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This paper explores how feminist and indigenous archaeologies can ally to produce decolonizing heritage practice through intersubjective methods. Intersectional feminisms, particularly Native feminisms, suggest that focusing on local gender contexts in indigenous community research can subvert settler colonial systems, under which sexism and racism conspire to oppress Native people. I apply these insights about the decolonizing potential of localized gender research to a community‐centered project at Nunalleq, a Thule‐era site near the Yup'ik village of Quinhagak, Alaska. Here, stakeholder perspectives on gender suggest that framing site interpretations through concepts of family and teaching/learning would align with community values in potentially powerful ways.

Like many other Alaska Native communities, the Yup'ik people of Quinhagak follow a subsistence lifestyle that is multi-faceted, socially embedded, and specifically tailored to the land and water on which it is practiced. This paper provides a synthesis of Quinhagak residents' perspectives on subsistence in both the present and the past, as documented in original interviews and in the literature, with a focus on how gendered social identities are enacted through these traditions. The Nunalleq site presents a unique opportunity to examine the time depth of local subsistence lifeways and their social iterations, as well as how these were affected by changing landscapes and climate-all realities of contemporary Quinhagak life, just as they were for the ancestors at Nunalleq. The interrelation of subsistence and sociality has implications for how we understand Yup'ik resiliency and survivance in the face of such changes.