Beyond two worlds: Identity narratives and the aspirational futures of Alaska Native youth

Abstract

Indigenous communities across the Alaskan Arctic have experienced profound revisions of livelihood, culture, and autonomy over the past century of colonization, creating radical discontinuities between the lives of young people and those of their parents and Elders. The disrupted processes of identity development, access to livelihoods, and cross-generational mentorship associated with colonialism have created complex challenges for youth as they envision and enact viable paths forward in the context of a rapidly changing Arctic home. In this study, we consider the meanings associated with different constructions of culture and selfhood, and the ways in which these identity narratives position Inupiaq Alaskan Native youth in relation to their personal and collective futures. Through an intergenerational and participatory inquiry process, this study explores how representations of shared heritage, present-day struggles, resilience, and hope can expand possibilities for youth and thus impact individual and community health.

Introduction

The stories we tell about ourselves matter immensely in terms of both their implications for present-moment well-being and the complex ways in which they guide us into the future. These narratives constitute and reinforce specific identity constructions, providing a context for personal and collective aspirations and paving navigable roads to the future as ideas and stories are realized through action. Much can be learned from identity narratives because they represent personal experience and memory in particular ways, illuminating the sensibilities, priorities, and worldviews of the speaker, along with those of his or her community (Baumeister & Newman, 1994; E. M. Bruner, 1986; J. Bruner, 1990; Cruikshank, 2000). Public narratives—those stories and understandings that are pervasive within a community and are shared using particular sequences and tropes in public spheres—both shape and reflect collective memory, and offer insight into personal and shared sense-making (Fivush, Habermas, Waters, & Zaman, 2011; J. Habermas, 1990; Mohatt, Thompson, Thai, & Tebes, 2014). These memories and sensibilities in turn guide collective and individual agency (T. Habermas & Bluck, 2000; Waters, Shallcross, & Fivush, 2013). In this way, public narratives provide insight into larger structures of meaning that reflect heritage, cultural values, and a community’s visions of the future, providing community members with structures of meaning to make sense of the world and to craft individual pathways within it. For many Alaska Natives navigating personal and cultural worlds at the forefront of profound social change (Allen et al., 2014; Ulturgasheva, Rasmus, Wexler, Nystad, & Kral, 2014; Willox et al., 2014), these narrative building blocks are very much in flux. Rapid and imposed cultural, economic, and political shifts have destabilized the constructions of shared meanings and values that orient individuals and communities toward the future (Allen et al., 2014; Bjerregaard, 2001; Bodfish, 1991; Brody, 1975; Burch, 1994; Chance, 1990).

In the wake of more than a century of colonization, Alaska Natives navigate identity within disjunctive and conflicting expectations between Western and Indigenous cultures and communities (Chandler, Lalonde, Sokol, & Hallett, 2003; Cloud Ramirez & Hammack, 2014; Condon & Stern, 1993). To negotiate these tensions, Indigenous youth must engage in creative endeavors that incorporate aspects of the past to articulate their present and future selves in meaningful and viable ways. Within this context, older and younger generations’ narratives of identity, culture, and futures can provide insights into the subtle narrative corollaries and enduring deprivations that are a consequence of rapid and imposed social change; more importantly, such perspectives can also provide clues for expanding possibilities for Arctic Indigenous youth as they shape their futures.

Theoretical background

Public narratives reflect collective sensibilities and memory, calling forth in particular sequence those events and associated meanings that resonate within a particular context (e.g., family, community, political group) and time (E. M. Bruner, 1986; J. Bruner, 2002). Personal narratives often integrate these public narratives in ways that are relevant to one’s identity at a particular time and context. These narrative constructions are necessarily fluid, but they can provide insight into the personal and shared sense-making that influence resilience and well-being (Rasmus, Allen, & Ford, 2014; Wexler, Joule, Garoutte, Mazziotti, & Hopper, 2014).

On community and individual levels, identity narratives both portray and influence adaptive capacities and resilience. Public narratives of resilience and/or intractable wounding in response to mass and historical trauma correlate to community health outcomes (Mohatt et al., 2014). Similarly, personal narratives in response to hardship portray how individuals make sense of these experiences and how they organize their responses to them. Differences in how people narrate collective and personal suffering both predict wellness and portray resilience, or the lack thereof (Fivush, Bohanek, & Zaman, 2011; Sales, Merrill, & Fivush, 2013; Wexler, 2009; Zraly & Nyirazinyoye, 2010).

We utilize Appadurai’s (2004) “capacity to aspire” as an organizing schema to understand narratives of identity, community, and future. The “capacity to aspire” is a navigational and cultural capacity that involves imagining possible and promising futures, seeing viable pathways to attaining them, and accessing (or not) opportunities to test them out as part of the developmental process. Importantly, this framework highlights both the manner in which choices are structured by political, economic, and cultural contexts, and the ways in which individuals successfully negotiate these structures relative to their own aspirations.

