The Universes We Let Disappear

The great auk and the Indigenous peoples of the northern Atlantic shared a world shaped by cold oceans, islands and seasonal rhythms. For thousands of years, these ecosystems provided food, materials and identity for coastal communities. The great auk disappeared after centuries of hunting and exploitation, while northern Indigenous societies faced outside pressures that transformed their relationship with ancestral waters. This imagined encounter remembers a vanished bird and the human cultures that continue to protect the memory of the northern world it belonged to.