Photographer Page

Kiliii Yüyan

Hunter Larry Lucas Kaleak listens for the sounds of passing bearded seals and bowhead whales in the vibrations of a skin boat’s wooden paddle in the water. The Indigenous Inupiat of Alaska spend weeks camping on Arctic sea ice, waiting for migrating whales. But as global warming accelerates ice melt, it threatens the tribe’s 4,000-year-old tradition.

“I don’t know about you, but fireflies take me back to childhood,” writes Kiliii Yuyan, who captured these synchronous fireflies flashing at early nighttime in the forests of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “Here, in the space all around me, a thousand tiny green-yellow lights are miniature lanterns, blazing long enough to be seen but always escaping my cupped hands.”

An Inupiat hunter patiently waits on the edge of the ice in Utqiagvik, Alaska for a whale—a custom that’s at least 1,000 years old. Photographer Kiliii Yüyan is a descendant of the Hezhe (Nanai in Russian) hunters and fishermen of northern China and southeast Siberia. Over five years, Yüyan spent a total of 10 months camping a crew on the sea ice to watch for whales. “I started this project searching for the feeling of community I lost when my family was displaced from its homeland,” says Yüyan. “I left it with an invisible Inupiat sensibility deeply embedded, and a new community to call my home.” (Related: Meet the bowhead whale hunters of northern Alaska.)

The Arctic’s staggering transformation is at the heart of a new exhibition at the British Museum.

Rocks containing rare earth minerals like neodymium, widely used in electronics, glow in the exposure of an ultraviolet flashlight. This valley is at the base of mineral complex in southern Greenland that is the site of a proposed rare earth mine.

Evening light warms the flanks of Sermitsiaq, a beloved mountain overlooking Nuuk, the capital of Greenland. “Summer in Greenland is just an amazing thing,” says photographer Kiliii Yuyan. Though the sun shines 24 hours a day, the season itself is short, and people spend time out and about before the winter makes travel difficult.

LEFT: Yugu Alfred Ningeok is the son of a whaling captain and a member of an Inupiat whaling crew. RIGHT: An umiak, or skin boat, carries a small team in pursuit of a whale.

A butchered bowhead whale can yield thousands of pounds of food. The ninit —community shares of meat and blubber—are apportioned equitably to ensure that everyone benefits from a successful hunt. “The highest aspiration you can have is to become a whaling captain,” says photographer Kiliii Yüyan. “It’s a job that provides for the entire community.”