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4 - Shaping the Long View: Iñupiat Experts and Scientists Share Ocean Knowledge on Alaska’s North Slope

from Part I - From Practice to Principles

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2022

By
Matthew L. Druckenmiller
Edited by
Marie Roué ,
Douglas Nakashima  and
Igor Krupnik
Marie Roué
Affiliation:
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Paris
Douglas Nakashima
Affiliation:
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), France
Igor Krupnik
Affiliation:
Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC
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Summary

The Iñupiat Eskimo on Alaska’s North Slope live semi-traditional lives characterized by subsistence hunting and fishing and expansive natural travel networks. To the Iñupiat, the North Slope coastline is a social-cultural boundary between sea and land, marked by the location of past and current settlements, burial sites, family hunting locations, traditional places of refuge, and places immortalized through traditional stories. The coastline is where they observe, enter and exit the marine environment, and hence is interwoven throughout their local and traditional knowledge of the ocean and sea ice environment. Rarely, do local experts speak of ocean or ice features, or of a hunting story, without referring to a place on land. North Slope communities and their coastline are also staging areas for scientists who have adopted the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas as their natural laboratories. This chapter will explore a cross-section of the North Slope’s rich history of scientists working with local indigenous experts on coastal and marine topics, with specific attention to coastal emergency preparedness.

Keywords

sea iceshorefast icebowhead whalesIñupiat whalingcomanagmentcoastal observingUtqiaġvikAlaskacommunity-based monitoringChukchi Sea
Type
Chapter
Information
Resilience through Knowledge Co-Production
Indigenous Knowledge, Science, and Global Environmental Change
 , pp. 67 - 92
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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