Appadurai notes that individuals “become culture bearers through specific forms of education and discipline” (2004, p. 62), mediated and made apparent through the narratives they use to describe their lives, roles, communities, and futures. In this way, culture is understood as a future-directed capacity, which is mediated by narratives. These narratives anchor individuals’ lives and their trajectories to a set of values, expectations, and actions that position them in particular ways with respect to their futures. By considering the narrative constructions of the collective and personal past, present, and aspirational future deployed by youth and their Elders in one Inupiaq community, we aim to better understand the ways that rapid and imposed social change, changing material circumstances, and marginalization affect young people’s “capacity to aspire” and the kinds of relevant opportunities they can access to make their aspirations real. Importantly, while differences may exist in how narrative is structured and employed across cultures, the capacity that narrative indexes—an ability to meaningfully orient oneself to life as a actor anchored to self and world—is associated with youth resilience and health in both Native and non-Native populations (Chandler, Lalonde, Sokol, & Hallett, 2003; Fivush, Bohanek, & Zaman, 2011; McAdams, 1996, 2006).

In exploring some of the ways in which identity narratives are fashioned by young people and their Elders, our analysis considers how these different, sometimes conflicting, portrayals of cultural identities represent particular developmental challenges for Arctic Indigenous youth, and how individuals and the community as a whole have taken up the project of reconciling these complex, often disparate and conflicting, narratives of past, present, and future.

Context

The study community has a majority Inupiaq Alaska Native population (approximately 75%) and is located above the Arctic Circle. It is the largest hub community (population: 3,000) in a region of Arctic Alaska approximately the size of Indiana, with a total of about 8,000 residents. Since the beginning of the 20th century, inhabitants of this region have experienced a dramatic shift from nomadic, family-based subsistence lifestyles to small village settlements at the sites of mandatory mission schools. Although subsistence (hunting, fishing, and gathering) activities continue, most families purchase the majority of their food and other necessities from local stores or from Anchorage via plane or barge.

The last three generations of Inupiat have grown up under radically divergent life circumstances (Chance, 1990; O’Neil, 1986). Many grandparents speak primarily Inupiaq and were brought up practicing a traditional subsistence lifestyle. Parents of today’s youth were often sent far away to boarding schools and speak primarily English and some Inupiaq. Young Inupiat today attend school in their home communities and the vast majority speak only English. Youth are linked to global youth culture, listening to popular music, utilizing social media, and seeking out an array of media and products aimed at teens (Sprott, 1997). While adults and Elders are engaged with global media, we argue that this engagement plays a lesser role in the formative process of identity development for older people. Today, older and younger Inupiat speak different languages, and experience vastly different tensions and pressures as they navigate their lives and identities. The cultural distance and dissonance between generations is often described by adults and Elders as the root of social problems and health disparities among youth, particularly the higher rates of suicide found among youth than among adults and Elders (Reimer, 2002; Wexler, Silveira, & Bertone-Johnson, 2012).

Methods

The current study responds to calls among local leaders and organizations, including the tribal health organization and local tribal government, for research that engages young people as coresearchers, focuses on strengths instead of deficits, and provides venues for documenting local wisdom from respected adults and Elders. (The labels of youth, adult, and Elder correspond to ages 15–24, 24–64, and 65+ for the purposes of this study.) The method used in this study—intergenerational dialogue exchange and action (IDEA)—was developed in the study community (Wexler, 2011); IDEA engages young people in inquiry on local issues of critical importance to them through dialogue with peers, adults, and Elders in their community. Importantly, it is young people themselves who define what is of importance. Through this process, young people listen to the identity and heritage narratives of adults and Elders respected in the eyes of participating youth, and through these exchanges, they may gain insights that can be deployed in their own constructions of identity and future.

Data collection

For 2 months during the summer of 2014, we facilitated an IDEA pilot that engaged six university students from the “Lower 48” (contiguous U.S. states) and 11 Inupiaq youth as participant coresearchers. Lower 48 coresearchers ranged in age from 19 to 25 and included public health, environmental studies, and science undergraduate majors; one graduate student in public health; and a graduate student in clinical psychology. Only the psychology student had previous experience living and working in Alaska. Alaska resident coresearchers ranged in age from 14 to 22; two were college students, while the rest attended high school or otherwise lived locally. In this paper, we focus on data from local Inupiaq participants (youth coresearchers and the adults they invited based on interest in their stories and lives). These data include recorded question-and-answer sessions with invited community members, photovoice and digital storytelling projects by both local youth and students from the Lower 48, and pre- and postinterviews with local youth, which tracked changes in discourse and identity narratives employed over the course of the study. Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval was obtained from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Youth coresearchers identified three intersecting areas of interest for exploration during the IDEA project: (a) community, including issues related to civic engagement and resource development; (b) family, including values, parenting, and change across generations; and (c) leadership. Coresearchers formed smaller working groups whose focus lined up with their particular areas of interest, and began brainstorming and discussing local issues and personal experiences related to their topic. Coresearchers identified community members whom they felt held particular strengths in their areas of inquiry, and asked them personally to join our research group for a recorded town-hall-style interview. During these sessions, youth coresearchers asked the adult/Elder interviewees a series of questions, and engaged in round-table dialogue. Ten adult speakers participated in the program. After these sessions, coresearchers “debriefed” to synthesize, question, and talk about the preceding interview. Each session was recorded and transcribed verbatim.

