Climate Change and Cultural Survival in the Arctic: People of the Whales and Muktuk Politics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article explores the interface of climate change and society in a circumpolar context, particularly experienced among the Iñupiaq people (Iñupiat) of Arctic Alaska. The Iñupiat call themselves the “People of the Whales,” and their physical and spiritual survival is based on their cultural relationship with bowhead whales. Historically the broader indigenous identity, spawned through their activism, has served to connect disparate communities and helped revitalize cultural traditions. Indigenous Arctic organizations such as the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC) and the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission (AEWC) are currently building upon a strong success record of their past to confront the environmental problems of their future. Employing what the author calls muktuk politics—a culturally salient reference to the bowhead whale skin and the underlying blubber—the Iñupiaq have revitalized their cultural identity by participating in international debates on climate change, whaling, and human rights. Currently, the ICC and the AEWC identify Arctic climate change and its impact on human rights as their most important topics. The Iñupiat relationship with the land, ocean, and animals are affected by a number of elements including severe weather, climate and environmental changes, and globalization. To the Iñupiat, their current problems are different than those of the past, but they also understand that as long as there are bowhead whales they can subsist and thrive, and this is their goal. This new form of muktuk politics seeks to bring their current challenges to a wider audience by relying on more recent political experiences.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".