It was about ten thirty in the morning in Barrow, Alaska—the northernmost city in the United States, over three hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle—when families started arriving at the Nalukataq grounds to celebrate the successful spring whaling season. The sun was out, which was not surprising, since it hadn’t gone down for a month, but this morning it was particularly bright, and although the mid-June day wasn’t exactly warm, it was not uncomfortably cold either. The grounds had been set up, as always, in the area just south of the Arctic Ocean and immediately west of the Top of the World Hotel, where I had been staying for the past week. The area was a little bit north of the lagoons that separate the older part of town in the south from the newer part, which is sometimes called Browerville. Tarps had been stretched across a series of tall wooden poles to create a wind barrier around the semicircular area, and the flags of the two successful whaling crews that were hosting the event were flying high over the people below. Each crew that catches a whale during the spring season is responsible for distributing whale meat to the rest of the community during the Nalukataq festival. The year I was there, the crews in town had brought in seven whales. This was the first of three days that the Inupiat people of Barrow and a few other nearby settlements would come together to celebrate both the whale hunt and the whales themselves, as the people have done for over a thousand years.
By eleven o’clock, the celebrants were arriving in droves—in the midafternoon, there would be well over a thousand people, most of them natives—and invariably they were carrying with them large coolers and rubber tubs, as well as full place settings, complete with cups, plates, forks, semicircular knives called ulus, and even salt and pepper shakers and the occasional bottle of Tabasco sauce. I, however, had none of these things. It wasn’t because I hadn’t been warned. The whole week, whenever I told someone I had come all the way from Boston to Barrow to witness the whaling festival, I was inevitably told to bring, at the very least, a bowl, a plate, and some cutlery. Others advised me to bring Ziploc bags. What I had actually managed to obtain, however, was far more modest—a small Styrofoam cup lifted from the hotel coffee station as well as a clamshell takeout container and a plastic fork and knife that I cajoled from a waiter at Nig˙g˙ivikput, the hotel restaurant. These were just going to have to do.
I wandered around the grounds, taking in the scene and trying to predict what was going to happen. As the families arrived, they looked for prime spots around the perimeter where they could lay down their blankets, set up portable chairs, and settle in for the afternoon. Although there were a lot of people, most of them clearly knew each other, which was probably to be expected in a tight-knit community where there really isn’t anywhere else to go. Toward the open end of the semicircle, the two hosting crews had set up tents; inside the tents, members of the crews hustled around getting ready for the celebration. A couple of long wooden tables had also been set up nearby and were covered with boxes of food and large metal pots filled with caribou soup and other concoctions that would soon be served to the entire community.
I looked with wonder farther into the semicircle at the so-called blanket toss contraption that would serve as the main source of entertainment as evening approached. Pulled taut between several wooden poles was a trampoline-like “blanket” fashioned out of the skins of bearded seals that had previously covered the two small wooden boats (called umiaks) that the successful crews had used to hunt their whales. Although, sadly, I wasn’t able to stay around long enough to see it, in the evening the adults take turns bouncing on the blanket while the rest of the group grabs and snaps the thing, sending the bouncers flying high, high into the air. Back in the old days, hunters would do something similar to try to spot game far out onto the horizon, but now the toss is just for fun and some good-natured competition to see who can bounce the highest and most times without losing their footing or breaking a leg. Finally, in the middle of the semicircle, just sitting there on the ground on a piece of plywood, was a large chunk of meat that had obviously been part of a whale, though I had no idea what part of the whale it was from or what it was doing there.
Although I had hoped to run into at least one person whom I’d met over the past week, nobody looked familiar, and so I just walked around by myself, looking for a place to sit that would have a good view and not be on top of somebody else’s stuff. I took a seat on the ground for a while, but it was uncomfortable, so I soon stood back up. A very old lady in a bulky arctic parka approached me—this was probably her eightieth or so Nalukataq—and told me that I should have carried a chair with me from home. When I told her that my home was four thousand miles away, she looked at me with a confused expression. I explained what I was doing at the festival, and then I asked her about the big piece of meat in the middle of the grounds.
“That’s whale for visitors like you,” she said. “But you will need a big knife or ulu to cut it with if you want to eat it.”
“No problem,” I replied, pulling my little plastic knife out from my pocket and presenting it proudly to her. “I have this!”
If you’ve never experienced an eightysomething woman cackling at you, eyes full of pity for your sad, silly self, let me just say that it can make you feel pretty stupid.
