The Inuit Gift

On July 7, 2007, I awoke early to a brilliant Arctic sun already high above my hotel in Kotzebue, Alaska. Kotzebue is a town that guidebooks refer to as a "working Arctic town," or what I determined as code for "nothing to see here." Such a description is in stark contrast to nearby Nome, which caters to tourists, Iditarod sledding enthusiasts, and gold rush history seekers. I traveled the extra leg to Kotzebue so I could attend the Inuit Circumpolar Youth Council (ICYC) language symposium. The invitation had been extended to me by Nome-born Patricia Cochran, international chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC). ICC represents Inuit people across the Arctic parts of Alaska, Canada, Russia, and Greenland. ICC has both a youth council and an elders' council in addition to the main political organization.

It was a privilege to be invited to the ICYC symposium in Kotzebue, but after I accepted, I realized the symposium fell on the vaunted 7–7–7 date. I had originally planned to attend one of the Live Earth mega-concerts scheduled for that day. Live Earth, at that time, was one of the largest (and most expensive) efforts at generating public awareness and engagement with climate change. Many of the world's most popular musicians had signed on, and Al Gore's organization was programming the climate-related part of the program. It was meant to energize the faithful and convince others to care and do something—even switching light bulbs from incandescent to longer life compact fluorescents (CFLs) counted as a responsible response to climate change.

Each morning I was in Kotzebue, I would descend the stairs to the hotel lobby where a small group of male elders were chatting and laughing with one another in the seating area in front of registration. Tied together through networks of kinship and friendship, they came from various fly-in communities, like Point Hope, Kobuk, Barrow, and other villages in the northwest Arctic. The symposium was a reunion of sorts for everyone who attended. I was a bit of an anomaly, although they were certainly accustomed to scientists, social and otherwise, being in their midst to study them or their land.

The same group of elders had questioned me a day earlier about my identity. They were sure that I was a lawyer and had a good laugh when they found out I was a graduate student. Climate change as my topic of interest elicited a different response—the tone of the conversation shifted quickly. Several spoke very briefly and gravely of storms that had forced their whaling boats back in, changed game patterns, and continued dangerous erosion of their coastal villages. They didn't necessarily want to know what I was up to in an in-depth way, but they did want to inform me that these changes were very much an everyday concern for them.

On July 7, they were deep in conversation in their Iñupiaq dialect. We exchanged waves, and I headed out the front door beside them to be greeted by the gloriously bright sun and gently lapping waves of the Chukchi Sea. The dirt ring road about six feet from shore lay in front of the hotel and provided an easy footpath to the restaurant next door—one of only two or three places to eat out in a town of about 3,000 people. As I slid into a chair at the restaurant, I wondered if anyone in Kotzebue was aware or excited about the fact that somewhere in the world really famous musicians were rocking out about climate change to save the Arctic and, if one believed the most alarming projections, countries and land masses as we currently know them.

CNN was on in the restaurant, which doubled as a bar. It had updates from concerts under way in Tokyo and London. CNN's anchors were quite excited about the scientists' band broadcasting later on from Antarctica—excited, that is, in the canned performative way viewers have come to expect from on-air banter. I had to agree with their canned excitement, though. The "broadcasting from all seven continents" was a real novelty even if the seventh came by way of grainy satellite video from a socked-in Antarctic winter research station. That was it for a human polar presence, though—from the only continent devoid of indigenous human communities.

I glanced around the gritty restaurant with faded leather chairs and paneled walls. It occurred to me pretty quickly that I was the only one paying attention to the screens mounted on the ceiling above the bar. The wizened old fishermen in the booth behind me were talking about the relative merits of various winches and rigs. The elder Inuit couple and their grandchild in the booth beside them talked quietly. I couldn't make out what they were talking about, but they gave me a gentle nod to say hello, recognizing me from the symposium. Other breakfast-seekers straggled in over the next forty-five minutes, but the TV was mere background noise. Game day or election night this was not.

The Arctic was not center stage for Live Earth, despite the daily challenges of living in a vast expanse dotted with fly-in communities that have worked out a dependent relationship with ice and cold. The irrelevance of such an event to those actually experiencing the direct effects of climate change seemed palpable from this vantage point. Learning about compact fluorescent light bulbs just doesn't cut it as a solution when nearby, the ancient whaling village of Kivalina is in danger of being swept into the sea or, to put it less dramatically and more specifically, losing more and more of its small barrier island to permafrost melt and coastal erosion.

It has been argued that awareness-raising schemes like the massive undertaking of Live Earth are always removed, regardless of where one sits. Certainly, there were many critics and skeptics who wondered what the "real" net effect would be in terms of greenhouse gas emissions and the expense of broadcasting musicians like Sting, Madonna, and the Black-Eyed Peas live from large and fashionable metropolises like Tokyo, London, or Rio (Schagen 2007). Yet for those who long for a continued momentum of public interest and support for climate change action and the energizing of a new generation, there could be nothing better than a Live Aid for the Earth. After so many decades in which climate change remained on what Gallup called "the public's 'back burner,'" it finally seemed that such a massive event might be a way to raise the profile of climate change the way Live Aid or Farm Aid or other celebrity-laden events had done for other issues.

Between this gulf of the local and global, the direct present experience and the conceptual future, lies the difficulty of communicating the amorphous nature of climate change as an issue of concern. How to talk about it, where it's located, what the causal factors might be, when it may begin or how it already has, and any guesses at potential solutions appear, at first glance, to be audience-dependent. Locating what climate change...