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

Another material and spiritual element of Iñupiaq subsistence culture that is jeopardized by climate change is the practice of storing meat and fish in traditional ice cellars that are dug several meters into the permafrost.¹ The thawing of ice cellars is a common theme in interviews. One elder described an ice cellar, located a hundred and fifty feet away from a river, which was entirely washed away when the river rapidly eroded laterally. Ida Olemaun relates the importance of ice cellars:

The ice cellars are what we store our food, especially the whale, you know, cause it ferments more in there, gets it more tastier. And right now there’s some ice cellars that are thawing out too fast. So we have to be real careful with that whenever we store some whale meat, cause that’s for the Thanksgiving feast, for the Christmas feast, that we store, even our caribou, our ducks, geese . . .. When you have meat in the ice cellars they’re a lot tastier; they’re not freezer burn, they have more taste to it whereas when you store it in the freezer, it just freezes . . .. You have to be careful now with this global warming cause some have flooded too . . . and wastes all that meat.

Along with allowing meat to age properly, the cellars serve an important cultural and spiritual role in Iñupiaq whaling traditions, for a clean and empty ice cellar is required before one can go whaling in spring. Spring cleaning of ice cellars is also a ritual in the culture of sharing, as all stored meat and game must be consumed or given away as part of the cleaning process. In the words of a young Iñupiaq woman, “You have to clean out your ice cellar cause the whale won’t give itself unless it has a clean place to rest.” For the Iñupiat the loss of ice cellars is not trivial, for ice cellars are a crucial element of Iñupiaq subsistence life ways.

As the necessity of a clean ice cellar indicates, success in subsistence hunting depends on appropriate behavior. Of primary importance for the Iñupiat is the virtue of sharing. The spiritual and cultural significance of sharing, one of the core “Iñupiat values,” promoted through posters all over the North Slope, was raised in a great many of our interviews.² For example, hunting is generally described as having two fundamental purposes: to provide for one’s own family, and to share with others in the community. Sixty-three percent of households in northern Alaska harvest game, and ninety-two percent of households gain access to that harvest through networks of sharing.³ Sharing is also believed to strongly influence relationships with the natural and spiritual worlds, as comments by Evelyn Donovan and Ida Olemaun illustrate:

(My parents and grandparents) always told us to share, the hunt, the food . . .. If you are to have a successful hunt than you have to share and give what is down there and we’re taught not to waste. And it’s true that if you’re not sharing and you’re stingy, better way to say it I guess, you won’t have a bountiful hunting season as well. I’ve experienced that. (Evelyn Donovan)

You always share the bounty that God gives you ’cause that’s . . . why it’s giving of itself is that you share to the poor, the widow, the orphans, and . . . I think that’s what subsistence is all about, to share the bounty that God has given you, and that it’ll return, that you’ll have more to come back for you . . .. You know, that’s what it is—all the joy that you get from giving and it comes back in a different way to meet your need. (Ida Olemaun)

In Iñupiaq culture, sharing has deep significance beyond its obvious importance in ensuring survival in a harsh environment, for sharing the natural bounty is also a way of enacting ethical virtue, and strengthening and maintaining bonds within the human and natural communities. Sharing with other people is necessary for maintaining good relationships with other species, for animals will continue to give themselves up to hunters who enact appropriate sharing attitudes.⁴

Hunting and the Significance of Gender

We mentioned earlier that this project integrates feminist research methods, such as highlighting Iñupiat epistemic authority, or unique, “situated” wisdom concerning environmental change and ecological well-being on the North Slope. Another way that feminist methods form and inform this research is through our efforts to interview female elders, and to work against unconscious tendencies to propagate marginalization (such as sexist assumptions about the gender of the local hunting experts).⁵ Social scientists have noted that there is a limited amount of research focused on women in the Arctic and that “few researchers anywhere in the Arctic have documented in detail the daily routines of women and the vital contributions they make to the social and economic vitality of their communities.”⁶ We are therefore generally attentive to matters of gender that arise in the interviews, and ask questions about gender roles and norms when the topic arises in the course of an interview (which admittedly occurs most often in the course of interviews with female participants). Because the focus of our interviews is on the natural environment, discussions related to gender are most typically about women’s roles in relation to subsistence practices, and especially hunting.

