This work is what the Wrangel Island expedition had demonstrated the need for, although no one at the time would have framed it in those terms.

The expedition had shown — with terrible clarity — what happened when people attempted to live in the Arctic without the knowledge that Indigenous peoples had developed for that purpose.

The lesson took decades to be formally understood and acted on.

What Four Thousand Years Looks Like

The Iñupiat people of northern Alaska belong to a cultural tradition that is among the most successfully adapted in human history.

Their ancestors moved into the Arctic roughly 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, displacing or absorbing earlier populations in a region that had previously been occupied by people archaeologists call the Arctic Small Tool tradition.