A second component of this study involved the use of photovoice (Wang & Burris, 1997) and digital storytelling (Gubrium & Turner, 2011) to engage with the narratives and lifeworlds of both local and Lower 48 coresearchers. Photovoice is a process of photo-documenting community strengths and concerns “to promote critical dialogue and knowledge about important issues through large and small group discussion of photographs (Wang & Burris, 1997, p. 369). Weekly prompts, such as “What makes you proud of where you’re from?” or “What is something that you’d like to get better at?” were brainstormed by coresearchers, who were asked to take pictures of things in their community to represent their answers. Pictures were shared in photovoice sessions every week, allowing an open platform for discussion and explanation of the significance of particular photos as well as the weekly topic as a whole. These discussions were recorded, transcribed, and coded as well.

Coresearchers were encouraged to curate these photos for production as a digital story (short, participant-produced videos that combine voice, photos, and music to create narrated films), designed to support youth in reflecting on and representing their lives, relationships, and achievements, and to “develop more certain and positive identity formations” (Wexler, Gubrium, Griffin, & DiFulvio, 2013, p. 617). Stories included one coresearcher’s favorite caribou hunt and participation in Miss Teen Arctic Circle, and another coresearcher’s changing relationship with his parole officer. The digital storytelling component was intended to provide a way to reflect and debrief on the whole IDEA process, and participants were told that they would have an opportunity to share their stories at a community potluck. This potluck was the final event of IDEA, and was well attended by community members, Elders, former speakers, and coresearchers and their families.

Finally, pre- and postinterviews were conducted with local coresearchers, in which a series of questions regarding the three main topics of interest were posed to participating youth. A total of 20 interviews were conducted, including seven pre- and postinterview sets and an additional six either pre- or postinterviews. These interviews included questions such as, “What do you think are some future challenges your community might face, and how do you think you will get through them?” and “What do you hope most for your children/younger siblings/the next generation?” These interviews were designed both to gain insight into the identity narratives employed by young people and to track the changes, if any, in narratives over the course of the study.

Analysis

A modified grounded theory (Charmaz, 2006; Strauss & Corbin, 1998) guided our coding of transcripts to capture recurring themes. To maximize consistency of coding practice over time, a codebook/protocol guided the work of identifying discreet meanings in the text. The codebook was developed in an iterative fashion, continuously adding, merging, or reconceptualizing code categories based on their fit across transcripts. Each entry included operational definitions. The codebook was complete when the codes were able to capture the main ideas, feelings, and practices found across the transcripts.

After coding all of the transcripts, the research team considered prevalent codes within the sensitizing construct of Appadurai’s (2004) “capacity to aspire.” Importantly, Appadurai posits that narratives employed in constructing identity, position individuals in particular ways with respect to their futures. The rhetorical devices, associations, and organization of participants’ narratives of identity, community, and future provided a way of discerning the confines and capacities such understandings convey and reinforce. We used hyperRESEARCH software to manage the data: recording codes within each transcript, documenting code density, and allowing researchers to query data to identify emerging concepts among coded material. We explored these coding patterns to discern thematic prevalence across participants and to decipher how codes co-occur in interrelated themes. Once a manuscript was completed, we circulated it among the IDEA cohort and asked for feedback from adult/Elder speakers, youth coresearchers, and other community members. In total, eight IDEA participants—five adult/Elder speakers and three youth coresearchers—reviewed our findings and approved the publication of this paper.

Findings

Narratives found throughout the transcripts reflect consistent patterns of discourse and identity construction in relation to culture, community, and future aspirations. The three dominant themes found throughout the narratives of Inupiaq youth coresearchers, adults, and Elders are: (a) collective mourning for the loss of traditional ways, which is endangering the continuity of Inupiaq culture and identity; (b) reclamation narratives aimed at reestablishing a distinct and historical Inupiaq identity through the enactment of a concrete, identifiable set of cultural skills; and (c) an emerging discourse that suggested a need for the reconciliation of two disparate cultural worlds, and which supported adaptive, diverse, and changing notions of Inupiaq identity.

Mourning culture loss and reclaiming Inupiaq identity

Across all transcripts, cultural identity narratives were framed with reference to historical trauma and threats to Inupiaq ways of being, posed by colonial disruption and change. Narratives of culture loss, culture death, and disappearance were strikingly common across our youth interviews and had clear and negative implications for the future, as the following exchange illustrates (coresearchers are referred to by fictional first names).

Interviewer: What do you think are some future challenges your community will face?

Marcus: I think, losing our culture in a way—that affects us a lot, because our culture is kind of dying.

