Our Home is Drowning: Inupiat storytelling and climate change in Point Hope, Alaska

Contemporary storytelling among the Inupiat of Point Hope, Alaska, is a means of coping with the unpredictable future that climate change poses. Arctic climate change impacts Inupiat lifeways on a cultural level by threatening their homeland, their sense of place, and their respect for the bowhead whale that is the basis of their cultural identity. What I found during my fieldwork was that traditional storytelling processed environmental changes as a way of maintaining a connection to a disappearing place. In this article I describe how environmental change is Culturally manifest through tales of the supernatural, particularly spirit beings or ghosts. The types of Inupiat stories and modes of telling them reveal people's uncertainty about the future. Examining how people perceive the loss of their homeland, I argue that Inupiat storytelling both reveals and is a response to a changing physical and spiritual landscape.