Appendix a Survey of the Literature
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APPENDIX A SURVEY OF THE LITERATURE APPENDIX A TABLE OF CONTENTS Section Page A.1 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... A-1 A.2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND....................................................................................A-2 Pre-Contact Whaling....................................................................................................... A-2 Arrival of Euro-Americans and the Period of Commercial Whaling ............................. A-7 Post-Commercial Subsistence Whaling........................................................................ A-14 Expansion of Subsistence Whaling............................................................................... A-18 Imposition of a Quota and Establishment of the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission (AEWC)................................................................................................... A-23 The Current Socio-Political Context of Subsistence Whaling...................................... A-27 A.3 THE CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE OF CONTEMPORARY SUBSISTENCE WHALING ................................................................................................................... A-31 Conceptual Value.......................................................................................................... A-32 Social Value.................................................................................................................. A-34 Technical Value ............................................................................................................ A-41 Commodity Value......................................................................................................... A-44 A.4 BIBLIOGRAPHY......................................................................................................... A-47 LIST OF TABLES Table Page A.1 Bowhead Whales Landed per Year by Decade during the Post-Commercial Subsistence Whaling Era .............................................................................................. A-15 A.2 The Annual Round of Whaling-Related Activities in Barrow...................................... A-36 A.3 Supplies and Services Necessary to Participate in Whaling in Barrow........................ A-39 OCS Activities and Bowhead Whaling in the Beaufort Sea Page A-i This page intentionally left blank. Page A-ii OCS Activities and Bowhead Whaling in the Beaufort Sea A.1 INTRODUCTION The Alaska Natives who have hunted bowhead whales for subsistence purposes to the present time include both St. Lawrence Island or Chaplinski Yup’ik1 speakers and Iñupiaq2 speakers. The St. Lawrence Island Yup’ik speakers who harvest bowheads reside on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea, while the Iñupiaq speakers reside on the island of Little Diomede in the Bering Strait and along the coastline of northwest Alaska and the Arctic slope. The residents of the three whaling communities that are the focus of this report (Barrow, Nuiqsut, and Kaktovik) are primarily Iñupiat. The community that has been selected as a control (Savoonga) is a St. Lawrence Island Yup’ik whaling village. This literature survey does not purport to be a comprehensive review of all the literature available on the subject of subsistence whaling in the communities under study. The culture of the relatively small number of Alaska Natives who traditionally hunted bowhead whales has long been a research focus of social scientists, and the accumulated literature is vast (for example, see the on-line annotated bibliography compiled by Marquette (2002)). The comment by Charles Hughes (1963:452) that, “Rarely has so much been written by so many about so few” would appear to be appropriate here.3 However, it is believed that the major written sources of information were consulted in the survey. The first half of the literature survey draws on an array of writings to provide a historical overview of the whaling tradition. It includes selected references depicting the pre-contact bowhead whale hunt and relating the major developments affecting the hunt up to the present. The section concludes with a compilation of publications describing the current socio-political context of subsistence whaling in Alaska. The historical overview is written in the past tense for stylistic and editorial reasons. Consequently, it may obscure significant aspects of historical subsistence whaling that have continued up to the present. To remedy this situation the second half of the review focuses on literature describing the contemporary significance of whaling for the communities of interest. The literature selected examines the importance of the bowhead whale hunt for the formation and maintenance of Iñupiaq and St. Lawrence Islander cultural identities. 1 St. Lawrence Islanders speak Central Siberian or Chaplinski Yup’ik along with their Russian relations located on the Chukchi peninsula. Recently, they have begun to refer to their language as St. Lawrence Island Yup’ik, a reflection of their pride in local identity (Jolles 1991). 2 The words “Iñupiat” and “Iñupiaq” will be found throughout the document. “Iñupiaq” is used as a singular noun, referring to an individual person, or it can be used as an adjective to describe a characteristic such as “Iñupiaq culture.” “Iñupiat” is a plural noun and refers to the people collectively. 3 Hughes was commenting on the extensive anthropological literature on “Eskimo society” in general. He noted in 1963 that comparatively little had been written about Alaska Native coastal communities per se. The ensuing years have seen the completion of a large number of Alaska Native studies, but the ethnographic coverage has not been even. For example, in comparison to the Iñupiat, relatively little has been written about St. Lawrence Islanders. OCS Activities and Bowhead Whaling in the Beaufort Sea Page A-1 A.2 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Pre-Contact Whaling Iñupiat knowledgeable in their oral history say the bowhead hunt reaches back many thousands of years, deep into time immemorial (Hess 1999). Archaeologists have variously suggested that whale hunting first originated among Old Whaling, Choris, Birnirk, Punuk, or Western Thule cultures (NSF 2000a). While whale bones have been found associated with all of these cultures, there is considerable disagreement among researchers as to when and where whaling originated, that is, when whale remains at archaeological sites no longer represent scavenging of naturally beached whales for meat or raw materials but represent active hunting instead. It appears that harpoon and float whaling began in the western Arctic (probably among the Siberian Yup’ik) and spread eastward to other parts of the Arctic over the past two millennia (NSF 2000a). The archaeological record also suggests that after c. A.D. 800-1200, whaling became an increasingly central focus of subsistence for the peoples of both the Bering Sea region and north Alaska (Bandi 1995; IWC 1982). This development probably arose from a combination of factors, including a diffusion of technological advances in sea hunting equipment, ice patterns that forced the whales close to shore, control by a captain over his crew, cooperation between crews, and most important, a sufficiently large population to allow several crews to hunt together (IWC 1982). Unlike the Inuit to the east, whalers of the western Arctic developed permanent communities at strategic points where the whale migration passed close to land (NSF 2000b). 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. The food supply and material culture of these communities depended on the bowhead (Lee 1998). Nearly all parts of the whale were used. Frozen in underground cellars for future use, its meat, blubber, and intestines furnished half a winter’s food supply. Blubber was also burned for fuel, and the baleen provided structural materials for the semi-subterranean sod houses of the region. Because it did not collect frost, the tough, fibrous baleen figured prominently in fishing and hunting technology. It was bent into buckets, ice scoops, bows, and sled runners; shredded for fish line and lashings; shaved for boot insulation; and knotted into nets. In addition to whaling, the seasonal round of subsistence activities in the whaling communities typically included winter ice hunting for seal, spring or summer ugruk (bearded seal) and walrus hunting, and fall sojourns inland to hunt caribou (Nelson 1982; Rainey 1947). Another important aspect of the economies of these villages was the extensive trade networks that interlinked the coastal villages with one another and with nomadic hunters in the interior of Alaska or Siberia (Hughes 1984; Sheehan 1995). In the trade between coastal villages and inland groups, sea mammal oil was exchanged for caribou products. Trade among coastal villages consisted of unevenly distributed resources such as walrus and ugruk. The technology used for whaling was relatively simple, but the gear was effective enough for the whaling villages to take perhaps a total of one hundred whales a year (Bockstoce 1986). Both the Iñupiat and St. Lawrence Islanders hunted whales using open, flat-bottom boats made of a frame Page A-2 OCS Activities and Bowhead Whaling in the Beaufort Sea of driftwood lashed together with sinew and covered with ugruk or walrus hides (Hughes 1984; Murdoch 1892; Rainey 1947; Spencer 1959). The