Inupiat hunter butchers a caribou
NOAA Photo Library
Scientists investigating climate and biology in Alaska and the Arctic have slowly discovered a reservoir of essential background knowledge — the observations from Native residents.
Listening to the people who gather food on the land and sea opens a door on past conditions and can help put the present into perspective, according to an news story that appeared recently in the journal of Science.
Certainly, scientists must be careful with anecdotes and be alert to bias, the article points out. But with a satellite record only 30 years old, and other data going back only a few generations, tapping Native memory has become an ingenious tool for extending research into climate change, sea ice, storm tracks, marine mammal populations, fish runs, bird migration and vegetation shifts.
The March 15 article, by Science writer Jennifer Couzin, begins:
“I say that there are three sure signs of spring,” says Caleb Pungowiyi, a 65-year-old Siberian Yu’pik who lives in Kotzebue, Alaska (and former head of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference). “The ducks and the geese coming back, tourists coming back, and scientists who come back to check their instruments.”
Some Inuit in Alaska call these researchers Siksik, the Inuit word for the ground squirrel, which pokes its head up only in the summer. For their part, these “squirrels” have traditionally gone about their business, rarely tapping the natives for their expertise.
A “sik-sik”
NOAA Photo LibraryBut as climate change sweeps through the Arctic, decades-old divisions between the indigenous people who live there and the scientists who parachute in and out are slowly dissolving. Projects that draw on traditional knowledge of animal migrations, ice patterns, shrubbery, and weather are popping up from Baffin Island, Canada, to Rovaniemi, Finland. The goal is to use local information–say, about the health of individual caribou or about whales killed by hunters–to supplement and enrich scientific data, such as sea-ice or vegetation changes.
“We’re living in a period of extreme uncertainty, and these perspectives add insight,” says Gary Kofinas, who studies resource management at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. “I think it’s fair to say that we need all the help we can get.”
Many Alaska scientists have already recognized Native science as an essential resource in figuring out the natural world of the Far North. The classic example arose in the 1970s when federal biologists assessing bowhead whales realized that they had been missing hundreds of animals that swam out of sight below the ice. They had been warned by Inupiat whaling captains that population estimates were wrong, that the whales were passing beneath their feet. At their urging, biologists looked further.
“The influential 2005 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment ranked indigenous knowledge high on the list of topics that scientists should pay attention to,” the Science article says. “And the International Polar Year, which began this month, lists the sustainability and perspectives of societies living in the Arctic as one of six themes shaping its research agenda.”
Hundreds of times each year, Alaska Native hunters pause beside their freshly killed seal or whale to cut out a tiny sliver of tissue — then send it to a lab for genetic analysis or contaminant tests. Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, Native elders work with federal managers to write hunting rules and set quotas. Hunters sit down with scientists to design studies — and then go out and help capture the shrewd, fast-moving subjects.
Two bowhead whales
Credit: Dave Rugh, NMML
”Western scientists have learned that traditional knowledge can be a very reliable source of information,” Maggie Ahmaogak of Barrow, executive director of the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission, told the U.S. marine Mammal Commission a few years ago during an Anchorage meeting. ”As a result of this work, we now have better understanding of the bowhead than any other species.”
When federal biologists investigated reports of a beluga whale pod in Disenchantment Bay and Russell Fiord, they fine-tuned their study with memories of Tlingit elders in Yakutat. The Alaska Beluga Whale committee — an award-winning group of whales and hunters from Alaska villages — helps manage beluga whales and direct research in Alaska’s Arctic.
Beluga whales near ice
Credit: Robyn Angliss, NMML
Climate change has taken the whole approach to a new level. Villages like Shishmaref and Kivalina now face destruction from erosion and storms — partly because the locations were selected as permanent village sites long ago by white men with no local knowledge. Now, as village leaders struggle to find funding to move to stable ground, they rely on traditional knowledge to find the best new locale.
Listening to Natives may be new for hard science and engineers, but anthropologists have long understood the key to unlocking human culture lay with the people themselves.
A March 27 letter to Science by UAF social anthropologist Patty Gray pointed out “working side by side” with Native people isn’t some revolutionary technique.
“It might be worth pointing out that social and cultural anthropologists have been conducting research in this way for about a century— it is called the ethnographic method. They have carefully documented indigenous knowledge (long before this became jargon) in countless ethnographies that have largely been ignored by “science” as being too detailed and too biased for serious scientific study.”
Pungowiyi, who has submitted a proposal to the National Science Foundation for a climate change study with Eagle River anthropologist Henry Huntington, told Science that the collaboration between Natives and Western science must continue.
Understanding the Arctic requires more than numbers and satellite photos, the article quoted Pungowiyi. There’s a need to “put a human face to the effects,” he points out. “That’s what we’re trying to get to.”