When Oliver, fifty-five, had been a boy, he had heard his elders tell of trying to get a whale to give itself to you so your village could eat, which meant survival. Not getting one could mean starvation. Oliver remembers, too, asking his elders often if they wanted coffee or tea because the only time their tent or home was warm was when someone was cooking. Today, there is no fear of literal starvation, but there is concern for the starvation of the Eskimo spirit. They don’t want their culture to be lost. Being around them made me realize how little of my own culture I had any idea of, much less practiced.
It was April 26, 2000, but I wasn’t out at their camp long before day and night and date and year no longer mattered. Time doesn’t matter on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. What matters is the condition of the ice. The ice that had stretched all the way to the North Pole was now breaking apart, making openings for the bowhead whales to come through on their annual migration north and east to the Beaufort Sea. The whale, and to a lesser degree the many sea mammals that thrive here, are the main reason these Inupiat people have thrived. When most of Europe was still a bunch of heathen tribes, a bold whaler pointed out to me, the Inupiat people waited on the edge of the land-fast ice for the whale to come to them.
Bowhead whales are the only large whales living only in the Arctic. They have massive heads with a thick bone structure that they can use to break through a foot of ice. That is the reason they can survive in this land of ice. As creatures that must breathe oxygen to live, it enables them to survive in a world where sea ice is dominant. Their heads are about 40 percent of their total body length; they have up to twenty-eight inches of blubber to keep them alive in this chilly climate. A forty-foot-long bowhead weighs one ton per foot—that is eighty thousand pounds of whale. Today, as it always has been, when a whaling crew kills a whale, the people will use almost all of these eighty thousand pounds. Today these people live in wood-frame houses; they used to use the bones to support their sod homes. Oliver chains one of his dogs to a whale rib mounted in the ground by his house. A relatively few years ago, what the humans didn’t use was eaten by their dogs, who were an important part of their cultural identity. Snow machines have taken over for the dog teams of old.
Unlike the humpback’s, this whale’s skin is smooth like a black skipping stone. The black skin of the whale has always been many people’s favorite part. Called muktuk, it is rich in vitamin C. The men of the crew who were hosting me at their whaling camp told me it tasted like coconut. I would try muktuk, I was told, if they got a whale while I was here. The blubber was used for fuel and food. The whale’s internal organs were prized. The heart was eaten; it could be the size of a big man and weigh two hundred pounds. Portions of the intestines were used as well, the kidneys and liver too. The membranes from the whale’s liver were used to cover the Eskimo drum frame to give them a pulsing, relentless beat for their dancing.
The killing of a forty-foot bowhead that weighs eighty thousand pounds would be a cause to thank the highest spirit. If there were five hundred people in the village, which would be a large number, and forty thousand pounds of the whale was usable, that would be eighty pounds of food per person. One thing the people did have a few thousand years before everyone in southern climes was a way to freeze their catch year-round. They just dug a room out in the permafrost twelve feet down and had their year-round walk-in freezer.
If I had not been accepted and trusted by Alaska’s Native leadership at the beginning of my trip, I would never have gotten this opportunity. To come out here to the ice meant I would be living for a time with this crew, sleeping on the floor of the tent they all shared, eating their food at the end of the land-fast ice. Land-fast ice is still connected to land; sometimes it too breaks away from the mainland and floats away. The crews travel by snow machine, hauling the sealskin whaling boats that they use to glide silently in the water toward the dark streaks in the sky. Every piece of ice and the ground is silver and white and is reflected as white in the clouds in the sky. But the leads that the whales travel through are dark, almost black, like the cold, deep sea, and the darkness is reflected in the sky. It shows up in the sky for many miles, and the whalers follow the dark streaks in the clouds to choose the best spots to locate their campsites.
