Ethnography as Racialised Womanhood in the Arctic Writings of Josephine Diebitsch-Peary

In the history of Polar exploration, Josephine Diebitsch-Peary is primarily remembered for travelling with her husband Robert Peary in his attempts to reach the North Pole, and for giving birth to their daughter while in the high Arctic. This chapter unpacks the complex interactions between gender, race and environment in the colonial ‘contact zone’ constructed through Diebitsch-Peary’s ethnographic writings. Diebitsch-Peary published a travel narrative, My Arctic Journal (1893), followed by two children’s books, The Snow Baby (1901) and Children of the North (1903). In her writings, Diebitsch-Peary mobilised her embodied difference to the orthodox persona of the male explorer by drawing on the rhetoric of manifest domesticity. Diebitsch-Peary also contrasted herself with Inughuit and Inuit Kalaallit in North Greenland, including the women she lived with for extended periods. Diebitsch-Peary’s descriptions of Arctic Indigenous peoples were highly racialised, paternalistic and embedded within the broader anthropological debates of human developmentalism and nature-nurture. When Diebitsch-Peary described the people she met, she narrated them as part of the natural environment—an environment she in turn described and visualised as inherently foreign and hostile. Diebitsch-Peary’s books were highly popular and shaped visions of the Arctic and Arctic Indigenous peoples in the American context. By taking seriously her books as significant ethnographic texts, this chapter aims to consider how popular literature influenced perceptions of extra-European peoples and environments within the context of white imperialistic expansionism.