The Native Alaskan Survival Story That Revealed How Indigenous Knowledge Helped Humans Adapt To One Of Earth’s Harshest Environments

She was afraid of guns and terrified of polar bears.

She was a seamstress from a mission school.

But she was also Iñupiat.

And somewhere in that identity — in the hands that had been trained to work with needle and thread, in the eyes that had grown up reading a northern landscape even if they had not been taught to hunt in it, in the practical intelligence that had gotten her through a life of sustained hardship before she ever arrived on Wrangel Island — there was something she could draw on.

The first thing she had to learn was how to trap.