The Point Hope 8

SECOND OF THREE-PART SERIES:

In March 2009, nearly eight months after news of a an alleged caribou massacre near Point Hope rippled across Alaska, eight hunters from a Native subsistence community on the edge of the Chukchi Sea found themselves accused of wasting caribou during an infamous Fourth of July hunt. Though their remote village remained cloaked in the ice and snow of winter, there was suddenly a new round of concerns about what had happened a summer before. The Point Hope eight spanned a wide range of age and hunting experience; some still lived at home with their parents, while others were on their own. A few had their own young families for which to care.

At the age of 30, Aqquiluk Hank, a husband, a father and the Little Dribblers basketball coach, was the oldest of the group. The youngest, Koomalook Stone, was 18 and still working to finish high school.

The case against them turned on a state law that sometimes rubs against traditional practices. Sports and subsistence hunters alike in Alaska are saddled with strict requirements for salvaging meat from their kills. The law says "all edible meat" must be taken and goes so far as to stipulate that this includes the meat between the ribs and attached to the bones of the neck. Technically, Rep. Carol Gatto told the State House Resources Committee in 2006, a hunter couldn't legally leave behind "even a molecule."

All hunters in Alaska -- trophy or subsistence hunters, resident or non-resident, Native or white -- are required to abide by this waste law, but it has been rarely enforced upon subsistence hunters in rural areas where people are sometimes processing many animals in a short period of time to obtain enough meat to last most of the year. In such circumstances, to save time, meat is sometimes left between the ribs or on the neck.

Though this has sometimes become an issue, mainly with non-local hunters who complain they are being held to a higher salvage standard, state wildlife biologists have usually interpreted the law liberally, at least as it regards caribou in areas with huge surpluses of the animals. The Western Arctic caribou herd numbers nearly 400,000, and the annual subsistence take is estimated at only 14,000 to 16,000, with another 400 to 800 animals killed by non-subsistence and trophy hunters. This harvest of less than 5 percent is considered to be what the herd can support on an annual basis. The herd is so large that on several occasions since 1990, large die-offs of 2,000 to 4,000 caribou have been tied to localized food depletion causing starvation.

Given such numbers, there is little concern if some meat is wasted by local residents. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game, which is responsible for tracking such things, doesn't even try to quantify it in the Western Arctic. Still, the same waste laws are in place there as elsewhere in Alaska, and every hunter is expected to comply.

As with so many rules in Alaska, though, these laws float across a cultural divide that shapes interpretations. In Point Hope, as in some other communities, there is a traditional -- and loosely followed -- belief that hunters should leave untouched animals that appear diseased or for some other reason inedible. Many of the hunters accused in the Point Hope case claim that is the reason they failed to salvage all of the meat.