April 13, 2009 -- For the Inupiat people of northern Alaska, whales are a way of life. These people eat the animals. They worship them. They organize their calendars around them. And on and on. It's been that way for thousands of years.
Now, however, climate change is pushing the whales further north, making it harder for the Inupiat to catch them. That environmental shift is threatening the culture's fundamental roots.
"If you have to pick one animal that is an icon of their traditional unity and identity, it's got to be the whale," said Chie Sakakibara, a cultural geographer at The Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York. "Their identity is synonymous with the whales."
And yet, these "people of the whales" are working hard to adapt to a changing world, said Sakakibara, who has spent five years documenting the Inupiats' efforts to cope.
Related Content:
"They are putting human faces on the phenomenon of global warming," she said. "This is a problem that will be happening to us in the near future."
The Inupiat subsist on a variety of animals, including caribou, seals, musk ox, and most important of all, bowhead whales. They eat the whale's meat, use its jawbones to build houses, and make drums out of its stomach. No part of the animal goes to waste.
Bowheads are huge, blubbery whales that spend much of their time in the coldest waters high in the Arctic. But every spring and fall, they swim past northern Alaska. And there, in Barrow and Point Hope, Inupiat communities spend months preparing for the hunt.
When the whaling season finally arrives, teams camp on the frigid sea ice for two months. After a successful kill, amidst musical celebrations, hunters distribute meat equally across the community. The Inupiat believe that the spirit of the whale watches over the entire process.
When Sakakibara first visited the Inupiat in 2004, she spent lots of time with whale hunters and their families. She was struck by how much these people spoke of the unpredictable weather and how hard it was becoming to catch whales.
In particular, warmer water temperatures have pushed the animals further north. Thinning sea ice has made camping for the hunt more dangerous. And coastal erosion has pushed Inupiat communities further inland. These changes and others have made whaling more and more challenging.
The good news, Sakakibara's research shows, is the Inupiat are working hard to cope with their rapidly changing world. They are adapting traditional stories, changing the timing of their drumming and dancing rituals (by using music to bring the whales to them instead of making music to celebrate a catch), and strengthening their appeals to the spirit of the whales.
The Inupiat are also adopting new technologies, such as outboard motors. They have traditionally chased whales in wooden boats that are coated in whale oil and driven by oars and lots of hard work.
"Because of where they live, they're used to coping with change and environmental danger," said Robert Rundstrom, who teaches geography and Native American studies at the University of Oklahoma in Norman. "So they might provide insight into how humans are capable of adapting."
And even the Arctic is changing more quickly than other areas, the Inupiat may have lessons that extend beyond their whale-centered lives.
"It's both a very focused study on a people and their relationship to whales, but it also has implications for how we understand human-wildlife relationships in drastically changing situations all over the world," Rundstrom told Discovery News. "In mainstream society, we think of ourselves as being very distinct from animals. There's them and there's us...For the Inupiat, for 2,000 years, it's been a wholly different ballgame."
Related Links:
Get the Wide Angle on Climate Tipping Points
our sites
video
mobile
shop
stay connected
corporate
