Essay

For many people, the Arctic conjures images of vast untouched icescapes (Dittmer et al. 2011). Yet this image hints towards the truth of the region: it is a homeland to Indigenous peoples who have had relationships with and used its lands and waters for millennia. What you see above is a snapshot of the age-old practice of ice fishing, but there is more to be read in this photo. This module will explore a sliver of contemporary Iñupiat life and bring into question our understandings of “traditional” Indigenous practices, particularly in the context of a rapidly and profoundly changing Arctic.

Kivalina is a 400-person Iñupiat community located about 80 miles above the Arctic Circle on a barrier island along the northwest coast of Alaska. Often described as a subset of Inuit; the Iñupiat also descended from Thule culture and have resided in northern and western Alaska for some 5,000 years. Framed by the Chukchi Sea to the west and the Kivalina lagoon to the east, Kivalina is uniquely poised at the intersection of land and waters which have historically provided its residents with ample seasonal subsistence opportunities. On this particular day in December, a small group of friends from the village took two colleagues and me on an ice fishing trip several miles up the frozen Wulik River. While novel for us southerners, trips like this one are common for people in Kivalina. Along with whales, ugruk (bearded seals), and caribou, fish are a central part of Iñupiaq diets. Dolly Varden (what the locals simply call trout) and greyling are particular favorites, and are usually easy to come by if you know where to look. Local fishers do, because most of them have spent a lifetime on the land and were taught about habits and ranges of fish, animals, and other country foods from a young age by their parents, grandparents, and other community members.

With these kinds of learning norms, it’s true that some aspects of food provisioning in places like Kivalina have remained relatively consistent for generations. However, this photo doesn’t align entirely with mainstream definitions of “traditional” Indigenous hunting and fishing. For instance, you might have noticed the plastic ANCSA bag, synthetic clothing and boots, and shiny snowmachine as curious counterparts to the classic stick rods and fur ruffs. Some of these elements might seem like a departure from traditional Indigenous practices, but this module will show how they are actually a part of them.

In recent decades social, economic, and environmental transformations have altered the ways in which people in Kivalina interact with their ancestral territories and access wild food resources. Climate change especially has created challenging new conditions with great implications for the safety of land users in the area, as well as for food sovereignty (ICC 2020). These immense changes have necessitated increasingly rapid adaptation by Arctic Indigenous peoples, who must struggle to keep pace with them.

“These used to be gradual changes, things we could easily adapt to. But now, it’s chaotic… you can’t take your own knowledge for granted anymore”

– Colleen Swan, Volunteer Search & Rescue Coordinator, Interim City Administrator of Kivalina

Adapting to climate change used to mean adjusting whaling hunts by a few days or going berry picking slightly earlier than in past years. But as Colleen describes above, climate change has wrought drastic impacts that can not be responded to so simply anymore. In fact, climatic warming is unfolding at a rate four times faster in the Arctic than anywhere else on the planet (Rantanen et al. 2022). Loss of permafrost compromises traditional underground food storage systems and creates unstable lakes and bogs that diminish land users’ ability to move across the tundra (Brubaker et al. 2009). Rising sea levels damage homes and render coastal communities unprotected from offshore wind and waves. Storms leave families without power or shelter and sometimes result in deaths (Irrgang et al. 2022). Sea ice freeze-up and thaw are becoming more unpredictable and unreliable each year, threatening the mobility and safety of coastal hunters and resulting in reduced access to hunting areas central to Native food systems (Lin et al. 2022; Meier et al. 2014). Changing animal phenologies create new challenges for subsistence hunters attempting to track them each season, thereby putting local food security at risk (Brinkman et al. 2016). Climate change is also framed as a threat multiplier: in addition to posing the daunting environmental challenges mentioned above, it simultaneously serves to intensify the legacies of colonial violence and social inequity that permeate Arctic Indigenous communities (Whyte 2017).

Despite these challenges, Iñupiat people are not helpless nor hopeless. Resilience and ingenuity in the face of such rapid, entangled changes is part of a long and unbroken history of adaptation by Iñupiat that stems from strong cultural values that center relationality, sharing, hard work, and flexibility. This Iñupiat Ilitqusiat has always guided community action and adaptation, whether in relation to past climatic changes, colonization, or any other number of hardships (Topkok 2015). As many Iñupiaq elders are quick to point out, their culture and communities wouldn’t still be there if they had been bound by strict rules about what they could or couldn’t do to make it through myriad periods of upheaval. Put simply, Iñupiat values mean that adaptation is the Iñupiaq tradition.

Thus, the use of snowmachines, synthetic materials, and plastic bags alone does not make the Iñupiat people in this photo any less Iñupiaq than past generations. Rather, it speaks to the ways in which their practical worldview and value systems translate into their willingness to use whatever tools, resources, and knowledge that are available to them to support self-determination, food provisioning, and decision making in their communities. This does not mean that people in Kivalina have completely abandoned the teachings and skills of their ancestors either. They look up weather forecasts online, but still leverage their embodied knowledge to read the sky and ice for signs of danger before they go out hunting. They use GPS devices, but teach their children how to wayfind using wind and landmarks in case the batteries die.

The true problem then is not that Iñupiat have traded dog teams for snowmachines and harpoons for rifles, but that Iñupiaq agency and intergenerational ties have been jeopardized through historic and ongoing colonial processes. Iñupiaq people are clearly abundantly capable of making decisions about what works best for their communities, but colonialism serves to sever connections between elders and younger generations and between people and the land, distancing them from their Iñupiat Ilitqusiat principals. For example, in precontact times Iñupiaq groups were highly migratory, moving with the seasons to follow food resource availability. When missionaries created a village at the Kivalina site and mandated that families settled there permanently for schooling purposes, those Iñupiat were robbed of their ability to move around freely. The establishment of fixed villages under colonial pressure continues to impact Iñupiaq communities today, especially when coastal erosion and storm risk makes certain village locations like Kivalina particularly vulnerable to infrastructure damage and environmental disasters, and when settlements make locating and reaching wild food resources more difficult.

However, people in Kivalina continue to push back against colonial and climate pressures by finding and implementing new ways of navigating social, political, and environmental changes that pose challenges to their survivance. “Survivance” names the conjunction between resistance and survival, underscoring a sense of native presence and actuality over absence, nihility, and victimry. By constantly leveraging collective and individual skills and knowledge, Iñupiaq communities are not only keeping their tradition of adaptation alive, but are centering it in their struggles for sovereignty, justice, and healthy futures in their northern homelands.