THIRD OF THREE-PART SERIES:
When eight hunters from the village of Point Hope -- all of them under the age of 31 -- were charged in connection with the wanton waste of caribou this year, many elders in the community felt the weight of the blame. For countless centuries, it has been the responsibility of the older generation to pass on to the younger the respect for animals that defines life here on the edge of the Chukchi Sea. Grandfather to father, father to son, this is the way the Inupiat culture has survived in the Arctic for thousands of years. In a perfect world, caring and attentive instruction would, the elders felt, prevent misdeeds in any hunt on the nearby tundra.
Elders also felt blamed in accusations by Alaska State Troopers that they had stonewalled the search for the outlaw hunters. Comments about the community's uncooperativeness first appeared in an Alaska Department of Safety press release in July 2008, and immediately inflamed an already deteriorating relationship between troopers and the people of Point Hope. Leaders for the Native Village of Point Hope called the remarks "appalling." Of all of the dimensions to the case, it was the gloom cast on the elders they found the most offensive. Disrespecting the elders -- the living, breathing link to Point Hope's ancient past -- disrespects the very culture that they are, through birth and tradition, responsible for preserving.
Seventy-five-year-old Joe Towkshea, a widower and a musician, said his heart hurt when he was told of the accusations hunters from among his own people could have killed and abandoned more than a dozen caribou in the nearby Lisburne Hills. Towkshea still hunts, although not as much as he used to. He had, however, just returned from a September caribou hunt when he agreed to speak with a reporter over coffee inside his tidy home on the southwest side of Point Hope.
He lost his wife years ago, but still calls out to her. Clutching an electric guitar, he sings home-spun ballads of her love and his loss, of heaven and of God.
He knows the accused hunters well enough to call them "buddies." Well enough, he adds, to ask them if what prosecutors say is true. All of them, he says, feel badly about the charges, but maintain they are innocent. Towkshea believes them.
Point Hope hunters, he said, are taught to kill only what they can use and eat, nothing more. Wasted meat is lost food and people just don't do that. He agrees bad meat should never be brought into the home for human consumption. But he does think it should be fed to dogs, or brought back to the village and thrown away.
Still, he can understand circumstances that would lead someone to kill a less-than-ideal caribou. He believes sick or wounded animals should be shot to end their suffering -- something he himself did this past summer when a wounded caribou wandered into his camp.
More than anything, though, he believes it is unfair for the state to tar an entire community with blame for a hunt gone bad. Pointing at his chest, he explains that, in blaming "Point Hope" hunters for the massive kill, he personally felt the state was blaming him. He thinks that's wrong, which makes his ideas for bringing the controversy to an end somewhat surprising.
Towkshea wonders if a community-wide collection to raise money to pay a fine would bring everything to an end. If the village is indeed at fault en masse, let's pay, get it over with and move on, he said. Even if the community is not at fault, he still thinks it's a plausible solution. What he proposes, in effect, is a payoff: a simple way for everyone to get this case behind them and move on.
Tending to the land and the legacy
Elders Elijah and Doris Attungana echo Towkshea's sense of personal affront at what has happened. Elijah, the local Episcopal priest, learned to hunt back when people ventured out from the villages on foot for long distances and dogs were the only transportation. The hunting ethics he learned date back to the days before the modern world arrived on the shores of the Chukchi.
He doesn't hunt anymore, but still makes trips to whale camp and inland to collect fresh river water. His wife prefers the taste to that of Point Hope's tap water, and likes to use river water to make tea.
On a quiet afternoon last month, he sat on his coach with a soap opera playing on the TV in the background, and explained, "we are subsistence people;" subsistence people who chose not to roam with the herds, but to make a permanent settlement and wait for the gifts of the land to come to them.
"The old people used to say, the sea and the land are our gardens," he said. "You planted yourself here. Now take care of it."
He points out his window to the Chukchi beach, the sea beyond, and the rolling mountains to the southwest. "We hear this from our elders: 'It's just like your garden, take care of it, the animals and the land,'" Elijah says.
To this day, he said, he tries to instill in young hunters the appreciation for this place handed down to him by his forefathers. He wants the next generation to know the land, its features and its names, so they feel comfortable in the country and know how to make their way home.
His wife, Doris, worries about the younger generation. There are drugs, alcohol and violence in the village now, and she appreciates the role law enforcement plays in trying to ensure safety and peace. In the case of the accused hunters, she says, if they intentionally wasted caribou, they should be punished. But if they just made mistakes, a criminal prosecution seems heavy-handed, Doris says.
Like many in the village, she questions whether the accused hunters' crimes are even a part of the so-called massacre wildlife troopers spent a good deal of time and money to solve. Are the Point Hope eight simply bycatch, she wonders? Are they caught up in a criminal prosecution for making isolated mistakes that were uncovered in the intense hunt for someone to blame?
Each of the eight hunters is accused of having a hand in unlawfully leaving one or more caribou wholly or partially behind when they came home from a hunt. But none are accused, specifically, with the large-scale "slaughter" that offended teacher Kurt Schmidt, troopers and -- after the state issued a press release and photos -- much of Alaska. As attorneys for the Point Hope eight point out, there is a big difference beween the isolated cases of a few hunters allegedly leaving some meat in the field and the large-scale waste troopers claim took place.
As legal defenses play out in court, however, there are disagreements in the village as to how to handle mistakes that were made on the hunt, if mistakes were made. Attungana believes intent matters. Others say that no matter the intent, the tribe should handle it on its own and commit to teaching the men how to be more responsible. Still others, like Enoch Tooyak, believe hunters who broke the law should face the law.
