I'm Jago Cooper I'm Head of the Americas at the British Museum and I'm Amber Lincoln a
curator in the Americas section at the British Museum. Welcome to the Citi exhibition Arctic:
culture and climate. In the Arctic climate change isn't a distant threat in the future it's the
lived experience right now. There are places that are melting for the first time in human history
and this exhibition is about the lives and experiences of the people who live there.
At the heart of this exhibition is decades of collaboration with indigenous Arctic people
Jago, Peter Louvers and myself have worked with hunters, herders, scholars
political advisors, seamstresses, storytellers on this exhibition and we're particularly grateful
that they've been so generous in sharing their knowledge. To really understand the Arctic,
you need to do what I'm doing now; stand on top of the north pole and look down at the world.
When you see the circumpolar north from this perspective you start to understand some of the
connections between the different places from the nets of Siberia to the Inupiat of Alaska
from the Sami of Northern Europe to the Inuit of North America. These cultures are incredibly
diverse and have their very own histories but there's one thing which bonds them together.
What I'm standing on is the sea ice and that's melting at an astonishing rate.
Ice is also access to bountiful worlds. Andrew Qappik's 'There's Another One' beautifully
captures the rich life underneath the sea ice and its significance for people who rely on that life.
And this is as important today as it was in the past. When we think about the problems and
solutions of climate change it really needs a sort of fundamental rethink about how we live with the
planet. If you conceive of the planet as a sort of finite set of resources that those with the power
and technology can exploit for their own gain, then that's a difficult place to start. The Arctic
is the complete opposite of that. People are an integrated part of the ecosystem. They're part
of a living world and just one small humble part of it. This translates to the aesthetics of art
itself. Throughout this museum you see these big marble monuments, iconoclastic objects of power.
But the value of what art means in the far north is completely different. So this fish skin bag,
translucent, ethereal, created in the 19th century captures this understanding that when you take an
object the value and beauty of its creation is how you respect the environment from which it came.
So if your starting point is thinking about the environment in a completely different way, then it
changes everything about your relationships with it. Take hunting for example, you might think that
hunting and the success of hunt is based on the technology you have or the skills as a hunter.
But in the Arctic that's not the case, it's the choice of the animal who they wish to give
themselves up to and they do that based on the the personality of the hunter, their soul and the
aesthetics of their tools. Take this world's first wetsuit behind me which was used to go out hunting
whale. This is an object that had to be perfectly created in order to justify the killing of the
whale. And these practices, these ideas, continue throughout the Arctic today. So if you take Brian
Adams' photograph of Marie Rexford from Northern Alaska, Brian is an Inupiat photographer and he's
capturing the continuation of these practices with the whale blubber lying down ready to be socially
shared after the success of the hunt. For Arctic Indigenous People the weather isn't something to
be resisted or overpowered, it's something to be used, it's a tool to be harnessed. So for instance
seamstresses who make the wonderful clothing and footwear that make life in the arctic possible
have a knowledge of weather. They use particular forms, they use particular temperatures,
humidity and seasonality in order to tan the hides used to make clothing such as the gut skin parka
that are so essential to hunters and others for traveling and staying dry. They tan the gut skin
in a deep freeze, the coldest part of winter, to get this very opaque white with flexibility.
This is weather knowledge that people use. In frozen climates, icy seas, being able to
predict the weather is essential knowledge for hunters and reindeer herders.
In conversations we had with hunters in Shishmaref of Alaska, for instance Delano Barr
explained to us how he learned from his grandparents and father to predict the weather
and they used the stars, they used the colour of the sky, they observed animals to see
how they were behaving um and this was essential before hunting in through kayak for instance.
You needed to know the swell of the waves was the ice coming in. Unfortunately with global climate
change these generations of knowledge this you know of patterns of weather knowledge is
made obsolete as global climate change is making weather patterns alter so so significantly. And
hunters like Delano Barr have stressed that we all have to adjust ourselves to the weather.
We have to make changes. When everything starts changing due to global warming,
oh boy that messed up everything. You know the way of thinking. The way we live because
our ocean would be completely frozen by October. I mean,
with this climate change now it's still summertime in October here up here and we're
near the Arctic Circle we're just a few miles south of the Arctic Circle in Chisholm up here.
