The Last Speakers by K. David Harrison

years. A tiny fraction of their knowledge of snow and ice is beautifully captured in a brilliant book called Watching Ice and Weather Our Way, one the snow naysayers should read. As Dr. Igor Krupnik, the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s Arctic expert, notes in his book The Earth Is Faster Now: 9
    The use of wind directions,…allows Yupik observers to collect and pass on information by highly meaningful environmental packages…. Hence, it is not the observation itself that makes an impression of Native knowledge being holistic, intuitive, and multifaceted, but rather the whole cultural “package” that is associated with each specific ice and weather term it uses.
    Krupnik goes on to show how native knowledge is based on principles quite different from modern meteorological science:
    Scientific…weather observation…is based on following the temperature and pressure curves, and on recording their current trends. Unlike scientific monitoring, the Yupik watch is focused upon specific signs that signal shifts from one phenomenon, condition, or weather and ice regime to a different one that can be defined by a different term.
    So what makes a Yupik such a skilled weather forecaster? In Krupnik’s view, “The more words (and combinations) one knows, the more precise one’s observation and forecast can be.” Now that Yupik is shifting and giving way to English, the environmental knowledge and ability to forecast weather are being degraded:
    As the use of Yupik words for specific weather patterns of ice and weather by younger people declines and the Yupik terms are replaced by English words, with a different (and often much more simplistic) meaning, the hunter’s overall awareness of his environment fades away. That is why the Yupik elders are very proud of, and so keen on passing on to younger people, their extended Native terminology of ice and weather conditions.
    Nor does their complexity end with ice. As it turns out, the Yupik also know names for different winds. Chester Noongwook, a Yupik elder, says: “We have several kinds of winds here in Savoonga. Aywaa (Aywaapik) is a direct north wind from the sea. Nakaghya is a northeasterly wind, it comes from Nome. Kenvaq is a northwesterly wind; this is the old name, and we now call this wind Naayghiinaq (“that from Siberia”). There is also another northerly wind, Quutfaq, that can come from anywhere between northwest and northeast. Asivaq is a direct east wind,” and so on.
    Besides winds, they have specialized names for many kinds of ocean currents, stars and constellations, and all manner of seasonal phenomena. All this information feeds into a sophisticated weather forecasting ability honed over a lifetime of careful observation. Its profound depth cannot be compared to what American snowboarders know about snow, not even in the slightest. And it should be of deep and urgent interest to all branches of science, not only linguistics but also biology, climatology, anthropology, and others. We are losing one of the finest, most sensitive systems ever devised to detect weather patterns and climate change. And the system can survive only in its original form, in the heads of local Yupik experts who apply it to local conditions.
    Is it science? Is it systematic, falsifiable, and reliable in the way we expect the scientific method to be? Or is it just haphazard, unreliable cultural intuition that we can replace with our better science? I’ll give Dr. Krupnik, the Smithsonian’s Arctic expert, the last word:
    Native observers…have their own ways of memorizing and documenting such events. They look for certain and, often, very specific indicators that are meaningful to them, both culturally and individually. To a scientific observer, the resulting story may seem “intuitive” and even eclectic, but it is no less solid, since it is based on the very same practical indicators followed over many