• 1 Lopez, Barry, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (New York, Vintage, 200 (...)
• 2 Lopez, Barry, Arctic Dreams, 248-250.
• 3 Lord, Nancy, Beluga Days: Tracking a White Whale’s Truths (New York, Counterpoint, 2004), 69-70.

1In Arctic Dreams, Barry Lopez sought out what he called “the Native Eye,” something he felt that both Vladimir Arseniev and Laurens van der Post had found, respectively, in the Siberian taiga and the Kalahari Desert.¹ But, what exactly is “The Native Eye,” and why would it be important to convey to a wider audience? Essentially, “The Native Eye,” being more than mere perspective, is a wider means of experiencing the world, almost an extension of Jakob von Euxküll’s theory of the Umwelt, which one veritably must earn via long-term observation of, and immersion into, a particular biome, thereby gaining a kind of local genius, often resulting in a deeper understanding of the anthropomorphism rife in Native cultures, which is directly related to the idea of personhood. Lopez suggests that the last great spiritual leap for Western culture, aside from that outlier, quantum physics, was potentially the medieval Cathedral.² Nancy Lord, whose work, Beluga Days, will be highlighted herein, similarly states in her memoir, Fishcamp, “[m]y ancestors let their spiritual lives wither like vestigial tails and developed instead mental lives focused on rational thought, involved not with felt life but with ideas.”³ In exploring human relations with animals, then, from the perspective of “the Native Eye,” a much different picture emerges regarding animal rights and love from that of our industrialized, rational society, one inherently worth the years of observational travel and writing in order to convey Outside.

• 4 Lord, Nancy, Fishcamp: Life on an Alaskan Shore Island (Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 1999 [199 (...)
• 5 Hess, Bill, Gift of the Whale: the Iñupiat Bowhead Hunt, a Sacred Tradition (Seattle: Sasquatch Boo (...)
• 6 Fienup-Riordan, Ann, Boundaries and Passages: Rule and Ritual in Yup’ik Eskimo Oral Tradition (Norm (...)
• 7 Fienup-Riordan, Ann, Boundaries and Passages, 97, 118.

4People, like animals, in Alaska Native culture, can be considered part of the food chain and not above it, lording over it. From this perspective, the large-scale industrial farming of the Lower 48 could be considered much more of a hindrance to the lives of animals than hunting. Likewise, animals are considered to be non-human persons, subjects, not objects. Importantly, to begin the first argument here, from this particular perspective, taking animals in a respectful way is an extraordinarily important part of Alaska Native existence. That respect can be viewed as a means of honor that can also be considered an expression of love, and of deep spiritual awareness. This awareness is extended beyond the human and animal person world to flora,⁴ which also has a form of spirit, and should likewise be respected, honored, and loved. This universal subjectivity gained through close contact and interwoven existence naturally tends to create empathy in many, leading to an undefined form of love that is not often expressed in literature in terms that the West may consider to be love. Yet, in Bill Hess’s powerful photos from his work Gift of the Whale we see an Iñupiat whale hunter nose-to-nose with a bowhead whale trapped at a winter breathing hole as the man spends days out on the ice soothing the animal with his voice and his touch.⁵ But, as will also be discussed, this worldview carries heavy caveats and misinterpretations by Western culture, who simply cannot comprehend the subtleties of Native interest without deep immersion, of the respectfulness necessary in hunting to kill, much the point of several chapters of Nancy Lord’s Beluga Days. It is likewise integral to anthropologist, Ann Fienup-Riordan’s work on the Yup’ik people, Boundaries and Passages, which focuses heavily on keeping a clean and respectful house for hunted seals to be received as guests⁶ and feeding them fresh water after being hunted.⁷ To clarify before moving forward, Westerners tend to have less intimate relationships with the natural world than Alaska Natives who maintain, or have rediscovered, “the Native Eye,” as well as linguistic, cultural, and spiritual connections to their surroundings. Furthermore, the global views of Western Umwelten often do not allow for the understanding of a connection of empathic love involved in the holistic nature of the Alaska Native hunt and the taboos surrounding its ceremony. The love expressed by the latter is a deeply intimate and personal experience that shapes entire connections to the natural world. And though love is rarely connected with killing in Western worldviews, the careful watching, the prayers, and the offering of fresh water to animals, for example, display a deep empathy for the animals and for the holistic circle of life in which they all live. In contrast, a Western view tends to see humans as protectors over creatures as a means of showing love.

