The maritime fur trade caused the extirpation of sea otters from southeast Alaska. In the 1960s, sea otters were reintroduced, and their numbers have increased. Now, sea otters are competing with people for what have become commercially important invertebrates. After having been absent for more than a century, the reentry of this keystone species has unsettled people. Although some communities perceive sea otters as a threat to their livelihoods, others view their return as restoration of the marine ecosystem. The federal Marine Mammal Protection Act authorizes any Alaska Native to harvest sea otters for subsistence provided that the harvest is not wasteful. Some people are seeking to define “traditional” Tlingit use of sea otters as not only using their pelts but consuming them as food, but some Tlingit maintain they never ate sea otters. This project analyzes the largest precontact archaeological assemblage of sea otter bones in southeast Alaska, with the benefit of insights gained from observing a Tlingit hunter skin a sea otter to infer that Tlingit ancestors hunted sea otters primarily for pelts. The extent to which other Indigenous peoples of the North Pacific consumed sea otters as food deserves investigation, especially as sea otters recolonize their historic range.

Increasingly, understanding how the role of historical events and context affect present-day health inequities has become a dominant narrative among Native American communities. Historical trauma, which consists of traumatic events targeting a community (e.g., forced relocation) that cause catastrophic upheaval, has been posited by Native communities and some researchers to have pernicious effects that persist across generations through a myriad of mechanisms from biological to behavioral. Consistent with contemporary societal determinants of health approaches, the impact of historical trauma calls upon researchers to explicitly examine theoretically and empirically how historical processes and contexts become embodied. Scholarship that theoretically engages how historically traumatic events become embodied and affect the magnitude and distribution of health inequities is clearly needed. However, the scholarship on historical trauma is limited. Some scholars have focused on these events as etiological agents to social and psychological distress; others have focused on events as an outcome (e.g., historical trauma response); others still have focused on these events as mechanisms or pathways by which historical trauma is transmitted; and others have focused on historical trauma-related factors (e.g., collective loss) that interact with proximal stressors. These varied conceptualizations of historical trauma have hindered the ability to cogently theorize it and its impact on Native health. The purpose of this article is to explicate the link between historical trauma and the concept of embodiment. After an interdisciplinary review of the “state of the discipline,” we utilize ecosocial theory and the indigenist stress-coping model to argue that contemporary physical health reflects, in part, the embodiment of historical trauma. Future research directions are discussed.