Losing a Way of Life

The Inupiaq have called Alaska’s North Slope home for as long as anyone can remember. Longer even. Before European contact the Inupiaq lived in an egalitarian society relying on the land, the sea, and each other for their food, clothing and shelter. Over time, pressure to participate in the wage labor system increased, and as members of the community left for work outside the village, aspects of the traditional way of Inupiaq life began to fall by the wayside.

The Inupiaq are a resilient and tenacious people. Despite, or perhaps, in spite of all the challenges to their traditional ways, their sense of cultural identity has stayed more or less intact. One of, if not the central aspect to Inupiaq culture is and has forever been the ability to subsist off of the land. Throughout the entire history of their people, hunting whales, seal and caribou has been a cornerstone of Inupiaq life, and today is still as integral to that way of life as ever.

Now the Inupiaq face a unique and daunting challenge to their way of life; global warming.

Nowhere on earth can the effects of climate change be seen as clearly as in the arctic, and no other culture on earth is as affected by these changes as those who depend on the arctic environment for many of their most basic needs.

Global warming has caused large amounts of what was once multi-year sea ice to melt. The Inupiaq have to use these large chunks of ice as anchor points from which to hunt the bowhead whales early each spring that the entire village depend on. If the ice disappears completely, the ability to hunt the whales will be jeopardized, if not lost entirely. Warmer temperatures have also caused the wet marshy ground that makes up the much of the North Slope to take much longer to freeze solid each year. This makes travel across the tundra in search of caribou far more difficult if not dangerous and in some cases, impossible.