The edge of the ice is not stationary. The currents flowing in the ocean can be intense, and the wind can blow the massive, two-to-three-feet-thick sea-ice chunks and building-size icebergs wherever it wants. Sometimes the whalers must vacate their campsites as rapidly as humanly possible, take down their tent and observation posts. Free-floating icebergs or, worse, village-size pieces of ice weighing millions of tons can slam into the shore-fast ice. The collision of these potent powers creates wreckage and death if humans are in the way. It can also cause the shore-fast ice to break off, and suddenly you’re floating toward Russia. Many Inupiat people over the years, while seal hunting or, in lesser numbers, whaling, have been standing on the ice when it broke away; no one ever sees them again. Today the North Slope Borough has one of the most elite rescue squads in North America. The flatness and the white and the storms and the stubborn independence of the people make for lots of rescue situations.
The bowhead whales that the whaling crews seek seem plentiful, though no one knows how many there are because there are no exact ways to count them. If the lead is too wide, they are almost impossible to harpoon by hand out in the ocean. The narrow leads force them to come up to breathe in a smaller space, sometimes no wider than a creek. Whitlom Adams, a member of a crew who’s in his early eighties and who has the most peculiar, contagious laugh, told me about a whale his crew got in 1955, when he was a young man. When they butchered it, they found a carved ivory and jade harpoon point embedded in the blubber. The Eskimo whalers had originally used ivory, jade, and slate as harpoon points. The coastal Eskimos had traded with the interior Eskimos for caribou hides and jade from a nearby mountain of jade. But the Eskimo people had stopped using jade and slate in the 1850s, after the Yankee whalers from the eastern United States had arrived in 1848 and introduced them to metal points.
So that meant the jade harpoon point had been broken off in Whitlom’s bowhead whale over one hundred years ago. No one knows exactly how long a bowhead whale lives, but they live much longer since the Yankee whalers left Alaska in about 1915. The Yankee whalers had nearly eradicated them, killing more than nineteen thousand between 1848 and 1915. It has been estimated that about twenty thousand whales lived in the area when the whalers arrived.
In addition to the metal harpoon points, they left behind descendants as well. Some of the whaling captains from Massachusetts and other ports on the East Coast started families in Alaska. Oliver Leavitt, the whaling captain who had invited me, was a product of one of these families, begun by a famous Jewish-American whaling captain from Massachusetts named George Leavitt.
This white world is not truly white. The ice has edges of pale blue and clear green and icy silver. It’s not flat but has been bent and broken from the impact of drifting ice from the sea. As difficult as it is to make sense of this, I am on a snow machine heading toward the seawater that holds the most numerous concentration of sea life on earth. In the Arctic, green plants are the foundation of life. At first there looks to be no green anywhere—how could there be in the frozen-over ocean? But in the sea, tiny plants, phytoplankton, are food for krill, tiny shrimplike creatures eaten by whales, squid, and fish. The squid and fish and other crustaceans are in turn eaten by the sea mammals, seals, walrus, belugas. These oceans on top of Alaska, spreading out from Barrow, provide the nutrients to sustain all this life, so it is possible for the Eskimos to have existed here for so long.
I seriously considered asking my “drivers” to slow down. They were sitting on a cushioned seat, and my cushion, although larger than theirs, didn’t have enough padding. My internal organs felt as if they were being shaken into a much smaller cavity. It might only have been a couple miles down the trail through ice and pressure ridges, over the deep
cracks, around where violent movements had pushed ice mounds into blockades of rubble. A few fresh inches of snow had accumulated on the snow machine trail. Finally the guys slowed down; ahead was a dark gray line up in the clouds. It was the open water reflecting up in the sky. I could see a large canvas tent; some snow machines were parked near it, a few attached to freight sleds. Some square blocks of ice had been cut out by a crew member and placed at the dark water’s edge.
My drivers took my bags out of the sled, I climbed out, and they took off. This world was not a place for young people; they were excited just to go near the camps, hoping someday they would be chosen to be members of a crew, hoping someday they would be strong enough to throw the harpoon. In earlier days the elders had drawn the silhouette of a whale in the snow to teach the young men where to aim the harpoon. At least forty crews were up and down the edge of this unstable land-fast ice for several miles north and south of Barrow. Everyone was totally focused, reverent, hoping that this spring a bowhead whale would give itself to their crew.
