He was saying: the Iñupiat do it, so it can be done, so we can do it.

The result was four dead men and one woman who survived partly because she had Iñupiat heritage that provided partial access to the knowledge Stefansson had treated as a simple set of accessible techniques.

The lesson that researchers and land managers eventually drew from this and similar episodes was that Traditional Ecological Knowledge could not be extracted from its context and applied as a portable toolkit.

It had to be understood as a knowledge system — one that required respect for its complexity, acknowledgment of the community and transmission structures that maintained it, and partnership with the knowledge holders themselves.