This dissertation is a material attention to the recent past and present in the circumpolar north, a place seen as the Anthropocene’s canary in the coal mine. Specifically, I focus on Nunatsiavummiut politics and environmental practices amidst materialities that are ephemeral—like sea ice, icebergs, and weather—and materialities that have long and complex afterlives—like objects with multiple generations of reuse, and the ruins of Cold War-era radar bases and toxicity which has leached from these ruins into the land and water. This work centers one 600-person community (Hopedale, Nunatsiavut) from 1948-present for reasons of accountability, long-term relationship-building and because of the richness and specificity of community histories in the circumpolar north. This focus serves as a rejoinder to settler perceptions of the circumpolar north as a melting spectacle demonstrative of a planet-in-crisis. I ask: what local environmental shifts, specific historical actors, and Inuit politics are erased through crisis-driven, planetary framings? By attending to the specificity of the environment, temporality and materiality of the sub-Arctic, I examine how these erasures are produced and map their political repercussions on the Inuit present. This dissertation employs archaeological, archival, and ethnographic methodologies to interrogate fraught histories and presents of colonial occupation and Nunatsiavummiut self-determination. Ultimately I argue that Nunatsiavummiut sovereignty is not only framed by discourse but by practice-based refusal via northern materialities. These northern materialities are both in flux and deny the predictability necessary for colonial occupation, imperial infrastructures and forms of social scientific research. Nunatsiavummiut engagements with these northern materialities via practice-based refusal is in direct contrast to outsider conceptions of the north as a cryo nullius where icy scapes are empty, rather than specifically Inuit and sovereign.