TO WAIT
The dominant color where I live is green, green in every shade. Other colors, such as the brown of the tree trunk, are minor players. Here there is no green, no color at all but the pale colors of the ice, and the whalers wear white covers over their parkas to camouflage themselves from the whales’ eyes.
The crew had set up a wooden seat on the ice like a long bench with a back. Canvas tarp had been laid over it to block the wind that could rob even these Eskimo men of body heat and—fur side up—caribou skins for the crew to sit on. From here the whalers watched for approaching whales. They were migrating through here from the southwest, so the bench faced south. Someone sat on this bench at all times, watching and listening and being still, quiet, even silent.
Oliver Leavitt awaits the bowhead whales near Barrow. PHOTO BY PETER JENKINS
A couple of silver thermos bottles were lying on the hides. When thermos bottles first came to the Arctic, they were cherished; the people built fur-lined bags to protect them. But the most important man-made item on the ice was their boat, a twenty-two-foot boat, all wood and painted white on the outside, light blue inside. Almost every crew had a similar boat, but with just a wooden frame and a sealskin covering. The boats are pointed and narrow and perched on the edge of the ice; they must be ready for launch by the crew at any second. For the crews to get a whale, seconds and fractions of a second matter.
Oliver greeted me coolly. He was sitting on the caribou skins, his wide, tan face and black hair standing out from the white of his parka and everything else. Friends had told me, and by now I understood, not to expect much talking at first with Native Alaskans. There would be more silence than words. For my first day on the ice, I sat by Oliver on the caribou skins and mostly just observed and listened.
I was startled by the beauty of their world, the beauty of the perfectly clear ice, ocean, and sky. It was different from anyplace else in Alaska I’d been so far. There were no mountains, no trees. There was no green or vegetation at all now. Practically all of the Arctic is a frigid desert. The reason so much water soaks the top of this land after snow and ice melts is because of the permafrost. This forever-frozen ground is sixteen hundred feet deep in places. All rain and snowmelt stay close to the surface. So flying over the land around Barrow, you see what appears to be an endless collection of lakes, ponds, creeks, and rivers.
My first day with the Leavitt crew we saw thirty to forty whales, at least. And those were just the ones that happened to breathe as they came by. The lead at first was maybe a half mile wide. On the other side of it were floating slabs of two-and-a-half-foot-thick sea ice that were once connected to the land-fast ice we camped on. In the midst of the lead was a shimmering, frozen margarita blend of newly forming ice and some aqua blue icebergs. They seemed to move faster than the slab ice; they probably caught the wind with their bodies. It was almost supernatural, watching the aqua blue icebergs, tall and jagged, bright and brilliant, moving against the backdrop of the dark gray sky and the ice topped with a fresh coat of powdery snow. All the icebergs and slabs of ice were moving southwest, the opposite direction of the bowhead whales. Winter was over, and if the whaling crews could fill their small quota of whales allotted them by the International Whaling Commission, they could provide many tons of the healthiest of food to their people.
I overheard Oliver talking to his brother-in-law, Hubert Hopson, who, although he was in his late forties, still looked strong enough to take on a polar bear with a spear. He was known as a great hunter, still a designation of honor, not long ago the highest honor that could be paid to an Inupiat. He was complaining that the TV in his house always seemed to be on, it was like a too loud “member of the family.” Oliver said he could sit here and look out at the moving ice and ever-changing lead, looking and listening for the whale, and be perfectly satisfied. His regular job took him to Portland, Houston, Anchorage, and Washington, D.C. He said he would rather be here at the edge of the land-fast ice than anywhere else in the world. Oliver’s brother-in-law, who reminded me of a soft-spoken Mike Ditka, nodded. At least they were speaking English. If I had not been here, they would have been speaking their language, which they did at times even with me sitting there. When I half-jokingly said I had no idea what they were talking about, Oliver said, “Too bad,” half-jokingly.
