“The Arctic is a place where people go to become more of what they are” – Speculative Arctic Ecologies and Futuristic Anti-Extractivist Horror in Sean and Rachel Qitsualik-Tinsley’s “Lounge”

Abstract

This chapter explores Indigenous Arctic Horror fiction as a boundary-crossing form of speculative fiction exploring the power of Indigenous narratives beyond settler colonial imaginaries. Sean and Rachel Qitsualik-Tinsley’s Arctic story, “Lounge” first published as part of the collection Taaqtumi – An Anthology of Arctic Horror Stories (2019), will form the main focus of my analysis. To frame my reading in the context of Indigenous stories of warning that may be understood as analogous to monster tales (see Collier-Jarvis, Krista (2024). Beneath the ice: exploring the qallupiluk. Nighttide Magazine , 29 December. https://nighttidemag.com/2024/12/29/morbid-minds-beneath-the-ice-exploring-the-qallupilluk/ (Accessed 17 October 2025); see Borwein, Naomi Simone (2025). Global Indigenous horror . University of Mississippi Press, Jackson, Mississippi), I will also draw on the Qitsualik-Tinsley’s retelling of the Qallupiluq myth from Innuit mythology in “The Qallupiluq Forgiven” (in Ajjiit: Dark Dreams of the Ancient Arctic [2011]). I argue that “Lounge” destabilizes extractivist approaches and codes Indigenous knowledge in the materiality of the land. The main part of my analysis focuses on the ways in which “Lounge” interweaves imaginative physics and speculative fiction around autonomous technology with Indigenous knowledges about kinship and relationality to create a narrative that challenges an extractivist-colonial understanding of the world in general and imagines a future of Arctic ecologies that is grounded in Indigenous thought. Drawing on Indigenous as well as Anglo-European criticism, I read Indigenous horror as indicative of the disruptive potential of Indigenous speculative fiction that moves beyond colonial imaginaries of Indigenous people as inhabitants of a lost past and a precarious, “Othered” present.