For whatever reason—perhaps their size, their gracefulness, or their intelligence—whales have always been objects of awe and admiration for human beings. We celebrate them in our books and movies and works of art and collectively spend two billion dollars every year to watch them swim, jump, and twirl around majestically in their natural habitats. Humans have also, however, long hunted whales, not only for their abundant meat, but also for their blubber, which used to be sold for lamp oil; their baleen, which some time ago was used to make ladies’ corsets; and even their bones and smelly ambergris. By the mid-twentieth century, our seemingly unquenchable thirst for whale products had caused a massive decline in the numbers of whales and led to the listing of several species as endangered. The International Whaling Commission, a body created in 1946 to provide for the conservation of whale stocks, ultimately issued a complete ban on commercial whaling. The ban took effect in 1986. Although several countries still defy the IWC and engage in the practice, either outright or under the cover of doing “scientific research”—most notably Norway, Iceland, and Japan—the moratorium has certainly had a positive effect on whale populations around the world.
Although it prohibits commercial whaling, the IWC does authorize a smattering of communities around the world to engage in “subsistence whaling.” The communities are places where people have traditionally hunted whales for their own use and where the whale hunt represents a critical aspect of the community’s history and culture. Subsistence whaling communities exist in Greenland, Russia, Japan’s eastern coast, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines in the Caribbean, and the United States. In the United States, the IWC regularly grants the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission the right to take a healthy number of bowhead whales every year (the actual number of whales taken varies widely, but is usually between forty and seventy-five), and the Alaskan commission distributes the quota among the eleven traditional whaling communities in the state, including Barrow. In recent years, the IWC has also allowed the Makah Tribe of western Washington State to hunt a small number of gray whales. Thus far, the Makahs have only taken one whale under the permit. As Robert Sullivan describes in his masterful book A Whale Hunt, the hunt for that whale—being the first hunt that the tribe had carried out in seventy years—was both incredibly difficult for the tribe itself and extremely controversial among antiwhaling advocates and other environmentalists.
Traditionally, the whale hunt in Inupiat communities like Barrow was as much a religious practice as a search for food. The National Park Service brochure for the remarkable Inupiat Heritage Center in Barrow puts it this way: “A successful whaling crew believed that the 60-ton animal had given itself to them as a result of their virtuousness in the preceding year and their rigid adherence to the proper rituals. Inupiaq whaling was both a means of subsistence and a religious ritual, and the two could not be separated.” Although whaling in Barrow today may not be quite the religious ritual that it was in the past, the practice continues to be deeply imbued with religious significance, including the continued belief that the whale gives itself to the hunters. Whether whaling in Barrow should technically be considered a religious practice, however, is not ultimately all that important. I made the trip because whether or not whaling “counts” as religion, for the Inupiat community, whaling certainly plays a similar role that religion plays in other small, close-knit communities. As a young whalers’ teaching guide that I came across in the town library says, “Whaling is fundamental to our lives. It defines who we are.” Studying the conflict between environmentalism and a deep-seated cultural practice like Inupiat whaling, then, can provide relevant lessons for the religious context as well.
More specifically, I figured that learning about whaling and its importance for the Inupiat community might give me a better understanding of the controversy over taking bald and golden eagles in Wyoming and elsewhere. The Native American tribes in the Lower Forty-Eight who want legal permission to take eagles, after all, are seeking something quite analogous to what the native communities in Alaska already have for whales. The trips that I had made before I visited Barrow, which was my last trip for the book, had taught me a lot about how we might manage conflicts between religious practice and the environment, but I was still feeling unsure about the eagle situation. I traveled to Barrow, in other words, to see what the whales could teach me about eagles.
Flying to Alaska from the East Coast takes so long that when you get off the plane, it’s a surprise that people are speaking English and using US currency. My original plan had been to spend a couple of days in Anchorage and then maybe four in Barrow. The exact days of the Nalukataq festival aren’t set until a week or two before they occur, however. When it turned out that I had guessed wrong about when the festival was going to start (I’d had to buy the tickets a month earlier), I had to change my plans at the last minute so that I could at least catch most of one of the days. As a result, I ended up spending less than a day in Anchorage and over six in Barrow, which, as you will see, is a long time to spend in Barrow.
