North American Arctic

Just to kick things off, I thought we could start by taking a look at the more historic angle on the polar regions, understanding what has shaped their governance,

So I think it's really important to say if you talk about the polar regions, you just have to be very mindful that the Arctic and Antarctic are very, very different geographical spaces and they have very different political and economic histories as well.

So briefly, The Arctic is clearly different to the Antarctic geographically because it's a semi enclosed ocean surrounded by land and it's been occupied for millennia by indigenous communities, northern settlers.

and by and large in the last 30 40 years we would have said has been widely celebrated as being a sort of zone of collaboration and cooperation and clearly the last four or five years as a consequence of the full-scale invasion of ukraine by the russian federation have challenged some of that but that would have been the picture we told about the arctic during the cold war the Arctic was one of the most militarized and securitized places on the planet.

So whilst we can talk about the last 30, 40 years being relatively peaceful, collaborative, it's really important environmentally that we understand that the Arctic still has lots of toxic Cold War legacies to deal with.

And that's a particular challenge in russia but also actually in greenland canada and parts of the united states the antarctic is a continent surrounded by the immense southern ocean arguably it's more interesting here because the political geography is complicated we have a 1959 antarctic treaty that declares for the first time a region that is a zone of peace and collaboration and, importantly, should not be nuclearized.

So it's actually the world's first nuclear-free zone.

And that would have been fine.

So what is it? Now, like all Indian reservations, the story of how the Navajo Nation came to be is complex and tragic.

Its Dine people have inhabited the Southwest since their migration from Arctic America around the 15th century AD, but the path that directly led to the establishment of the reservation began with the Long Walk.

After years of conflict between European Americans and the Dine, the US federal government directed the army to end what was, in their eyes, the Navajo problem.

Soldiers descended on Navajo land, destroying much of their civilization, and one by one forced bands of Dine to walk 400 miles or 650 kilometers from their homelands to Fort Sumner in New Mexico, where they were imprisoned on cramped, unproductive land.