Subsistence

A record eulachon run just wrapped up in Haines. They’re an oily smelt fish that are known to run in just a few dozen rivers in Alaska. Yet little is known about this long-loved subsistence fish, locally known as hooligan. The only ongoing research on Southeast Alaska hooligan is the result of a nine-year study by the Chilkoot Indian Association.

Mike Binkie stands calf-deep in the Chilkoot River, bent over a plastic bucket and armed with small clippers. Small silver fish wriggle in water that’s milky with eggs.

But these fish aren’t to eat. Binkie and a small team are clipping their adipose fin, then letting them swim on upriver. They count each fish they clip.

“So every ten clips, we make a click,” Binkie said. “Then we write all those down and then they find out somehow through that way how many fish are in the river.”

Upriver, another team is netting fish and counting them, too. They count how many clipped fish they find, so they can extrapolate the total number of fish.

“Nobody knows these guys’ life cycle,” Binkie said. “It’s kinda cool.”

But they’re working to find out.

“It’s a huge food source for these animals and for sea lions in particular. It’s a really vital piece of our whole ecosystem,” said Meredith Pochardt, director of the Takshanuk Watershed Council. “So, culturally we’re looking at this from the subsistence side, but also ecologically it’s a very important food source.”

That’s why the Takshanuk Watershed Council partnered with the Chilkoot Indian Association about a decade ago, to help them with their hooligan study. The aim of the study is pretty simple: to figure out how many hooligan are running in the Chilkat Valley each year. It’s a first step to learning more about the fish. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game completed a eulachon study in 2002, but left many questions unanswered.

“Prior to 2010, there was zero population data for northern Lynn Canal,” Pochardt said. “And so, that was why the study started. Just to gather that baseline data.”

Back then, NOAA fisheries had just declared the hooligan a threatened species down south. They’re protected under the Endangered Species Act from British Columbia to Northern California. That designation prompted the Chilkoot Indian Association to start keeping track of the yearly hooligan returns.

The populations up here in the Upper Lynn Canal aren’t threatened. In fact, this year the team has counted a record number of fish. About 26 million.

Back on the Chilkoot, Klukwan resident Tony Strong is using a dip net to catch a few.

“That rock creates a small back eddy and that’s where the fish will come up and get a little rest,” he said. “That’s where I can capture them.”

Strong fills his net with a practiced hand. He’s been out in the water for awhile, but his clothes are still dry and clean. His mother and grandmother taught him how to harvest the fish when he was a little boy.

He’s filling three 15-gallon buckets. A couple of these buckets will be on a plane to family in Juneau this afternoon. The fish ran for about a week this year–a long run for hooligan. But Strong knows how to make the catch last all year.

“So we smoke it, we dry it, we freeze it, and various other things: eat right quick! It’s an acquired taste,” he said with a smile. “It’s delicious.”

He shields his eyes against the sun and waves at some friends on the bridge. Gulls sweep overhead, aiming for the dark parts of the river, where the water is black is fish.

In Utqiaġvik, the average temperature has risen over 7 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 50 years. That’s among the biggest jumps in Alaska and the world.

People in Utqiaġvik are already experiencing impacts from that warming, like changes in the sea ice they hunt from, and increased coastal erosion as the period of time when the shoreline is protected from storms by sea ice has gotten shorter.

And in eighth grade science, students in Alaska’s northernmost town study climate change in a way that encompasses the global picture, but pays particular attention to what’s going on in their own backyard.

Third period is about to start at Eben Hopson Middle School, as science teacher Kevin Neyhard stands at the door to his classroom and ushers in the last stragglers from the hallway.

Neyhard has a lot to get through in this class period. The section he’s teaching right now sometimes gets a bit squeezed, since it’s at the end of the year. But for the past six years he’s been teaching here, he always gets to it eventually.

This is the part of eighth grade science where students in Utqiaġvik learn about climate change.

In today’s class, Neyhard is showing the class data reflecting how carbon dioxide levels and temperatures are rising, and how that corresponds with a decline in Arctic sea ice.

Just half a degree Celsius of warming could mean an ice-free summer on the Arctic ocean, he explains, which would lead to even more warming.

“Why else is the ice important?” he asks his students.

