| Summary: | This chapter demonstrates the ways that performances of expressive culture can strengthen bonds based on shared ways of life and on a powerful human-nonhuman identification, even across geographic and cultural distance. The author recounts how nineteenth century Iñupiat whaling communities adopted Azorean and Cape Verdean sailors who fled the harsh life on Portuguese commercial whaling ships, creating transnational bonds of kinship. In both communities, spiritual connections to the whale became intertwined with local versions of Christianity. As climate change has made ways of life in the Arctic and island communities of the Atlantic increasingly precarious, both communities turn to music-making and festivals to commemorate the past and revitalize their spiritual and cultural relationships to the whale.
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