Making the best of my half-day in Anchorage, I met up with a former student named Jackie, who years ago had left a big Manhattan firm to practice law in Alaska and sing in her own jazz band. Jackie had been to Barrow a couple of times for work and suggested that we go to a grocery store so I could buy some food for my stay. She explained that since everything has to be flown or shipped into Barrow, the prices are far more expensive and the selection far less plentiful then in Anchorage. Jackie advised me specifically to get some produce. “It’ll cost you five dollars for an apple in Barrow,” she told me. “And it will be an old apple.” I filled my basket with bananas, nectarines, nuts, and granola. Jackie suggested I buy an avocado, but I was resistant, because buying an avocado is always like playing the lottery—you never know whether it’s going to be completely gross inside. (A Nobel Prize for whoever figures out how to send a tiny person into the middle of an avocado to report back on its condition.) Jackie insisted. “You’ll eat it anyway,” she said, “because you’ll be in Barrow.”
Jackie also accompanied me to a liquor store, where I bought a 750-milliliter bottle of Bushmills Irish whiskey for the trip. For many years now, Barrow has been a damp town, meaning that although it is not illegal to drink alcohol there, it is illegal to sell it. The citizens passed the law because alcohol was wreaking havoc in the town, raising the incidence of domestic violence and other crimes, although counterproductively, the law does allow most people to import a certain amount of liquor from out of town every month. Moreover, although it is generally illegal to bring alcohol into Barrow, an exception to the law allows visitors to bring with them up to a liter of spirits, so that’s what I decided to do, even though I had an inkling that the hotel where I was staying had a strict policy banning alcohol completely from its premises. The idea of being completely alcohol-free for six days above the Arctic Circle, where the sun never sets, was just too much for me to bear.
The ninety-minute flight from Anchorage to Barrow is more expensive than the flight from Boston to Anchorage, and although the plane was full-sized, at least half of it was blocked off and used for transporting cargo. The ten rows that were reserved for passengers were filled with people who (other than me) clearly all knew each other.
The Barrow airport resembles a small-town bus station. It is too small to fit all the people who use it, and the luggage just gets thrown onto a slanted platform where people compete to grab their stuff first. I took a six-dollar cab ride to the Top of the World Hotel and checked in. The place had just recently been renovated and was quite lovely, at least on the inside. In the lobby, a glass case held a full-sized mastodon tusk underneath a flat-screen, high-definition television. There were indeed prominent signs declaring the hotel’s no-alcohol policy and announcing that anyone caught with alcohol would be told to leave, so when I got to my room and unpacked, I wrapped the whiskey bottle in some clothes and buried it deep in my suitcase, where I hoped nobody would come looking for it. There are only three hotels in the town, and the other two were fully booked, so if my hotel kicked me out, I would surely have frozen to death in the parking lot, at least if a polar bear didn’t get me first.
A word about polar bears. Everyone in Barrow talks about polar bears, and I was assured by many people that they can be found there, usually out on the ice where they hunt for seals, but also occasionally in the town itself. During my stay, I heard at least three different versions of the “you don’t have to be fast enough to outrun the polar bear, you just have to be able to outrun the slowest person in your group” joke. The Wikitravel page for Barrow says, “If you do see a Polar Bear stay at least 100 yards away, and preferably in a vehicle. Polar Bears absolutely will eat you.” It was probably for the best, then, that my trip ended up being totally, completely, 100 percent polar-bear-free.
After settling in at the hotel, I took the first of many lonely walks that I would take around town throughout the week. Barrow is unlike any other place I have ever visited. It is almost otherworldly, somewhat postapocalyptic—what I imagine it might be like to live on the moon. The land and sea stretch out flat as far as the eye can see—there isn’t a tree within hundreds of miles of the place—and the wind whips through town with an intensity that makes it feel cold even when the temperature is above freezing. Since the area receives less than a half foot of precipitation every year (measured in rainfall inches), it is technically a desert, and you can feel the dryness of the air on your skin and lips. The sky is eerie and gray, as the light from the sun, though it never completely disappears during the summer, mostly remains low on the horizon (I can’t imagine what the place must be like between November and February, when the sun is never seen at all). The town is quiet, the empty air occasionally punctuated by the sound of a dog barking or an ATV growling down one of the muddy, unpaved roads that crisscross the village. Because the scant snow nevertheless remains on the ground for most of the year, the ramshackle homes are ashen and weather-beaten—the whole place looks like it could use a power wash and several coats of fresh paint. Homes are built on stilts so they don’t sink into the ground when the permafrost melts each spring, and the yards are filled with wrecked equipment, broken-down snowmobiles, and all sorts of other bric-a-brac that makes it look as if everyone were holding a yard sale that no customers want to visit.