People shout out answers: “Polar bears!” “Seals!” “Walrus!” “Whaling!”

Climate change is personal to the students here, where many people use the land and ocean to access subsistence resources, and even residents as young as these 13- and 14-year-olds have seen a change in the coastline due to erosion.

Neyhard’s approach to this subject gets personal too. He usually starts this unit by handing out a homework assignment where students have to ask an adult outside of school a series of questions about climate change.

“Have you seen anything in your life that you would say is a result of climate change?” he reads out loud to the class, as he goes over the homework. “You know, examples,” he continues. “What have they seen change, if they’ve seen things change?”

Neyhard tells the students what he doesn’t want is for them to go home and say, “Here Mom, you have homework.”

“I want you to talk to people,” he tells them. “That’s the whole point, is to get you to actually talk and learn from people in the community.”

When students come back to class with stories from parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and other adults, it becomes a sort of crowd-sourced teaching tool. Neyhard puts the answers in a database, and they go over it in class.

His curriculum is largely shaped by a growing national model for science education called the Next Generation Science Standards, which the North Slope Borough School District has adopted. The state of Alaska hasn’t adopted the next generation science standards yet, though they’re considering a framework incorporating it. The standards say students should be able to “ask questions to clarify evidence of the factors that have caused the rise in global temperatures over the past century,” with emphasis on “the major role that human activities play.”

There is also a set of locally-developed Iñupiaq standards that relate to the environment and influence how Neyhard teaches this course. For example, they include an expectation that students show responsibility toward the environment by “comparing and contrasting conservation-oriented behaviors with irresponsible behaviors.”

But Neyhard also takes cues from the responses he gets to the annual survey.

“Basically, I want to try to teach in accordance with what this community is feeling and thinking,” he said.

The majority of the responses to the survey reflect a belief that human activity is either partly or fully responsible. So that’s the way he teaches it.

“I do lean towards the human influence of things,” he said.

He also gets the students out of the classroom for their climate change education. Each spring he takes them out onto the shorefast sea ice for a day-long field trip.

“They get the traditional, ecological perspective on sea ice and how it’s changing and shifting from the whaling crews and whaling captains,” Neyhard said. “And then they come back to a home base area … and we drill cores through the ice to learn about it from that perspective.”

He also brings in area scientists to answer student questions.

“They ask about how it’s affecting a lot of the animals: seals, bowhead of course is a big one, polar bears, caribou,” he said.

Neyhard does talk about the challenges and potential consequences of climate change in this class — and that can be scary to some students. But he ends by talking about the ways that people are trying to address some of those challenges.

He keeps track of the adaptations that are being discussed in Utqiaġvik, and shares them with his students — like the idea of building a rock wall along the beach to slow erosion. Neyhard also has students do a final project where they research a particular approach to a climate change problem.

He wants them to walk away from this class not just with a better sense of how their world is changing, but also how people are trying to respond to that change — both globally and here at home.

On the North Slope of Alaska, the Iñupiat tradition of hunting bowhead whales has an ancestry over 1,500 years old.

Today in Utqiaġvik there are two annual hunts when the whales pass by on their migration. The fall hunt has historically been done on open water, and the spring hunt from the ice that attaches to the coast each winter.

But as temperatures have risen in the Arctic, the ice that serves as the platform for spring whaling has changed dramatically.

And even though whalers in Utqiaġvik say that they’re adapting to that change, some also say the ice is less stable than it used to be — and more dangerous.

Whaling captain Gordon Brower’s camp at the edge of the ice looks very similar to how his father’s looked when Brower first started going out whaling with him back in the late 1960s: a sealskin boat perched at the edge of the ice, along with a simple canvas windbreak and a wooden sledge covered in caribou skins that serves as a makeshift bench.

Around the boat, a handful of whalers, including Brower’s brother, nephews and grandson, joke and talk as they watch the open water — waiting for the arcing backs of bowhead whales to come close enough for them to chase.

Though parts of this traditional hunt are the same as when Brower was a kid, there are some big differences. Chief among them: the ice.

For starters, the extent of the ice that attaches to the coast is shorter than it used to be. Walk a few dozen paces back from the ice’s edge, and you can see the buildings of downtown Utqiaġvik.

