These carvings were found buried with Thule remains.

Anne Jensen at the Nuvuk archaeological site with the Exploratorium’s Robyn Higdon.

One of the largest questions in northern archaeology concerns the Thule people, ancestors to modern Iñupiaq people. How did the Thule people come to be in Alaska? Why did they spread rapidly to Greenland and Canada? Anne Jensen and Laura Thomas are part of a project that’s helping to answer these questions. They’re also working to save ancient remains from washing into the sea at the historic settlement of Nuvuk. Global warming is melting the sea ice, exposing more open water with waves that hit the coast for longer periods of time, especially in the fall. At the same time, storms and storm surges are fiercer. The result is an increase in erosion, which is causing more skeletal human remains to surface.

Laura Thomas at the Nuvuk dig site.

People abandoned Nuvuk in the 1940s. Most of it has already been lost to the ocean, but waves and ocean storms are uncovering graves, some 1,000 years old or older. Under the direction of Jensen and Thomas, local students have been working each summer to save their ancestors from an unwanted reburial at sea. With the encouragement of the Iñupiaq Elders, scientific studies are carried out before reburial at a protected site. These studies may help in understanding Thule origins and their adaptations to climate change.

The Nuvuk Archaeological Project crew excavating.

While Barrow was once known for its snowy owls, the bird’s population is dwindling.

Barrow, the northernmost settlement in the United States, is a unique American community.
In the spring, you might see groups of indigenous Iñupiaq whalers heading onto the sea ice, or in the fall out into the open Arctic Ocean as their ancestors have done for over 1600 years. If you visited during parts of the spring and summer, your internal clock might spin from continuous stretches of daylight; the constant darkness during parts of the fall and winter could be just as dizzying. If you’re lucky, auroras might offer up dazzling light displays in the sky. If you’re unlucky, a polar bear could sneak up on you.

People have lived in Barrow for about 4,000 years. The Iñupiaq people originally called it Ukpeagvik, which roughly translates into the “place where snowy owls are hunted.” Today, the city has over 4,400 residents; more than 60 percent of them are Iñupiaq. They still practice traditional ways of life, including subsistence hunting, but live solidly in the modern world, working in the nearby oil fields, for example.

A residential home in downtown Barrow.

There are also lots of scientists in the area. In fact, Barrow has been called “the Arctic’s science city.” From the mid-1900s to 1981, the United States Naval Arctic Research Laboratory (NARL) was a center for scientific study in the region. After it closed, several other science-related organizations sprang up, including The Barrow Arctic Science Consortium (BASC). The nonprofit BASC, created in 1995, encourages research and educational activities in Alaska’s North Slope (Barrow’s home borough) and areas of the nearby Arctic Ocean. BASC helps the local college, the North Slope Borough (the seat of government for the area), and the Utqiagvik Iñupiat Corporation (UIC) to work collaboratively in support of Arctic science.

Barrow’s row of satellites near UIC and BASC.

Since 2002, a lot of the scientific study has been centered at the Science Division of the UIC, Barrow’s local village corporation. UIC Science took over a renovated NARL building and is the setting for many programs, including the Barrow Schoolyard lecture series (a science education outreach program), funded under the National Science Foundation’s Long-term Ecological Research (LTER) program. Some of the scientists who visit the area study in the Barrow Environmental Observatory, 7,466 acres of tundra owned by UIC that are permanently reserved for Arctic research.

An old research hut on the tundra.

In addition to these local organizations, others research entities are in Barrow, too. They include the U.S. Department of Energy (Atmospheric Radiation Measurement), the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration, and projects sponsored by the National Marine Fisheries Service, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, and the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology, among others.

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 umiaq, circa 1884. Photo taken during first International Polar Year.

Bowhead whale hunting was, and continues to be, important to the Iñupiaq culture—not just for the food it provides, but for the sense of community and cooperation it creates. The whales can weigh as much as 60 tons, which means they have to be hunted by groups of people working together with a whaling captain. When they kill a whale, the Iñupiaq thank it for giving its life to them, and the whole community shares in its bounty. Much of the equipment traditionally used by their ancestors, including a umiaq, or sealskin canoe, is still used today.

An umiaq near Barrow, 2008.

Contact with Europeans came in 1826, when two British men arrived and renamed the area Barrow (the Iñupiaq named it Ukpiagvik, “the place for hunting snowy owls”). By 1854, the first commercial whaling ships arrived at Barrow and trade began between the Iñupiat and European whalers. From 1852 to 1854 the British overwintered twice looking for a lost expedition. Shortly afterwards, the first commercial whaling ships arrived at Barrow and trade began between the Iñupiaq and whalers from the East Coast of the United States.

In addition to skins and whale, seal, and caribou meat, the Iñupiaq traded ivory and crafts.

Trade and contact with the outside world changed the Iñupiaq way of life. They acquired new technology, including guns, which they incorporated into their traditional hunting methods. Missionaries arrived in the late 1800s, introducing western religion. Contact also exposed the Iñupiaq people to new diseases. As a result, the population declined until western medicine was introduced in the 1920s.

In the last fifty to one hundred years, the people of Barrow have seen rapid change. The North Slope is home to the largest oil reserve in the Arctic. The oil and gas industry has brought many new jobs to the area. Barrow is also part of the North Slope Borough, a large incorporated area established in 1972, which has also added government and private jobs as well as modern conveniences. Now, light is supplied by electricity instead of seal oil, for example, and dogsleds have been replaced by snowmobiles.

Snowmobiles have replaced dogsleds in the Arctic; here, they even replace the dogs.

Today, 60 percent of the people in Barrow are Iñupiaq; 98 percent of the people in the other seven North Slope villages are also Iñupiaq. While much has changed, many traditions remain. The Iñupiaq continue to do subsistence whaling and other hunting, for cultural as well as practical reasons (food is very expensive there and hunted food is much healthier than store-bought). Many Iñupiats work part time to accommodate their subsistence way of life, and some jobs are structured so they can take “subsistence leave.” With climate change looming, however, the Iñupiaq people are now in danger of losing their major food sources as well as some of their traditional ways of life.

Iñupiaq Barrow resident Ida prepares whale meat with a traditional Iñupiaq knife.

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.