• 8 Raban, Jonathan, Passage to Juneau: A Sea and its Meanings (London: Picador, 1999), 348.
• 9 Raban, Jonathan, Passage to Juneau, 190-191.
• 10 Wenzel, George, Animal Rights, Human Rights: Ecology, Economy and Ideology in the Canadian Arctic ( (...)

5In order to understand the need for the deep immersion required for such a view, a quick look at some iconoclastic discussions by respected British travel writer Jonathan Raban, seems pertinent. In his 1999 work, Passage to Juneau, Raban provokes the reader with a description of the misplaced Western views of “John Muir Indians and Fenimore Cooper Indians […] people who apologized to salmon before killing them, who hugged trees before turning them into war canoes, like good school children of the 1990s, following Mother Nature’s rulebook.”⁸ Interestingly, in equating this saccharine glimpse of the Native perspective through the lens of what he calls the “Northwest nature writers,” and with Barry Lopez in particular,⁹ Raban creates a dichotomy between New Age American thought and European thought regarding “nature,” including the treatment of animals. That writer describes a dichotomy between Wordsworth’s descriptions of England’s Lake District, carefully coiffed by man, and Emerson “at his most vatic,” where nothing but pristine, untouched, old-growth wilderness will do. Raban, a humanist who often takes the contrarian view in defending local cultures, be they the working-class Whites in and around Seattle or the evolving cultures of modern Native peoples, makes a strong point in warning against the “noble savage stereotype.” This is because discussing animal rights and Native understandings of animal and plant personhood, as a part of a broad community, can be co-opted into a Western understanding, which can have the tendency of being oversimplified or manipulated for particular interests, the kind of interests that want to see the Inuit living in ice igloos with no Western technology, only hunting and gathering for food, and consequently dying young of starvation and communicable diseases.¹⁰ Raban’s argument, then, is that you have to allow Native peoples self-determination, to make their own cultural decisions moving forward, viewing them as in a state of evolution rather than having lost their essence. But, in warning against rendering Native peoples two-dimensional, Raban himself risks rendering them two-dimensional, despite his extensive study of ethnology, in not truly seeing the depth of Native cultures, instead focusing too heavily on the errors other people make in their own shallow views of said cultures.

• 11 Newell, Mike, No Bottom: In Conversation with Barry Lopez (Ohio: XOXOX Press, 2007), 35.
• 12 Kollin, Susan, Nature’s State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of No (...)
• 13 Rainey, Froelich G. The Whale Hunters of Tigara. Volume 41: Part 2 (New York: Anthropological Paper (...)

6Raban’s argument is important to the arguments herein because many outsiders view Alaska Native interests as corrupted from their original, perhaps prelapsarian, views, and that Alaska Natives therefore need to be guided toward either their “Old Ways” or assimilated into the modern world. However, in defense of Lopez’s perhaps halcyon view of Native culture, that writer has stated in interview with Mike Newell that numerous other writers have expressed the dire problems in Native communities, and that he has therefore attempted to highlight the positives of Native cultures, as well as the inherent worth of their perspectives.¹¹ Alaska literary scholar, Susan Kollin, has suggested meanwhile that avoiding the fetishization of the state as the Last Frontier, which requires discussion of nuance rather than ingrained views, is of the utmost importance.¹² Though both Raban and Lopez make important points, then, perhaps a nuanced middle ground could be more helpful to the people, their worldview, and the biomes of Alaska. However, this does indeed leave a lot of questions open as to what that means for how Alaska Natives express their love for animals, as self-determination has allowed for evolution in thought and culture that has at times moved away from specific, spiritual belief systems. For example, the importance of, and understanding of, certain deities has shifted due to exposure to European and Christianized worldviews.¹³

• 15 Fienup-Riordan, Ann, Boundaries and Passages, 47.

