I’m not sure you realize that the Inupiaq still hunt whales. Muktuk, or beluga meat, is a sea-flavored treat. I readily admit I have tried it more than once and I love it. I also admit that it breaks my heart a little bit when I think about the relationship the beluga have had with humans and how humans have taken advantage of that.
A family, and by that I mean around twenty people, could live through the winter on five or six beluga. The hunting season traditionally was late June and July. Processed meat was stored in the ground over the summer, (permafrost is an excellent refrigeration technique requiring no fossil fuels), and dug up to keep the village fat and happy all winter. (I need to interject here that traditionally Eskimos are quite lean. Not fat at all). Each summer, the village moved downriver to a tusk-shaped peninsula called Elephant Point, and Buckland proper was a ghost town for four to six weeks. Elephant Point juts into Eschscholtz Bay which in turn connects to Kotzebue Sound. It earned its name when a mammoth tusk was found there. I think the fact that it looks like a tusk from the air is incidental.
The Inupiaq practiced cooperative hunting. The most experienced hunter determined when the time was right to go after the whales, this being when the tide was coming in and had crawled up the beach about three feet. Until this moment, the camp was silent. No children were allowed to sing, scream, or play in the water, no dogs allowed to bark. The whales wouldn’t approach if they could hear the people. The captain would say, “All aboard,” and the boats would launch. The hunters would herd the whales into shallow water in order to “catch” them. First a shot, then the harpoon. Each boat had two hunters and someone to run the motor. After catching a beluga, the boat would tow it back to camp for cutting, drying, boiling, storing. The people had enough to eat.
The last great hunt was in the 1990s; I think 1996. There was another good year in 2007. By a great hunt or good year I mean over 100 whales. Last year two whales were caught and people were pretty excited about that.
In response to the harvest decline, some village members and the Alaska Beluga Whale Committee have been studying, researching, worrying, and resolving to help the beluga regroup. The Cook Inlet beluga population, (Cook Inlet is the passage by water to Anchorage), has dropped to 350 whales and is not recovering, despite achieving endangered species status. There are over 100,000 beluga worldwide, and we know the Kotzebue Sound whales are still around, so why don’t they come into Eschscholtz Bay any more? Are numbers getting low enough that endangered species status is on the horizon for these whales as well, which means no muktuk, even on special occasions?
Some excellent people decided that in order to keep the whaling culture alive, time was becoming critical. It has been thirty years, and the way of the hunt will die completely within a generation or two if some solution isn’t found.
The Wisdom Keepers Conference was imagined by The Alaska Beluga Whale Committee. The goal of the conference was to enable the Inupiaq to address the beluga decline as a people before the government steps in and disallows hunting completely. I feel lucky to live in the village that they chose to host the conference. Apparently the thought was that Buckland is community minded, beluga knowledgable, and visionary enough to be successful at working together to make a significant start toward initiating beluga recovery. We are, after all, the Nunachiam Sissauni.
The conference was held at the school over three days. Several scientists flew in from as far away as Florida. There was an orca specialist, a whale geneticist, a human environment interaction specialist, a man who has been studying this very population since the mid eighties and spent three seasons on Elephant Point at that time, and a woman who is an expert on the Cook Inlet beluga population, five visiting scientists in all. These specialists spent Thursday listening to stories of the Buckland elders.
I was fortunate enough to have time after school to sit in for an hour or so. The format was a conversation. People took turns telling stories, the chairs in a big circle, almost as if there were a campfire in the middle. It felt like a reunion with folks saying, “Do you remember the time when…” and “Nathan always had the fastest boat…” and “I remember when the four horsepower boats showed up. The village had three, and that changed everything.” The women told of processing meat and steering the boats, being told to hush, and watching for spouts. The men told of the pride they felt as they were taught to take a greater part in the hunt. I felt as though I were witnessing a vanishing moment.
They also discussed why the whales stopped coming. It was startlingly abrupt. One year they were there and the next they weren’t. When they came back in 2007, they were skittish and not as willing to sacrifice themselves. I heard stories about people bragging that they would get twenty whales to make money selling the meat, only to end up being the only hunter to catch none. A Kotzebue elder told a story of conflict between the Kotzebue and Buckland whalers concerning following the traditional hunting practices and the whales not returning after that. Some thought it was the louder boats or jets, some thought it was Greenpeace playing Orca songs underwater to keep the whales away, (Not as far fetched as that may sound, truth to tell). No one knew for sure or perhaps everyone knew one piece.