“I guarantee you, somebody’s looking at us with binoculars,” said Brower, laughing.

He said that even a decade and a half ago, the ice could extend 10 or 15 miles out from shore. Nowadays it’s usually more like a mile or two.

At least part of that has to do with the fact that Utqiaġvik’s winters have gotten milder.

“Certainly the weather has been very different about creating ice,” said Brower. “Not the very long, sustained 40 below, 30 below type weather.”

It also means that the ice is thinner.

“I think it’s changed quite a bit,” he said. “I mean, it looks the same, it’s just a different size. The ridges are different sizes.”

Brower is talking about pressure ridges: the mountains of this landscape created by the colliding plates of the ice. They not only rise into the air above the ice, they also go down below the water. If they go down far enough, they act like anchors, holding the ice in place on the ocean floor.

The thick ice of the past made bigger pressure ridges, Brower said, which meant bigger anchors and safer ice.

“I think it was a little more stable, and there was a little bit more assurance that the ice you were on was not going to disintegrate on you that easy,” said Brower. “Today you gotta think about it. And be more prepared and be more vigilant about your surrounding.”

Poorly-grounded ice can lead to what’s called a “breakout event” — a phenomenon where a piece of ice (potentially one that people are camped on) breaks free and starts floating away. Sometimes without the people on it even knowing it’s happening.

This past year, the temperatures in Utqiaġvik in the fall and early winter when the ice was forming were some of the warmest on record. And in early February, something really abnormal happened: At least 10 miles of shorefast ice in front of Utqiaġvik broke away, including in places that are typically very well-grounded.

Few people were going out on the ice at that time, and no one was hurt. But Brower said that if the ice wasn’t grounded well enough then, it gives him pause about trusting it now.

“So it’s kind of, like, iffy still,” he said. “If you had a good west wind and the water table came up, it can dislodge it and move it around.”

Talking to whalers in Utqiaġvik, they point to different ways that the ice is changing and different ways that impacts what they do.

Some talk about the ice being more susceptible to breakouts. Others say that it’s harder now to find ice thick enough to pull whales up onto.

Some call the ice conditions more “dangerous” than they used to be and speak about it with concern. Others say it doesn’t worry them; that they have the skills and knowledge to navigate the changes.

The thing you hear pretty much across the board is that whalers are finding ways to adapt.

Those adaptations are things like being more alert to how the ice is moving, and being more cautious about places where it might be thin. But it also could include replacing the traditional skin boats with motor boats when ice conditions deteriorate, so that if there is a breakout event, whalers can get back to the safe ice more quickly.

I asked Brower’s 35-year-old nephew Jack Frantz if all this change — and potentially more in the years ahead — makes him worry about the future of whaling in this community. He said it doesn’t.

“I’m always going to be out here hunting,” he said. “The ice conditions could be here or could not be here, but we’re going to find a way to hunt. … Even if the ice wasn’t here, we’d be waiting on the edge of the beach I guess for whales to show up.”

Whalers in Utqiaġvik describe whaling as their “life,” their “pride,” one of the things that brings their community together and connects them to their culture.

As long as there are bowhead whales swimming off the coast of Utqiaġvik in the spring, many hunters say they will find a way to get to them, no matter what happens to the ice.

A humpback whale that beached in Turnagain Arm south of Anchorage near Girdwood has died. Biologists say it is an uncommon location for a humpback, and they are now studying its death.

The whale became stranded Sunday and again Monday. It appeared to free itself Monday night, but its body washed ashore Tuesday a few miles away from where it had first beached.

On Wednesday, researchers carefully took measurements and samples, and subsistence users harvested blubber for food.

The whale looks to be 2 years old or a little younger, according to Kathy Burek, a veterinary pathologist and part of the National Marine Fisheries Service team investigating the whale’s death.

The researchers are still looking at what caused its death, but Burek said she thinks the whale might have been following fish or smaller whales that are better-suited for the narrow, shallow channels of Upper Cook Inlet.

“I really think the most likely thing is, this is just a really young animal. Maybe it followed the hooligan up or a bunch of belugas,” Burek said. “So I think he just got a little confused and headed up the arm and he just got lost and can’t get out.”