Iñupiat women’s concern with food and cleanliness, evident in the excerpts above, should not be taken to imply that their roles in relation to subsistence practices are limited by European notions of femininity or women’s work, or by a strict hierarchical dualism. Women do have specific roles in hunting, including sewing the clothing that is necessary for the hunt, skinning and butchering, and preparing meat for consumption. But women’s relationship to hunting is not necessarily limited to the standard roles, and traditionally, women’s standard roles are not considered secondary or auxiliary to the role of animal slayer. In her landmark 1990 essay “I’m Not the Great Hunter, My Wife Is: Iñupiat and Anthropological Models of Gender,” Bodenhorn argues that the traditional anthropological view that in subsistence cultures women “gather” but do not “hunt” does not fit the Iñupiaq example; Eskimo conceptions and definitions of hunting extend beyond the act of seeking out and killing animals, and hunting includes activities typically characterized as women’s work. Bodenhorn writes, “Among the Iñupiat, ‘hunting’ is defined to include attracting, killing, butchering, transforming the animal into food and clothing, and following the proper rituals, all of which are needed to maintain amicable animal/human relations.”⁷

1. See Patricia Longley Cochran and Alyson L. Geller, “The Melting Ice Cellar: What Native Traditional Knowledge is Teaching Us about Global Warming and Climate Change,” American Journal of Public Health, 92:9 (September 2002): 1404-1409. [↩]
2. One version of the list of values (not ordered hierarchically) is: Sharing, Love and Respect for our Elders and One Another, Spirituality, Family and Kinship, Compassion, Humor, Cooperation, Knowledge of Language, Hunting Traditions, Humility, Respect for Nature, and Avoidance of Conflict. For more on Iñupiaq values and environmental ethics see Cuomo, “Eskimo Environmental Ethics,” forthcoming. [↩]
3. Sophie Thériault, et al, “The Legal Protection Of Subsistence,” 56, citing Robert J. Wolfe, Subsistence in Alaska: A Year 2000 Update 2, Alaska Division of Subsistence, 2000. [↩]
4. It should also be mentioned that most Iñupiat on the North Slope are Presbyterian, and their articulation of appropriate behavior is also typically couched in religious terms. [↩]
5. The historical anthropological and pseudo-anthropological literature on Arctic peoples abounds with tangential descriptions of the work of women. Although it was nearly impossible for authors describing day-to-day life in the Arctic to ignore the contributions of women, it was apparently equally difficult for white male authors of a certain era to acknowledge the full significance of women’s work. A typical example is Diamond Jenness’ Dawn in Arctic Alaska, an account of a year spent among Eskimos in northernmost Alaska in 1913. Jenness relates many memories of time spent in Eskimo households, and describes women who trap, hunt, travel the countryside, prepare all meals, and work tirelessly to craft and repair the boots and parkas of everyone in the household, including visitors. Yet when describing “the Eskimo woman” (already admitting no diversity in the category), rather than taking the sum of interesting evidence into account, Jenness, who did not speak Iñupiaq and describes no situation in which he had a real conversation with an Eskimo female, relies on his own cultural projections. Here is an example: “An Eskimo woman demands very little: her world is small and her mental horizon limited. Life seems full and satisfactory to her if she has someone who will supply her basic needs of food and shelter, someone for whom she must cook and sew and by whom, in due course, she can bear two or three children . . .. Her proper mission, she believes, is to establish and maintain a smoothly running household.” (Diamond Jenness, Dawn in Arctic Alaska. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957.) A similar pattern of erasure and misrepresentation is evident in varying degrees in related literature, including James W. VanStone, Point Hope, an Eskimo Village in Transition, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962; Nicholas, J. Gubser, The Nunamiut Eskimos, Hunters of Caribou, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965; Nuligak, I, Nuligak, Maurice Metayer, Trans., Toronto: P. Martin Associates, 1966; Richard, K. Nelson, Hunters of the Northern Ice, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969; Richard K. Nelson, Shadow of the Hunter: Stories of Eskimo Life, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980; David Boeri, People of the Ice Whale: Eskimos, White Men, and The Whale, New York: Dutton, 1983; Thomas R. Berger, Village Journey: The Report of the Alaska Native Review, New York: Hill and Wang, 1985; John Murdoch, Ethnological Results of the Point Barrow Expedition, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988. A well-known and more contemporary first hand account of an Inupiaq woman’s life is found in M.B. Blackman, Sadie Brower Neakok: An Iñupiaq Woman, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989. [↩]
6. Mark Nuttall, “Critical Reflections on Knowledge Gathering in the Arctic,” in Louis-Jaques Dorais, Murielle Nagy and Ludger Muller-Wille, eds., Aboriginal Environmental Knowledge in the North, Quebec, GETIC: 21-35, quoted in Kerrie Ann Shannon, “Everyone Goes Fishing: Understanding Procurement for Men, Women and Children in an Arctic Community,” Etudes/Inuit/Studies, 30:1 (2006): 10. [↩]
7. Barbara Bodenhorn, “I’m Not the Great Hunter, My Wife Is: Iñupait and Anthropological Models of Gender,” Etudes/Inuit/Studies, 14:1-2 (1990): 64. [↩]