Academic researchers in Indigenous communities have a fraught relationship with Indigenous communities with data mining, and this history remains inseparable from the legacy of colonialism and colonization. It was this reputation for outsider extraction that my mentor Martha Aiken was afraid of. She had seen how local knowledge and experience were conveniently extracted, simplified, and plugged into the market economy as medicine, books, popular music, and designs, or when they were instantly turned into private property after being detached from their appropriate cultural contexts. Rarely was a plan to benefit the community part of this enterprise. On my first day in her community as a graduate student, Martha asked me to swear that I would commit myself to cultivate a long-term relationship with her and her community before starting to work on my dissertation research. I agreed to make the commitment. Now, many years later, I am still in the process of earning my place. The process of relationship-building has opened many doors to me that would have otherwise stayed closed; it is obvious but not an exaggeration to say that this study could not have been written without community participation and co-authorship. Martha has since passed away, but as a faculty member at Oberlin College, I continue to share her wisdom with my students to educate future generations of scholars—both Indigenous and non-Indigenous—about the importance of social justice, research ethics, community benefit, collaboration, and reciprocity so the future scholars will never disappear. Whale Snow is a token of my humble reciprocity with Martha and the community that adopted me and considered and cared for me as their own. As a partial fulfillment of Martha’s mandate, I wrote this book to offer insights into the depth of Iñupiaq-whale relations, and especially how they intersect with Iñupiaq struggles to achieve cultural sovereignty through the whaling cycle, and in so doing exhibit resilience in the face of unrelenting impacts of global climate change.