The Video Game That Attempts to Preserve Native Alaskan Culture

The Iñupiat people, a tribe native to Alaska, did not have a written language for much of their history. Instead, for thousands of years, their culture was passed down orally, often in the form of stories that parents and grandparents would tell and entrust to their children. In recent years, those stories, and the lessons and values and history that they contain, have become harder to preserve, as the young people of the tribe, growing up in the modern world, have drifted further and further from traditional ways. This video, which originally appeared on "The New Yorker Presents" (Amazon Originals) and is based on a story by Simon Parkin, is about a recent experiment in transmitting Iñupiat culture through a new medium: a video game. The tribe worked with a New York-based company called E-Line to create a game based on an old Iñupiat tale called "Kunuuksaayuka," in which an Iñupiat child travels across the wilderness to find the source of the bitter blizzards that have been hitting his village.