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To examine the trend of “witness tours” that travel to the North American Arctic to experience, document, and then advocate on behalf of environmental issues in the North. These tours are presented as part of a colonial legacy that has long witnessed the North as a space of potential investment from the South. Especially in their reliance upon suffering as a narrative practice to justify their experience, these tours repeat patterns that reduce the agency of Northern communities and peoples to address changes they are facing. The chapter also provides best practices for such excursions and compares their approach to Northern-based expeditions that also advocate for environmental conservation and protection.

In the first part of the chapter, the history of colonialism and exploration sets the foundation for understanding the recent trend in witness tours. These tours are then examined through a discourse analysis of their narratives to highlight their connection with colonial approaches to the North. The final section of the chapter presents three necessary steps to reduce the reliance upon colonial legacies for these tours.

The witness tours examined are heavily dependent upon using their resilience of the travels to travel through harsh landscapes to make their case for caring about these landscapes. Far from being an innocent narrative strategy, this reliance upon suffering provides a level of elitism to these narratives at the same time as it reproduces colonial patterns. The chapter suggests three steps to avoid these problems: (1) Recognize the stories of people who live in the North; (2) Do not present the Arctic as a timeless wilderness landscape; and (3) Understand our limited perspective on the North as outsiders.

The chapter suggests that witness tours need to be understood within the context of a history of colonial exploration in the Arctic as well as the agency of Northern peoples to address both environmental change and colonialism.

Using bibliometrics to examine eight core journals in the year 2000 for the disciplines of higher education and library science, characteristics of the authors were determined, including gender or sex; Carnegie Classification or institutional affiliation; and position of the authors. Characteristics of the articles were also examined, including the research methods used such as descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, or qualitative analysis. A content analysis of each article was performed to determine the subjects discussed in each literature. For both disciplines, it was learned that males publish more, the highest Carnegie Classification, extensive research institutions, were represented the most, and authors came from academic departments other than their own disciplines. In higher education, inferential statistics were used frequently; in library and information descriptive statistics were used frequently; both disciplines failed to use research methodologies regularly. From these findings, it appears that both disciplines are still emerging and are in their early stages of development.