For Tooyak, hunting is a necessity, despite the fact that he has a job. The power plant employee says the high costs of fuel, electricty, clothes and groceries take such a big bite out of his income that his family needs the meat provided by the land to get by. Tooyak began hunting at age 10. Under the guidance of his father and grandfather, Tooyak shot his first caribou. He says the men patiently watched as he aimed and squeezed the trigger -- an exciting thing for a young boy. They celebrated his first kill.
Then the hard work began. He, not his father or his grandfather, had to butcher the animal and pack the meat back to the village. It was not easy. Tooyak remembers being taught how to hold the knife and where to cut. He remembers how the men in his family told him that if anything went wrong during future hunts -- anything -- that he was to come home and tell someone.
That's something he's taught his own son, Jeremy, who last summer did that very thing. Jeremy came across a friend, Koomalook Stone, who'd accidentally sliced into the stomach of a caribou while gutting it. Jeremy suggested Stone wash the caustic gastric fluids off the meat and butcher the animal. But Stone, he said, chose instead to leave the animal behind. When Enoch Tooyak learned of what happened, he encouraged his son to go to the authorities, which his son later did, according to court records.
Despite his son's coming forward, Enoch says the boys remain friends. Although his son is away at college now, he still encourages Stone to finish high school. And Stone, it's worth noting, also helped investigators. He agreed to ride with them by helicopter and take them to his hunting party's kill sites.
Meanwhile, Enoch Tooyak is also concerned about the hunting skills of people beyond his immediate family. He'll watch, sometimes for hours, as young hunters scramble across the land. When they need help butchering, or finding their way home, he'll step in. He's trying to do something about the mistakes he believes may have been made during the 2008 hunt. He's among a group of experienced hunters and elders holding city workshops for younger children and teens on the hunting basics, including how to spot a sick animal and how to handle meat.
| Former Point Hope Mayor Steve Oomittuk gives a tour of his aunt's sod house, which she lived in until 1975. |
Harvesting knowledge
"Shooting a sickly animal is a mistake," said former Mayor Steve Oomittuk. To better educate the young, the city has opened a youth center to help elders connect their rich history to its future memory keepers, the young. In addition to talking about proper hunting practices, they also hope to teach the traditional way of life, cultural pride and the need for cultural preservation. There are things in danger of being lost to the wave of technology sweeping over the village in the form of television, computers and mechanized transportation.
"We grew up in a different time," he said. "Sod houses; no TV. Dog teams; no vehicles. No drugs, no alcohol, living a traditional lifestyle."
Today's young hunters, he said, "are living in the fast lane."
In the decades since Oomittuk was a child, technology has come roaring into the village. High-powered rifles and increasingly sophisticated telescopic sights mean hunters no longer need to get so close to caribou before taking a shot. All-terrain vehicles make it easier to get into the Lisburne Hills to hunt and far easier to haul back game. In years past, hunters walked or traveled by dog team to the hunting grounds. They were away from home for days at a time. And the weapons they had at their disposal demanded they get close for the kill, allowing them to better assess an animal's health before deciding whether to shoot it.
Oomittuk speaks passionately of the bond hunters develop with the animals, and how the people of Point Hope center their way of life around their relationship to the animal world. The movements of the animals -- the whales, walruses and seals offshore, the caribou inland -- define their seasons and their culture. Dances, songs and stories honor the animals, which have long fed, clothed and sustained them. Even their homes were once made partially of whalebones, and whalebone graves escorted them into the afterlife.
The people of Point Hope are fighting to save this world.
"We want to preserve (our culture), and we want to let the younger generation know that they come from a rich heritage," Oomittuk said.
As the village works to get beyond the wounds left by last year's hunt, the waste investigation and subsequent charges have also effected change beyond the village.
In the aftermath of the hunt, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game for the region is looking at ways to better familiarize hunters with rules and regulations. Fish and Game biologist Jim Dau says because state law does not provide hunters any guidance about what to do when they harvest a diseased animal, his department is "currently discussing how to better inform people about what maladies do and do not constitute a threat to human health, and what to do when someone harvests a diseased animal."
The Alaska Board of Game will consider a proposal next month to redefine the legal definition of "edible" so that it no longer includes diseased meat.
As the case moves forward, defense attorneys are employing a wide variety of tactics. For some, plea deals appear to be in the works. Others are challenging the constitutionality of the controlling laws, as well as the prosecution's interpretation and application of those laws. And some are mounting "necessity" defenses, arguing that they left the meat behind as a matter of health and safety.
Searching for truth
We may never know how much waste really occurred during the caribou hunt in July 2008, or by whose hands it was committed. But for some people familiar with the investigation, there are certain truths: Egregious waste did take place on the tundra; troopers have a duty to investigate all crimes; for all the criticism of how the case was handled, Alaskans would have rightfully been outraged if troopers didn't look into what happened; subsistence hunts -- like many hunts -- aren't always perfect, but all hunters are bound by the same rules.
Kurt Schmidt, the former teacher who alerted troopers to the wasteful kills, sums it up simply. "This is negligence," he said in his first interview with Alaska Dispatch on Friday."There's nothing cultural about it. What I saw was wrong."
He believes the use of the word subsistence is so politically charged that it has become a façade for some people to hide behind, a defense to invoke when something questionable takes place that Native people don't want to answer for.
"There is no justification, no excuse to waste," he said.
Still, the search for answers has exposed other truths for the people of Point Hope: non-hunting city dwellers don't understand the subsistence lifestyle, and their rush-to-judgment remarks can be cruel; the press will run wild with eye-catching headlines; state laws can seem flawed; and Alaska Natives' subsistence way of life sometimes feels like it's under attack.
"The troopers tried our entire village in the media and failed to correct misinformation when printed in the paper" Steve Oomittuk says. "No one in Point Hope thinks it's OK to waste meat."
Contact Jill Burke at jill_alaskadispatch.com.