The outward appearance of the town, however, masks how much Barrow and its residents have going for them. Somewhere between 4,000 and 4,500 people call Barrow home. About 60 percent of the population is Native Alaskan; the others are a mixture of mostly whites and Asians. Some of these non-Natives have come to teach, provide medical services, or do scientific research (the town’s location makes it a prime spot to learn about the effects of global warming). The ground nearby is filled with oil, and a lot of money has been invested in the town’s public buildings. There’s a brand-new state-of-the-art hospital, an eighty-million-dollar high school, and a blue turf football field where the high school Whalers play their home games three miles from the northernmost point in the United States.
My intention was to spend some time talking to people involved with whaling so I could understand the role that it plays in the community. But since my efforts to contact whaling captains had been met with silence, I decided just to try to meet people around town and talk with them. This, however, turned out to be far more difficult than I had thought, largely because there are no public gathering places in Barrow—no shopping malls, no cafés, and certainly no bars. The town does have half a dozen or so restaurants scattered about (e.g., Arctic Pizza and Northern Lights), but other than the one in the hotel, which caters mostly to tourists, they were basically empty when I ate at them. I had never really understood the idea of a pub as a public house before, but in Barrow, I felt the absence of such a place fairly strongly. It certainly made for a week with a lot of empty time, which I filled by watching World Cup games and twenty-two episodes of Orange Is the New Black. Desperate for things to do, I watched some of a co-ed softball tournament one afternoon at the dusty dirt “field” behind the public gymnasium and attended a folk music show at the library. The show was put on by a quirky singer named Sunrise, who turned out to be the pop-star Jewel’s aunt and who insisted on shaking my right hand with her left hand and vice versa because doing so “makes a circle.” I snuck occasional healthy slugs from my contraband bottle of forbidden whiskey.
Of course, it wasn’t all fun and games during my week in Barrow. Though it was harder than I’d hoped, I did manage to talk with a bunch of people around the town. I chatted with a librarian, the people at the Inupiat Heritage Center, and some of the members of the hotel staff (Cristina, who had just returned from living in Mexico and whose brother is on a whaling crew, was particularly friendly). I took a few tours of the area—two with whaling crew members (Will and Bob) and one with a guy named Mike Shults, whose mother, Fran Tate, famously (she was on The Johnny Carson Show once) owned Pepe’s, a Mexican restaurant that was a Barrow icon until it sadly burned to the ground in 2013. I visited Mike’s brother Joe’s “museum” in his cramped home, a crazy but fascinating hodgepodge of Barrow-area relics and where mastodon bones and baleen sleds share shelf space with a collection of old Big Mac cartons and a Cleveland Cavaliers bobblehead. While I was on Mike’s tour, we ran into a whaler who described to us the exact location on the whale where you want to strike it so the bomb (more on this in a bit) goes off in just the right place to kill the animal cleanly.
In the course of these and other conversations, I learned quite a bit about the communal and religious aspects of whaling in Barrow. But first, a few facts:
• Bowhead whales are one of the largest species of whales in the world, growing up to sixty feet or more in length. The Inupiat say that the whales weigh roughly a ton per foot. According to IWC estimates, the worldwide bowhead population is somewhere between eight thousand and twenty-five thousand whales.
• Bowheads are thought to be able to live for up to two hundred years. On one occasion, whalers in Barrow found a stone harpoon tip inside a whale that they had killed, indicating that the whale had been hunted by somebody else before modern whaling techniques had even been invented. According to the whaler who told me this story, the find made him feel united with his ancestors, as though they had both hunted the same exact whale, over a hundred years apart.
• In Barrow, there is both a spring and a fall whaling season. In the spring, the whaling crews hunt more-or-less traditionally, cutting a path through the ice, camping for weeks near the water, and hunting in eight-person wooden boats that are covered with seal skins. When a whale is killed, sixty people are needed to pull it onto the ice, where it is butchered. In the fall, the crews use aluminum motorboats, and bulldozers bring the whales to where they will be processed. People in Barrow don’t like to talk very much (at least with outsiders) about the fall whaling season.
• There are forty-plus whaling crews in Barrow. Each crew has a captain, who is responsible for the equipment and safety of the crew. The crew consists of not only the eight people who go in the boat, but also the wives of the crewmembers and other helpers, sometimes young people, who take care of the camp, make the coffee, and the like. Many of the crews have their own distinctive jackets, some with Bible quotes about whales on them. The women who are part of the crew are in charge of distributing the whale meat once the whale is butchered. Traditionally, all of the actual hunters have been men, but during the Nalukataq celebration, one of the captains gave a shout-out to a young woman who had trained on their boat, saying, “Our culture is moving forward.”
