Living with the ghosts of climate change

The Iñupiat tell of how a trickster raven wanted to create a homeland for the people. One day, the raven saw a giant creature swimming across the ocean, so he harpooned it. The dead creature turned out to be the ancestor of the bowhead whale, and it was reborn as the ancestral Iñupiaq home of Point Hope, Alaska.

Point Hope represents one of the longest continuously inhabited settlements in the Western Hemisphere. The Iñupiaq ancestors were among the people that crossed the Bering Land Bridge earlier from Asia to North America and eventually founded Point Hope around 500 to 600 BC, along with Barrow and other native villages.

Japanese social scientist Chie Sakakibara would trace a similar journey to Point Hope more than 2500 years later. Sakakibara, a 35-year-old Assistant Professor of Geography at Appalachian State University, first came to the United States in August 1998 as an undergraduate student in Native American Studies at the University of Oklahoma. She grew up in the small town called Mihama in the Aichi Prefecture, some 40 kilometres south of Nagoya, Japan believing that Native Americans looked like the fair-skinned, blue-eyed Caucasian actors who portrayed them in early Hollywood Westerns. That misconception disappeared dramatically when she watched the movie Dances with Wolves and saw Native American actors portraying themselves for the first time. “They look like us!”, the then-middle schooler thought. One of the elders in the film even looked like Sakakibara’s grandfather.

A trip to the tiny village library in Mihama turned up the story of the Bering Land Bridge. Scientists discovered evidence of the land bridge once forming a dry path between Siberia and Alaska about 12,000 years ago, which allowed people to cross over into North America. This historical information strengthened the sense of kinship in Sakakibara’s mind. She eventually travelled to Barrow, Alaska – the so-called “top of the world” – years later, in 2004 for preliminary fieldwork for her doctoral dissertation in cultural geography, after obtaining her undergraduate and Masters degrees at the University of Oklahoma.

A similar sense of kinship caused Sakakibara to be mistaken for an Alaska Native when she first went walking down the streets of Barrow. The young Japanese woman who had recently arrived to study the culture of the native Iñupiat, was approached by two female Iñupiaq elders. The elders asked her something in their native tongue. Sakakibara didn’t understand. “Who’s your father? Who’s your mother?” asked one of the elders in English. “Shoichi and Kazuko,” replied Sakakibara, all confused. The elders then asked if she was an Iñupiaq who was raised in a city such as Fairbanks or other big cities in

Alaska outside the North Slope Borough. “No, I’m from Japan, and my parents live in Japan,” Sakakibara responded. But she immediately understood their fascination with her appearance.

Sakakibara spent several seasons living and working with the Iñupiat of Barrow and Point Hope. In that time, she was adopted by three different whaling crews. Sakakibara came to realise the tremendous impact that climate change had imposed upon the people of the North. She listened to the stories of the Iñupiat and witnessed the struggle to preserve their ancestral home in the face of a warming Arctic. Severe storms and rising sea levels forced the Iñupiat of Point Hope to relocate from Old Town to New Town several kilometres away in the 1970s. That relocation left a lasting cultural trauma, as the townspeople watched their traditional homes and the whalebone cemetery holding their ancestors slowly vanish beneath the waves.

The slow-motion drowning of Old Town may not match the shocking drama of quake-triggered tsunami waves which swept away Japanese coastal villages on March 11, 2011. But there’s a grim sense of irreversibility for the Iñupiat in the loss of their homeland to the sea. The old places are gone, and they cannot rebuild where their ancestors had lived for thousands of years.

“The Iñupiat are so place-based as it is revealed by their stories, songs and memories,” says Sakakibara. “Their land is the whale, and the whale is the land. Environmental transformations caused by climate change now threaten the core of their cultural identity and their ties with the bowhead whale – the cornerstone species of the Arctic Ocean and the icon of the Iñupiaq culture.”

A Swiftly Changing Arctic

When the wind blows strong and the waves are high, the spirits make themselves known. One of the Little People was nursing its baby in the abandoned site of Old Town after a fall storm. The Little Person met a hunter, followed him to New Town and mingled with the Iñupiat. But one day, its baby crept into the ear of a dead caribou and was eaten by a dog belonging to the Iñupiat. The Little Person left, but since then his kind have begun to return.

In Point Hope, the relocation has caused other changes as well. A few Iñupiaq collaborators shared stories with Sakakibara about small, human-like beings known as the ‘Little People,’ who have long been known among the Alaska Natives as tricksters and miracle-makers. The abandonment of Old Town was followed by increasing reports of the Little People appearing in and around the ruins of Old Town, near the coast.

The ‘Little People’ had formerly been identified only in the open tundra away from the sea. But their appearances around Old Town indicated the change in how the Iñupiat viewed the area. In Sakakibara’s view, the ‘Little People’ have become spiritual ambassadors to help the Iñupiat retain their ties to their drowning home.

Unlike the urban views of the environment, the Iñupiat still see the natural world filled with animal spirits, trolls, shape-shifters and the Little People. The Iñupiaq stories explain their coexistence with all the forces within the natural environment, which help people anchor their emotions to their eroding homeland and changing natural landscape.

One Iñupiaq man named Samuel (pseudonym) told Sakakibara about dragons that had once lived in a nearby lake, but added that the dragons had become homeless and either died or moved off after the lake drained of water. His words reflected how Arctic lakes drain or emerge in response to climate change.

Now the same type of storytelling has become one of the Iñupiaq people’s best strategies for adapting to the harsh reality of climate change, not to mention dealing with the trauma of losing their ancestral home. The evolving stories have allowed the Iñupiaq people to make sense of their changing world as they continue to fortify their eroding homeland against the rising seas as the Netherlands and other countries have done.

Storytelling as an adaptation may prove even more crucial as other Iñupiaq villages face the same fate as Point Hope. Warming temperatures have slowed the annual formation of so-called shorefast ice on the coast that typically protects settlements against erosion and storm surges. Shrinking sea ice has also forced Iñupiaq hunters to travel across larger distances of water in the search for bowhead whales during the fall, due to the slower formation of the shorefast ice. In the past, they were able to find the whales just a few kilometres offshore. Such changes challenge the physical, economic and social resilience of the hunters and the community.