Bringing monitoring equipment out on to the sea ice on an Inuit sled.

Many partnerships have already formed, or are forming. Some are practical—such as pairing indigenous guides who understand polar bear behavior with scientists who need bear protection. Some are more profound. For archeologist/anthropologist Anne Jensen, who often collaborates with Iñupiaq Elders, Iñupiaq people often fill in the gaps in research. In 1994, for example, the body of a young girl from about A.D. 1200 surfaced on a bluff near Barrow. Jensen was called to examine it and discovered that the girl had been buried with some pieces of skin. The Iñupiaq Elders were able to identify the skin as part of a kayak cover by looking at its shape and its stitches, drawing on their traditional knowledge.

In Canada’s Ashkui Project, Environment Canada scientists collaborate with Innu Elders to gain understanding of the area’s ecology. Here, both parties discuss the results of water chemistry tests.

Increasingly, there are more formal partnerships between researchers and indigenous people as well. For example, geographer Shari Gearheard is heading a three-year National Science Foundation–funded project in which scientists and Inuits in Canada, Greenland, and Alaska form a research team to study sea ice. According to Gearheard, scientists know relatively little about the small-scale and regional processes and changes in the sea ice, while the Inuit have a very detailed knowledge of sea ice at the fine scale. “This is useful for scientists, who study sea ice mainly from satellite imagery, so they have complimentary perspectives,” she notes.

Shari Gearheard with Ilkoo Angutikjuak, Inuit Elder and hunter from Clyde River, Nunavut, with whom she has worked closely since 2000 on environmental change research.

These partnerships are not without problems, however. For example, scientific data and indigenous knowledge can conflict, and collaborations have raised the issue of indigenous knowledge as intellectual property. Also, it’s not always easy for indigenous people to trust scientists; they’ve been burned in the past. As scientist Glenn Sheehan notes, “Local people that I know were treated with radioactive iodine in a “zany” experiment to see if it would affect their susceptibility to cold. These people did not speak English at the time, and they were not told what was happening; in fact, they were given lies. Now when some of them get cancer they are convinced, perhaps rightly, that it was scientists who did this to them.”

Despite these issues and obvious past abuse, the collaborations between scientists and indigenous people are increasing, providing a more complete picture of the Arctic and climate change than either perspective could offer alone.

An Iñupiaq whaling captain and boat on the frozen Chukchi Sea.

Artifacts found in western Siberia suggest that people were in the Arctic about 40,000 years ago. There’s also evidence that the first people to reach the Americas may have come through Asia and gone through the Arctic on a land bridge between Alaska and Siberia some 20,000 years later. Scientists believe that the area now known as the Alaska was the first settled region of the Arctic, probably about 15,000 years ago.

Today, the Artic is home to about 4 million people spread across several countries: Norway, Sweden, Canada, Greenland (a territory of Denmark), Russia, the United States (Alaska), Iceland, and Finland. About a third of those people are believed to be indigenous.

The indigenous groups are Inuit (Inuit includes the Iñupiaq and several other peoples), who range from Alaska to Canada and Greenland; the Saami in Scandinavia; the Nenets in northwest Russia; the Sakha (Yakut) of Russia; and the Chukchi of Siberia.

Many indigenous groups in the Arctic have formed organizations to speak with a unified voice and to protect their way of life.

A mother and daughter shopping at Barrow’s main grocery store.