• Every year, the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission allocates Barrow between twenty and twenty-five strikes. Every time a harpoon hits a whale, it counts as a strike. The harpoon is not what kills the whale, however. The harpoon is connected to a darting gun, which shoots an exploding projectile bomb deep into the body of the whale. If the bomb goes in at the right place, it could by itself kill the whale. If not, the hunters carry special shoulder guns, which will finish the job.
• Once the whale is butchered, clear and firm rules govern how it is distributed. Certain parts go to the captain. Others go to the crew who caught the whale. Half of the baleen goes to other crews who helped tow the whale back to shore. One part goes to the harpooner. Some is shared by all whaling crews in town. Still others are divided up and distributed at the Nalukataq or other feasts like those at Christmas and Thanksgiving. It’s complicated.
• Families keep their whale meat and other subsistence meat (seal, walrus, caribou, fowl, etc.) in ice cellars that are dug into their yards. Groceries in Barrow are, as Jackie told me in Anchorage, indeed ridiculously expensive. A favorite pastime of visitors to Barrow involves going to the supermarket and looking at the prices and gasping. My favorite item was a twelve-pack of paper towels that was selling for $37.75. A big (but not too big) jar of mayonnaise was retailing at $14.95. Because of these crazy prices, the citizens of Barrow do in fact rely on their subsistence catches for a good deal of their food. People I talked to said they eat whale something like twice a week. Under federal law, the subsistence meat cannot be sold.
• Around town, there are a number of Dumpsters painted with pictures and inspirational messages. My favorite has a picture of a whale and says SAVE THE WHALES . . . FOR DINNER.
It was clear from everything I saw and heard in Barrow that although the purpose of catching the whale is to provide food for the community, the hunt is thoroughly imbued with religious significance. I asked the two whaler tour guides if whaling is a spiritual activity, and both enthusiastically affirmed that it is. The whaling exhibit at the Inupiat Heritage Center, which is where the whaling community expresses itself most clearly to the outside world, also speaks in religious terms about the hunt. A plaque titled “The Whale Gives Itself to Us,” for instance, says: “We must be solemn when the whale is dying. We request silence when we strike, and no expression of joy is made until the animal is dead, in respect to the whale’s spirit. After the whale is dead, the men surround the whale and say a prayer of thanks for the gift.” Another plaque is devoted entirely to the spirit of the whale:
Our traditions speak of the spirit of the whale as being a flame of light burning in an oil lamp attended by a young girl. The young girl tends to the flame and only steps away to breathe when the great whale surfaces. If the flame were extinguished, the spirit girl would die in the same instant. While men may hunt the physical whale, the spirit of the whale gives itself to the women. The women maintain the sanctity of the home, feed the needy, and care for others. The whale’s spirit tells other whales of the kind treatment it received and convinces them to give themselves to the men the following year.
Beyond the religious accoutrements of the whale hunt, however, is the more important point that whaling holds the Inupiat community in Barrow together and gives it meaning. In this way, whaling serves the same function that more obviously religious traditions serve in other communities. Whaling is everywhere in Barrow. It runs through every aspect of the town, from the name of the high school sports teams to the town seal to the food that people eat twice a week for dinner. For a couple of years in the late 1970s, the IWC actually banned subsistence whaling in the Inupiat communities. When I asked the whalers how the ban had affected the town, one man told me that it was “dismal,” while the other said that in those couple of years, the community had almost lost hope. Both men told me that nearly every member of the Inupiat community in Barrow is involved in whaling in some way.
A Japanese researcher who spent many years studying the role of whaling in Barrow and wrote an excellent paper about it summarizes the role of whaling nicely:
In sum, the whaling activities and feasts are culturally, socially, spiritually, politically, and nutritionally important in contemporary Inupiat society. They also form a basis for their ethnic and community identities. . . . [W]haling and associated feasts of the Inupiat are inseparably related to their contemporary way of life. Thus, the whaling tradition of the Inupiat is fundamental for the cultural and social continuation of the Inupiat as a people.
Perhaps there is no better testimony to the importance of whaling to the community than how young the children start taking part in it. As one of the whalers told me when I asked him about his son, “I want him to start being involved when he turns nine. So it gets into his heart.”
Following my conversation with the cackling octogenarian, I had located a good-enough place to sit down on the northern side of the Nalukataq grounds and waited for the festivities to begin. They started with one of the crew captains making some opening remarks in Inupiat and then a long prayer, also in Inupiat, except for the very end, which concluded, “In the name of Jesus, Amen.” Most natives who live in Barrow these days practice as Presbyterians, although my guess is that it’s with an Inupiat twist. The prayer took place with the members of the two crews—maybe thirty people in all—standing around in a circle and holding hands. Later I would ask somebody what they had been praying about, and the answer was that they were thanking the whale and praying for it, as well as giving thanks to a Christian God for the food.
