Do Glaciers Listen? Anniversary Edition: Local Knowledge, Colonial Encounters, and Social Imagination

This anniversary edition of Julie Cruikshank's acclaimed work demonstrates the ways in which natural and cultural histories become entangled.

Do Glaciers Listen? examines conflicting understandings of glaciers in the Saint Elias Mountains, a rugged area where Alaska, British Columbia, and the Yukon Territory meet. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, significant geophysical change coincided with social upheaval from a growing European colonial presence and increased trade among Indigenous Peoples.

The European visitors saw glaciers as inanimate and subject to empirical investigation. However, Indigenous oral histories described glaciers as sentient, responding to human behavior and shaping the physical and cultural environments through which they move.

Through these contrasts, Cruikshank demonstrates how local knowledge is produced rather than discovered through colonial encounters, and how it often conjoins social and biophysical processes. The result is an interdisciplinary tour de force filled with insight about our relationship to the world around us.