Another coresearcher, Lester, stated:

I haven’t been raised really with a lot of my culture—so like, my mother didn’t teach her sister how to Inupiaq dance, and sing, or drum. I lived with, like, White people’s food—like cereal, not, like, with muktuk, or whale, or sealskin, or stuff like that.

Embedded in these narratives is a conceptualization of culture as a coherent, concrete, bounded, and static entity—existing as an object outside of oneself—that can be gained or lost through its enactment. Various iterations of coresearcher Nadia’s statement, “Like, you know how our culture is dying?” were some of the most common in our interviews. Stories of cultural change across generational lines follow a similar pattern: “A lot of our traditional ways and teachings are going out the window,” one Elder informed our group. Many youth coresearchers echoed this statement:

Interviewer: How do you think families today are like Inupiaq families from the past?

Katrina: Different. Like, we lost a lot of our culture. Like, nobody does subsistence things as much as they did back then.

Interviewer: Are there similarities, do you think, from the old days to now?

Katrina: Umm...Not really.

In this way of thinking, losing specific skills—or gaining new ones different from those considered traditionally Inupiaq—is assessed as a process of losing one’s culture and identity, or even allowing it to “die.” Marsha, an adult speaker, expanded on this notion of culture as a concrete object that can be both given to others and taken away: “I don’t think it’s our fault that we lost that culture,” she says. “It’s not my fault. And I don’t think it’s my parents’ fault either, for not giving it to us.” Both implicitly and explicitly, Inupiaq culture was typically defined in static and historical terms, maintained through the enactment of traditional activities and teaching others cultural and subsistence skills. Being Inupiaq was represented as spending time on the land, hunting, and fishing; learning and practicing cultural acts such as sewing clothing, Eskimo dancing, and cooking Native foods; and learning and speaking Inupiaq.

Following up on this idea, Dr. Wexler asked coresearcher Nadia, “How is your culture dying?” She answered, “Like, a lot of generations are getting into technology and not that many kids are going to camp, doing subsistence.” The antithetical connection between technology (and change generally) and culture was commonly reiterated throughout interviews with youth. The influx of technology, wage economies, schools, and imposed political systems is described by many adults and Elders as part of a pattern of culture loss, the oppression of Native voices and ways of being, and the violence of historical and ongoing colonization. One Elder speaker, Paul, related the following regarding the cultural disruption and fragmentation surrounding Westernization:

Well, in the whole arena of a Native people being sovereign, so to speak, language is the verbal cornerstone of any particular culture. But there’s also the psyche of the culture itself, the wholeness of what makes people Inupiaq...and all of those kind of center around, I guess what you could call cultural treasures—language being one of them, but that’s just the verbal part of it. And that’s the reason why I think there’s such major concern about the loss of language, [which] in fact would be a step towards the de-culturalization of a Native people.

If culture can be lost (or die), perhaps it naturally follows that it can be found again (or resuscitated) through its reclamation and renewal. For example, the IDEA pilot took place in an Inupiaq language immersion preschool aimed at teaching children the basics of their language, heritage, and cultural skills such as berry-picking, basket-weaving, and preparing and putting away meat. While today’s youth rarely speak more than a few words in their traditional Inupiaq language, this school represents such a movement towards “recovering Native identity” (Paul’s words, again) through the relearning of these “cultural treasures.” Another adult speaker, Susan, continued:

I think our vision for me, for the people, would be to reclaim our Inupiaq spirit. Feel proud to be Inupiaq. I think a lot of people [say] “I ain’t gonna wear no atikluk, I’m not gonna wear no mukluks. I ain’t gonna go Eskimo dance.” I think it would be really important for me—for us—to reclaim our heritage. And to stand up and be strong. Be fierce, and be [pause] not a fighter to where you’re gonna have wars, but be fierce in your beliefs and who we are, so that we can educate more people about our way of life.

These narratives point to the centrality of the project of learning and carrying on Inupiaq culture, represented as a specific and concrete set of skills, knowledge, and behaviors. This illustrates a fundamental faith in Inupiaq culture and people as a source of hope, resilience, strength, identity, and belongingness. The success of the future is measured—especially by Elders—against the embodiment of this highly structured cultural identity, which is strongly identified in the minds of many Inupiat with personal and collective well-being. Conversely, the collapse of traditional cultural identities is often identified with concrete manifestations of social fragmentation and suffering, such as alcoholism, suicide, and domestic violence. The following narrative—of the derailing and collapse of a historically stronger, more resilient people—was strikingly common throughout youth interviews. Youth coresearcher Katrina stated:

They [Inupiat] seem stronger back then and more traditional. Their language was there. It’s way different. I don’t think it’s the same. Maybe same, like, how it was in their community, and with their family. But I don’t think it’s the same.

Every youth coresearcher described longing for a deeper affiliation with his or her cultural roots, yet many felt they lacked the navigational capacity and/or external resources to get there. While it is important to recognize that these cultural skills are far from consistently taught to young Inupiat, their disappearance is not from lack of expressed interest by youth. Katrina, referring to her own enactment and embodiment of Inupiaq culture, told us,

I don’t really know much, even though I’ve been around it all my life. Like, I wanna learn more—like how to speak it...I know how to cut fish...I don’t know how to cut caribou or anything, but I wanna learn.

