Sergie and the White Seal: An International Arctic Indigenous Collaboration

In 1893, Rudyard Kipling published a story about a place “away and away in the Bering Sea”: Saint Paul Island, Alaska. Entitled “The White Seal,” this story was the only one in Kipling’s famous The Jungle Book to take place somewhere other than India, and it depicted a harshly beautiful landscape populated by charismatic fur seals – and villainous “Aleut” hunters who slaughtered them for sport. Though this depiction was purely a figment of Kipling’s imagination (he never visited Saint Paul), the story enjoyed widespread success and remains among the most enduring portraits of the remote Alaskan island.

“The White Seal” was due an update, and one was released in the summer of 2026. Tukuuludaa Bering Sea-Based Design and Education Center, in conjunction with The Alaska Native Language Center (ANLC), published an Indigenous retelling of Kipling’s story, adapted into a young adult chapter book and renamed: Sergie and the White Seal. In this version, the titular white seal meets an Unangan boy with newfound shamanistic abilities, and the two team up to fight the evils of overfishing in the vulnerable Bering Sea ecosystem. It recharacterizes the fur seals and the Unangan not as mortal enemies, but as equal partners in stewardship of their lands and seas.

A brief foreword gives the historical context of Kipling’s alleged “seal killings,” explaining that the Unangan people were forced to meet seal quotas every year under threat of dire punishment by the Russians and, later, the Americans; and a glossary gives the meanings and pronunciations of over 60 Unangam Tunuu words and phrases that appear throughout the text.

With Sergie and the White Seal, our goal is to decolonize the widely beloved story through the retelling, and to paint a new portrait of Saint Paul Island for audiences to enjoy – this time on Unangan terms.

To tell the story, and in addition to the book, we created a corresponding art installation that showcases characters from the retelling as soft sculptures crafted from local St. Paul Island materials using traditional methods.

This project fostered international collaboration among Indigenous artists in Sápmi and Unangam Tanangin (Aleut homelands). The Sámi artists Rebecca Tornberg and Mickael Berglund illustrated our book and adapted it into a short animated film that premiered at the Arctic Arts Summit in June 2026, respectively. A second showing of the exhibit will be in October 2026 at the 54th annual meeting of Aleut Shareholders in Bellevue, Washington.

The novel, published through the Alaska Native Language Center, is currently available for sale at the University Press of Colorado Website, Amazon, Target, Ebay, Barnes and Noble, and anywhere else books are sold. A full cast audiobook version of the novel is currently in production, a description of which we will add to the website upon completion!