Five hundred years ago, in a mountain-ringed ocean fjord in southeastern Alaska, Tlingit hunters armed with bone harpoons ran their canoes through chunks of floating ice in search of seals near the Sít Tlein (Hubbard)- glacier. They must have looked nervously up at the looming, broken face of the glacier, aware that ice streams could thunder down and endanger the boats – and their lives. As they approached, they are said to have asked the seals to give themselves as food for the people and spoke to the spirit of Sít Tlein to release the animals from his care.
Tlingit elders in the Alaska Native village of Yakutat today describe their ancestors’ daring hunt for harbor seals, or “tsaa,” and the people’s respect for the spirits of the mountains, glaciers, ocean and animals of their subarctic world.
Long ago, they say, migrating clans of the Eyak, Ahtna and Tlingit tribes settled in the Yakutat Fjord when the glacier retreated. They changed their hunting camps over time to stay close to the ice floe colony where the animals gave birth each spring. Clan leaders managed hunting to prevent premature harvest, overhunting or waste, reflecting indigenous values of respect and balance between people and nature.
Now the 300 Tlingit residents of Yakutat continue this way of life in modern form, harvesting more than 100 different fish, birds, marine mammals, land game and plants for their livelihood. Harbor seals are the most important; their rich meat and blubber are prepared according to traditional recipes and eaten at daily and memorial meals.
Yet the community faces a crisis: the dramatic decline of the seal population in the Gulf of Alaska due to commercial hunting in the mid-20th century and the animals’ inability to recover due to warming ocean waters. To protect the seals and their way of life, residents are turning to traditional ecological knowledge and ancestral conservation practices.
We are an Arctic archaeologist studying human interactions with the marine ecosystem and a Tlingit tribal historian of the Yakutat Kwáashk’i Kdelusion clan. We are two of the leaders of a project that investigated the historical roots of the situation.
Our collaborative research, which brought together archaeologists, environmental scientists, Tlingit elders, and the Yakutat Tlingit tribe, has been published as the book “LaaXaayík, Near the Glacier: Indigenous History and Ecology in Yakutat Fiord, Alaska.” In it we describe the changing way of life of the indigenous people and the changing relationship with their glacial environment over the past 1000 years. To do this, we have combined indigenous knowledge of history and ecology with scientific methods and data.
Ancestral sealing
According to oral tradition, the village of Tlákw.aan (“old town”) was built on an island in the Yakutat fjord near the GineX Kwáan, an Ahtna clan from the Copper River who migrated through the mountains, intermarried with the Eyak and exchanged ceremonial copper shields for land in their new territory. They lived off the fjord’s abundant resources and hunted in the seal colony near the retreating glacier, which was then a few kilometers to the north.
Today, Tlákw.aan is a cluster of clan homesteads in a quiet forest clearing, and our excavations there in 2014 were aimed at learning more about the lives of the residents and their use of seals before Western contact.
Radiocarbon dating shows that Tlákw.aan was built around 1450 AD, which aligns oral accounts with geologists’ reconstruction of the glacier’s position at that time. Artifacts confirm the identity of Ahtna and Eyak of the inhabitants. Sealing artifacts found at the site include harpoon points, stone oil lamps, skin scrapers, and copper flange blades. Common seal bones are common, with more than half coming from young animals captured in the rookery.
The location reflects native conditions: an abundant seal population, dependence on seals for meat, oil and skins, and sustainable hunting in the glacier colony.
Impact of commercial sealing
The American purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 disrupted the traditional seal hunt in Yakutat. To meet rising global demand for seal skins and oil, the Alaska Commercial Company supplied Alaska Native communities with guns and recruited them to kill harbor seals by the thousands.
Yakutat was an important hunting ground for the new industry from about 1870 to 1915, and each spring the entire community moved from their main winter village to hunting camps near the glacier. Men shot seals and women prepared the skins, smoked the meat and turned blubber into oil. In the fall the men paddled ocean-going canoes, loaded with seal products for trade, to the Alaska Commercial Company’s post in Prince William Sound.
We compared historical data and accounts of elders from this era with archaeological evidence from Keik’uliyaa, the largest camp. The scale of the enterprise is evident from photographs from 1899 showing long rows of canvas tents, smokehouses, seal skins drying on rafters, hunting canoes washed ashore and women flanging piles of seal carcasses. Within the rock contours of the tents we found glass beads, rifle cartridges, nails, glass containers, and other trade goods that reflected the community’s changing culture and its integration into the capitalist market system.
Commercial hunting overloaded the seals’ reproductive capacity, leading to a population crash in the 1920s. This cycle repeated itself in the 1960s, when world prices for hides rose and hundreds of thousands of harbor seals were captured in the Gulf of Alaska by Alaska Native hunters, exceeding sustainable yields. The seal population declined by 80% to 90%.
Although the commercial seal hunt ended in 1972 with the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the seals have never recovered. The days when the ice floes were “black with seals,” as Yakutat elder George Ramos Sr. remembered, are gone, perhaps forever. Warming oceans due to global climate change and an adverse Pacific Decadal Oscillation cycle have reduced the amount of fish important in the seals’ diet, clouding prospects for their comeback.
Care for seals and the community
In response, Yakutat residents changed their diet and sharply reduced hunting. In 2015, they took 345 seals – about one per person – compared to 640 in 1996. There is now very little hunting in the floe colony, which allows the seals to raise their young. undisturbed.
The community works with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Alaska Native Harbor Seal Commission to monitor and co-manage the herd, bringing their native expertise in seal behavior and ecology. They have also been active in efforts to protect the seal colony from disturbance by cruise ships.
The Yakutat people are once again committed to the ancestral principles of responsible care and spiritual concern for seals, seeking to ensure the survival of the species and the continuation of the life-sustaining indigenous tradition of seal hunting.
This article is republished from The Conversation, an independent nonprofit organization providing facts and analysis to help you understand our complex world.
It was written by: Aron L. Crowell, Smithsonian attitude and Judith Daxʱootsú Ramos, University of Alaska Southeast.
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Aron L. Crowell receives funding from the National Science Foundation, National Park Foundation, Sealaska Heritage Foundation, and the Smithsonian Institution.
Judith Dax̱ootsú Ramos receives funding from Cook Inlet Region, Alaska Native Heritage Center.