Hunting Whales and Seals: The Sea-Mammal Hunters

Status: Researched draft — cultural review pending

How to read this entry: Documented fact = archaeological record, treaty text, or published scholarship (Sources). Tradition — the people's own account = a people's oral history or organisation teaching, labelled as such. Debated / Claim = disputed point, printed as a sourced range or disagreement. Scope: a history in time, not a technique catalogue. Peoples are kept separate — Iñupiaq, Yupik, Inuit, Dorset, Thule, Makah, and Nuu-chah-nulth — and one people's method, terms, or rights are not transferred to another.

The Toggling Harpoon: Invention, Old Bering Sea, and Dorset

• What toggling means. Documented fact: A fixed point tends to pull out of a diving sea mammal, so the toggling head sits loosely on a foreshaft, detaches on impact, and line tension through an off-centre hole toggles it sideways under skin and muscle, so it cannot be drawn back through its entry hole. The line, not the shaft, holds the animal. The full harpoon was composite: shaft, ivory socket and foreshaft, head tipped with stone or later metal, sinew line, and in whaling a float (Metropolitan Museum of Art, n.d.; Fitzhugh & Kaplan, 1982).
• Date — a disagreement. Debated / Claim: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (n.d.) puts the advent of the toggling harpoon at “about 1500 BCE.” Other Bering Strait sequences place fully developed, decorated toggling heads in Okvik and Old Bering Sea cultures of the first millennium CE (Collins, 1937; Mason et al., 2019). No single invention year is asserted; the dispute is over dating and what counts as the first true toggle.
• Old Bering Sea. Documented fact: Centred on St. Lawrence Island and both Bering Strait shores, Old Bering Sea hunters carved toggling heads, socket pieces, and winged counterweights in walrus ivory (Old Bering Sea I–III) (Collins, 1937; Fitzhugh, 2009). One later head is dated about 400–800 CE (Loovers, 2022). Revised radiocarbon work narrows early Okvik / Old Bering Sea occupation to about 300–600 CE, expanding about 500–1000 CE, continuing alongside Punuk and Birnirk to about 1400 CE (Mason et al., 2019).
• Why it changed the hunt. Documented fact: Toggling, with line and float, let a hunter stay connected to a large diving animal from kayak or skin boat, and let several hunters fasten to one animal. Used for seal, walrus, and eventually whales, it remained in use into the twentieth century (Fitzhugh & Kaplan, 1982).
• Dorset — separate history. Documented fact: Dorset culture, roughly 500 BCE–1500 CE in the eastern Arctic, also used toggling heads in its own forms, for seal and walrus (McGhee, 1996; Maxwell, 1985). Debated / Claim: Dorset large-whale hunting is not established on the Thule scale: whale bone in Dorset sites may come from hunts, scavenged strandings, or smaller whales. Dorset is not credited here with the Thule whaling system (McGhee, 1996; Maxwell, 1985).

The Thule Expansion, c. 1000 CE and After

• Who and when. Documented fact: Thule culture, ancestral to modern Inuit, developed in northern Alaska and spread east across the Canadian Archipelago to Greenland (McGhee, 1996; Mathiassen, 1927). Debated / Claim: Textbooks long placed the main movement at about 1000 CE; McGhee (2000) proposed the 1200s on revised radiocarbon grounds. “c. 1000 CE” is used here only as conventional shorthand.
• The whaling explanation. Documented fact: Mathiassen (1927) argued Thule success rested in part on the skin boat, kayak, dog sled, and open-water whaling. McGhee (1969; 1996) developed this: Thule families followed bowheads east as warming — the Medieval Warm Period, c. 900–1200 CE — extended bowhead range eastward.
• Challenge. Debated / Claim: Revised dating, sea-ice data, and bowhead genetics argue the migration began as the Little Ice Age began, under heavier ice (Mason, 2020). The rapid spread and whaling link are not in dispute; trigger and century are.
• Whaling villages. Documented fact: Early Thule winter houses were framed in part with bowhead bone, beside large middens. At one Somerset Island complex: 11 whalebone houses and at least 125 bowheads (Savelle, 2002; UAF, 2008). Savelle estimated use of up to about 60 percent of a carcass — his estimate, not a universal rate.
• Adaptation. Documented fact: As climate cooled, some large whaling villages gave way to smaller, more mobile settlement focused more on seal and caribou; whaling stayed central where bowheads remained accessible, notably northern Alaska (McGhee, 1996; Maxwell, 1985).