8This passage is obviously important in pointing out the relationship between human and non-human persons, animals as subjects and not objects, yet the author later reminds us that the Western view still misses another very important aspect. She notes, and these are the types of subtleties lost in works like the prodigious Passage to Juneau by Raban as well as Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, that apologizing for killing an animal and other respectful treatment does not come from a Westernized version of spiritual appreciation so much as a respect for a prescription of societal “rules both to create and to maintain the proper boundaries and enact the proper ceremonial exchanges between them.”¹⁵ In other words, Yup’ik culture is very highly bound by cultural norms and taboo based on the spiritual traditions gathered over multiple generations. Animals are treated with respect, often not because of a “New Age” emotional, spiritual link, but because they are bound to a cycle of reincarnation and will return remembering whether or not they were killed respectfully.

• 16 “Nancy Lord,” accessed 25/03/2021, http://www.writernancylord.com/

11Nancy Lord moved to Alaska after college and has spent several decades fishing for salmon on the Cook Inlet. She has written almost a dozen books in the off season and has increasingly focused on environmental issues with a heavy focus on animals.¹⁶ Her work has an interesting relationship with love toward animals in that in maintaining such a close proximity to the natural world and her environment for so many decades she has approached what Barry Lopez has called The Native Eye to some extent, and her expression of love could perhaps be said to approach that of Alaska Natives discussed above. For instance, in the following excerpt from the prologue of Beluga Days, Lord expresses her love and respect for the cycle of life while overtly shying away from sentimentality:

• 18 Lord, Nancy, Fishcamp, 203-4.
• 19 Lord, Nancy, Beluga Days, 34.

13As for the form of the work, notwithstanding the caveats discussed above, the prologue is mostly written in a somewhat sentimental and descriptive style common to American “Nature” writing. The epilogue, entitled “Watching, 2002,” is written in a similar vein, pondering existential questions regarding the whale. Other than these two chapters and one other chapter entitled “Beluga Love,” Beluga Days shifts toward journalistic travel writing that moves away from the sentimental and toward investigating the reasons behind the dwindling numbers of Cook Inlet beluga. There are travels to multiple communities with multiple interviews and descriptions of meetings that are meant to dig into the web of complexity in solving environmental problems. The question here, then, is whether such a technique constitutes any less an expression of love than that of sentimental and direct descriptions of empathy? Considering her proximity to the natural world, where, for instance, she has insisted she goes weeks on end at her fish camp without talking to another human and being no less happy,¹⁸ her expression of love can perhaps be considered as approaching that of the Alaska Native community love discussed above as a sort of holistic agape, a love of existence and of the natural world itself, including the majesty of the animal persons within it. But, like many Alaska Natives, she does not discuss the issues in those terms as they are not expressions that tend to work within the Alaska Native Umwelt. She does, though, attempt to explain the Alaska Native viewpoint in detail. At one point, she says, “I […] knew that Native people who moved to Anchorage didn’t stop being Native.”¹⁹ Though many Alaska Natives move to that urban area for remunerative purposes, she notes that they continue to live close to the land. “[…] even in 1998, gathering and preparing food was central to Native life. Salmon, caribou, seal, berries, clams, ducks, wild celery—these foods still, throughout Alaska, made up a sizable portion of most Natives’ diets […] When Native people travel […] They share their gifts” (34). The view on this page, again, is of a sort of honor given to the natural world and their connection to it, to the cycle of life. She then discusses the meat of the environmental issue at hand:

• 21 Brinkley, Douglas, The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York (...)

