This is the ninth post in the Historicizing Adaptation blog series, introduced here by series editor Shannon Stunden Bower.
On a cool and unusually crisp day in August 1977, Harry Brower, Sr., sat solemnly at his desk in Utqiagvik, Alaska, deliberating the dubious future of the bowhead whale hunt. Since approximately 800 A.D., populations of Iñupiat people residing in what now constitutes the North Slope Borough (NSB) had utilized toggle-head harpoons and seal skin floats to harvest bowhead whales. While the weapons used by whalers evolved over time, the hundred-ton bowhead bodies continued to serve as a critical source of food for Iñupiat communities due to their rich fat reserves and substantial sizes. Brower also knew the bowhead whale hunt served as a crucial source of cultural continuity for the Iñupiat because of its communal nature. Entire communities contributed to whale processing procedures while snacking on maktak – a traditional delicacy consisting of raw whale skin and blubber – before dividing and distributing the meat. But Brower also realized that the hunt was at risk.
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Three months earlier, the International Whaling Commission (IWC) implemented unprecedented regulatory reform. After four days of deliberation during an annual meeting that took place from June 21-24, the IWC banned bowhead whaling among Indigenous peoples, including the Iñupiat in the NSB. The IWC’s decision was based on observational data. Relying on sightings of bowhead whales that scientists obtained in 1976 from aerial surveys and an ice-based census station located eight miles from Utqiagvik, the IWC’s Scientific Committee estimated that there were between 1,000 and 1,600 bowhead whales remaining in the Chukchi, Bering and Beaufort Seas. Seeing the same scientists suggested that there were more than 11,700 bowhead whales before commercial whaling began in the area in 1848, such figures raised concerns regarding the stability of the bowhead whale stock and justified the drastic move to ban whaling.
Data pertaining to the number of bowhead whales harvested and struck by Iñupiat whalers also seemed to suggest that their subsistence hunt threatened the existence of the species. The financial compensation associated with the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (1971), combined with the subsequent rise in regional oil revenues, had accelerated the advance of capitalism into Indigenous communities. In the face of such change, the intensity of Iñupiat whaling increased; while hunters retained roughly 12 bowhead whales per annum between 1910 and 1969, their average annual take rose to approximately 32 whales between 1970 and 1977. While illustrating that bowhead became increasingly important for the Iñupiat during this period because many people were unable to afford the conveniences associated with the burgeoning cash economy, these figures also implied that Iñupiat hunters were partially responsible for the decline of the bowhead whale. Although commercial whaling drove population declines, the IWC’s decision to ban bowhead whaling reflected the multiple factors at play. Among the Iñupiat, the ban brought widespread food shortages, and extreme levels of stress plagued people who struggled to feed their families.
Iñupiat leaders like Brower were troubled by the IWC’s decision and disputed the data on which it was based. The traditional knowledge that whalers gained over generations of direct observations suggested that the bowhead population was far larger than scientists believed. Brower succinctly summarized the problem: “There are a lot of bowhead whales out there that the scientists are not counting. Many are out far beyond [or under] the ice and therefore are not seen when they pass by Barrow [Utqiagvik].”1 But scientists rejected such claims, insisting Iñupiat whalers lacked the scientific knowledge needed to support their assertions.
Brower and other Iñupiat whaling captains knew they would need to adapt their resistance tactics and respond directly to the claims of scientists. Together with the Iñupiat and Yupik captains of eleven neighbouring whaling villages, Brower thus formed the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission (AEWC) on September 1, 1977.2 In so doing, the whalers created a not-for-profit organization to protect Iñupiat communities by challenging the policies imposed by the IWC. But reforming the regulations still required scientific proof. At Brower’s insistence, the AEWC thus formed its own Science Advisory Committee in 1980, which allowed Iñupiat actors to advance their own research priorities, rather than relying on scientists affiliated with government agencies. Subsequent studies that utilized acoustic monitoring ultimately confirmed that bowhead whales were passing out of sight of the census stations utilized by scientists, and provided correction factors to account for these uncounted whales. As a result of such efforts, the AEWC was formally incorporated in March 1981, and immediately entered into a Cooperative Agreement with the United States Department of Commerce and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which established that the AEWC was responsible for overseeing the local subsistence bowhead whale hunt.
