn Parry, Jamie Griffiths, Tanya Tagaq, Zacharias Kunuk, and Norman Cohn, among others, the essay goes on to think with works by the Iqaluit, Nunavutbased Qaggiavuut Society and Igloolik's Isuma Collective. These meditations on performance include Laakkuluk's remarkable uaajeerneq (Greenlandic mask-dancing), the qaggiq or ceremonial iglu (igloo), site of late-winter gatherings for dance, feasting, drumming, games, and practices of gathering and spiritual resilience taken up as "'relived' cultural dramas" by Kunuk and Cohn. These artists' works shape pluralities of ways of knowing and doing that defy singular epistemologies of world, ecology, language, nationhood, and time. Shaped in resurgent Inuit practices, and traveling in the north, south, and internationally in politically charged engagements, these works refuse and interrogate settler constructions of sexuality, gender, and relationship with the nonhuman, speaking potently to contemporary conditions of rapid thaw affecting Greenland and Nunavut. Centering Inuit arts, languages, and practices while addressing recent histories and living memories of forced settlement, extraction, and cultural genocide in the Arctic and sub-Arctic, these works reveal ontologies of time charged with resurgent epistemic possibility, turning toward embodied and reimagined performance practice and expression in the circum-polar north.