Domestic dogs have been central to life in the North American Arctic for millennia. The ancestors of the Inuit were the first to introduce the widespread usage of dog sledge transportation technology to the Americas, but whether the Inuit adopted local Palaeo-Inuit dogs or introduced a new dog population to the region remains unknown. To test these hypotheses, we generated mitochondrial DNA and geometric morphometric data of skull and dental elements from a total of 922 North American Arctic dogs and wolves spanning over 4500 years. Our analyses revealed that dogs from Inuit sites dating from 2000 BP possess morphological and genetic signatures that distinguish them from earlier Palaeo-Inuit dogs, and identified a novel mitochondrial clade in eastern Siberia and Alaska. The genetic legacy of these Inuit dogs survives today in modern Arctic sledge dogs despite phenotypic differences between archaeological and modern Arctic dogs. Together, our data reveal that Inuit dogs derive from a secondary pre-contact migration of dogs distinct from Palaeo-Inuit dogs, and probably aided the Inuit expansion across the North American Arctic beginning around 1000 BP.

This article takes a performative approach to understanding the significance of hiking practices in 'wilderness' landscapes. It examines the role of the Norwegian Trekking Association in nationalising hiking practices in Norway through the use of technologies of governance and by incorporating people into particular practices of movement. The paper thus shows how the Association was implicated in the production and continued re-production of a nationalised landscape, and how the performance of route-making and route-following have prioritised certain kinds of activities, and hence certain kinds of people, over others.

This article approaches Indigenous concerns with World Heritage through the use of three Norwegian Sámi sites. The article argues the importance of approaching World Heritage as a process. A process, in this context, is a multi-sited, multi-dimensional coming into being. Exploring the ways in which World Heritage sites are brought into existence provides the opportunity for a closer view of exactly how Indigenous rights are relevant. The three Norwegian Sámi cases examined confirm the need to maintain two perspectives of the use of Indigenous rights. Firstly, Indigenous rights are useful as a postcolonial trope, making visible the cultural gaze of World Heritage institutions and processes. Secondly, heritage protection processes have a concrete impact upon the lives of a people. Significant themes in the course of such processes are opportunities of co-management; the continuation of cultural practices and opportunities for economic development. While Norway, internationally speaking, is recognised for its Indigenous rights initiatives, cases of heritage protection have indicated the existence of several severe blind spots in the Sámi rights implementation.

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As a collaborative production, the exhibition New Arctic aspired to explore postcolonial versions of the Arctic. For this purpose, the exhibition included, among others, an installation called a map machine, seeking to display the Arctic as a site of ongoing ontological politics. To our audiences, the map machine visualised how an inhabited Arctic continues to become a periphery, open to new resource exploitation, a Dreamland “out of space and time.” In this text, I mimic the work of this map machine by describing a series of outside interventions on the Varanger Peninsula, in the Sámi core areas of Norway. The case that initiates the set of actions described in this text is a proposed expansion of a quartzite mine in the small village of Austertana. I illustrate how maps and bureaucratic processes as working political technologies introduce new cartographic visions of this land–water interface, counteracting other existing versions of the same landscape. The case illustrates how exactly such new visions impose urgently meaningful single-action landscapes, or how the Tanafjord was literally reworked from a landscape of endangered species to a landscape defined by an issue of maritime security.