16Considering this type of love and its expression in Lord’s journalistic travel writing, this article may now proceed to the heart of an important Alaska Native argument and Lord’s navigation thereof: we feel uncomfortable with others “looking at our food.” In one particular meeting amongst the many described in Beluga Days, “the director of an environmental organization” politely asks the Native hunters present, as is so prevalent in the modern promotion of eco-tourism, to take people on tours to see the whales instead of killing them. This idea sounds a priori like a logical solution to the modern Western mind. A camera in place of a gun has become common mantra among thoughtful Westerners ever since big game hunters realized they were killing off entire species at roughly the turn of the 20th century.²¹ Yet, Lord says, “feet shifted.” Lord says, “I knew what was coming because I had heard it before, the uneasiness of subsistence users with other people ‘looking at our food.’” This subtle expression gets across the idea to the reader that the multiple parties involved in protecting the Cook Inlet beluga whale do not see eye-to-eye, and that good intentions are not always well-founded, though the writer accomplishes this feat without ever attacking anyone directly, rather suggesting that there may be a bit of ignorance coming from Outside, by pragmatic, logic-minded parties with differing agendas. Lord continues:

• 23 Fienup-Riordan, Ann, Boundaries and Passages, xiii.

18To step back for a moment once again, this passage comes from a chapter aptly entitled “The Whale in the Room,” as a play on words to the common expression, “elephant in the room,” meaning the large-scale problem that no one wants to discuss. “The whale in the room,” then, is that Lord is accusing Natives, as well as scientists, fishermen, and the oil industry, of slowly killing off the belugas of the Cook Inlet. If she is going to accuse the larger Alaska Native community of irresponsibility, she must do so wisely. Her resulting technique is to maintain her own perspective as an on-looker, but a semi-informed one, explaining a situation in which the reader is presumably not familiar but which is also obviously not uncommon. “I knew what was coming because I had heard it before […],” she says. Therefore, again, we are introduced to a new idea, but understanding that said idea is also well-worn to some. Lord’s passage further works with Fienup-Riordan’s suggestion that the Native point of view is often misunderstood; that, as “they told her repeatedly, ‘You kass’at [white people] always want to know about the things we do, but it is the rules that are important.’”²³ Guided by a regulated, cultural tradition rich in complexity, Alaska Natives are neither New Age exemplars, nor are they childish creatures to be guided by the Western scientific mind. In this particular situation, the result is that activist environmental groups of a foreign culture are attempting to impose their values, just as activist Christian missionaries once did and are now often viewed quite negatively.

• 24 Klein, Naomi, This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. the Climate (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014 (...)

20In Naomi Klein’s 2014 This Changes Everything, that writer suggests that non-Native people are beginning to realize that Native people frequently serve as the front line to the fight against climate change, and that the technocratic and logistical know-how of the West should be combined with the spirit and fight of Native communities who truly have nothing left but to fight.²⁴ If non-Native groups are to work with Native groups, though, even, or particularly, in literature, they absolutely must be respectful of the fact that Native culture often has differing priorities and norms.

• 25 Unpublished interview with me, 30/3/2018.

21Lord’s work in Beluga Days provides exactly such a template. Yet, we must remember that Lord, despite a prolific career spanning decades, has never gained wider fame the way that New Yorker writers such as Rachel Carson have, and this is partly due to her locally-oriented work which does not quite resonate with a wider audience. Beluga Days has specifically as its goal to save the Cook Inlet beluga, as well as to discuss the difficulty in organizing a concerted effort to save the Cook Inlet beluga, and therefore, its inclusivity and respectfulness toward all groups involved in the situation almost automatically deters Outside interest, with the exception that it demonstrates a template for a successful local model, as Beluga Days participated in the stabilization of the Cook Inlet beluga population.²⁵

• 26 Brinkley, Douglas, The Quiet World: Saving Alaska’s Wilderness Kingdom (1879-1960) (New York: Harpe (...)
• 27 Lowenstein, Tom, Ancient Land, Sacred Whale: The Inuit Hunt and its Rituals (London: Bloomsbury, 19 (...)
• 28 Lowenstein, Tom, Ancient Land, Sacred Whale, 50-51.

