“That, too, was part of the long answer Beringians might have given, had Thomas Norton been able to ask in 1852, to the question What is a whale? It made the darkness of the polar nights visible, the cold bearable, and stomachs satiable. It was a soul in life, a gift assuring human survival in its death, a means to power, a site of communal labor, a set of expectations and ceremonies, a theory of history.”