Environmental Change, Indigenous Knowledge, and Subsistence on Alaska’s North Slope

In initiating collaboration with elders of the North Slope we were asking them to share their wisdom and experiences with us, for the shared benefit of improved understanding of the landscape in warming conditions. But the primary goal of the project was not simply to glean information from the locals. We hoped that this research could benefit the community, by providing an archive of videos and logs of interviews, and making available our findings about local environmental change. Because the North Slope Borough maintains a geographic information system (GIS) with an indigenous knowledge component, for “documenting, monitoring and managing resources, and assessing cumulative impact to the marine and terrestrial environment,” ¹ we determined that a relatively permanent way to make the information shared with us available to the community was to develop a GIS based on the interviews, which would ultimately be the property of the local community. A GIS is a layered, multidimensional map that displays geographically referenced data in a variety of ways, creating a powerful tool for managing, analyzing, and querying spatial information. Through the GIS, all geographically specific information provided by participants, which they have given consent to share, can be accessible and available to the local Iñupiat community for a variety of purposes, such as analyzing patterns of environmental change, researching historical sites, tracking changes in hunting, fishing, and berry harvesting, and cross-referencing with other data.

Before embarking on the project or determining our specific methods we held informational meetings and met with community leaders to ascertain whether this sort of collaborative research and archiving was desired. Other visiting researchers have worked with Iñupiat elders, and in recent years a number of journalists have journeyed the North Slope to gather first-hand accounts of climate change and responses to planned expansion of oil drilling, so we were concerned about contributing to “interview fatigue.” ² We found that local elders were quite interested in participating in this sort of research, and nearly everyone with whom we spoke expressed curiosity about our scientific project and a desire to share information about changes they have witnessed in the landscape. Respecting elders’ knowledge and expertise is a common local theme, and people are quite aware of global concerns about climate change. In addition, many residents of the North Slope have some familiarity with the technologically intense petroleum industry, which is widely regarded as a powerful partner rather than an outside enemy, and that same attitude may extend toward scientific research. Another contributing factor to the relatively positive response to our research may be that in Alaska there are number of institutions and organizations, such as BASC, the Alaska Native Science Commission, and the Alaska Native Knowledge Network, which advocate for native peoples’ interests in relation to scientific research. ³ It seems that the existence of agencies whose work includes fostering contacts between scientists and community members helped pave the path for our collaboration.

As of July 2008 we have interviewed fifty-two Iñupiaq residents of the North Slope Borough communities of Atqasuk, Barrow, Wainwright, and Nuiqsut. Most participants are elders, and one third (eighteen) are female. Participants are identified by asking local contacts the names of elders with extensive knowledge of the landscape and lakes of the area, and by snowball sampling, or asking interviewees to recommend other possible participants. The elder whose initial suggestion helped spark this research has often served as a “fixer” and translator. Interviews revolve around detailed maps, such as recent satellite images or official North Slope Borough maps that feature native allotments. At the outset we tell participants that we are studying the thaw lakes and how they form and drain, and that we are interested in anything they know about the lakes, as well as any landscape changes they have witnessed. We also let them know that we are archiving the interview for the community, and that they are welcome to share anything that they would like to have recorded. All participants are asked if they are willing to sign a consent form, and the form indicates that video and other records of the interview will not be used in public without explicit consent of the participant. ⁴

Each interview is rather unique, taking shape in relation to the experiences and interests of the participant and the particular dialogue that emerges. Even when arrangements have been made to talk with one person, conversations often turn into group interviews, for spouses, friends, and family members want to listen and contribute, and sessions are seen as an opportunity to visit and share stories (see Figure 3). Most interviewees are very adept at identifying locations on maps, but careful to distinguish between things that they know directly, and things that they are aware of only through hearsay. The time scale of peoples’ knowledge and memories vary, but regardless of the age of participants, interviews inevitably include much discussion of landscape and weather changes that have been noticed over the course of a lifetime, or over a significant number of years traveling and engaging in subsistence activities.

