John Muir is often celebrated for his profound sense of place, yet the Alaska he made famous was built partly on what he could not make sense of. This talk proposes "reading from the canoe," a method for reading Travels in Alaska alongside Tlingit stories, like “Kaax’achgóok,” and theorizations of place and life. Traveling through Lingít Aaní in canoes captained by Tlingit sailors, Muir was materially and epistemically unsettled by relations he could not make sensible, relations that survive in his prose only as figure and omission. Against Muir's Alaska, observed and recorded from a distance, Tlingit canoes offer a sense of place grounded in kinship, reciprocal obligation, and change. Attending to what Muir registered but refused in favor of settler comprehension, the talk asks what a sense of place might mean when it is known only through the opacity of relation rather than possessed.
Breadcrumb
The Unsensibility of Place
Mitch Jurasek is a third-year PhD Student in Columbia University’s English and Comparative Literature Department and a literary, cultural, and environmental researcher of colonial Alaska, his home state. Broadly, he studies the ways human communities have made contact and produced meaning across human and more-than-human differences. More specifically, he traces how power and material have flowed—and continue to flow—to and from the here-ish locus of colonial Alaska. Prior to Columbia, he worked at Outer Coast College in Sitka, Alaska. His work has been supported by venues such as the Colby Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities Fellowship, the Provost Doctoral Fellowship at Columbia University, and Bowdoin College’s Kaufman Family Research Fellowship. His research has been awarded Columbia University’s Robert John Bennett Memorial Award, for the best paper in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences expressing original thought in comparative literature or across literature and the arts & sciences.
