In Utqiagvik, Alaska, the Iñupiat rely on whaling and subsistence hunting for the bulk of their diet, a practice dating back thousands of years.
For a few days each June, the saltwater wind that blows over the fairgrounds in Utqiagvik, Alaska mixes with the smell of coffee, salmonberry pie and fresh whale meat. Stimmelmayr received the organs back in March, just hours after the Little Kupaaq whaling crew successfully harpooned a 25-ton animal. Little Kupaaq member Martin Edwardsen was in the boat that day. With the community’s help, the Little Kupaaq crew hauled the animal onto the ice and butchered the meat. But, as Edwardsen cut out the kidneys, he noticed something off. Tiny translucent worms wriggled along the surface of the organs. He set the kidneys aside and called Stimmelmayr.
The North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management is the community’s first line of defense. The team includes ecologists, biologists and hydrologists who work under the leadership of an Iñupiat director, Taqulik Hepa. The researchers are just half of the equation. The department also employs a robust team of Iñupiat subsistence hunters who are revered in the community for their ecological knowledge.
In a town where a case of Dr. Pepper costs $14.99, subsistence hunting is essential. Image by Gabe Allen for Mongabay. “I was a teenager,” Colleen Akpik-Lemen, director of the Iñupiat Heritage Center, told Mongabay. “It was the saddest year.”, estimated that the current population of bowheads in the region was only 6 to 10% of pre-commercial whaling levels. Afrom the same year urged that Iñupiat whaling was “of great concern.” However, the data used to back these statements amounted to a handful of infrequent reports with widely varying estimates.
Just months after the ban, North Slope Borough Mayor Eben Hopson formed the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission. In the early years, the commission worked under the watchful eye of the federal government to monitor bowheads and establish strict subsistence hunting quotas. Slowly, the community regained its right to harvest whales.
Today, that dynamic is still paying off. The bowhead whale hunt is now protected, but the Iñupiat face another existential threat: climate change.