Samples taken from the whale can answer a variety of questions, including how stressed the whale had been in its final days or, looking at its genetics, how it is related to other whales, Burek said. They might not find a specific cause of death, she said, but there are still many research projects that will benefit from studying samples from the whale.

That includes a researcher in California who is hoping to get the whale’s entire head, which Burek guessed weighs more than a ton.

“Because he wants to get it into a freezer and then do an MRI, or a scan, of the entire head to try to look at the anatomy of a Mysticeti, or a baleen whale, head,” Burek said.

If it’s even possible, Burek said, the whale head would have to be hauled up a rocky embankment with heavy equipment. Testing of other, easier-to-get samples is already underway.

On Tuesday, 10 women were inducted into the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame.

One of them was Marie Adams Carroll from Utqiaġvik. She stepped into a leadership role as a young woman on the North Slope during a time of crisis — when subsistence activities were threatened — and has been involved in public life ever since.

She’s been called a folk hero. And people who have worked with her over her 40-year career — or have seen the fruits of her labor — consistently praise her leadership.

On a recent evening in Utqiaġvik, Carroll sat at her sister’s kitchen table and pulled out silky, crimson-red cuts of fabric for her sister Diana Martin to look at.

“This is real pretty!” Martin exclaimed, “My favorite color.”

Carroll and Martin were working on an atikluk — a traditional Iñupiaq formal shirt that Carroll planned to wear to the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame induction ceremony.

This house is where the two women grew up, along with nine brothers and sisters. And — you could say — where Carroll’s role as a leader began.

“We’d get all these chairs together and form a train, and play and play,” she remembered, “and about half-hour before mom would come home, I would become a queen.”

“I remember that!” said Martin, and the two women burst into laughter, reminiscing about how Carroll would command her siblings to do various cleanup activities.

Her leadership inclinations may have been sharpened in the clamor of sibling games. But she traces her interest in finding meaningful work back to a serious moment in her childhood: an illness she had when she was 6 or 7 years old.

“I felt like I was in and out of my body,” she said. “As I saw my body drifting away, I thought, ‘But God, I haven’t done anything with my life. I need to do something.'”

She recovered from that illness. But the feeling of needing to make her life mean something — that didn’t go away.

She saw education as a path to that, and she became the first person in her family to go to college.

But in 1977 — before she’d finished her bachelor’s degree — the North Slope was hit by some seismic news: The International Whaling Commission was concerned that the population of bowhead whales was too low to support a subsistence hunt, and had put a moratorium on it. That kicked off a huge fight in northern Alaska for the right to whale.

It was this moment that marked the real start of Carroll’s public career.

Her brother Jacob Adams was serving as chairman of the organization that formed to advocate for the whalers — the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission — and he and her and cousin Oliver Leavitt recruited her to work for the organization. A few years after she started, Adams and Leavitt proposed that she lead AEWC, and she became executive director.

At first, some whaling captains didn’t think a woman should be their representative. But that changed before too long, according to Leavitt.

“Marie became central around our life, because she represented us for the whale, and the ability to whale,” he said. “She was kind of the folk hero around here.”

Leavitt said that Carroll led with integrity and intelligence, and was instrumental in preserving the rights of northern Alaska communities to keep whaling.

Eventually, things settled down enough that Carroll felt she could leave whaling issues to try her hand at other things.

She worked in local government for a while — as the city manager for Utqiaġvik, and later as a top deputy for the mayor of the North Slope Borough.

And then another colossal task came her way. The tribal nonprofit health organization on the North Slope — Arctic Slope Native Association, or ASNA — wanted to build the region’s first modern hospital, and they asked Carroll to come on board as health director and lead that project. 

At the time, she said, the only medical facility in Utqiaġvik was run down and way too small to serve the needs of the community.

“There were only six exam rooms serving about 5,000 people,” she said. “We had outdated equipment. … When I first started they had duct tape on the nurse’s station.”

It took about a decade to get the new hospital funded, and another few years to build it.

Today, the Samuel Simmonds Memorial Hospital is a large, sleek building in Utqiaġvik, with light filtering into a high-ceiling lobby, and art by Iñupiaq artists decorating the walls.