I knew that the whaling crews were going to serve food to the rest of the people attending the Nalukataq festival, but I had assumed that the guests would get up from where they were sitting and go to the food at some central location rather than the crews bringing the food to us, which is how it actually worked. The soups came first, mostly caribou but also goose and duck. A nice person from one of the crews scooped me out a ladle of caribou soup into my tiny Styrofoam cup. The soup was mostly broth with just a little chunk or two of caribou, but it was delicious and welcome, given the cool weather.
And then came the day’s first taste of whale. Over the course of the week, I had tried whale in the form of muktuk several times, provided by the natives who were running the various tours I’d taken. Muktuk is a cut of whale that includes both the blubber and the skin of the animal, usually boiled, sometimes salted, and served in small chunks or strips. It can be chewy, and it’s hard to explain what it tastes like—definitely fishy, a little like tuna, with maybe a touch of that indescribable savory umami sensation that the scientists say is the fifth taste—but I had really enjoyed it, and so despite feeling a little guilty about eating this treasured creature, I was nonetheless looking forward to eating more.
The first preparation of whale that the crews served at the feast, however, was a far cry from the relatively benign muktuk. Scooped by hand out of deep buckets of reddish-brown goop, this was what the Inupiats call mikiaq or mikyuk, which is a mixture of whale meat, skin, blubber, and I think organs, all fermented for a few weeks in the whale’s own blood. Mmmm! Having lived in China before, I’ve eaten a lot of weird things, including dog, snake, and little live shrimp still jumping around in a tangy liquor sauce, but I was not at all thrilled about trying this stuff. I probably wouldn’t have, either, except that a guy sitting next to me told me that I should definitely try it. Since he was a member of a whaling crew himself, I felt it would have been rude to object, so I asked one of the bucket people for a “very small” piece, which she happily deposited into my Styrofoam clamshell box.
The whale was surprisingly tough, however, and my little plastic silverware was unequal to the task of cutting it. I was about to give up, when luckily (I guess) the guy next to me saw me struggling and lent me his long, sharp knife, which I used to cut the piece up, although the action also totally shredded the clamshell, rendering that thing thereafter useless. I returned the knife and ate up the mikiaq, hoping that it wouldn’t kill me. Unfortunately, I don’t really have the words to describe how the stuff tasted, but suffice to say, I did not ask for seconds.
During the break that followed, I wandered back to the hotel to warm up a bit and get a new caribou-soup-free coffee cup. When I returned, little kids were taking turns on the blanket toss, and a small group of native singers were singing Christian songs with verses like “Oh God my savior Lord to me” and “One, two, three, devil’s after me . . . seven, eight, nine, he missed me all the time.” One of the captains came to the microphone to announce that the slab of whale that had been sitting in the middle of the grounds was now cut up and available for visitors to take home with them. I joined a crowd of people—mostly members of other Arctic communities—by the huge blue tub and cardboard boxes that were now filled with large pieces and chunks of whale meat and watched as people jockeyed for space and selected the choicest pieces to put in their Ziploc bags for the trip home. A fellow visitor from New York whom I had met earlier in the morning told me that she thought this was “their Black Friday,” which I didn’t understand until she explained that the throng of whale-slice choosers looked like mall shoppers battling for the last discounted flat-screen television on the day after Thanksgiving. I stood and watched the free-for-all for a good while and even considered taking a piece myself, which maybe I would have if I’d had any idea what to do with it. As it was, I would have had to put the slice in my coat pocket for the fifteen-hour trip back to Boston.
The next part of the festival day—and the last part for me, because I had to leave at around 5:30 p.m. to catch my plane—involved mass distribution of lots of different parts of the two whales. It was during this time that I finally succeeded in my quest to find someone I could hang out with and talk to about the festival. My earlier efforts on this front had gone nowhere. First, the old lady had laughed at me. Then, a woman named Fluffy showed me to an empty chair that I thought was one of hers, but that actually belonged to someone else who had left for a while and then come back and sent me packing. Finally, a youngish guy I approached to ask about the meaning of the prayer had no idea what it was about but was really interested in asking me questions and in fact periodically approached me throughout the afternoon to ask me things about Boston like, “Did you ever see Larry Bird?” and “How’d you like Good Will Hunting?”