Statements such as this were remarkably common throughout our youth interviews, reflecting a breakdown between notions of a valued future and the limited pathways to realizing it. Such ruptures, according to our coresearchers and especially the study’s adult and Elder speakers, are bound up with the intergenerational discontinuities forced upon Inupiaq communities through colonization. For instance, Elders in the community talked about not being able to speak their language in school, and having to go far away from home to mandatory boarding schools or to sanitariums for tuberculosis.

Another coresearcher expanded on the desire to connect to his culture, sensing the importance of carrying it on while simultaneously feeling the immense challenge of the task before him:

Lester: But I’m not really happy about the language. Like, as a kid, I wasn’t [pause] I wish I was raised with my tata, my anna—my grandma and grandpa—to learn the language. And a lot of kids here, the language is dying, slowly...I think it’s important to, like, keep the language going, to learn some what people really knew about.

Interviewer: For you, what’s important about that?

Lester: To talk to my grandparents...and understand what they’re saying.

Interviewer: And if you had kids, would you want them to—?

Lester: I would love for them to speak Inupiaq.

The essential fact of a language barrier across two generations of family symbolizes, for Lester and many others, that two cultural worlds have come to exist—quite literally, within the same house—and that these worlds must now be navigated independently, or else reconciled in some hoped for but hard to achieve way. This rift dramatically limits the resources available to Lester and many others for making sense of and navigating the worlds they inhabit, as access to the wisdom and support of Elders is curtailed by the lack of a common language and shared experiences.

The challenges inherent to navigating rigidly defined, dichotomized cultures were often referenced—by youth, adults, and Elders—as a primary structural force responsible for pervasive social suffering. Several Elders spoke in their interviews about the conflicting demands of navigating “between worlds” and the cultural binaries and deeply conflicting worldviews within them. Referring back to her college years, one adult speaker, Susan, related the following story of navigating “between” cultural identity worlds:

My mom in college, she used to encourage me to quit school. And she used to say, “You can’t eat a book! You have to know how to put ugruk away.” She begged me to quit school because I was wasting my time learning with books, ‘cause she’s, like, the most subsistence person that live off the land. And she used to scold me and tell me I have to...go cut ugruk, I gotta put caribou away because our family need it. And in her generation, she was right. But for some reason, I wanted to be able to do both. It was very, very difficult to finish college because she begged me to quit every single time—because I should be more of a skin sewer, and be putting away our Eskimo foods. So it was very difficult, but had to do it [go to college].

Such stories highlight the basic conflict of navigating the often conflicting priorities and values of two distinct ways of life. The speaker is direct in pointing out the struggles experienced in navigating an Arctic landscape very different from that of her parents’ generation; yet even in choosing to do both—enacting traditional Inupiaq and Western identities simultaneously—she found herself in what she described as a nearly impossible situation. As cultural worlds are dichotomized, they are often simultaneously made incompatible and mutually exclusive. Almost always, young people must forego some key developmental skills of one world in order to achieve in the other.

The reconciliation of diverse and changing Inupiaq identities

The profound social change affecting Arctic Alaska—and the narratives linking culture to a discrete set of traditional activities, skills, and knowledge—begs the very question of what it might mean, now or in the near future, to be Inupiaq at all. Massive shifts in livelihoods, access to resources, and the broad-scale shifts away from traditional political and economic systems over the past hundred years have displaced many of the signposts and anchors of historical Inupiaq identity. In their place, there is not yet a clear path forward.

Participants of all ages—youth, adults, and Elders in equal measure—began to question the binary that locates Native identities as an opposite to Western ways of being and doing, and perhaps the understandings of the foundations of Inupiaq identity itself. For example, one youth coresearcher, John, hybridized the two identities and worlds in reference to his own positionality as a young Inupiaq man without the breadth of traditional hunting skills, which is so frequently seen as necessary for the construction and maintenance of his cultural identity:

I like to think about myself as a domesticated Native...I don’t know. My friends go out [on the land] a lot. Since my dad wasn’t there to teach me and my stepdad never really went out hunting, I never had anybody like a father figure to teach me. But yeah, I try to change that. My friends, they say, “I don’t take you!” And I say, “Why?” And they say, “You don’t know!” And I say, “Teach me!”

John’s not knowing how to hunt as a young man precludes his being Inupiaq through hunting, a dynamic perpetuated when he is barred access to these valued cultural activities on the grounds that he doesn’t already know how to do them—despite substantial motivation to learn. John paints a striking picture of the challenge of identity navigation: He is succeeding in college, doesn’t know how to hunt, has difficulty accessing traditional activities (though wants to learn them), and yet still feels himself to be, in some deeply meaningful way, Inupiaq. John also makes a clear and coherent attempt at the resolution of this struggle, in the tragicyet-playful notion of the “domesticated Native.”