Many people don't realize that the Arctic has been populated for more than 30,000 years.
People were living in the far North long before Britain was repopulated after the last ice age.
And these people in the far North have lived through big changes before. And what we see from
their technologies, from the things they leave behind is their amazing ability to adapt and
develop new technologies. One of the reasons we know so much about Arctic prehistory now,
is that these objects are now melting out of the permafrost due to climate change. Here we see some
objects from some walrus hunters living in northern Siberia around one and a half
thousand years ago. The beautiful intricacy of the walrus bone and ivory
shows how these people were creating objects using materials traded in from the south. You can see
small pieces of iron are hafted in the ads heads. This essence of the Arctic, this ability to adapt
to large amounts of change, to innovate with new technologies, these are essential skills
that people in the Arctic need today. Like their ancestors before them, Indigenous Arctic People
have used these same resilient strategies, adaptation, innovation and collaboration
to manage the the rapid social economic and political changes of the last 300 years.
These have been the result of European exploration and the Russian annexation of Siberia,
and the colonial stories and histories that that came after that. Some of the earliest encounters
between Inuit and European explorers for instance were violent such as Martin Frobisher's
encounter with Inuit of Iqaluit in 1577, but others have shown an incredible amount of
collaboration as these well-adopted local people shared their knowledge for instance with Ross's
crew in the 1830s. Rhere's a depiction by Ross himself of two Inuit men looking at a chart and
explaining where the Europeans were at the moment and and giving them local knowledge. And in turn
the Europeans, who were often ill-equipped for these harsh climates, were incredibly impressed
with the innovative technology and the use of resources that many of the people they encountered
had displayed such as this early Inuit sled from Northern Greenland which is
made and remade from many different materials; driftwood, antler. And what's amazing about this
sled is that you can see the reuse of the material so everything was so efficiently saved and kept
that you know a crossbar would have been reused for a bow drill for instance and then
reused into something else and you can see the evidence of that when you look closely at this
wonderful sled behind me. This is an Inuksuk. An Inuksuk is a place marker in the landscape and
you can find them throughout the Far North created by the Inuit. This particular one
is one built by Peter Irniq, who's Neujat in repulse Bay. After many years of discussion,
Peter came over to London and and went down to a quarry in Kent and then took out some Kentish rag
stone and built this inuksuk right here in the British Museum. In a way, they act as markers
or places in landscape that can connect up the the geographies of London and the Far North together.
And when you hear Peter Irniq talk, for him they act as symbols of resilience,
symbols of knowledge that are passed down through generations and that remain to today. Inuksuk is
a really good way to learn about Inuit culture, Inuit customs and Inuit traditions because as
I said inuksuk is a symbol of survival for Inuit since many many thousands of thousands of years
ago. Since Arctic Indigenous People are on the front lines of global climate change,
they're also leading the way in raising awareness and finding solutions to the problems affecting
their communities. We've asked two Indigenous Arctic organizations to curate this section;
the Shishmaref Erosion and Site Expansion Coalition and the Inuit Circumpolar Council Alaska
have brought two major issues that they're dealing with to the visitors here in London. Shishmaref,
a low barrier island is rapidly eroding as a result of fierce storms. They are working to
prevent being some of the first climate migrants. The Inuit Circumpolar Council of Alaska
is working for food securities. Some of the problems that come from climate change also
include the the melting of the permafrost, invasive species, increase in contaminants.
This is affecting people's food systems and of course being able to continue to
hunt and gather and fish is really important to people.
So what's amazing about these organizations is that they're relying on some of these same
strategies adaptation innovation collaboration that their ancestors have used for millennium.
'Atigiit Silapaat' the beautiful printed parkas above us were created by
young kids in Kinngait and Pangnirtung Nunavut who are inheriting a warm Arctic. They've been
working with a group of artists out of Toronto, the Embassy of the Imagination,
to reflect on climate change and the experiences of changing environments around them.
They are calling for reciprocal global action and solidarity during this time of transformation.
Most exhibitions at the British Museum are about the past, but this is an exhibition
which is really about the future. We really hope that you'll come along and listen to the
stories being told by communities in the Arctic and look at the incredible objects
that have these narratives of living in a time of dramatic global change.