The Last Speakers by K. David Harrison Page A

years…. Despite a popular perception that Native knowledge is generally intuitive and holistic, Yupik ice and weather watch is not scanning for every environmental signal possible. It is very well organized around a few key factors—such as wind, current or ice movement—and it focuses first and foremost upon conditions for maritime hunting and the related behavior of critical game species. Therefore, Native experts usually have a very coherent—one may say, “fully scientific”—vision of the annual sequence of weather and ice regimes, the migration patterns of major maritime animals, and how these two cycles are related. 10
    To sum up, the Yupik elders are the premier Arctic observers and experts, and they possess a knowledge that is scientific in its attention to detail and ability to remember patterns, and a language that has encoded all this knowledge in complex ways in hundreds of specialized and highly descriptive words. The snow debunkers should observe the uses of these words in their native context, relying on the accounts of the Yupik elders, before blithely claiming that there is no such thing as complex snow and ice terminology, and that even if there is, it is of no interest to science. What the Yupik know about ice and snow is part of our common human patrimony. As an unparalleled repository of expertise on Arctic weather conditions, it may contain clues that could help us understand and adapt to the current radical patterns of global warming that disproportionately affect northern latitudes. We ignore Yupik snow and ice knowledge at our peril, and we stand to profit greatly from acknowledging its complexity and its antiquity.
    Living in one of the harshest environments on Earth, with an acuity driven by survival, the Yupik identify and name at least 99 distinct sea ice formations. Here are a few ice descriptions from Watching Ice and Weather Our Way:

Qenu
Newly forming slush ice. It forms when it first gets cold.
Pequ
Ice that was bubbled up by pressure ridging.[The] bulb cracks and falls down, and when it breaks, the water shows up. It is then covered by new ice or snow and it is very dangerous to walk on. So, when this happens, you better detour it….
Nutemtaq
Old ice floes that are thick and appear to have had a snow bank on them for a long period of time. Good to work on.
Nuyileq
Crushed ice beginning to spread out; dangerous to walk on. The ice is dissolving, but still has not dispersed in water, although it is vulnerable for one to fall through and to sink. Sometimes seals can even surface on this ice because the water is starting to appear. 11

    Notice all the information encapsulated in these definitions: the dynamic conditions that cause the ice to form; its appearance, texture, solidity, and (in)suitability for walking on; the season or time of year; the usefulness for hunting; and the possibility of finding sustenance.
    How many hours and days, in a lifetime of Arctic hunting and foraging, would an elder have devoted to learning the smallest nuances of ice and weather patterns? Igor Krupnik, who helped collect the sea ice terms, describes how ice-watching is “a lifelong and twenty-four-hour passion, since there is always someone checking weather, sea and ice at any given moment. In a critical time—when men go out hunting, during the spring whaling season, or when the weather is shifting rapidly, several people spend hours scanning the horizon and discussing signals (indicators) related to the status of weather and ice.”
    The Yupik science of weather has a very different foundation than modern meteorology. Our focus is on temperature and barometric pressure, indicators that are little regarded by the Yupik. Their science relies on “an extremely sophisticated system of wind terminology that identifies some ten or twelve (or more) types of winds by specific direction and other features.” The system of information packaging that links wind types