UC Davis

How do Unangax̂ People of Unangam Tanangin [Alaska’s Aleutian Islands] continue subsistence processes and sustain environmental responsibilities amidst a changing climate? And how might Unangax̂ subsistence Protocols shape global climate change interventions towards environment justice? Discourse surrounding Alaska Native subsistence hunting, fishing, and gathering are dominated by State legal policy in the Circumpolar Arctic, which approaches subsistence as quantifiable and legislatable events that devalue more-than-human kin as “natural resources.” My dissertation examines transmissions of Unangam qaqamiiĝuu [Unangax̂ subsistence] cosmologies through Unangax̂ performance and storytelling across different seasons, to demonstrate how sustainable Unangax̂ practices advance climate change mitigations, food sovereignty, and environmental justice movements. I reveal how Unangax̂ narratives about subsistence processes are altogether different from State-led understandings. These differences have real-world consequences for sustainable place based Unangax̂ stewardship practices in particular, and sustainability movements more broadly. While Unangax̂ subsistence practices provide food and supplies for families in Alaska Native villages, which are geographically distant from conventional grocery stores or farms, I provide a deeper study into the significance of Unangam qaqamiiĝuu lifeways in cosmological terms. To do so, I bring Critical Indigenous Performance Studies emphases on embodied forms of subsistence practices and processes to bear on questions of food sovereignty and environmental justice in Unangax̂ communities.Unangax̂ subsistence cosmologies are deeply relational praxes and structures rich with culturally specific Protocols. Subsistence Protocols persist in Unangax̂ communities through processes such as storytelling and performances associated with seasonal migrations of animals. Unangax̂ stories contain ways to understand how the current climate crisis stems from environmental injustices that breach Protocols, such as those funded and carried out by colonial and capitalist extractions. Throughout each chapter, creative component, and part, I weave together archival, embodied, and creative strategies to theorize Unangax̂ subsistence cosmologies as a means to generate decolonial Unangax̂ futures. I feature collaborations with forty Unangax̂ People across Unangam Tanangin communities and Anchorage where I employ archival research with community based Unangax̂ method agiidal [visiting] to share stories of subsistence processes and Protocols. My research demonstrates the significance of Unangax̂ Protocols set forth generations ago proliferated into present day as acts of stewardship and participation in a subsistence abundance lifestyle, all of which work to foster Unangax̂ futurity. While studies of climate change in the Arctic often only consider statistics outside the human experience, my work attends to lived experiences of climate change and the creation of new performance Protocols that tend to right relations with the environment and more-than-human kin. Through taking a closer look at Unangam qaqamiiĝuu processes and praxes, the world-making capacity of Unangam Tunuu, storytelling and the transmissions of oral histories, and Unangax̂ feminisms, I offer interventions into structures of settler colonialism that position themselves to narrate and diminish subsistence as merely an event and Unangax̂ Knowledges as marginalized non-scientific knowledge. I offer Unangax̂-specific understandings of relationships in place and with Peoples to inform global climate change initiatives that disproportionately affect Indigenous Peoples of the Circumpolar Arctic.