Another youth coresearcher considered the possibility of reconceptualizing this tension between alternate worlds as instead a matter of personal freedom to seek and incorporate chosen aspects of culture and tradition. Speaking of a friend whom he perceives to be trapped in stereotypically “Native” ways of being, Adam explained: “I don’t want him to be stuck in this culture, I want him to be part [emphasis added] of it... It’s not that you’re born Native so you have to do this kind of stuff.” This perspective of choice differs significantly from other ways of conceptualizing culture as one’s solemn duty to carry forward, and perhaps belies this coresearcher’s own particular positionality “between” worlds: He goes to college, leaves village life for the Lower 48 regularly, and has a White father; yet, he still looks and understands himself as Inupiaq. This notion of culture as a choice appears relatively rare in the community as a whole.

Others, especially adults, envision not a process of domestication or choice, but a necessary reconciliation of Native identities with the present-day reality of life in Arctic Alaska. One adult speaker, Tony, addressed the tension between notions of cultural adaptation, change, and death:

You know, adapt is an interesting word, because some people will say adapt means give up, or adapt means abandon, or adapt means leave something behind...Adapt might mean change, but it doesn’t mean give up who you are.

Susan, an adult speaker, expanded on the idea that Inupiaq cultural identity is not a transitory, contingent entity, but a belongingness that extends throughout time, space, and most of all, change. In a passionate voice, she related this interaction with her brother in a story to our coresearchers. Her brother speaks first in her story:

“No matter where you go in this world, you always have a people. You’re Inupiaq people and you belong. Don’t ever forget it!” And I was like, “Yeah, yeah.” When I was in middle school, I didn’t really take it that serious. But as I got older, it resonates in my whole being. I do have a people, I do have a tribe, and I do belong. I belong. I’m not just a feather blowing in the wind and landing wherever it goes. Nope, I have a people.

Adaptability was referenced several times in youth interviews, as well as during adult and Elder talks, as an important Inupiaq value and staple of character and identity. This suggests that while practices and circumstance may change, being Inupiaq is a certainty that persists across time, development, and change. Tony explained:

Our skin is always going to be brown...And I think I was trying to explain this to somebody at a subsistence workshop. They’re like, “Well if you move to Anchorage, you can’t subsist anymore!”—that’s the expectation. But did you stop being Inupiaq when you got on the plane? Did you stop being Inupiaq when you got into Anchorage? Could you stop being Inupiaq if you went to Canada, or to Hawaii, or Washington State? Who you are [pause] you’re always going to be who you are. And there’s a real spiritual connection that transcends that, and I think that that’s important to sustain.

These narratives speak to the tension of longing for a historical and actionable mode of being Inupiaq that is reflected in subsistence activities and speaking Inupiaq, and describe a path that can move young people from the challenging present into an uncertain but potentially bright future. Adult speaker Susan suggested how Inupiaq identity might be sustained and carried forth, while at the same time navigating change through flexibility:

I just think it’s important for us to reclaim our heritage and to do everything in our power not to become a people of the past. You know, we still exist. We are not a people in a museum. So I think, we’re not gonna go back and, you know, hunting with dog teams—although some people still do. We’re not gonna go back in time. But we can use what we have right now to really reclaim our history and our heritage.

Another speaker, Marsha, referenced the ways in which change can be harnessed for the purpose of sustaining and supporting Inupiaq culture and identities:

So I appreciate the technology...What I like to tell young people is to use that to your advantage. You can use technology to get your culture back. We have two different dialects of the Inupiaq language that you can put it on your computer...What I do is I turn it on at work and I just leave it running all day long. So I am constantly hearing things like that. I went to [the local radio station] and I turn on Eskimo stories they have, you know, all the time. You can make a CD of that. All day long I just listen to that...So if you use technology to your advantage, then you can, therefore, use it to teach other people.

This same woman spoke of learning how to make traditional Inupiaq diapers in a lesson taught by a friend’s grandmother on YouTube. Examples such as this highlight the manner in which the preservation of the past, the intersection of Inupiaq and Western cultures, and the reality of ongoing and dramatic change might intersect to form viable and navigable futures. While the specific details and dynamics of cultural reconciliation and renewal projects are still ambiguous and emerging, our study points to several promising movements towards actionable visions for strength-based, Indigenous identities for those living in Arctic Alaska, as well as for those youth who choose to leave.

Discussion

Key discontinuities between the lives of youth and those of their parents and Elders have made the tasks surrounding identity development in the Indigenous Alaskan Arctic decidedly challenging, with important implications for the health and well-being of youth and their communities (Wexler, 2014). In this discussion, we will explore some of the challenges inherent to navigating identity in the context of shifting cultural worlds and imposed social change, as well as the attempted resolutions put forth by both youth and adult participants in the IDEA process.

