Project Background:
Inupiat along the Alaskan coast and on Little Diomede Island as well as Siberian Yupit living on St. Lawrence Island and on what is now the Chukotkan coast have all developed sophisticated technologies for living off the land and marine resources of their environments. These include, among other things, walrus, seal, fish, ducks and geese, caribou, Dall sheep, bear, berries and greens. Of these resources, the largest - and the one to take on the most importance in social life - is the whale.
Baleen whales have been pursued by hunters living in the Western Arctic for the past 2000 years or longer, along the coasts of the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort seas. The bowhead has long been the preferred whale for Inuit hunters in Northwest Arctic. Customarily, gray or lesser baleen whales might be taken if conditions for hunting bowhead were unfavorable. Unlike their Inuit cousins to the east, whalers of the Western Arctic developed permanent communities at strategic points where the whale migration passed close to land. Today, the villages of Ekven in Russia, Gambell on St. Lawrence Island, Wales, Point Hope, and Barrow continue to occupy long-standing permanent whaling communities, some of which extend back for thousands of years. Many other smaller villages, which sprang up along the coast between 800 and 1000 years ago, fell into disuse as people moved around in response to 19th and 20th century developments. Today's whaling communities forming the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission (AEWC) include (from east to west) Kaktovik, Nuiqsut, Barrow, Wainwright, Point Hope, Kivalina, Wales, Gambell, Savoonga, and Little Diomede - with links to Chukotkan, Makkah, and Canadian Inupiat communities.
This ancient, highly specialized and potentially dangerous form of hunting has followed the path of whale migration along the Alaskan coastline and developed in response to environmental conditions that varied according to local geography as well as to the seasons. Because of Arctic conditions, indigenous hunters developed specific techniques for hunting on land, in the snow, in the water, and on ice. Whether in the spring or in the fall , whaling success required - and still requires-great skill in reading weather conditions, currents, and the whales' travel routes.
Although whales may have never been the sole source food for the indigenous communities in the Western Arctic, they are in many ways, their most important resource. A single whale produces tons of usable food (meat, maktak - or whale skin and blubber, organs) and durable material such as bone and baleen which historically and today has been used for trade or personal use: construction, tools, baskets, jewelry, and so forth.
Permafrost makes it possible to construct 'ice cellars' in which food can be stored for a year or more. For countless generations people have been able to collect enough food of all sorts to host feasts in celebration of whaling which supports as sense of togetherness that extends well beyond individual communities. Indeed, in many ways, the food that is shared during these events forges a connection between the world of humans and that of animals.
The social organization of whaling has developed in unique ways in different places and across time. However, unlike the marine hunting societies to the East, virtually all of the Western Arctic whaling societies developed formal institutions which existed outside of the household - primarily the Qargi, or ceremonial house, and the whaling crews which were attached to them. These endured from season to season and depended on whaling captains and Angatkut, or shamans, whose specialist skills afforded them recognized status within the society. On the Alaskan side at least, Qargit became the focus of social, political, and economic life, where men met to work on tools an equipment, where the entire community gathered for dancing and story telling in the evenings, where important matters of state were decided, where celebratory feasts marking the annual whaling cycle took place, and where intervillage trading feasts were held. Trading - which moved goods from Siberia to Eastern Canada, and whaling became highly important sources of wealth well before the moment of first European contact and social relations became differentiated as a result. However, in part because individuals have never 'owned' the animals on which their lives depend, individuals have never been in a position to control other people's access to their means of subsistence. It is not surprising that the extent to which whaling captains could exercise power, as opposed to asking for cooperation from people of virtual equal standing, has varied significantly from village to village and within villages depending on historical circumstances.
While many of the basic elements of modern whaling stretch back to its prehistoric origin, radical changes came to the North with the arrival of the so-called Yankee whalers in the 19th century. Operating within an expansive world market system that paid no attention to the idea that whales and humans were in a reciprocal relationship, commercial whalers had already fished out virtually all of the whaling grounds further south and east. They were set on harvesting the greatest number of whales as quickly as possible from these newly 'discovered' Arctic populations. The new fishery was in pursuit of baleen (for a variety of uses) and oil for America’s lamps, not meat and blubber for food. Initially, the annual appearance of whaling vessels from the South presented coastal people with opportunities for trade as many ships were ill-equipped to survive in the Arctic. As commercial whalers established shore-based stations in the late 19th century, many local whalers joined forces with the Euroamericans. Some of the newcomers married in and hybrid forms of whaling developed which combined knowledge and techniques from both sides. At the same time, 'white' institutions - schools, trading posts, magistrates, and churches - were being introduced which were to have profound effects on local lives.
The encounter was always a mixed blessing - new relations may have provided new opportunities, but they often ate into the ways people could decide how to conduct themselves; new technologies and new trade goods, including alcohol, came with waves of new diseases and periods of famine. In a repeat of a story that has happened many times over in the history of 'New World'/European relations, the local population suffered drastically. Sometimes almost entire villages were wiped out by a single epidemic; region-wide, the overall population was cut in half between 1850 and 1910.
The promise of potential profits encouraged the commercial fleet to kill with a ruthless efficiency that almost completely eradicated whale stocks - with walrus soon to follow - by the first years of the 20th century. The combination of scarce stocks, the invention of material that could substitute for baleen and the onset of World War I drew most Euroamericans back down to the continental United States and by 1915, whaling in the Arctic was once again under the control of indigenous whalers.
This very brief sketch describes some general patterns. We have already said , though, that practices vary in response to ecological and historical conditions. As Isaac Akootchook, from Kaktovik, pointed out recently, customs at times 'have to be altered to fit our way of life...what will be effective in your village will not be good for our part of the country' (1991 North Slope Borough Elders' Conference). Wales, Gambell, and Savoonga, for instance, depend almost entirely on the sea for their subsistence; Wainwright and Barrow use extensive river systems to gather inland as well as marine resources, and Nuiqsut villagers must travel many miles to the coast in order to whale at all. By the same token, the history of Euroamerican contact may play out over and over in similar ways, but neither history nor its legacy is ever the same. Wales, Point Hope, Barrow and Kaktovik all have had different experiences with commercial whalers, with missionaries, and with agents of the government and those experiences have shaped the interactions that people take part in today.
This project, entitled Whale Hunting Societies of the Western Arctic: A Regional Integration, as its title suggests, takes a very broad and multidisciplinary perspective to the question of how whaling in the Western Arctic has developed over thousands of years. Researchers come from the physical, biological, and social sciences; their disciplines range from climatology, whale paleo-biology, geology and contemporary whale biology to archaeology, oral history, and social anthropology. Researchers thus cover prehistoric, historic, and contemporary time frames. Some researchers, such as Allen McCartney or John Dixon, have have been collecting data region-wide; others, such as Owen Mason, Carol Jolles, and Herbert Anungazuk have been gathering information from a cluster of related villages - Wales, Gambell, and Diomede, while still others, such as Mary Ann Larson, Roger Harritt, Craig George, and Barbara Bodenhorn have focused on a particular place (Point Hope, Wales, and Barrow respectively). Below you will find brief descriptions of the individual components of this research project. Click on the workshop page, communities or specific subjects for further information. Click on NSF proposal for a more detailed report on the whaling project.