I had almost given up when I happened to meet a great young guy named Gabe—a native Inupiat who was born in Barrow. Gabe had left Barrow for a while to go to school in Florida before returning to play a kind of liaison role between the natives of Barrow and the outside world in the media and elsewhere. This guy was really funny and knowledgeable, and it was a pleasure to listen to him describe the various roles he’s played in Barrow. He has served on a whaling crew, hunted caribou, watched out for polar bears, and done many other things you would expect a young Inupiat guy to do growing up. Gabe explained to me that he loves to eat whale, which he claimed is incredibly nutritious in addition to being delicious. He used to carry bags of muktuk in his pockets to munch on during school, and he even tried for a time to go on an all-muktuk diet that he was hoping to write about for a men’s health magazine (even he couldn’t pull that off for long enough). I asked him whether there was a lot of prayer on the hunt, and he said that there was—before the hunt, during, and after, much of it to Jesus. “This,” he said, pointing at the crowd collecting and munching on whale, “is our bread and our wine. Only with more protein.”
Over the next couple of hours, the two crews came around to distribute all sorts of different cuts of whale to the community. Gabe collected as many pieces as he possibly could, even making sure that I got my allotted share, which I then graciously donated to him. At the same time, though, he also took small pieces of each cut, sliced them up with an ulu, and let me try all of them. There was something called quaq, deep-red chunks of whale meat, several different cuts of muktuk—one with a pinkish layer of blubber under the thick, dark layer of skin and another one with more orangey blubber—and a cut from the tail, the name of which I forget, but which was much tougher and less palatable than the other cuts (a woman nearby, when asked why she wasn’t eating the tail piece, responded, “I’m done teething”). I don’t see myself going out of my way to eat any more whale during my remaining years on the planet, but I do have to say that most of it was pretty delicious.
Witnessing this part of the festival, I had two overwhelming impressions. The first was that whales are freaking huge! The amount of whale that the two crews distributed to the people to take home with them in the coolers was amazing. The chunks and pieces and slabs just kept coming and coming. There would be one distribution of the quaq, say, where every person got five or so blocks of meat, and then since there was still plenty of quaq left, the crew would hand out another three blocks to everyone. And then there was the next cut and the next cut, and so on. By the end of the day, there were hundreds of coolers filled to the brim with pieces of whale. Moreover, this was just the first day of the festival. And only a few parts of the whale are distributed at this festival. And this was just the festival for the spring hunt, with the fall hunt still on the way. The whales, in other words, really do continue to feed the town. It’s incredible.
The second major impression I had was that this is what I’d been hearing about all week. Everything that the Inupiats had told me about the whales giving the community meaning and holding it together and being a source of joy was vividly on display. Everyone was laughing and smiling and joking with each other and talking to friends and family and basically filled with happiness and cheer and hope, and it was all because they are allowed to hunt and kill and eat these whales. When I had first arrived in Barrow, I hadn’t been sure what I thought about the practice of hunting whales or whether a subsistence-whaling exception to the global ban was necessary. After my week in Barrow, my thinking on the issue had evolved. Of course, I sincerely hope that those who hunt the whales don’t hunt so many of them that the animals become endangered. But sitting there on that cold, sunny day, hundreds of miles north of the Arctic Circle, watching a community bond over an activity that it has practiced for centuries, I believe I understood why the Inupiat need to hunt the bowheads, and I decided that the law was right to let them do it.
When thinking and talking about religion, we have to keep in mind that religious practices are important not only for individuals, but also for communities. Pretty much all of the religious practices described in this book, for instance, have in them a communal aspect that is at least as important as, if not more important than, their individual aspect. Think of Catholics in New York or Boston coming together to celebrate Palm Sunday Mass or the millions of Chinese people in Hong Kong making a pilgrimage to the Yuen Yuen Institute to burn joss paper in its enormous furnace. What about the hundreds of Buddhists outside Taipei congregating at Hai Tao’s hilltop temple to worship together and (usually) to release animals into the environment? Or the many millions crowding the streets and beaches of Mumbai to say good-bye for the year to the great Lord Ganesh. Any regulation that the government enacts to protect the environment from these practices, then, will affect not only the many individuals who are practicing their religion, but also the larger religious community. And so, the government, when deciding whether and how to regulate religious practices to protect the environment, must consider the effects of the regulation not only on individual religious expression but also on the religious community comprising those individuals.