23Nancy Lord chooses not go into much depth on this spiritual connection, preferring to stick with a rather utilitarian discussion of subsistence tradition, which may resonate more widely with disparate demographics involved in the specific debate. But yet, there are some aspects of Alaska Native lore and spiritual tradition that merit being briefly discussed here in order to explain to those not familiar with Native culture how animal persons are specifically intertwined into society and what that means for their unique expressions of love and general interactions. The goddess Sedna, for example, occurs in Inuit oral literature throughout the Western Arctic. Though the goddess’s name may change, or certain aspects of her story, the story of Sedna is generally explained as a young woman thrown overboard from a boat to drown, and as she clings to the side of the boat, her fingers are chopped off by her father, which become sea animals to be taken by hunters. Sedna now lives at the bottom of the sea and controls the sea animals. Therefore, she, and they, must be treated respectfully, so that Sedna will release the animals to humans for sustenance.²⁶ Sedna is but one specific example, but respect for animal persons is even more normalized in other forms of Native oral literature. For instance, Raven Man, celebrated throughout Alaska Native culture, is often said to have stolen the sun to create day. Raven is curious and mischievous, a shapeshifter, often respected, and the oral literature of Native communities surrounding Raven Man is backed up by observation of this intelligent, capable bird, who is as likely to help you as to play a trick on you.²⁷ There is therefore a tremendous amount of honor given to ravens in many communities, who even go so far as to identify with them in their tribal clans and moieties. Variously, in Alaska Native oral literature, bears not infrequently shape-shift into human form, aiding humans in need or even marrying humans, turning their spouses into bears.²⁸ Like ravens, then, bears are particularly respected and identified with in many Native cultures. As for further examples, human people sometimes become seal people, or wolf people, or frog people, etc. Such proximity to the natural world and the basis for spiritual stories naturally creates that sense of holistic love and honor for animals and community discussed frequently herein. Animals in these scenarios become neighbors, family members, even providers of tribes, all with dynamic personalities to be honored, loved, on their own terms and in many cases through mimicry: the wearing of ritual masks while singing and dancing.

• 29 Fienup-Riordan, Ann, Boundaries and Passages, 63, 259.

24These references are indeed pertinent to the idea expressed herein regarding the importance of the loss of subsistence lifestyles because the well-known imposition of Western values on Native peoples has taken not only a physical life but a spiritual aspect. It is truly difficult to register a rich spiritual life in the Alaska Native model of one’s own culture when living in a logic-driven, Western world. Yet, small groups persist, searching for the veritable Umwelten of their ancestors (when animal persons spoke to human persons, shapeshifting was common, and the Earth was thin, allowing for communication between realms of existence and spiritual travel;²⁹ ideas mirrored in many forms of Buddhism) to offer them purpose in communities which have experienced change exponentially greater than the change Westerners are currently experiencing. As noted above, all of this must be taken into account when traveling and writing in places still occupied by Native interests, which can come across as immature, or even inane, to a writer or observer lacking in context.

• 30 Kolbert, Elizabeth, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (New York: Picador, 2015).
• 31 McPhee, John, Coming into the Country: Travels in Alaska (London: Daunt Books, 2015 [1977]).
• 32 Packer, George, The Unwinding: Thirty Years of American Decline (New York and London: Faber and Fab (...)
• 33 Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2002 [1962]).
• 34 Thubron, Colin, In Siberia (London: Chatto and Windus, 1999).
• 35 Raban, Jonathan, Passage to Juneau, 1999.
• 36 Lord, Nancy, Beluga Days, 5.
• 37 Lord, Nancy, Beluga Days, 179.
• 38 Lord, Nancy, Beluga Days, 160.
• 39 Lord, Nancy, Beluga Days, 6, 177.
• 40 Lord, Nancy, Beluga Days, 66.
• 41 Lord, Nancy, Beluga Days, 67.
• 42 Lord, Nancy, Beluga Days, 67.

