Two peoples hunted the same whale for opposite reasons

On the rooftop of the world, the Iñupiat Heritage Center in Barrow
(Utqiagvik), Alaska tells the story of the Iñupiat people, who **have
thrived for thousands of years in one of the most extreme climates on Earth**,
hunting the bowhead whale — Agviq.

The same whale, two relationships

In the 19th century, the quiet northern seas **swarmed with commercial
whalemen from New England**, who sought the same animal for its **baleen and
blubber**.

Two hunts, one species. For the Iñupiat, the bowhead was food, material,
social structure and calendar — a whale taken and distributed across a
community that had built its way of life around it. For the whaling fleet it
was a commodity: baleen for corset stays and buggy whips, blubber for lamp
oil, sold in cities thousands of miles south.

The heritage centre exists because that encounter is part of Iñupiat history
too, not a separate American story that happened nearby. A heritage centre on
this coast that told only one of the two would be incomplete, and the fact
that it is a National Park Service affiliated site — telling the whaling
story from the Iñupiat side of it — is the point.

What is there

Arts and culture programming, in a building whose subject is a living
culture rather than a past one. The bowhead hunt continues.

Location: Alaska. Source: U.S. National Park Service.