Perhaps the most pervasive way of making sense of this change locates modern Inupiat in a world of cultural identity binaries in which the two “worlds”—White/Western versus traditional/Inupiaq—are juxtaposed as competing, mutually exclusive possibilities for structuring identity and moving through life (Henze & Vanette, 1993; Wexler & Burke, 2011). For youth, this perspective carries with it a complex set of challenges: It structures life in their communities as a kind of double bind where they are asked to succeed, by disparate parties, in deeply dichotomized Western and Indigenous worlds. They are simultaneously asked, by their Elders on the one hand and by the Western educational, economic, and political systems on the other, to carry culture forward, to succeed in Western institutions, to be good hunters, to work wage labor jobs, and to “be” Inupiaq—in a world that no longer allows for the full expression of what that has historically meant. These worlds are maintained as separate and often antithetical in the prevailing discourse, and invoke a powerful moral stand against the assimilationist tactics employed by 20th-century Alaskan colonists.

Yet this pattern also creates complex, bounded, and adversarial worlds of cultural activity and meaning-making for youth, playing out both in the concrete tasks of life as well as on the level of identity formation and autobiographical memory. In portraying these cultural worlds as competing, irreconcilable opposites, Inupiaq youth are challenged to navigate both worlds with significant constraints placed on their ability to exist fully in either. To succeed singularly in either cultural world—where such worlds and their embedded identities are defined as mutually exclusive, adversarial binaries—is, as one local man put it, still to “fail.” The reality for Inupiaq youth is that the navigation of both systems—both identities—is becoming not just a specialized skill, but an unequivocal demand in the modern Arctic north.

In addition, many youth understand and locate themselves on a historical trajectory of Inupiaq culture and life in which they see their culture dying and the possibility of their parents’ and grandparents’ ways of being Inupiaq no longer existing in the very near future. Designated as “culture bearers” by their parents—and perhaps even more so, their grandparents—it is made clear to youth that they will be the ones who will decide the future of their people and way of life. This is explained to young people frequently in terms of cultural reclamation narratives in which one’s possibilities for remaining Inupiaq are determined through the enactment of specific cultural doings (e.g., subsistence, speaking Inupiaq, traditional skills, and dance). Yet in the broader contexts of education, wage labor, and the various other changed realities of settlement and city life in the Arctic, these skills are consistently devalued (not to mention their forced erosion through assimilation practices), while pressures to learn skills oriented towards cash economies and modern technologies only mount. In this context, “losing culture” becomes a central cultural identity narrative in itself, one where loss is a highly pressurized central trope. Culture loss, in other words, becomes a defining feature of cultural identity.

Adult and Elder narratives, as well as those of the youth that mirror them, tend to represent Inupiaq cultural heritage and identities as entities contingent upon their repeated enactment: as a set of historically situated performances that represent Inupiaq-ness in the face of modern pressures that threaten its continued existence. The structural changes that threaten cultural continuity are often subtle and are talked about in general, vague terms, although their impact is very real. For instance, the cost and complexity of subsistence hunting has grown ironically expensive, as accessing traditional practices and livelihoods has become contingent upon the purchase of gas, guns, snow machines, and boats now used in harvesting foods from the land. The time and energy costs of learning traditional skills—exactly those skills that are increasingly marginalized by Western economies and values—are massive. The increasingly dominant pressures of the Western world demand an entirely different set of priorities, skills, knowledge, and wisdom, starting with 12+ years of education that begins each year at a prime subsistence time in August. Each year, Inupiaq children must either start their school year on time or have the opportunity to be at camp for caribou hunting or berry picking. To choose to go to school according to the academic calendar, in this example, is to forego the opportunity to fully engage in important cultural learning. Yet to walk away from “doing and being Inupiaq” is to become “domesticated,” and in this way lose a part of one’s own world, to abandon one’s side in the battle to retain heritage and meaning in the face of generations of colonial violence, culture loss, and forced social change. In short, the task given to youth is to preserve history and heritage in an ever-changing world, while simultaneously being stripped of that world by the unceasing structural pressures of colonization that marginalize Inupiaq ways of knowing, being, and relating to the world— the “quiet violence” of colonialism (Wexler, 2009). Young Inupiat must navigate all these tensions from an early age, often without the needed resources to make sense of the structural pressures they are experiencing (Wexler, 2009). The developmental tasks around identity formation and the creation of meaningful narratives are simply much harder in this world.

Thus, the double bind associated with cultural identity binaries plays out on several levels. First, influential adults place competing, morally charged, and often contradictory demands on youth—go to school versus practice subsistence, for example—based on dichotomized cultural landscapes. Second, the concrete reality of finite material, social, and psychological resources means youth must forego some key developmental skills of one world in order to achieve in the other. Third, there is no clear path to livelihoods: it is growing increasingly difficult to practice pure subsistence, yet to switch over to a wage labor economy is to commit to $12/gallon for milk, to have one’s cultural habitus and skill set devalued, and in many cases, to consider oneself “whitened” or “domesticated” by the work. Fourth, accessing skills in one sphere is tremendously difficult from the position of the other: practicing subsistence, for example, maps poorly onto math homework, while learning subsistence skills is rather hard (as John points out) without already being immersed in them through one’s (traditional Inupiaq) family. Finally, people experience and articulate profound moral reasons for resisting the cultural world of their colonizers—just as others put forth arguments for not investing their time and resources in trying to reclaim heritage on the verge of the Arctic’s complete economic and environmental revision.

