“WE ARE TORN ABOUT OUR FUTURE”: Big Oil and Iñupiaq community health in Arctic Alaska

This chapter reveals how political and economic turbulence inaugurated by Big Oil manifest in rural Arctic Alaska at the expense of Indigenous health and community integrity. Cultural geographer Chie Sakakibara and Arctic Indigenous scholar and community health worker Rosemary Ahtuangaruak contextualize Iñupiaq modernity by exploring how the bowhead whale, a cultural and physical cornerstone species for Iñupiat, is entangled in the making of human health and well-being and, by extension, facilitates the “complex matrix of sovereignty in relation to extractive industries and fears for future environmental destruction.” In chronicling the history of oil industry development in the Beaufort Sea and Chukchi Sea, Sakakibara and Ahtuangaruak illustrate how the cold water offshore contributes to contemporary Indigenous identities in Arctic Alaska and compellingly argue that it is “time for us to borrow animal voices.”