25So how, then, does Nancy Lord approach the subject? Following the journalistic form of travel writing not unlike what we may consider The New Yorker model employed by Elizabeth Kolbert,³⁰ John McPhee,³¹ and George Packer,³² and not far from what Rachel Carson³³ was attempting to do, Lord simply talks with people and listens to their problems, often sorting chapters by subject matter or interest group. This model is different from that of other modern travel writers such as Colin Thubron³⁴ and Jonathan Raban³⁵ in that journalistic New Yorker writers tend to sporadically jump back and forth, often, again, as Lord has done, basing chapters and travel agenda on subject matter instead of chronologically following a single journey. Though, as previously mentioned, Lord focuses heavily on a local model; she interestingly employs the New Yorker travel writing format to visit Alaskan villages on the Cook Inlet around her hometown of Homer, and on the Arctic tundra, in Point Lay (as well as brief excursions to Quebec and Chicago), describing what she sees and gaining insight. Lord is never saccharine in her descriptions. She limns the deep issues she sees with Alaska Native culture, but she is always even-handed, fair, and attentive to deep histories. Outside the prologue, the epilogue, and a chapter entitled “Beluga Love,” Beluga Days does not in fact directly deal with the emotional connection between belugas and humans very often, so she employs two techniques in order to approach the sensational and the relationship between the two species: 1) she searches for those relationships in past works of literature; and 2) she goes to see belugas at an aquarium in Chicago. In the first instance, she attempts to reach back into Alaska Native oral history in order to find a deeper understanding of that relationship in the Cook Inlet. Perusing the works of anthropologist Frederica de Laguna,³⁶ and of ethnographer Peter Kalifornsky,³⁷ as well as The Journals of Captain James Cook,³⁸ she searches for any discussion of the beluga, mostly unsuccessfully. But Lord indeed notes that the local ethnographic work Shem Pete’s Alaska discusses the construction of a Dena’ina yuyqul, a spruce tree uprooted and flipped upside down, posted into the marsh during low tide, so that a hunter with a spear may climb into the upturned roots and wait for high tide to bring in beluga.³⁹ This indicates a sense of attachment to the animal, honoring it through long hours of watching, followed by hunting and finally eating communally. In this way, the Dena’ina did not bother the whales except during the hunt, they did not hunt the whales in large numbers for being competitors in salmon fishing, and they did not pollute the whales, all of which the industrial world has since done; the latter displaying a sense of humans being above the animal person community, the cycle of life. In the second instance, in the chapter entitled “Beluga Love,” Lord hesitantly visits an aquarium, against her moral judgment, in order to view the belugas firsthand.⁴⁰ As the waters of the Cook Inlet are often quite muddy, particularly around the shallow coasts where beluga can safely stay away from the threat of orcas, Lord rarely has seen more than the spouts and fins of pods passing her by. She notes their ugliness from the human perspective. “[…] I saw: folds of fat bunched like double, triple, quadruple chins as the one vertically poised white whale bent forward, as if to look down its length to where some phantom toes may have been.”⁴¹ As she stood there transfixed, “look[ing] like a nutcase”⁴² as other people came and went, she was reconciling what she had always known of them with what she was seeing, and how this animal she had spent so much time attempting to save actually appeared to a human. She adds, quite candidly, “These belugas were alternately lumpy and hollow and curiously contoured, as though their creator had been very unhandy in his application of modeling clay.” But she follows that by saying:

• 45 Colwell, Mary, John Muir: The Scotsman who save America’s wild places (Oxford: Lion, 2014), 144-145
• 46 Wolfe, Tom, The New Journalism (London: Picador, 1975 [1973]), 34-36.
• 47 McGinniss, Joe, Going to Extremes (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980), 16-18, 73-79, 108-112.

28This passage is extraordinarily informative. For the outsider, Lord expresses the importance of the whale hunt to the solidarity and sense of meaning in the community. In adapting to modernity, in dealing with community trauma so common in Native cultures, her travel to the Dena’ina school demonstrates the direct problems with disconnected Native youth. The writer is unable to get through to the “angry” teenagers the way she was with the younger students and some adults. She points much of the blame on the ignorance of outsiders who have power over the community. A principal tells her that kids who are sleeping cannot cause problems, which is reminiscent of the common frontier quip, “The only good Indian is…”, and here Lord is wise enough to not even finish, “…a dead Indian,” which is not only extraordinarily insensitive and entirely lacking in empathy, but is the kind of thinking which has led to literal genocides.⁴⁵ The importance in this passage is not only direct, but it lies in explaining the frustration that these generations grow up experiencing as similar outsiders come into their communities, treating them as second-class citizens, and telling them they can no longer practice subsistence living, which, as has been discussed herein, is not only their tradition but is inextricable with their spirituality, their existence. In 1980, New Journalist, Joe McGinniss, published a piece of travel writing about Alaska in the age of oil, entitled Going to Extremes, in which he exposes the consequences of ostensibly endless flows of money on Alaskan communities. Yet, McGinniss, in approaching the state with a fresh mind in the mode of the New Journalists, ends up with the result that Alaska Natives come across as their worst selves, entirely without context of the deep histories and trauma that Nancy Lord discusses. This is a conscious literary decision⁴⁶ allowing for nuanced views of individuals in Alaska,⁴⁷ but it is also a dangerous ethical mistake in such a place as Alaska.