Two Buckland residents, Percy Ballot and Ernie Barger, were determined to have student participation in the conference. After all, it is my students who will determine the fate of the whales and whaling culture. I jumped in with both feet and tried to convince my students that it was a worthwhile project. The sophomores came up with a power point of beluga facts that was quite fun to create as a group. Did you know that beluga sleep half a brain at a time? They really do sleep with one eye open!
The juniors, however, transformed the whole conference. We read N. Scott Momaday’s Way to Rainy Mountain about his journey back to his Kiowa grandmother’s home during the year following her death. The book is set up to have a short traditional story or myth followed by what I call an “anthropological paragraph” from a more distant, impersonal point of view about the Kiowa people, followed by what we called a “reflection” by Momaday. Story, impersonal, personal. It’s a pretty groovy book and the class read the whole text aloud, even though I gave them the option to read only selections. One of those golden teacher moments.
So we wrote myths. The theme was belugas, but other stories came out of the project. Why it is important to not whistle at the Northern Lights, for instance, (they will cut off your head). One ahna’s (grandmother’s) tale of flying bears, told at Elephant Point to several of my students several years ago, turned into two myths, and not swimming after eating was a common theme as well. When the myths were done, the class interviewed two of the visiting scientists, Glenn Seaman and Henry Huntington, to collect the anthropological information. The end product is an anthology of stories and reflections inspired by The Wisdom Keepers Conference. Our contribution was received enthusiastically. I wasn’t available to witness the public reading, but Jay Denton, our science teacher, convinced students to read the myths aloud to the conference participants. I was so proud when they asked me to run off more copies because they wanted to take one home!
The second day of the conference, the village members grilled the scientists. “What if we transplanted some whales here?” “Where are these whales when not in our bay?” “Were the whales trapped in the ice in Russia in the late 1900s our whales?” “And what about Greenpeace?” Another fascinating conversation of which I was able to catch an hour. The final day I missed, but they brainstormed solutions. The conversations will be compiled and reviewed and hopefully another conference will be forthcoming. Hopefully the Inupiaq will use their sense of community and honor of the ancestors to renew the harmonic relationship they have had with the whales for over a thousand years.
A family, and by that I mean around twenty people, could live through the winter on five or six beluga. The hunting season traditionally was late June and July. Processed meat was stored in the ground over the summer, (permafrost is an excellent refrigeration technique requiring no fossil fuels), and dug up to keep the village fat and happy all winter. (I need to interject here that traditionally Eskimos are quite lean. Not fat at all). Each summer, the village moved downriver to a tusk-shaped peninsula called Elephant Point, and Buckland proper was a ghost town for four to six weeks. Elephant Point juts into Eschscholtz Bay which in turn connects to Kotzebue Sound. It earned its name when a mammoth tusk was found there. I think the fact that it looks like a tusk from the air is incidental.
The Inupiaq practiced cooperative hunting. The most experienced hunter determined when the time was right to go after the whales, this being when the tide was coming in and had crawled up the beach about three feet. Until this moment, the camp was silent. No children were allowed to sing, scream, or play in the water, no dogs allowed to bark. The whales wouldn’t approach if they could hear the people. The captain would say, “All aboard,” and the boats would launch. The hunters would herd the whales into shallow water in order to “catch” them. First a shot, then the harpoon. Each boat had two hunters and someone to run the motor. After catching a beluga, the boat would tow it back to camp for cutting, drying, boiling, storing. The people had enough to eat.
The last great hunt was in the 1990s; I think 1996. There was another good year in 2007. By a great hunt or good year I mean over 100 whales. Last year two whales were caught and people were pretty excited about that.
In response to the harvest decline, some village members and the Alaska Beluga Whale Committee have been studying, researching, worrying, and resolving to help the beluga regroup. The Cook Inlet beluga population, (Cook Inlet is the passage by water to Anchorage), has dropped to 350 whales and is not recovering, despite achieving endangered species status. There are over 100,000 beluga worldwide, and we know the Kotzebue Sound whales are still around, so why don’t they come into Eschscholtz Bay any more? Are numbers getting low enough that endangered species status is on the horizon for these whales as well, which means no muktuk, even on special occasions?
