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Whale Snow: One Question for Chie Sakakibara In Whale Snow: Iñupiat, Climate Change, and Multispecies Resilience in Arctic Alaska, author Chie Sakakibara, assistant professor of environmental studies, explores how the relatedness of the Iñupiat of Arctic Alaska and the bowhead whale forms and transforms “the human” through their encounters. Sakakibara is native to Japan and an adoptive member of the Iñupiaq whaling community. The book’s publisher, University of Arizona Press, asked her five questions—here, we reprint one of them. What do you hope people take away from your work?
The book’s cover features the work X-ray Whale by Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson, an Iñupiaq artist and writer who was born and raised on the North Slope of Alaska. “Her creations eloquently tell many stories, and they often point to a positive reciprocal relationship that goes across the boundary of humans and nonhuman animals, which gets intensified in our times of global climate change,” Sakakibara says. “This dynamism is the subject of Whale Snow.” All royalties accruing from sale of the book go to the North Slope Borough Iñupiat History, Language, and Culture Commission.
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OBERLIN ALUMNI MAGAZINE 2020 FALL/WINTER
Indigenous vulnerability to climate change has been discussed extensively in the fields of public policy, political science, anthropology, and geography, but comparatively few studies have actually shed light on the ways in which people emotionally invest themselves in their entanglements with animals and environments to nurture resilience. In contrast, Whale Snow shares powerful and positive stories about Indigenous experiences coping with climate change. As climate change increases environmental and cultural uncertainties, it also intensifies Iñupiaq emotions and relatedness with the bowhead whale to seek out cultural activities that strengthen social identities and a politics of Indigenous sovereignty. In this sense, my narrative departs from studies that emphasize human vulnerability and instead serves as an ethnography of hope cultivated and entangled with interspecies relations. This book lies at the intersection of my personal life and stories of America’s northernmost Indigenous society. My narrative is steeped in a deep long-term relationship between a culturally adopted
Japanese woman in the two Iñupiaq villages and her adoptive family members, relatives, mentors, collaborators, colleagues, friends, and acquaintances. This is the story of the people and the bowhead whale, and at the same time, the story of my own life. My fieldwork has become synonymous with my personal growth and fulfillment as an adopted member of whaling crews through participation in everyday life in contemporary rural Alaska. In many different ways and contexts, my adoptive families and kin taught me that the Iñupiaq-whale relationship is a force of innovation and adaptation that now serves as a way to cope with social stress and the unforeseeable future. In other words, this book was germinated in my own process of becoming an Iñupiaq (meaning “a complete person”) through building a relationship with Iñupiat and their nonhuman kin, and I present this book as a humble offering for the people and whales who are connected through emotive bonds, words, stories, and songs that they have so generously bestowed upon me.
For all five questions, see uapress.arizona.edu/2020/11/ whale-snow-five-questions-withauthor-chie-sakakibara. 9