The Storied North: Reimagining Climate Fiction Through Indigenous Narrative and Knowledge

This paper argues that Northern Indigenous climate fiction reframes both the Arctic region and the climate crisis, challenging settler-colonial narratives that depict the North as barren, empty, or doomed. Drawing on close readings of Sheila Watt-Cloutier’s The Right to Be Cold (2015), Tanya Tagaq’s Split Tooth (2018), and Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018), I argue that these works position the North as both a literal and symbolic barometer for climate change – an inhabited, storied, and relational space where survival is collective, intergenerational, and culturally grounded. I place these texts in dialogue with dominant, often Euro-American, climate fiction (cli-fi), which reproduces colonial tropes of the Arctic as hostile and unknowable, demonstrating how these narratives advance a counter-vision rooted in Indigenous epistemologies and lived experiences. My analysis foregrounds how Indigenous temporal frameworks – particularly spiralic and cyclical understandings of time – offer a crucial pedagogical intervention, disrupting linear, progress-oriented Western models of crisis and futurity. In Split Tooth, Tagaq’s portrayal of nuna (land) as kin collapses the human–nature divide, while Moon of the Crusted Snow reframes “apocalypse” as a recurrent historical condition rooted in colonization. Both works resist speculative depictions of survival as exceptional or futuristic, instead grounding resilience in ancestral knowledge, ecological reciprocity, and everyday acts of care – while restoring narrative authority to Indigenous communities. This paper draws on scholarship on Indigenous futurisms, decolonial environmental humanities, and the politics of genre, offering a model for reading cli-fi through place-based, Indigenous epistemologies. Ultimately, I argue that by centring Indigenous voices, Northern cli-fi not only challenges extractive and dehumanizing portrayals of the North but also redefines cli-fi itself as a genre of survivance, relational ethics, and collective futurity – offering critical lessons for climate education and conversation today.