Sometimes, the community-focused nature of a religious practice can reduce the effects of that practice on the environment. One big bonfire for the entire group might have a smaller environmental impact, for example, than if each individual started his or her own fire. If the community can come together over a sacrifice of a single animal, rather than each person sacrificing a different animal, all the better. In the case of the whales in Barrow, it’s not as if every person needs to go out and catch a whale. A few catches should do the trick. Indeed, if the community does not need to eat all twenty or so whales that it catches every year, it should be limited to catching fewer.
Throughout this book, I’ve tried to limit my recommendations to the governments or environmental advocacy groups seeking regulation of a religious practice, and I have not made recommendations aimed at religious individuals or communities themselves. As I explained in the introduction, I have avoided advising religious groups, because, as an outsider to those communities, I lack the authority to suggest that they do or don’t do anything. Still, if I had to plead for religious groups to do one thing differently when it comes to religious practices that harm the environment, it would be to think about whether the needs of the community could be satisfied by collectivizing the religious practice in question. Might the Hindus in Bangladesh get away with “sacrificing” one turtle instead of a hundred thousand during the Kali Puja festival? Rather than immersing thousands, could saying thank you and farewell to one giant Ganesh statue in the sea next to Mumbai suffice? My hope is that as the religious and environmental communities of the world continue their discourse on how to keep both sides of the religion-environment divide happy, collectivizing eco-unfriendly practices is one possibility that religious communities will agree to take seriously.
Some communities, of course, already do. The Native American tribes that seek whole bald and golden eagles, as well as their feathers, for their religious ceremonies, are not seeking to take an inordinate number of eagles. This restraint should not be surprising, as Native Americans are, on the whole, quite protective of the environment. Indeed, in most controversies involving Native Americans, the government, and the environment, it is the government that is trying to do something harmful to the environment (see, for example, the classic Supreme Court case of Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, in which a Native American tribe sued, unsuccessfully, to stop the US Forest Service from building a road right through the tribe’s sacred forest).
The potential harm to the environment from the Native American use of eagles and eagle feathers, particularly now that the bald eagle is no longer listed on the endangered species list, is minimal. On the other hand, the eagles play a critical role in preserving the strength and identities of the Native American communities that need them. How the Inupiats of Barrow describe the role of the whale for them is remarkably similar to the Arapaho Tribe’s description of the eagle’s importance, in an earlier-discussed court case:
Eagles, in the Arapaho culture, are revered and used for religious ceremonial purposes. . . . An Arapaho does not go out with the purpose to “hunt” an eagle. An eagle presents itself and donates its “holy body” to an Arapaho who needs it for ceremonial purposes such as with the Sun Dance. The Sun Dance is vital to the religion of the Arapaho people. Our deep connection to eagles is a vital and necessary component for the cultural survival and religious identity of the Arapaho people.
Should the Native American tribes that want to take a small number of eagles have the right to take them? This was basically the question that got me started on the journey that has become this book. Well, after thinking about it for several years, and logging a whole lot of miles flying around the world to help me think about it better, I think I’ve finally found my answer:
Yes! (Probably.)
Okay, so I guess I hedged on that answer a little bit. But I hope you understand by now why I wanted to hedge on it: to emphasize that these questions about how to balance environmental protection and religious freedom are usually hard, quite hard. I’m sure that plenty of people out there will disagree with me on this point and think that the issues are easy. Some nonbelievers will no doubt believe that society, and particularly the law, should not make special accommodations for religious practice. Why should we let people burn bonfires or pollute the water or kill animals for religious reasons, when we wouldn’t let them do the same things for nonreligious reasons? On the other hand, some believers will undoubtedly think the questions are easy but reach the exact opposite conclusions. Surely in the big scheme of things, the amount of pollution contributed by religion is so small that society, and particularly the law, shouldn’t bother itself with regulating such a fundamental part of so many people’s lives just to make a point about equality.
My position is that both of these views are equally wrong and that in most instances when religious practice and environmentalism collide, the law and the rest of society should seek an appropriate balance, one that will differ depending on the context but that will always benefit from a consideration of the lessons I’ve laid out in these chapters. Religious practices are fundamentally important to those who partake in them, so even those who do not engage in these observances should afford the practices some respect. On the other hand, the natural world is necessary for all of us, and even small harms can have large impacts on the environment and public health.
The key in every case is to take both sides of the equation seriously and to think creatively about how best to protect our precious environment while still allowing religious believers a wide swath of freedom to continue practicing their cherished beliefs. Of course, I am not saying that society will achieve an adequate solution every time—the issues are far too messy to hope that religious believers and environmentalists will be able to compromise and cooperate every time they find themselves at odds. What I am saying, however, is that when it comes to religious practices that harm the environment, the stakes on both sides are simply too high for us not to try.