Illuminating traces: enactments of responsibility in practices of Arctic river tourists and inhabitants

If taken for granted, ideas about nature underpinning nature-based tourism will often obscure or displace human livelihoods existing within a landscape. The result, whether characterised as colonial or ethnocentric, will in the minds of some correspond with injustice, contemporary or historical. In seeking to avoid static and privileging perspectives of ‘nature’, this article illuminates relational enactments of responsibility in the contrasting practices of tourists and Indigenous inhabitants of a Canadian Arctic riverscape. This intention is informed by first, the relevance of thinking ontologically about nature and, second, the aspects of Emmanuel Levinas' responsibility ethics for identifying relationships amid cultural difference. Empirically, the paper draws on participatory and visual research with guided canoeists and Inuit inhabitants of the Thelon River, illuminating that (a) culturally diverse practices contribute to making and remaking Thelon natures contemporaneously and (b) these practices can be understood as expressions of responsibility to and for others connected to personal and social–cultural identity. In addition to situating river tourists and inhabitants at the centre of responsible tourism debates, the article introduces theoretical, conceptual and methodological spaces for understanding and analysing moral engagements with others in creating culturally sensitive tourism natures and enabling transformation.