#TheYearofBelief | #TYBResilience

Scraping Away What Doesn’t Belong: Preparing for Respectful Arctic Research

NOTE: We’d like to express our gratitude to ARCUS for all their decades of service and important contributions to the Arctic research community. Our dad Caleb Pungowiyi was part of the foundations of ARCUS and Cana served for two years on the ARCUS board. Taikuu, ARCUS!

🌿 From the Land: Salmon Season Ends, Moose Season Begins

By October, the fish racks stand mostly empty. All summer they carried strips of salmon—bright orange in the first days, then darkening to leathery persimmon as they dried under the wind and sun. The work of checking, scraping, cutting, and hanging is finished, and the dried fish is packed up and tucked into the freezer, ready to come back out for snacks, soups, and feasts through the winter. Salmon season has closed its chapter for the year.

Now moose season arrives. Families move from the coasts and riverbanks to the river valleys and tundra, turning their attention to tracks, trails, and weather. When a moose is brought home, it becomes a different kind of labor: quarters carried heavy on shoulders and pulled over tundra, silver skin and sinew cut away, the meat divided between families. Some is packed into freezers; some is dried for jerky strips, just as fish was weeks before. The seasons overlap in purpose if not in timing: both are about preparing, both are about making sure the people will eat well and stay strong when the daylight shortens and the storms return.

Corina and her son Ty head up river to camp for moose hunting.

But whether it is salmon in July or moose in October, the practice is the same: we watch for insect eggs—qupiliġuk—whenever we dry meat. The eggs appear quickly, almost instantly it can feel like. They are bright white, like a small thin grain of rice, against the flesh, almost clean-looking, yet dangerous in their quiet persistence. On salmon strips, they collect in the little folds we cut for airflow, hiding under fins and around bones. On moose, they nestle into seams of fat or edges of drying racks. Left unattended, they hatch in a day or so, burrow in, and turn food into waste.

Cana picked off qupiliguks from under the tails of these fish this summer. However, it’s not necessarily respectful to the meat to take photos of the fly eggs on it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So we make rounds. With butter knives, with ulus, with patience, we scrape. In the fish camp, you hear the soft rasp of knives against wood and the quiet talk between family members moving strip by strip. In every season, you hear the same rhythm at the drying racks for game meat, a steadiness in the daily checking. It is slow, repetitive work, but it is what keeps the food safe.

Our Elders remind us: if you don’t scrape the little things early, they fester, even if the surface looks fine. This is not only about meat, but about life. As Iñupiat, we are taught to remain true to our values in the small things as much as the big things. Subsistence itself—working with our hands, checking our food, practicing daily care—keeps us grounded in who we are and steady in what matters most.

Corina’s husband Lance and a bull moose he harvested. Hunting itself is hard work that starts with much preparation and no guarantees of “success.” After the harvest there is much more work that starts with the literal “grunt work” of quartering and heavy hauling!

🏛️ From the Institutions: Looking Closer at What’s Overlooked

Cana just spent two weeks at Toolik Field Station, 170 miles north of the Arctic Circle along the Dalton Highway. She was there, on paper, to help her friend and colleague Dr. Cansu Culha with her research on permafrost erosion. But, in reality, she was really there watching the underside of research—the part that rarely makes it into reports or publications. How scientists—PIs, research technicians, grad students—actually do their work in the field. How teams and institutes coordinate logistics in such a remote place. How these complex research networks talk with one another about data, problems, and possibilities.

Cana outside of the dining hall at Toolik Field Station. She borrowed a bright blue coat from their gear closet so she was more visible out in the field. There are so many nice “touches” that the Toolik team does that makes working there so wonderful.

What Cana noticed was both exciting and daunting. On the one hand, there is so much space for Arctic community members to be part of this science—not just as informants or consultants, but as research technicians, logistics staff, and scientific contributors. On the other hand, the practices she observed made her realize how much closer she needed to look. If she wants to help communities to step into these roles in ways that feel feasible and approachable, she need to slow down, notice the small things, and think systematically about how this work actually happens. And then think about how it can work well for both communities and science.

Cana and Dr. Cansu Culha walking out to GTH89, a retrogressive thaw slump south of Toolik.

This connects directly to what Durá et al. describe in their article, “Positive Deviance as Design Thinking: Challenging Notions of Stasis in Technical and Professional Communication” as the positive deviance pivot—a rhetorical and methodological shift toward those at the margins who succeed despite the odds. As they note, “extreme users are different from average or typical users who need a solution. Extreme users have already found a solution or employed a successful work-around, but because they are small in number and generally outside the problem scope, they are often overlooked.” (Durá et al., 2019, p. 378).

There is a Toolik tradition of wearing a costume out at GTH89. You can see the headwall of the slump behind us. Fun with science is important–especially if you have to posthole across snowy tussok tundra for miles each way 🙂

Just as with qupiliġuk, the hidden details matter. On the surface, research looks polished and streamlined when you see the final product. But the real work—the field hacks, the improvisations, the daily practices and careful, often tedious, labor that keep projects alive—often happens underneath, in the overlooked places and seemingly ordinary moments.

Cana designed an experiment analyzing the organic matter from tundra plants holding together the soil. Not something she does often in her technical communication research.

For equitable Arctic research to grow, we need to pay attention to these small, replicable practices. Who is already doing the quiet, sustaining work that could guide others? What are the outlier habits—like checking and scraping for qupiliġuk—that keep a project resilient? By learning from those edges, and by slowing down enough to see them, we prepare ourselves and our institutions for more respectful Arctic research.

🧭 TYB Framework: This Week’s Practice

• Know Who You Are: What values help you catch small problems early rather than hide them?

• Do the Next Right Thing, Even Imperfectly: “Scrape” and tend daily, even if it feels tedious. Vigilance is resilience.

• Invest in a Community of Support: Who helps you see what you missed? Who checks the racks with you?

• Reinforce Hope with Grit: Each scrape feels small, but together they preserve the whole harvest.

This Week’s Challenge: Scrape Early, Tend Often

• Where in your research practice are qupiliġuk appearing—small neglects, compromises, or surface-only actions?

• What overlooked habit or extreme user (in positive deviance terms) can teach you a better way forward?

• Take one action this week to scrape away what doesn’t belong—before it festers.

Remembering Forward

Preparation is not about predicting every storm. It’s about steady vigilance, the patience to notice small things before they spread. Resilience in Arctic research grows from the same discipline as subsistence: scrape early, tend carefully, and keep the harvest clean for those who will depend on it.

Cana takes a break out on the snow covered tundra after taking GPS readings of a geologic feature.