Northern Landscapes: Place- and Identity-Making in Sub-Arctic Canada

Abstract

This chapter focuses on Barlow in Yukon, Canada, and is broken into two broad sections exploring place- and identity-making. Specifically, Eglinton highlights the narrative of marginalisation and overarching geographic dichotomies including, for instance, urban/rural, organising youth place-making, before turning to the ways in which place sat in tension with the (racial and gender) identities youth actively sought to produce. The author describes the negotiations youth needed to make when drawing on hip-hop as a tool in their identity- and place-making: she zooms in on racial and gender identities – in this case, on a youth cultural formation in Barlow called the ‘Original Gangstas’ or ‘OGs’ (a group of Indigenous boys who identified as black and drew on the performances of hip-hop artists). Eglinton argues the OGs, a group that was, in part, a product of colonialism, the physical landscape, Indigenous values, visual material culture (VMC), and the like, was not local orglobal but a relational form continuously produced in the space among the social-political-material landscape, the inequitable conditions of globalisation, and the global cultural flows (including VMC), all of which were at once a resource and constraint on youth identities. The author concludes by extending Appadurai’s (Theory Cult Soc 7:295–310, 1990; Global ethnoscapes: notes and queries for a transnational anthropology. In: Fox RG (ed) Recapturing anthropology: working in the present. School of American Research Press, Santa Fe, pp 191–210, 1991) scapes (e.g. mediascapes) to include ‘landscapes’ as both contexts and artefacts mediating youth self- and world-making.