What it's all about

Like proud cultures everywhere, the Inupiat of northern Alaska portray their heritage in many ways, but they aren’t just remembering their heritage, they’re living it. Many high schools around the country have nicknames that honor those traditions, and the North Slope schools are no different. The nickname for the high school team in Barrow is the Whalers. In Point Hope, it’s the Harpooners. Bowhead whale skulls adorn the entrances to each school in town—a small one in front of the elementary school up to a twenty feet long, five-ton skull at the local college. Instead of a favorite sports team or labor union, local people have the names and flags of their whaling crew on the backs of their jackets. Around town, painted dumpsters sport depictions of bowhead whales and whale flukes. On the side of one dumpster, it reads, “Save the Bowhead…for dinner.”

In Barrow, life really does revolve around the subsistence whale hunt. Unlike the tri-corned hats in Williamsburg or the bead and blanket shops outside tribal casinos, the whale skulls and whalebone grave markers you see here are not reminders of a heritage past, but active parts of an ancient culture still alive in the present.

Before moving to Barrow, I, like most outsiders, thought of Inupiat whaling as a novelty, as something they did to honor tradition. I had been in Alaska a number of years before moving to Alaska’s farthest point north, but mostly urban Alaska. I thought of subsistence as a supplement to a “normal” diet, a way to eat cheaply, and to eat well. To me, the subsistence lifestyle meant carrying Alaska’s proud history of frontier independence into the internet and supermarket age. It was a nice touch, but that was all.

Even in Barrow, it took me until this weekend to really understand what a true subsistence lifestyle means to the people and communities who live it. It’s deeper than the holes it fills in their checkbooks or the facetious comments on dumpsters that make Greenpeace cringe. It’s deeper than words can adequately describe.

When I hear the North Slope Borough Mayor try to explain it to a gathering of oil industry and government officials, I wondered if his trouble describing the importance of subsistence, whales and otherwise, stemmed from a lack of suitable English words. Now, as I try myself, I know that if the words are there, I definitely don’t know what they are.

When I saw the smile on the successful whaling captain’s face and the enthusiastic cooperation of the crew members butchering 30 tons of meat in about as long as it would take me to butcher 30 salmon, I felt it. Like when Layla was pregnant, I’m not claiming to know what it means to be pregnant or to be a hundredth generation subsistence whaler, but I know that it’s more profound and deep than I can understand. The Mayor doesn’t need to find the words to explain it to me. I can never hope to know it, but now I get it.

There is no other culture left in our country which has as direct and active ties to its pre-Columban heritage than that of the Alaska Natives in the far north of Alaska. They may use aluminum boats with outboard motors for the fall whale hunt now, and bulldozers and forklifts to move them onto an abandoned military runway to butcher them, but using these modern conveniences has not taken the pride or meaning out of the hunt. And it has not made the hunt any less important to the hunters and their families than it was ages ago. It’s not just about the tradition or the fact that subsistence supplies eighty percent of their diet, it’s what connects them to each other, gives them identity, frames their rites of passage and otherwise defines the Inupiat as a people.


I can still see the reverence of their ancestors in the hunters and crew, which did include some young people, although I cannot help but feel that I am witnessing the last generations of a great culture. I fear that the constant currents of western life are carrying Inupiat youth away from this ancient culture on rafts of plastic and ephemeral satisfaction, and that the strong ties to the past are today facing their most daunting challenges on multiple fronts. The dozens of enthusiastic Inupiat helping to clean, portion and haul the three whales caught on Sunday still show the same connection to the whale as ever before. But with the constant and unstoppable pressure from outside sources like climate change, the incessant encroachment of oil drilling in their hunting grounds and the temptations of western life, history may well remember these Eskimos the last of the intact culture.


We arrived at the old steel plank airstrip just in time to see the forklift lower the first whale onto the rusty planks. The Navy built the airstrip with steel grids linked together over the natural gravel because no other hard surface could withstand the harsh environment. Just north of town, the old airfield sits on a spit that divides the Beaufort and Chikchi Seas as it projects north from mainland Alaska. A few dozen people were there when we got there to see the first whale of the season, and over the two hours it took to process the whale, more people would come and go.

A whaler paced anxiously around the whale with his long carving blade fastened to the end of a broom-length wooden pole. The instrument looked as if it had been handed down for generations, as it likely had, and seeing it in the weathered hands of the parka-clad man instantly made me forget the five ton yellow hydraulic forklift that had placed the whale in front of us. The sight propelled me back in time better than any sci-fi, time-travel movie could ever do. I reached out and touched the whale’s tail to beam me back to the present.

There were spectators, mostly locals and a few lucky tourists, but the event was anything but theater. After a prayer and a few photos of the captain and his family and crew, the captain made the first cut and the pragmatic dismantling began. The crew and a few others working for their share of the catch quickly allocated tasks and took to their jobs with business-like efficiency and head-down hard work. Bystanders soon realized they needed to give the crew plenty of room or they would be run over by six foot slabs of steaming maktak. That light bulb clicked for me early in the process when I looked up from my camera’s viewfinder to barking admonishments and four crewmembers in rubber boots and bloody Helly Hansens charging toward me. They drug their pink burden with ropes attached to medieval hooks. Two went to my left, and two to my right. In a move wrought of necessity and reminiscent of my childhood dodgeball days, I hurdled the spindly ropes and narrowly avoided an embarrassing and sure to be unpleasant face-down ride on the fatty sled. Pay attention and stay out of the way, son. These people are working.


It was a relatively warm day, probably in the mid-twenties, but after a couple hours I began to get cold. The wives and daughters of the crew boiled slices of the fresh maktak and fed it to the gracious workers, many of whom had shed their parkas and hats to keep themselves from overheating with all the work. I find maktak palatable, but after a couple hours of standing around only yards from two chilling arctic seas, I was hoping one someone would offer this gaper one of the steaming morsels of instant energy. No luck, and as it seemed to disappear from the tray as fast as she could bring it, I decided not to ask.

Some women cut maktak with their ulus, or “women’s knives,” and others worked the stoves. Two other women collected the whale’s intestines in large burlap sacks to be cleaned an served at the community feast that evening along with the tongue and kidneys. An elder man sat near the stoves with a file, sharpening the various cutting tools. One man explained to him that a notable hunter of a past generation gave him his adze-shaped butchering tool. The old man smiled as sharpening that blade had taken him back in time as well.

In all, the hunters landed three whales that day. Their sizes increased at almost perfect intervals with each new catch—26 feet, 37 feet and the last was 47 feet. Harry Brower Jr., Chairman of the Board for the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission got the first whale, and Jake Adams, former President of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation got the second. The Mayor of the North Slope Borough, Edward Itta landed the third whale, which took two heavy duty forklifts and a bulldozer to slide the behemoth onto the airstrip.

Itta struck the great bowhead around mid-day, and the sun was setting around six o’clock when the heavy equipment brought it ashore. Onlookers took pictures and kids climbed onto the enormous whale while the Mayor hauled out his boat and drove to the scene. A cloud hid the last sun, and cold and fatigue (yeah, it was tiring just watching) set in for the three of us. We piled in the car just as the crew began to carve the first slats in the giant whale. The crew had plenty of work ahead of them, and the crowd had thinned, now composing of more spectators than helpers. Their enthusiasm and deliberate work would keep the crew going into the darkness, but we needed some dinner. Even after being here almost a year, I was glad to have been able to take a brief glimpse into an age-old culture still fighting to stay alive today.

Here are some more photos of the day...warning, some are a bit bloody...