WHALE SNOW: Iñupiat, Climate Change, and Multispecies Resilience in Arctic Alaska

Abstract

With increasing public environmental consciousness evinced by the rise of sustainability-based educational curricula and the mainstreaming of the socalled environmental movement, it can sometimes be easy to forget that the United States remains a whaling nation, one of only four in the world given quotas for aboriginal subsistence whaling by the International Whaling Commission. American whaling is often construed as an element of the real and literary past, statically captured in such maritime classics as Moby-Dick and In the Heart of the Sea. Geographer Chie Sakakibara’s Whale Snow—which would hold its own on a bookshelf alongside Melville’s (1851) and Philbrick’s (2000) volumes—introduces, or for some, reintroduces, a contemporary American community for whom whaling remains central to its cultural, spiritual, and physical subsistence: the Iñupiat of Alaska, centered in the Arctic communities of Point Hope and Utqiaġvik (formerly called Barrow). The product of multigenerational and multispecies relationships more than 15 years building, this book is the new academic standard on Alaskan whaling in a time of rapid environmental and societal change. The word Iñupiat, like many of the world’s indigenous demonyms, means “real people.” Sakakibara shows how the connections they forge with whales, whaling, and whaler ancestors help the Iñupiat “remain resilient and real when the ocean rises” (xiv). This is done, in part, by reinforcing old traditions: cultural, like the aġġi or drum dance (Chapter 5); temporal, like “the whaling cycle”—a calendar that prescribes whaling-related activities throughout the year in preparation for the main spring hunting season and the secondary autumn hunt (Chapter 1); or sociological, like the system of human organization based upon whaling crews and their families. Resilience and realness are also reinforced through adaptation: geographical, as illustrated by the wholesale movement of an entire community from its original site, now lost to rising seas (Chapter 4); spiritual, as with the simultaneous “Indigenization of Christianity and Christianization of Indigeneity” (146); and political, as memorably illustrated in a chapter titled “The New Harpoon” (Chapter 3). The literal new harpoon—a Norwegian introduction with an exploding head—plays only a minor role here; the new harpoon in the chapter’s title is a metaphorical one: the Alaska Native Claims Settlement, a political tool (others writing about whaling have referred to harpoons as “weapons”) focused on “subsistence rights, land claims, and