More than 4,000 miles away from Maine, native peoples are confronting modern pressures that they say are threatening their traditional way of life. Climate change, commercial shipping and offshore oil operations, they say, are changing the land and seascape in the Alaskan Arctic. A group of 11 Inuit leaders is at Bowdoin College in Brunswick this week to share their concerns, as guests of the school's Arctic Studies program.

Harry Brower Jr, Susan Kaplan and Benjamin Nageak (left to right) is at Bowdoin College this week as guests of the school's Arctic Studies program.

Among the group of Inupiat and Yupik leaders is Harry Brower Jr, who serves as vice chair of the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission. Its mission is to protect the Bowhead whale, as well as to support his people's traditional whaling activities and culture.

"Being in Arctic we don't have daylight. Summer months are very short, and time of gathering resources is very limited, so we have to take that opportunity as it arises," Bower says. "And we look forward to conducting our gathering and hunting of resources and traditional foods that we need for the winter months."

But a number of changes in the Alaskan Arctic is putting pressure on those resources, which also include seals, beluga whales, walruses, and polar bears.

"Global warming - it's real to us,' Bower says. "A lot of people don't believe that there's something happening. But it is real to us. The changes have occurred over the past 25 years."

Benjamin Nageak is former director of the Department of Wildlife Management of the North Slope Borough, a region the size of the state of Minnesota, with an Arctic research lab headquartered in Barrow, Alaska.

"Right now, once the ice goes out, it goes out and stays out for a long time. When I was growing up the ice would come back and forth," he says. "So right now that's our concern. Our world has changed, and so that impacts not only marine mammals but also the migratory birds and all the other species that we depend on to this day for our sustenance."

Nageak says the disappearance of ice has opened the way for more commercial shipping, which is also a threat to marine mammals. These issues were taken up this afternoon in a panel discussion at Bowdoin College, home to the Peary-McMillan Arctic Museum, and Arctic Studies Center, named for the two prominent arctic explorers Robert Peary and Donald MacMillan, who both attended Bowdoin.

Museum Director Susan Kaplan says the school has long had an interest in the Arctic, and in its native cultures. "People from Bowdoin started to go to the Arctic in 1860, and there has been a long tradition ever since then of scientists and social scientists going north, primarily to the eastern Arctic, and as a result of that, we've got a long history of relationships with individual communties," she says.

The Museum's currrent exhibition, "Animal Allies, Inuit Views of the Natural World," explores the relationship between humans and animals in Inuit culture.

Photo by Laura McCandlish.