In indigenous cultures that live adaptably in close contact with ice, it has always been an ambiguous entity, and the stories told about glaciers have often blurred boundaries between human and non-human activity. Glaciers appear in these stories as actors – aware and intentful, sometimes benign and sometimes malevolent. In Athapaskan and Tlingit oral traditions from south-western Alaska, for instance, as the anthropologist Julie Cruikshank documents, glaciers are both ‘animate (endowed with life) and animating (giving life to) landscapes they inhabit’. In languages from this region, special
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