Recommended Reading

In 1977, the International Whaling Commission banned the Iñupiat from hunting bowhead whales, a practice thousands of years old. In court, the Iñupiat won the right to manage them and tripled the whale population in thirty years. Indigenous territories comprise thirty-seven percent of all remaining natural lands, reports Guardians of Life, and contain about eighty percent of the species on earth. National Geographic photographer Kiliii Yüyan argues for entrusting Indigenous peoples with maintaining this environmental stewardship, and I’m convinced. His nearly two hundred images from nine Native communities show humans intimately connected to traditional lands and acutely dependent on the health of everything living there. Facts are