Some excellent people decided that in order to keep the whaling culture alive, time was becoming critical. It has been thirty years, and the way of the hunt will die completely within a generation or two if some solution isn’t found.
The Wisdom Keepers Conference was imagined by The Alaska Beluga Whale Committee. The goal of the conference was to enable the Inupiaq to address the beluga decline as a people before the government steps in and disallows hunting completely. I feel lucky to live in the village that they chose to host the conference. Apparently the thought was that Buckland is community minded, beluga knowledgable, and visionary enough to be successful at working together to make a significant start toward initiating beluga recovery. We are, after all, the Nunachiam Sissauni.
The conference was held at the school over three days. Several scientists flew in from as far away as Florida. There was an orca specialist, a whale geneticist, a human environment interaction specialist, a man who has been studying this very population since the mid eighties and spent three seasons on Elephant Point at that time, and a woman who is an expert on the Cook Inlet beluga population, five visiting scientists in all. These specialists spent Thursday listening to stories of the Buckland elders.
I was fortunate enough to have time after school to sit in for an hour or so. The format was a conversation. People took turns telling stories, the chairs in a big circle, almost as if there were a campfire in the middle. It felt like a reunion with folks saying, “Do you remember the time when…” and “Nathan always had the fastest boat…” and “I remember when the four horsepower boats showed up. The village had three, and that changed everything.” The women told of processing meat and steering the boats, being told to hush, and watching for spouts. The men told of the pride they felt as they were taught to take a greater part in the hunt. I felt as though I were witnessing a vanishing moment.
They also discussed why the whales stopped coming. It was startlingly abrupt. One year they were there and the next they weren’t. When they came back in 2007, they were skittish and not as willing to sacrifice themselves. I heard stories about people bragging that they would get twenty whales to make money selling the meat, only to end up being the only hunter to catch none. A Kotzebue elder told a story of conflict between the Kotzebue and Buckland whalers concerning following the traditional hunting practices and the whales not returning after that. Some thought it was the louder boats or jets, some thought it was Greenpeace playing Orca songs underwater to keep the whales away, (Not as far fetched as that may sound, truth to tell). No one knew for sure or perhaps everyone knew one piece.
Two Buckland residents, Percy Ballot and Ernie Barger, were determined to have student participation in the conference. After all, it is my students who will determine the fate of the whales and whaling culture. I jumped in with both feet and tried to convince my students that it was a worthwhile project. The sophomores came up with a power point of beluga facts that was quite fun to create as a group. Did you know that beluga sleep half a brain at a time? They really do sleep with one eye open!
The juniors, however, transformed the whole conference. We read N. Scott Momaday’s Way to Rainy Mountain about his journey back to his Kiowa grandmother’s home during the year following her death. The book is set up to have a short traditional story or myth followed by what I call an “anthropological paragraph” from a more distant, impersonal point of view about the Kiowa people, followed by what we called a “reflection” by Momaday. Story, impersonal, personal. It’s a pretty groovy book and the class read the whole text aloud, even though I gave them the option to read only selections. One of those golden teacher moments.
So we wrote myths. The theme was belugas, but other stories came out of the project. Why it is important to not whistle at the Northern Lights, for instance, (they will cut off your head). One ahna’s (grandmother’s) tale of flying bears, told at Elephant Point to several of my students several years ago, turned into two myths, and not swimming after eating was a common theme as well. When the myths were done, the class interviewed two of the visiting scientists, Glenn Seaman and Henry Huntington, to collect the anthropological information. The end product is an anthology of stories and reflections inspired by The Wisdom Keepers Conference. Our contribution was received enthusiastically. I wasn’t available to witness the public reading, but Jay Denton, our science teacher, convinced students to read the myths aloud to the conference participants. I was so proud when they asked me to run off more copies because they wanted to take one home!
The second day of the conference, the village members grilled the scientists. “What if we transplanted some whales here?” “Where are these whales when not in our bay?” “Were the whales trapped in the ice in Russia in the late 1900s our whales?” “And what about Greenpeace?” Another fascinating conversation of which I was able to catch an hour. The final day I missed, but they brainstormed solutions. The conversations will be compiled and reviewed and hopefully another conference will be forthcoming. Hopefully the Inupiaq will use their sense of community and honor of the ancestors to renew the harmonic relationship they have had with the whales for over a thousand years.