My rear end was incredibly warm, as if some kind of heater were in the caribou skins. Oliver saw me putting my bare hand on the caribou fur and lifting it off, cooling it, and putting it back on it. He told me caribou fur, which had insulating air in each hair follicle, keeps your body heat from leaving, keeps the people alive. Not long ago, their coldest-weather clothes had winter caribou hide, fur in, as the lining. He said these hides here were old and nowhere near as insulative as they used to be.
The lead is closing and it’s time to retreat near Barrow. PHOTO BY PETER JENKINS
I noticed him looking intently toward the dark strip of open ocean before us. Just then there was an exhale, and the black silhouette of about a third of a bowhead whale came out of the new white ice forming beyond the open water. It was over a half mile from us. Oliver said that before they’d launch the boat, the whale had to be almost right next to us. Oliver had stopped looking at the whale; his experienced hunter’s eye knew instantly that it was too far away. He could see the lead shrinking, which meant the wind and/or the current was bringing the free-moving ice closer to us. Now the migrating whales would have to come up right next to us.
Getting ready, Oliver spoke to his fellow crew members even softer than he did before. Several stood near the boat. About half the crew appeared to be in their late twenties or early thirties. Oliver’s son, Billy-Jens, a tall and powerful young man, was the harpooner. There are so many Billys in Barrow, Oliver told me, that they call him by his full name. Billy stood ready.
The harpoon was in the bow of the tiny whaling boat, which looked like a rowboat. They would propel it with oars. Another harpoon, attached to 250 to 300 feet of manila rope and a bright pink rubber float, rested up against a block of ice nearby. Sometimes a whale would come so close to the edge of the ice, they could harpoon it without getting into the boat. More often than not though, the whalers spooked the whale: it saw them or heard them and dove. In fact, the sealskin from the bearded seal used as the skin of most boats but Oliver’s was intended as camouflage.
Oliver had a forceful presence, was a stable leader with a rooted power. He also seemed to have some sort of psychic quality, an ability that certainly the best leaders must possess to read people and their intentions. I know I don’t look anything like John Denver, who was a vocal opponent of commercial whaling in the 1980s, but I was white. I was not here to try to change what they do, just to observe. But people from the Outside have continuously and aggressively attempted to aggressively alter the Eskimo world, which had adapted in so many ways over many generations. It was not the Inupiat people who had senselessly destroyed the bowhead whale just to get the
baleen (a substance found in the jaws of whales and used for corsets and hairpieces) and the blubber to make oil, it was the Yankee whalers. At one time, Oliver said, baleen, which the Eskimos didn’t even use, was one of the most valuable things in the world per pound.
They had been whaling forever, and the whales always returned. They considered the whale their brother; they used the whale efficiently and had therefore been able to survive with relative security. Then after the bowheads had nearly been wiped out in other cold places, such as around Greenland and Norway, the Yankee whalers came to the Arctic. Then Russians came and forcibly claimed the land; though they never got to Barrow, they sold the whole place—which they didn’t own—to the United States. Then more recently, other Outsiders who claimed to love the whale and its song, who had probably never even seen a bowhead, wrote songs about whales, established organizations, and through the manipulation of world politics, got their hunt stopped in 1977. For decades, Oliver and his people have fought for the right to do something that is so foundational to their existence as to be a matter of life and death. They are keenly intelligent and practical people; they were some of the first Alaskan Natives to realize the need for a powerful posse of today’s allowed warriors—lawyers. The longer I was with the crew, the more I could understand why they could be suspicious of me every time they saw me sitting there.
Now the lead in front of us was about twenty-five feet wide at its most narrow. The current must have strengthened because the ice was moving south faster. Whales were coming up to breathe in the silvery haze of new ice, broken-off slabs of flat sea ice, and icebergs. Just the black, irregular ridges of their backs rose out of the water. When they exhaled, a silver plume rose up. Oliver clapped his hands, which is supposed to attract seals, and it worked—a small seal poked its head out of the water, its eyes large.