Walrus Skins and Weet-o-Weet: Uncomfortable Encounters in the Yupik Yaranga

This article analyzes a series of Arctic colonial encounters that took place between British naval officers and members of the Indigenous Yupik community in the mid-nineteenth century. Using a critical exploration studies approach and combining this with recent research investigating the geographies of dis/comfort, this article develops the concept of “uncomfortable encounters” to analyze written descriptions of the Yupik yarangi produced by these Arctic travelers. Presenting analysis of unpublished archival materials, the article focuses specifically on the sensorial, embodied descriptions contained in these accounts and investigates the uncomfortable atmospheres that the travelers experienced during visits to these tent-like dwellings. The article argues that these problematic descriptions reproduced and reinforced racialized understandings of Arctic Indigenous peoples, depicting them as intellectually, morally, and culturally inferior. The article thus concludes by calling for historical geographers to incorporate geographies of discomfort more fully in their analyses to gain deeper understandings of both archival materials and the histories they reveal.