What constitutes the double bind is that these pressures are experienced by many youth as irresolvable. When any step towards one culture constitutes a step away from the other—and when there is little room, in terms of the rather immediate material and psychological needs of developing youth, for the “failed” embodiment of either—a seemingly impossible situation is created. The implications of this predicament for youth health are hard to overstate. Elders already commonly locate youth problems such as alcoholism, suicide, and violence on the spectrum of consequences related to colonization and the subsequent collapse of cultural identity. We would add that beyond the disappearance or death of a specific historical identity is the vacuum created by not having a clear one now to give structure to both mental and material life, and thus no navigable world and future towards which to orient oneself.

We have followed several attempts at the resolution of this double bind as described by young coresearchers: some in which notions of Inupiaqness, or one’s relationship to it, are redefined; others in which the cultural dichotomy is dismissed as illusory or irrelevant to future plans; and some in which identity is emphatically related to the project of reclaiming heritage in the face of imposed change. Finally, there is the emerging project of coming to terms with the loss, violence, and trauma of the past century, while at the same time looking for ways to create meaning, narratives of self and community, and notions of a viable future built on a history of resistance and resilience in the face of colonization. These can all be seen as creative endeavors and embodiments of the narrative side of Appadurai’s (2004) “capacity to aspire”; the very fact of these projects occurring indicates some degree of success in envisioning individual and community futures.

Limitations

Several limitations to this study should be noted. First, the cultural identity narratives referenced are necessarily public narratives, spoken in a particular context that often included non-Native people from outside of the region. The politics of self- and culture representation can reasonably be assumed to affect the manner in which narratives are disclosed. However, the central premise of this paper—that culture shapes capacity through narrative—calls into question the distinctiveness of the public and private, and points to the role of public discourse in weaving personal narratives and structuring psychic life. While the issue of strategic representation is real, so is the remarkable cross-situational prevalence of the narratives documented here, as evidenced over the course of 25 years of combined researcher experience living and working in the region.

A second limitation is the positionality of the first author, as a young White male, relatively new to the region at the time of this study. The narrative analysis is undertaken by an outsider—and moreover, a very specific outsider—looking in. To address this issue, the author presented this manuscript and its findings to the Inupiaq coresearchers on two occasions, hosting focus groups to solicit guidance and feedback on the paper, and sent the analysis to the adult and Elder speakers for their review. There was uniform support for the ideas presented in this paper.

Third, the highly localized nature of identity and cultural narratives constrains the applicability of these findings to other groups or regions—even, possibly, to Inupiat outside of the specific village in which we conducted the study. However, we expect the broader illustration of how identity narratives position youth with respect to their heritage and futures to hold true across contexts.

Conclusion

It is clear that certain identity narratives—the “domesticated Native”, the reclaimer of cultural heritage, the straddler of two worlds—position youth in very particular ways within their communities and in relation to their aspirations and futures. This study suggests that both coherence and flexibility in these cultural identity narratives are important: that the creation of meaning and cultivation of adaptability in the face of the continuing turbulence of Arctic life may predict health outcomes beyond those indexed by the concrete and specific ways that identity is constructed. That is, the resolution of the double bind may be an important event distinct from how precisely it is resolved—though the “how” remains a question of deep social and moral significance. Thus, examples of young people who navigate this terrain with ballast and well-being are critically important to document. While the double bind metaphor highlights the very real struggles of Arctic youth, there are also many ways that they creatively engage with their worlds, forming secure identities, and finding their places in a complex and changing home.

Biography

Lucas Trout, MA, is Social Medicine Program Manager at Maniilaq Association and Lecturer on Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His research focuses on community-based strategies for addressing social determinants of health in rural Alaska Native communities.

Lisa M. Wexler, PhD, MSW, is Associate Professor of Community Health Education in the Department of Health Promotion and Policy at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She has been working in Northwest Alaska for 20 years as a social worker, community organizer, and researcher.

Dr. Wexler’s community-based research program, funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, utilizes a variety of participatory methods to investigate how social determinants contribute to the health disparity of Indigenous youth suicide, and the ways that cultural and social systems shape patterns of resilience within families and communities.

Joshua Moses, PhD, is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Haverford College. His multidisciplinary research focuses on disaster, community mental health, and response to environmental/social change. Joshua has worked with Nunatsiavut Inuit communities in northern Labrador on inequality, dispossession, community well-being, migration, and identity in the context of recent land claim settlements and large-scale resource extraction. He has also conducted research in the Northwest Territories on migration, housing, and homelessness. Joshua is committed to combining participatory action research and teaching, with a specific interest in the response of higher education to climate change, and the ways we are (or are not) preparing students for futures that society itself struggles to imagine.