For Iñupiat who rely on hunting and fishing for basic sustenance in the difficult environment of the Arctic, anything related to travel is a matter of safety and food security, and so is of the utmost importance. Travel patterns are quite seasonal and cyclical. Hunting and time spent at native allotments revolve around predictable patterns of animal migration, fish spawning, and berry ripening. Modern travel over the tundra is by snow machine, four-wheel all terrain vehicle, or motorboat, and existing trails and natural features are the only landmarks in the flat treeless tundra. Although some participants lamented a lack of knowledge of small detail, larger-scale changes in the landscape and quality of the tundra (whether it is frozen, dry, marshy, etc.) are unmistakable to the experienced traveler. ⁵ Those who hunt whales and other sea mammals are also highly attuned to changes in the location, depth, and quality of sea ice from year to year.

Each interview is carefully logged by two members of the research team, who transcribe all substantive comments and encode every mappable location for inclusion in the GIS. Of course, GIS technology is but one way of capturing, displaying, and analyzing data, and not all of the information given in interviews is geographically specific, or easily translated into GIS points. For some questions or audiences the narrative and interpretive information that is captured in narratives and videotaped interviews is more important. For example, as the testimony presented in the following sections show, Iñupiat elders’ responses to questions about their landscape elicit reflections on life and livelihood that are quite compelling and instructive, and much of the very important information and analytic wisdom conveyed in the interviews is not geo-specific, or locatable on a map.

With the recent proliferation of projects integrating local knowledge and spatial information technologies, a significant debate has arisen about the usefulness of GIS and other technologies for indigenous communities, and the tendency of such technologies to misrepresent traditional knowledge, or to reproduce the values of researchers at the expense of local communities’ interests. ⁶ Geographers Harris and Weiner present a list of methods and approaches that help create a GIS that is “community-integrated” and “progressive,” rather than reproductive of existing relations of power. They argue that a GIS should be constructed with the assumption that local knowledge is valuable and expert, the project should broaden community access to technologies and data, and a GIS should integrate multimedia in order to maximize accessibility to community members. ⁷ While many of the qualities recommended by Harris and Weaver have been integrated into our methodology, the debate about GIS technologies continues to inform our development of the GIS, our conversations with community members about the format and future of the GIS, and our collaborations with the North Slope Borough GIS office.

Interviews with Iñupiat residents of Alaska’s North Slope have generated important information about thaw lake processes and environmental changes on the Western Arctic Coastal Plain, and we have been able to corroborate participants’ observations of past lake drainage using satellite imagery and site visits via helicopter. Interviews with elders have also validated the timing of landscape changes studied by the physical geographers on our team, and provided data that was instrumental in a recent analysis of the impact of climate change on travel routes. Several scientific publications have resulted from this research. ⁸ But in addition to providing important information that helps us better understand the dynamic nature of the permafrost in northern Alaska, the interview process generates qualitative information about general environmental change and contemporary Iñupiaq subsistence practices and values. In the following sections we discuss prominent themes that have emerged in interviews conducted from 2003 through 2008, and present excerpts from several recent interviews. ⁹

1. North Slope Borough Department of Planning and Community Services. “About the NSB GIS.” 4 August 2008.[↑]
2. See for example Charles Wohlforth, The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change. New York: North Point Press, 2005.[↑]
3. “Principles for the Conduct of Research in the Arctic.” National Science Foundation Office of Polar Programs. National Science Foundation. 12 December 2006. 4 August 2008.[↑]
4. All participants and translators receive an honorarium.[↑]
5. For a more complete discussion, see Eisner et al, 2008.[↑]
6. See for example Jadah E. Folliot, Evaluation of Approaches to Depicting First Nations, Iñupiat and Iñuvialuit Environmental Information in GIS Format, MA thesis, Ryerson University and University of Toronto, 2005; Gernod Brodnig, and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, “Bridging the Gap: The Role of Spatial Information Technologies in the Integration of Traditional Environmental Knowledge and Western Science,” The Electronic Journal on Information Systems in Developing Countries, 1 (2000): 1-16.[↑]
7. T. Harris and D. Weiner, “Empowerment, Marginalization and Community-integrated GIS,” Cartography and Geographic Information Systems 25:2 (1998): 67-76, as quoted in Brodnig, “Bridging the Gap,” p. 9.[↑]
8. Hinkel et al, 2007, and Eisner, et al, 2008.[↑]
9. Excerpts in this and the following sections are from interviews conducted in Barrow in April 2007.[↑]