It offers a much better-equipped emergency room than the old facility and a whole list of services that people once had to fly to Anchorage for.

And Carroll is responsible for making that happen. She’s now been with ASNA for 20 years, over a decade of those as president and CEO.

Richard Hall — the hospital administrator — said her leadership has had a distinct vision.

“She’s always wanted everyone in this community to have the same type of health opportunities that you have in the big cities,” he said.

Carroll is in her 60s now. She said this is the job she’ll retire from.

But asking around about her in Utqiaġvik — where people speak with pride about her accomplishments and with deep respect for her as a person — it’s clear that the things she’s done on the North Slope will be remembered long after she stops clocking in.

Juneau middle schoolers traveled to Western Alaska last month as part of a sister school exchange. The program aims to bridge the gap between urban and rural Alaska, showing students how different life can be around the state, but also how much they have in common.

Their visit also happened to coincide with the earliest spring breakup the region has ever seen — a bonus lesson for the students that made a big impression.

Before last month, Mackenzie Olver had never set foot in Western Alaska, let alone in a village of a couple hundred people in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

That’s exactly why she went: Olver took part in a program funded by the Alaska Humanities Forum that sends Alaska students across the state on short-term exchanges to places very different from their hometowns.

Juneau’s Dzantik’i Heeni Middle School was matched with the school in Akiuk, part of the village of Kasigluk. It’s an all-in-one school, preschool to 12th grade — about a hundred students altogether.

Olver said her first impression of Akiuk was about what she expected.

“Very small, not many people, very flat. The geography did not include, like, any mountains or trees,” she said.

But she was quickly surprised by the warm welcome she and her classmates received. Especially from some of the village’s youngest residents.

“They like, came right up and were ready for piggyback rides,” Olver said.

Sandra Bouvier agrees. Like Olver, she’s in eighth grade at Dzantik’i Heeni. She said that even in their short time in the village, they got to feel like a part of things — at a community dance, or at someone’s sweet sixteen birthday party where it felt like everyone was there, eating beaver stew and celebrating together.

“You had to like, kind of shimmy through. It was crazy,” Bouvier said. “It’s all just connected. Like everybody knows everyone, and it’s not just asking your neighbor for like flour or something. You could go to anyone, pretty much.”

And the students got to see firsthand that community is not just about celebration — it’s also about survival. Like many rural Alaskans, most of Akiuk’s residents rely on subsistence activities like hunting and fishing to feed their families. That requires a lot of cooperation and sharing of skills and knowledge.

As it turns out, the Juneau students were in town for a momentous occasion: spring breakup, when the river ice cracks and melts away. The students watched as what had been a frozen solid highway for snowmachines and even cars quickly became open water.

The significance wasn’t lost on Olver.

“Many people in the village described it as the earliest breakup in 95 to 100 years,” she said. “So it’s really scary to see how climate change has really changed life.”

Breakup dashed some of the Juneau students’ plans. Crossing the river was suddenly a lot more difficult and dangerous, and the students said no one in the village was willing to take that risk with other people’s children.

Jay Lloyd led the trip to Akiuk. He’s a language arts and history teacher at Dzantik’i Heeni.

“And you know, we ask people about, you know, is it easier when the river’s open or when it’s frozen? And they’re like, ‘Frozen, because we can take our snowmachines anywhere then.’ You can just shoot across everything. They’re like, ‘Winter’s better,'” Lloyd said.

Instead of snowmachining down the river to Bethel for the Cama-i Dance Festival, Lloyd and the students got to see the start of spring fishing and birding — much earlier than normal.

It’s a perspective Lloyd appreciates.

“I look at, you know, the changes that are going on all over the place, and it’s, you know, ‘Hey, everybody has to adapt to them, and we’ll adapt,’ but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s for the better,” he said.

Lloyd said the value of the program is more than showing students how different life can be in other parts of the state. Actually, he said, it teaches them how much they have in common.

“They dress the same, they look the same, they listen to the same stuff. They like to play basketball, they like to play volleyball. They’re all on their phones, they’re all Snapchatting and whatever else. So a 14-year-old’s a 14-year-old, no matter where you are,” said Lloyd.

A week after the Juneau students returned home, a few students from Akiuk traveled to the capital city, completing the exchange.