a heated car where it s warm, this is actually a much nicer city. yeah. when you re walking everywhere, you start to get a little angry at the city. but now it s kind of pretty. like geoff carroll there are other locals speaking out to keep traditions alive. and maybe the biggest voice belongs to native fanny acpick. her program teaches inupiaq customs as part of the school curriculum. and i m meeting with fanny at the inupiaq heritage center to find out more about her and her work. i d like you to look at this. different hunting tools. mainly for butchering the whale. in my neighborhood, we d call that, i wish somebody would knife. that is a raincoat made out of seal intestines. black people, we just eat the intestines, we don t turn it into raincoats. you re literally using every part of the animal. oh, yes. everything that is given to us from the land, the ocean and the
after talking with fanny, i ve learned that barrow s native culture is defined by a harmonious connection between nature and man. so to help me see the beauty in this stark setting i ve enlisted local photographer john tidwell, who suggested taking me to point barrow, the northernmost point in town. he says it s a popular hangout for polar bears. so let s hope there s no white on black crime today. are you john? i m john. should i be scared? i m not but you should be. okay. thanks. come on in. i ll be scared. good thing i have a head start on fear. all right. thanks, john. welcome aboard. this is an environmentalist s nightmare. chasing after polar bears in a humvee. we re going to hit some real rough terrain, so hang on. whoa.
air is treasured. everybody thinks that it s so flat and cold and fren. but to us, it s a living world that we live in. that is a perspective i didn t have before i came here. so tell me, what part of your culture are you working hardest to keep? our language. yeah. my age group and some older than me, we were sent away to go to boarding school. i came home not myself anymore. and i almost lost the proper usage of our language. fanny is speaking of christian boarding schools that were opened in the early 1900s by missionaries trying to bring modern education to the north. and get ready for a shocker. missionaries working with natives, not that cool. in fact, in 2015 an official report by the canadian government described its role in