Whaling is an essential part of subsistence hunting in Siberian Yupik culture and high school student Tracy Tungiyan, in the village of Gambell on Saint Lawrence Island, wanted to understand more about it. So he interviewed a whaling captain from the community, William Parks, nicknamed ‘Wiyu.’
Tungiyan asked him whether whaling is easy or difficult.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
William ‘Wiyu’ Parks: There's a degree of difficulty in it. You got to think of how enormous the whale is. You're in basically a wash tub compared to the size of that whale. Depending on how the whale is moving, it could be pretty straightforward, catch up to it, strike. And there's some days where the tails are really thrashing. You can't get close to them.
We use these harpoons that have a barrel on there. We call them Puskaan. I don't know what they're called in English. I've always known them as Puskaan. It has a harpoon, buoy, line buoy, and it fires either a black powder bomb or a penthrite bomb into the whale.
Tracy Tungiyan: What does hunting mean to you?
WP: That's a good question. To me, hunting is mostly about survival, it's about tradition, and it's about feeding family, relatives as a community, which is the most important part of life, in my opinion. You need food to survive.
I think mostly it's like second nature to me. I don't even think of how important this is to me anymore, more so that it's the way I was brought up to live. It's a part of me. It's been a part of me since I was two, three years old.
TT: Was it easier hunting back then?
WP: Back then it was- seasons were more predictable. Weather was more predictable. In a way, it was easier. Nowadays, with lack of ice, bigger storms, shorter opportunities to head out. Yeah, I think it's more difficult now compared to back then. The windows of good weather are getting shorter.
I know that everybody that goes hunting isn't doing it for fun or sport. They're doing it (as a) means of trying to harvest food. It’s a part of who we are as people, as the community. Hunting is part of our nature. It's been for thousands of years.
TT: Why is catching a whale so important for Gambell?
WP: I think it's important mostly because of the size of the catch. There's enough to feed everybody. Just the sheer size of the whale. It's an opportunity to feed the community, to have a community gather. Whaling has been part of our culture since the first whale swam and man saw it. It was a means of survival.
Tungiyan produced that story with former KNOM reporter Wali Rana and Alaska Public Media’s Rachel Cassandra as part of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant-funded collaborative media project.
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