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June 17, THE NATION
U.S.-Japan Whale Feud Playing Out in Alaska
http://www.latimes.com/news/la-000042543jun17.story
Treaty: Nations have fought over quotas. A panel's ban threatens Eskimos' livelihoods.
By KIM MURPHY, TIMES STAFF WRITER

BARROW, Alaska -- It is the season of the midnight sun and still it's snowing. The Arctic Ocean looms up against the shore in chunks of jagged ice, the thermometer has barely reached 26 degrees by noon and the bloody hunks of whale meat George Ahmaogak has just hauled into town have to be thawed before his crew can start slicing into them.

This is the time of year -- on the lip between the treacherous Arctic winter and the glorious northern summer -- when the bowhead whales push their bulbous heads through the first narrow wedge that opens between the polar ice and the shore ice, creating an eerie symphony of hisses and puffs out in the frozen sea.

Ahmaogak and the other whaling captains climb into their small sealskin umiaqs and paddle out into the ice channels, hoping to plunge their harpoons into the tough skin at the back of the bowhead's brain. The whales thrash and die in the cold sea. Yards and porches all over Barrow fill up with towering piles of meat and bones. It has been more than a thousand years since the bowhead whale first fed an Eskimo along this stretch of Arctic coast. Such history made this community one of the few in the world legally able to skirt the 16-year-old international moratorium on whaling.

But that right was stripped away last month by the International Whaling Commission. In a political maneuver orchestrated by Japan -- which wants its own exemption for aboriginal whaling -- the commission for the first time rejected a quota for Alaskan and Russian Eskimos. The decision threatens the livelihood of thousands of Inupiat residents along Alaska's northern coast, and it sets the stage for a tough diplomatic contest between the U.S. and Japan.

Alaskan whalers have vowed to defy the ban if necessary -- a move that could put the U.S. out of compliance with the international whaling treaty it has worked for years to uphold around the world.

"This is what's kept these Eskimos alive for a thousand years -- all that blubber," said Ahmaogak, surveying the piles of meat spread across his yard as a dozen men and women methodically sliced, stacked, packaged and boxed it for storage in the permafrost underground. "You ask the elders, and they'd rather die than go without the whale. Without the whale, I don't think the Eskimo will survive."

While Native Americans in Washington state have battled conservationists and engaged in high-profile court fights over their recent attempts to hunt gray whales in the Pacific, Alaska's Eskimos for years have quietly hunted the bowhead.

The international community for the most part has accepted the principle that aboriginal peoples in places such as Alaska, Siberia, Greenland and the Caribbean are entitled to harvest a small number of whales each year for subsistence purposes, carrying on ancient cultural traditions that could be lost without the seasonal hunts.

In the Alaskan Arctic, the bowhead whale -- from steaks to organ stews to mikigaq (a gooey, fermented soup of whale skin and tongue considered to be a delicacy) -- makes up well over half of many families' diets in a region with few cheap alternatives. With all outside supplies brought in by barge or plane, beef rib steaks cost $7.68 a pound.

"To understand what subsistence is, you have to come up here when it's 70 below and see what it takes to survive in this stuff," said Ahmaogak, who is mayor of the North Slope borough here.