The fastest way to make a fool of yourself is to talk about culture and hunting with people who live, or whose parents and grandparents have lived, in a hunting culture. I am not going to tell you how I know this—just that I am going to continue to try to talk about culture and hunting.
It is incredibly difficult for any group of Alaskans to crawl out of their own memories and self-interest far enough to get a bead on the immensely important and immensely vague concepts of “subsistence” and “preserving culture.”
I read Craig Medred’s “Nelchina Caribou Ruling a Cultural Travesty” in the Anchorage Daily News this morning, and it seemed a mix of perfect sense and perfect lunacy. I had to take a walk to restore my head to its preferred state of emptiness.
Walking, I noticed that the swallows had returned to Cappuccino. I noticed that the fireweed had suddenly bloomed to the top. I noticed that the pair of Trumpeter swans on the lake still had one remaining cygnet, floating like a small grey dory tied to the bright white schooner shapes of its parents.
I scanned Slide Mountain with near-sighted gaze, and felt the twinge of love and excitement I always feel in this season when the stars are coming back at night, the berries are getting ripe and animals will soon be on the move.
I don’t know much about the natural history around here compared to the old people who used to live in the neighborhood: Ahtna elders Morrie and Joe Secondchief or the other trappers, Native and white, who lived and worked here over many decades. Through long love and acquaintance with these forests, they noted the rise and fall of rodents, birds, and mammals in every season.
Hunting knowledge, that aspect of culture so important to many Alaskans, requires acquaintance with the country and a need for the food it offers. Importantly, it requires that we learn from other people who know more than we do.
It’s part of a very long political discussion around Alaska, the very simplistic version being whether there should be some kind of rural preference for hunting instead of most hunts being open to all Alaskans. You can guess where Native groups and rural residents usually stand on this. It has gone back and forth, mostly because no one can define a rural resident who deserves preference or a city resident who is actually rural by birth or inclination. It is especially difficult because of some untidiness between Federal law and Alaska’s constitution.
Medred, a knowledgeable commentator on Alaska’s outdoors, did not like this recent court battle being tipped toward local preference. In a way, he’s just more optimistic than I am, because he thinks that non-hunters, “particularly young urban Alaskans,” can be inducted into hunter-gatherer culture and thus “foster a greater understanding of and appreciation for wild lands, no matter your age, race or ethnicity.”
That sounds nice and I hope it will happen, but I want the induction ceremony to involve some old guys and gals who love this place. Vivid in my mind, still, are the two young caribou bulls lying bloated beside the Glenn Highway a mile from our house a month ago, shot from a passing vehicle during the night.
Did those people think they were hunting?
Whatever hunting “is,” I don’t think anyone learns it without tapping into a community of hunting practice and hunting morality. I think you learn it by hunting with people who learned it from people they went hunting with.
It seems to me that community was what Superior Court Judge Eric Smith was trying to preserve as he ruled that prior history with the Nelchina game populations and land, family connections, and dependence on the resource would have to be counted as factors in the determination of who gets caribou permits.
I believe that the Native organizations who brought suit against the income-only criteria for subsistence permits would say preserving this particular aspect of culture was about more than shareholders and excluding other people.
We should all ask ourselves: Beyond the opportunity to eat wild meat, what else is it that we are trying to preserve?
Beyond what laws can dictate, how do we learn the reciprocity of the natural world without the chance—and necessity—of participating in it?
Beyond the opportunity that the law gives us to run around the country with guns and trucks, who can teach us a little respect?
Painful as this dialog about who gets to hunt caribou and moose may be, and the impossibility of solving it, we need to keep on talking.