There’s no hotel in Kivalina, and there's little extra space in people's homes: it's not uncommon for two or three families to live in a two-bedroom house. So all the visitors, including us, stay in the village’s single school. As such, it’s natural that we get lots of contact with the young people in the village. The day we arrived we spoke to the high school class, gave an overview of our research, and talked about what they do outside of school, which turns out to be a topic of great interest to everyone we spoke with: the elders, especially, struggle to keep alive the Iñupiat culture and subsistence way of life. Based on what the kids told us, the prognosis is mixed: they love to play basketball (the Kivalina Qayviks were…
While in Kivalina, we had the opportunity to meet with two elders from the community. “Elder”, as explained to us, is a person of age 57 or older who is well respected in the community due to his or her accumulated wisdom. While we patiently listened to the elders’ different descriptions of environmental impacts the community has faced over the last two decades such as water pollution, coastal erosion, decreased sea ice and reduced availability of wildlife for subsistence, I had so many questions. I wanted to learn how these environmental changes had impacted their traditional livelihoods. How had their livelihoods been modified over the years? What were the major causes of these changes? And, how was the culture being preserved by Kivalina’s younger generations?
I soon realized how difficult it…
We are sitting in a small conference room at Kaladi Brothers Coffee in Anchorage, Alaska. In front of me on a piece of paper, Carl Wassilie draws a circle with a dot in the center and tells me this represents mindfulness. This symbol was Carl's answer to my question about what he had referred to earlier as the "Yupik mind." The Yupik mind is more than just a way of thinking, it’s a way of being informed by centuries of stories passed from generation to generation through language, dance, and lived experience. This concept of mindfulness came up in many of our conversations with the people and organizations we met with in Anchorage and Kivalina, as well as our daily group conversations.
A key part of mindfulness for native communities is…
Well, we have been in Kivalina now for about three days and although we are safe and warm, we are still strangers to this community. Our exploratory research into the everyday lives and afflictions of the people bring us to the dilemma of how to best make notes of the situation. Do we handwrite using a notepad? Or will breaking eye contact to take a note be disrespectful to the elder telling us amazing Inupiaq stories?
This is a dilemma that I am sure a lot of researchers have come across but the fact of the matter is that we need to put down our pads for a moment and just listen. Sure notes are important but missing any piece of the story to me is such a tragedy considering that…
We've been in Alaska for almost five days now and we've learnt a tremendously diverse amount of fascinating information. We started with only a scientific understanding of climate change in the Arctic; rising sea levels and temperatures, melting ice sheets, thawing tundra, and changing migration patterns of ocean mammals. We then built on this scientific knowledge with social, legal and economic information pertaining to the Arctic region. We studied how the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 divided Alaska into 13 Alaska Native Regional Corporations that still cooperate on issues like health and finance, and how the act contributed to current social issues like alcoholism, domestic violence and suicide. We've experienced first-hand the corporate politics between these native corporations and the extractive industries, and the power struggle that they…
Tomorrow, members of the class of F&ES851 Environmental Diplomacy Practicum will depart on a week-long research trip to the ultimate frontier: the Arctic. We will explore the social, economic, cultural and political implications of recent environmental changes for indigenous Inuit communities and their subsistence lifestyles.
Why the Arctic?
The Arctic is at several critical environmental, political, and social justice tipping points. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recognized the Arctic as a region of particular vulnerability to climatic changes. This summer, a NASA report found that the extent of Arctic sea ice dropped to 4.1 million square kilometers, a new record, with an additional decline in sea ice volume by 72 percent from the 1979-2010 mean. At the same time, the U.S. government’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental…
