Living with Climate Change

This community recipe book from the Iñupiat village of Shishmaref, located on a barrier island near the Bering Strait, just shy of the Arctic Circle in Alaska, includes recipes from the Indigenous students that highlights their traditional diet: seal, walrus, many species of fish, and native plants and berries all figure prominently. Global warming due to the burning of fossil fuels has had a profound impact on Shishmaref and other Inuit communities. Traditional ways of procuring food, such as hunting marine mammals, becomes precarious as the sea ice melts. The ice barrier that protects the island from waves and storm surges has largely disappeared and the permafrost is melting: the land is sinking as the oceans rise. Community members in Shishmaref have voted to relocate three times, starting in 1973 and most recently in 2016, but without significant support lack the financial and logistical resources to move an entire village. 

Students of Shishmaref Day School 
Eskimo Cook Book 
Anchorage: Alaska Crippled Children’s Association, [1952] 

CO2 PPM in 1952: 311.8

Additional Information

For more information on Shishmaref and climate change, those with access to Penn State Libraries’ resources, can access Fierce Climate, Sacred Ground: an Ethnography of Climate Change in Shishmaref, Alaska by Elizabeth Marino (University of Alaska Press: 2015) here: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/pensu/detail.action?docID=4312501.