The bowhead whale hunt — central to Iñupiat culture for thousands of years — continues in communities like Utqiaġvik (formerly Barrow) using umiaks, the skin boats whose construction and use Ada Blackjack reinvented under survival pressure on Wrangel Island.

The umiaks used today incorporate some modern materials, but the basic design is the same design developed over millennia: a wooden frame covered with bearded seal skins, sewn by women with the specific waterproof stitch technique, propelled by paddle to approach whales silently in the Arctic waters.

The knowledge is alive.

It is being transmitted.

It is being recognized — finally, belatedly, by institutions that once worked to destroy it — as some of the most sophisticated environmental intelligence that any human community has ever developed.

What Her Story Means — Beyond The Survival