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With whale hunt photos, Bill Hess fosters intercultural intimacy

Bill Hess sat freezing on the sea ice for three years waiting for the perfect photograph. When it came, his pants were down.

Hess was only beginning his long career documenting the subsistence lifestyles of Alaska Natives. When I followed him to the Arctic to write about the same subject, having read his extraordinary book, "The Gift of the Whale," I hoped to learn how to make that same cross-cultural journey.

Now I think he has a lesson for all of us in our cross-cultural state.

Hess came from a Mormon family and attended Brigham Young University in Utah, where he courted his wife, Margie, a White Mountain Apache. He was fascinated by Native American cultures. He met Lakota cowboys on a mission and wished he could follow their buffalo hunt, but the buffalo were gone.

Hess thought of bowhead whales as the buffalo of the north -- huge animals indigenous people hunt to feed themselves.

"That was a real thing to me. That was a reason I wanted to go to the North Slope to see the whaling, because that was something that had been lost down there."

It was a long journey, up through a tiny tribal newspaper in Arizona and covering village news for Howard Rock's Native Alaska newspaper, The Tundra Times, in the early 1980s. As a cash-poor freelancer, during Alaska's deep recession in 1986, Hess managed to buy an airplane for $15,900. Scrounging for gas, he flew all over the state to meet its rural people.

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Winning the trust of Alaska's whalers is tough. They've been burned by journalists many times. And their subsistence tradition is private, spiritual and extremely dangerous. No place for tourists or amateurs.

Somehow, Bill did win their trust. Enough for Kunuk, also known as Jonathan Aiken Sr., to invite him into his whaling camp on the sea ice during the years when the hunt remained controversial and the internationally assigned quota for Alaska's hunters was low. That was where Hess sat, at the ice edge, for three years, improperly dressed, shivering through 24-hour watches with his hosts under the glowing sky of April and early May in the Arctic.

They waited for a whale and he waited for something even rarer: a picture of a harpoon being thrown into a whale's back.

In the third year, he got better winter gear. After sweating through the job of chipping an ice trail to the open lead of water, he went into a tent in the whale camp to change.

"I think, 'What if a whale comes while I am doing this?' " he said. "And I thought, 'No, no. I have sat out there for three years and no whale has come to us.' And that's what the Iñupiaq believe: The whale comes to you. And so I could take time to get into dry clothes."

He was in his underwear in the tent when he heard it. One hushed word: "Whale!"

Hess struggled out and saw the whale feet away, next to the ice, and he saw Kunuk raise the harpoon. He aimed the camera, but his breath had fogged the viewfinder. He began blindly shooting.

The harpoon hit. The whale disappeared. Quiet. And then, from underwater, the muffled boom of the harpoon's explosive charge inside the whale's body.

"And then the whale rises to the surface and it rolls to its side and it lifts a flipper into the air, and when that happens, that whale has given itself to you," Hess said. "It seemed to confirm what anyone outside the culture would think is just a wild story about the whale giving itself. I was amazed."

When Hess developed the film, it showed he had gotten his picture. He published that image and many others in a magazine funded by the North Slope Borough called Uiniq. The work established his reputation in the villages. That got him invited back.

"He fits in with all the communities and he tells it like it is," said Point Hope whaling co-captain Steve Oomittuk. "He is well-known and wellrespected for how he treats the people and how he writes about them. He's preserved the way of life."

Hess's pictures are exceptional cultural documents, capturing subsistence practices from before oil money transformed Arctic communities. They also stand up as art. Richard Murphy, who holds the Snedden Chair of Journalism at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said the pictures are clean and powerfully composed, and have an emotional power that can only come from intimacy with the subjects.

"You can tell by the expressions of the people photographed that he is a trusted person," Murphy said.

That's the quality that moves me in these photographs. It's as if they were taken by a peer rather than an outsider. Nothing is hidden. There are no masks.

Hess achieved that closeness in a culture that was not his own, something few have ever accomplished. But it wasn't magic. He told me his simple secret. He enjoyed his hosts' food. He slept in their tents and homes. He listened instead of speaking. He waited to be invited rather than asking to join in. He helped and gave back.

And, in his work, he reflected the culture on its own terms.

We live in many cultures in Anchorage and all over Alaska. We interact every day with people we don't really understand. We can learn something from Bill Hess. In a word, we can learn humility.

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Charles Wohlforth's column appears three times a week in Alaska Dispatch News. He is a lifelong Alaskan. Find him on Facebook or email him at cwohlforth(at)alaskadispatch.com. Hear his interview with Bill Hess on his Alaska Public Media radio show "Outdoor Explorer," which airs at 2 p.m. Thursday.

The views expressed here are the writer's own and are not necessarily endorsed by Alaska Dispatch News, which welcomes a broad range of viewpoints. To submit a piece for consideration, email commentary(at)alaskadispatch.com.

Charles Wohlforth

Charles Wohlforth was an Anchorage Daily News reporter from 1988 to 1992 and wrote a regular opinion column from 2015 until 2019. He served two terms on the Anchorage Assembly. He is the author of a dozen books about Alaska, science, history and the environment. More at wohlforth.com.

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