Bathsheba Demuth is an Assistant Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University and the author of the book Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. She discussed how along the Bering Strait, on the edges of what is now Northwestern Alaska and Northeastern Russia, Inupiaq and Yupik have hunted bowhead whales on the sea ice for millennia. In the 1840s, Indigenous hunts were joined by commercial whalers from New England, killing to fill whale oil lamps. Demuth asks: How did whales respond to the pressures of market hunting? What might we learn about the histories of fisheries from taking seriously the actions of bowheads and the knowledge of peoples who have known them the longest?
![Jen Rose Smith (dAXunhyuu [Eyak, Alaska Native])](https://mnai.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Smith-Jen-Rose-903x1024.jpeg)
