Chie Sakakibara

Chie Sakakibara is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College. She was trained in cultural geography, art history, and Indigenous studies. Her work explores human dimensions of global environmental change among Indigenous peoples. Native to Japan, Sakakibara is a proud adoptive member of the Iñupiaq whaling community. Her love of humans and nonhuman animals manifests in her academic work as well as in her life with one human daughter and two canine sons.

As a mythical creature, the whale has been responsible for many transformations in the world. It is an enchanting being that humans have long felt a connection to. In the contemporary environmental imagination, whales are charismatic megafauna feeding our environmentalism and aspirations for a better and more sustainable future. Using multispecies ethnography, Whale Snow explores how everyday the relatedness of the Iñupiat of Arctic Alaska and the bowhead whale forms and transforms “the human” through their encounters with modernity. Whale Snow shows how the people live in the world that intersects with other beings, how these connections came into being, and, most importantly, how such intimate and intense relations help humans survive the social challenges incurred by climate change. In this time of ecological transition, exploring multispecies relatedness is crucial as it keeps social capacities to adapt relational, elastic, and resilient. In the Arctic, climate, culture, and human resilience are connected through bowhead whaling. In Whale Snow we see how climate change disrupts this ancient practice and, in the process, affects a vital expression of Indigenous sovereignty. Ultimately, though, this book offers a story of hope grounded in multispecies resilience. Note: The cover art, x-ray whale, was designed by Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson, an Iñupiaq educator, artist, and environmentalist who was born and raised on the North Slope of Alaska. Hopson’s artwork tells many stories, and they often point to a positive reciprocal relationship that goes across the boundary of humans and nonhuman animals.