The formation of the AEWC in 1977 represented one of the first times Iñupiat actors in Alaska collaboratively organized themselves to protect their cultural and spiritual identity, socio-economic interests, and traditional relationships to the ocean and its animals through institutional means, and its history underscores the importance of including Indigenous sources of knowledge in policy processes. Fortunately, the success of the AEWC led to the establishment of other user-based resource management regimes, such as the Eskimo Walrus Commission in 1978, which have worked to decolonize relations of power and make space in local, national, and international management regimes for observational, experiential, and ecological knowledge gained by Indigenous Peoples in Alaska through close interactions with Arctic ecosystems.
Crucially, revisiting the creation and historical evolution of the AEWC also illuminates how the Iñupiat adapted their activism strategies in response to historically-rooted asymmetries in power and knowledge production between Iñupiat actors, on the one hand, and scientists and policymakers affiliated with the IWC, on the other. Rather than rejecting the latter’s regulations or the science underpinning them, the Iñupiat adapted their resistance tactics and collaborated with one another to establish an institutional coalition and a scientific advisory committee to generate their own data and contest state-sponsored science. By building institutional capacity and inserting their perspectives into policy-making processes from which they had previously been excluded, the Iñupiat of Alaska’s NSB affirmed their political autonomy and directly challenged stereotypical narratives prevailing among policymakers in the United States, which framed the whale hunting practices and knowledge sources of the Iñupiat as ecologically threatening and epistemologically inferior.
This act of contestation thus represented a form of political resistance that helped destabilize the monopoly that technocratic scientists – and their academic knowledge systems – have historically maintained over environmental governance. Historicizing these processes reveals how environmental regulations – and the science on which they are based – can function as instruments of power that perpetuate existing hierarchies of knowledge, authority, and access to resources by privileging certain forms of expertise and discrediting those of marginalized groups of people like the Iñupiat, which is crucial to recognize considering environmental regulations and science are frequently framed as neutral, objective, or value-laden. Importantly, historicizing the process by which Iñupiat actors adapted their resistance tactics in response to the IWC’s ban on hunting bowhead whales also highlights how they successfully asserted sovereignty over their traditional ways of life and the ecological resources on which their social, cultural, and spiritual customs depend.
Further Readings
Anders, Gary C. “Implications of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.” Journal of American Indian Education 25, no. 3 (1986): 12-21.
Brewster, Karen. The Whales, They Give Themselves. Conversations with Harry Brower, Sr. Fair Banks: University of Alaska Press, 2004.
Demuth, Bathsheba. The Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. New York: W.W Norton & Company, 2020.
Huntington, Henry P. “The Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission and Other Cooperative Marine Mammal Management Organizations in Northern Alaska.” Polar Record 28, no. 165 (1992): 119-126.
Marquette, W.M. The 1976 Catch of Bowhead Whales (Balaena Mysticetus) By Alaskan Eskimos, With A Review of the Fishery, 1973-1976 and a Biological Summary of the Species. Seattle: Department of Commerce, 1977.
Wohlforth, Charles. The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change. Berkeley: North Point Press, 2005.
Albert, Thomas F. “The Influence of Harry Brower, Sr., an Inupiaq Eskimo Hunter, on the Bowhead Whale Research Program Conducted at the UIC-NARL Facility by the North Slope Borough.” In Fifty More Years Below Zero: Tributes: Tributes and Meditations for the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory, edited by David W. Norton, 265-278. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2001.
Feature image: Bowhead whales migration patterns are primarily dictated by the sea ice, as they travel – either alone or in small groups – by following the ice as it expands and recedes. They have hard and bony heads that enable them break through the ice to breath if they need to dive beneath it to protect themselves from killer whales, which are unable to dive under the ice due to their large dorsal fins. As a result of the commercial whale hunt, however, they have become wary of humans, and increasing migrate far from the coast. CC BY-NC 2.0.
Notes
1 Albert, Thomas F., “The Influence of Harry Brower, Sr., an Iñupiaq Hunter, on the Bowhead Whale Research Program Conducted at the UIC-NARL Facility by the North Slope Borough,” in Fifty More Years Below Zero: Tributes and Meditations for the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory, ed. David W. Norton (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2001), 268.
2 Although the term “Eskimo” has been used historically by Iñupiat actors, it is important to recognize that this word is a derogatory and offensive exonym that is all-too-often used as a blanket-term by researchers, writers, and the general public to describe the Inuit throughout their homelands in Inuit Nunangat and the Arctic regions of Greenland and Canada, as well as the Iñupiat and the Yupik of Alaska and Russia. Even though the term is still included in the name of the institution with which this article is concerned – that is, the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission (AEWC) – the acronym of this institution or the phrase “the Commission” will instead be used throughout this article.
Campbell Clarke