Utoo Radio with Other News Sources, June 9, 2024 - Utqiagvik, Alaska, is known for its annual whaling festival, Nalukataq, where the town enjoys a feast of whale meat and stew.
However, last summer's festival saw the absence of whale kidneys, which were found in wildlife veterinarian Raphaela Stimmelmayr's laboratory. The worms, which are not known to be parasites, are being studied to determine their origins and potential threats to the health of whales and humans.
The North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management is the community's first line of defence, working with ecologists, biologists, and hydrologists under the leadership of an Iñupiat director, Taqulik Hepa. The department also employs a robust team of Iñupiat subsistence hunters who are revered in the community for their ecological knowledge.
The relationship between Indigenous knowledge and Western research is not new in the North Slope, as the people of Utqiagvik have worked at this intersection for nearly half a century.
The Prudhoe Bay oil strike of 1968 turned Alaska into a petroleum state, with the North Slope Borough at its epicentre. The Iñupiat emerged from negotiations with immense mineral wealth in 1973, and the newly-formed Ukpeaġvik Iñupiat Corporation became a powerful player in the oil industry.
In 1977, the International Whaling Commission removed an exemption that had previously allowed the Indigenous bowhead whale hunt, causing shockwaves throughout the Northern Slope. The news was felt by everyone, including the town's residents, who felt the loss of an essential food source and cultural practice dating back thousands of years.
The 1977 scientific committee report estimated that the current bowhead population in the region was only 6 to 10% of pre-commercial whaling levels. However, Iñupiat leaders saw a different reality, encountering more healthy bowheads than ever.
The Iñupiat community saw this as a growing need for whale meat, while the IWC saw it as an Indigenous community overhunting a vulnerable species to extinction. The Iñupiat formed the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission to monitor bowheads and establish strict subsistence hunting quotas.
The monitoring and management program was handed over to the North Slope Borough’s newly formed Department of Wildlife Management, which hired a mix of community leaders, subsistence hunters, and scientists. The department’s approach proved enduring and is still unique. Today, the bowhead whale hunt is now protected, but the Iñupiat face another existential threat: climate change.
Global warming in the Arctic, occurring almost four times faster than the global average, has presented new research questions, such as erosion, melting permafrost, and environmental changes. One of the biggest challenges for whalers is the changing nature of sea ice, which has made it difficult for them to find smooth ice to pull up whales on.
Since 2007, researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks have worked with local scientists and Iñupiat whalers to create annual maps of the trails made through the sea ice.
Climate change research in the Arctic has intensified, with scientists flocking to the North Slope every summer. This has benefited the town by helping the community plan and build local infrastructure and bringing money into the economy. However, a balance must be struck between local needs and important research questions. One solution may lie in a critical assessment of the underlying motivations for science, as it must benefit the resource.
Research that does this well tends to involve Iñupiat community members from start to finish, and the work is not pure Western science or an expansion of Indigenous knowledge divorced from the scientific method. Traditional ecological knowledge is an inherent knowledge system that has theory behind it and goes through the same motions as Western inquiry.
As the Arctic continues to warm, the Iñupiat will continue to hunt, forage, travel, and live in one of the northernmost ecosystems of the world. They have a plan to care for the animals, sustain them, and develop new practices that function in a new climate reality. The Iñupiat have realized that it pays to have good scientists on their team and their payroll and have provided them with access to a wealth of Indigenous ecological knowledge.
