He confesses that he had never traveled outside the United States and says with a laugh that he even lost count of the plane changes he made to get to Terceira Island, to participate in the GlexSummit 2023 that took place in Angra do Heroísmo. But Kimberly Kivvaq Pikok, a fisherman and biologist from the Inupiaq ethnic group, sees it as a mission to tell the world what’s happening in Alaska, especially the melting of the sea ice that can be observed from her town of Utqiagvik, the northernmost city in the United States and one of the northernmost in the world, just 2,000 kilometers from the North Pole. Interestingly enough, the 25-year-old avoids a catastrophic speech about global warming even to the Inuit people, who we traditionally call Eskimos: “It’s a really important fact for our community, because every year we see different kinds of changes in the behavior of sea ice, land and animals. We find different ways to adapt to these changes. We’ve already stopped thinking about climate change in a negative perspective, but in how to adapt to it.” And he emphasizes that anyone who crosses the Arctic Circle and visits Utqiagvik and other locations where Inuit communities live “will see how the survival instinct allows people to adapt to environmental changes at their maximum.”
Survival instinct is something that the Inupiaq people have shown for the past two centuries, ever since they saw the arrival of the British, Russians and finally Americans, ever since the United States bought Alaska from the Tsar in 1867.
Some recent symbolic measures, such as the name change of the town from Barrow, a figure in the British navy, to the traditional Utqiagvik, do not hide the accelerated Americanization of the 5,000 inhabitants, probably even of the other 15,000 Inupiaq who live in villages scattered along the northern coast of Alaska.
“We still have many of our traditions, such as the whale festival, which takes place in the country where I come from. Our community lives near Point Hope, the northernmost cape, and is the most traditional in my region. I think we sometimes modernize, for example in food. Today we eat kimchi [risos] like we were korean. I think modernization gives us new perspectives in terms of our way of thinking, our mindset,” explains Pikok, who studied biology at the University of Fairbanks, one of the largest cities in Alaska, a state that is the largest in the US and the size of 20 times Portugal.
The conversation is in English and Pikok admits that all his education was done in that language, although he still knows a few words of his people’s language. “The children started to learn English and the families encouraged it as it was the way to integrate into society. Today we are trying to revive our language so that we can learn it from the few speakers we already have,” he says. There will be only 2,000 people, mostly elderly, who still speak Inupiaq. “For most young people, the same thing happens as for me. We understand a few sentences, but we are not able to respond in our own language. It was my parents’ people who started learning English to go to school,” he added in a conversation at the Cultural and Congress Center of Angra do Heroísmo, after the lecture that filled the room where the GlexSummit, organized by Expanding, of Portuguese Manuel Vaz, and the Explorers Club of New York, took place in June.
Pikok was the first in her family to go to college and says she was always encouraged to learn more and raise awareness of her people’s concerns: “My community in Alaska supported me going to college. The fact that we have a higher education means we’ll come back and support the community so we can become leaders in that same community.”
The traditional religions of the Inuit today coexist with the monotheisms brought by various colonizers since the 19th century, and, as the biologist says, “we have all kinds of religions in our community today. We have the Catholic Church, the Presbyterian, the Mormon, etc.” American popular culture is also present in old Barrow – and Pikok used this name several times to refer to his town -, where there are basketball and soccer fields. “We don’t have fast food restaurants in Barrow, but what we do is go to Anchorage Airport, for example, where there’s a McDonald’s on the way back. We see a lot of people from the community ordering a Big Mac there and taking it home,” Pikok replies, again between laughs, adding that “we’re so American that we divide into Republicans and Democrats like the rest of the country.” Her smile won the three days of the GlexxSummit and it was curious to see how she was cherished by scientists, some from NASA.
With an annual rate of warming that scientists say is twice the average for the United States, Alaska is also in the spotlight due to debate between environmentalists and those who believe the melting opens up economic opportunities, such as expanding oil exploration. “There are always many people who want to protect the land around us. There is also a division between those who are pro-oil and those who want to protect the environment. What I have found is that no matter where one is, there is always a way to defend the chosen option: those who are pro-oil claim that this means our people have more money to buy food, and those who are pro-environment claim that this means more food for the whole community and that they can hunt in the traditional way,” the biologist says, trying not to take sides. because she knows that what she says as a public voice can be confused with a collective point of view.
“I hope to learn a lot more. I’m still very young in my academic career, I’m still a master’s student. I just hope I represent my community well while I’m so far from home. And this is my first time abroad,” she says. She confesses to being amazed at the Azores. And he even says he sees similarities with Utqiagvik: “I just thought about it yesterday. I walked along the coast and found that the unstable weather is similar to that of my region, one day it’s foggy and rainy, the next day it’s sunny…
DN traveled at the invitation of the GlexSummit
Source: DN
