“But the Eskimos Knew Better”: Representations of Arctic Whaling in Charles Brower’s "Fifty Years Below Zero”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this article, I examine Charles Brower’s Fifty Years Below Zero (1942) with respect to its depictions of Inupiaq subsistence whaling practices. Elaborating a theoretical framework that draws on scholarship produced by those working in the field of masculinity studies, I locate Brower’s memoir within the tradition of the American whaling narrative and compare it to two of its contemporaries, John A. Cook’s Pursuing the Whale (1926), and Hartson H. Bodfish’s Chasing the Bowhead (1936). I argue that, as a man familiar with Inupiaq culture, Brower possessed an attitude toward the Indigenous inhabitants of northern Alaska and Canada which was very different from that of Cook and Bodfish. I demonstrate that Cook and Bodfish go to great lengths to represent themselves and their employees as being isolated from the Yupik, the Inupiat, and the Inuvialuit. I also show that, throughout their narratives, they celebrate the achievements of white, American whalemen and dismiss the accomplishments of their Indigenous counterparts. Brower’s descriptions of Arctic whaling, meanwhile, praise these individuals for their courage, their boat-building technologies, and their knowledge of the behaviour patterns of bowhead whales. As I conclude, Fifty Years Below Zero ultimately reveals the remarkable impact that the Yupik, the Inupiat, and the Inuvialuit had on the American steam whaling trade and the significant amount of cultural exchange that occurred when individuals from these disparate communities interacted with one another.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".