Climate Change Threatens Inupiat Communities

"For the Inupiat people of northern Alaska, whales are a way of life. These people eat the animals. They worship them. They organize their calendars around them. And on and on. It's been that way for thousands of years.

Now, however, climate change is pushing the whales further north, making it harder for the Inupiat to catch them. That environmental shift is threatening the culture's fundamental roots.

"If you have to pick one animal that is an icon of their traditional unity and identity, it's got to be the whale," said Chie Sakakibara, a cultural geographer at The Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York. "Their identity is synonymous with the whales."

And yet, these "people of the whales" are working hard to adapt to a changing world, said Sakakibara, who has spent five years documenting the Inupiats' efforts to cope.

"They are putting human faces on the phenomenon of global warming," she said. "This is a problem that will be happening to us in the near future."

The Inupiat subsist on a variety of animals, including caribou, seals, musk ox, and most important of all, bowhead whales. They eat the whale's meat, use its jawbones to build houses, and make drums out of its stomach. No part of the animal goes to waste."

ORIGINAL SOURCE: Discovery News