• 48 Lord, Nancy, Beluga Days, 172-177.
• 49 Lord, Nancy, Beluga Days, 39.

30Sometimes, these confrontations and our subsequent sensitivities create a paralysis, preventing us from asking the tough questions that may offer us pragmatic solutions. One important question becomes: why should Natives be encouraged to maintain their spiritual differences and traditions? In this article on Nancy Lord’s Beluga Days, unlike in McGinniss’ work, it becomes obvious that cohesion in communities attempting to overcome trauma absolutely necessitates connection with spiritual and traditional lineage, creating a form of honor, sharing, and holistic love between human persons and each other as well as human persons and animal persons. Another, perhaps even trickier, question becomes: how can a travel writer be respectful of tradition, portraying the importance of spiritual connection, while also attempting to rein in that culture’s habits, which are in the process of leading to the extinction of a species of whale, even if the more direct cause of the decline was not their fault? Part of the answer, aside from extraordinary care in explaining the nuance of absolutely all good-willed sides of the issue, is for Lord to discuss TEK or Traditional Ecological Knowledge.⁴⁸ One glaring example of TEK is when a toxicologist at a meeting presents bar graphs declaring that the Cook Inlet beluga show the lowest percentage of PCBs, DDT, and heavy metals of any beluga group. Joel Blatchford, the same man who spoke in the previously quoted passage about discomfort with whale-watching, replies, “‘The Cook Inlet whales are sick […]’ He had, he said, personally thrown away four or five that had runny, yellow fat.”⁴⁹ This goes hand-in-hand with Lopez’s idea of “the Native Eye,” how thousands of years of accumulated observational knowledge may help modern understanding of science, as well as a reconnection with “the Native Eye,” that displays honor and empathy for neighboring animal persons, again leading to a holistic expression of Native agape. Blatchford, in other words, is not just worried about his food source but about the health of his neighboring persons and what that means for the broader natural cycle.

• 50 Lord, Nancy, Beluga Days, 69-70.

31To bring all of this together, Lord’s Beluga Days demonstrates that individual localities always have their own interests, as well as enough geographical and cultural importance that local travel writing can serve as an excellent tool to effect local change, which will almost inherently exclude wider success due to the micro-view of local interest. Meanwhile, an unfortunately broad, global monoculture absolutely does not preclude the environmental community, which tends to latch onto influential environmental celebrities. This is not a critique of such a tendency, as global figures are obviously important in a global fight against climate change. Furthermore, it must also be noted that there has always been an almost inherent interest in particular place in environmental literature. But what is different in the democratic model described herein is the specifically local focus, with local audiences in mind in order to effect a local difference. Even in global issues, local communities must work together to find their own solutions according to culture, path dependency, subsistence, etc. In Alaska, that means healing communities and finding ways to reconnect, or continue to connect, with the food systems in place that are being polluted by industrial society in a climate being changed by industrial society. This subsequently, and importantly, means coming to terms with multiple understandings of compassion toward animals that may require a view of man as part of a societal food chain respectfully offering personhood, instead of rising above it, manipulating it. In large, urban centers, by contrast, ecological solutions require focusing on more efficient, less polluting, modes of transportation and finding ways to access local foods in an overdeveloped region with little-to-no farms, sustainable or industrial. These two examples do not have much cultural overlap, which is why they should each search for local solutions and not judge one another according to globalized criteria, whether that be in food systems or in expressions of love toward animals. Furthermore, Alaska Native holistic perspectives of animal love could be helpful to those Westerners whose “[…] spiritual lives [have] wither[ed] like vestigial tails […]”⁵⁰