Open-Water Whaling: Iñupiaq and Yupik, the Umiak and the Umialik

• The boat. Documented fact: The umiaq is a large open skin boat — wood frame, walrus or bearded-seal skins sewn with sinew — used in late spring and fall for the whale migration, and for transport (National Park Service, n.d.; Murdoch, 1892).
• Crew and captain. Documented fact: A whaling umiaq worked under a captain. One museum account describes the umialik at the stern directing six paddlers, a harpooner in the bow; crew sizes vary and are not generalised from it (Penn Museum, n.d.; Spencer, 1959). Umialik — boat-owner / whaling captain in Iñupiaq sources — controlled boat and gear, recruited and fed the crew, bore the season’s costs, and owed distribution; status followed success and generosity (Spencer, 1959; Murdoch, 1892). St. Lawrence Island Yupik whaling had parallel organisation in its own terms (Hughes, 1960).
• Harpoon-float (avataq) method. Documented fact: The harpooner struck with a toggling head on a line to inflated sealskin floats — avataq in Iñupiaq usage, forms varying. One account specifies three floats; others give different numbers by whale and period (Penn Museum, n.d.; Murdoch, 1892; Spencer, 1959). Thrown clear, floats dragged, tired the whale, and marked its dive, until crews closed and lanced it. Darting guns and bomb lances were added later, on dates differing by community (Bockstoce, 1986).
• Sharing. Documented fact: Prescribed sharing of meat and muktuk (skin with blubber) beyond the crew — to other crews, elders, and community — and post-season feasts are consistently recorded; butchering and processing involved the wider community, including women’s work (Spencer, 1959; NOAA–AEWC materials, 1981 onward). Tradition — the people's own account: Accounts published by whaling communities and the AEWC describe the whale as giving itself to a prepared, respectful crew and captain’s household. Recorded at that published level only; whaling ceremonial content is not described beyond it.
• Smaller whales. Documented fact: The same technology served, with local variation, for beluga (including shallow-water communal drives, Inuvialuit / Mackenzie Delta and Kotzebue Sound), walrus, and bearded seal — distinct hunts (National Park Service, n.d.; Nuligak, 1966).

Seal Hunting: Staff of the Coastal Economy

• Ringed seal. Documented fact: The ringed seal was, across much of the coastal Arctic, the most reliable year-round resource — food, lamp oil, clothing, boat covers, line, and floats — through winter ice and summer water (Boas, 1888; Rasmussen, 1929; Freeman, ed., 1976). Bearded seal skin was valued for line and covers; importance is regional (Nelson, 1899).
• At the breathing hole (aglu). Documented fact: Ringed seals maintain breathing holes — aglu (agluit) — through land-fast ice. Boas (1888) and Rasmussen (1929; 1931), for Iglulik and Netsilik Inuit, describe hunters locating holes, often with dogs scenting them, each man at a separate hole, standing motionless on skin or fur to muffle sound, harpoon ready for hours. At the breath he thrust, played the line, enlarged the hole, and hauled the seal out. The hunt is mauliq in some Inuktitut sources. Details differ by region and are not merged.
• Under-ice netting. Documented fact: Especially in Alaska and parts of the western Canadian Arctic, nets were set under ice between holes or across seal channels, checked through the ice (Nelson, 1899; Spencer, 1959; Burch, 1975). Netting supplemented breathing-hole hunting in some places, rivalled it in others, and is barely recorded elsewhere — no single “Inuit method” is asserted.
• Open water. Documented fact: In spring and summer seals were harpooned from kayaks and later small boats, taken at the floe edge, and stalked on ice (Boas, 1888; Rasmussen, 1929; Nelson, 1899). The harpoon stayed essential after firearms arrived, because a shot seal can sink; line and float secured it (Freeman, ed., 1976).
• Dependence. Documented fact: Land-use studies recorded seal as the species taken in largest numbers by many coastal communities; a bad ice year meant hunger, lamp-oil shortage, and loss of clothing and boat material together — hence later sealing disruptions struck subsistence and income together (Freeman, ed., 1976; Usher, 1971).

Makah Whaling: Cedar Canoes, Ozette, and a Treaty Right

• Antiquity. Documented fact: The Makah Tribe — own name rendered Qʷidiččaʔa·tx̌ — lives around Neah Bay and Cape Flattery, Washington (MCRC, n.d.). Accounts place Makah whaling at at least 1,500 years; some say 2,000 — a range (Brown, n.d.; MCRC, n.d.).
• Ozette. Documented fact: Ozette village, near Cape Alava, was partly buried by a mudslide — dated about 1700, or about 1750, flagged here — sealing houses in clay that preserved wood, fibre, and bone. Storm erosion exposed houses in 1970; collaborative excavation by Makah members and Washington State University archaeologist Richard Daugherty over about eleven years recovered more than 55,000 artifacts — longhouses, whaling and sealing gear, harpoon parts, lanyards, float parts, and whale bone throughout the village (Archaeology Magazine, 2022; MCRC, n.d.). A carved whale dorsal-fin object inlaid with over 700 sea-otter teeth, from a high-status household, is at the Makah Museum (MCRC, n.d.).
• Canoes, crews, chiefs — published level. Documented fact: Historic Makah whaling used large cedar dugout canoes, crews conventionally described as eight men, under a whaling chief / harpooner whose right was hereditary and also earned through apprenticeship (Renker, 1997; Swan, 1870; MCRC, n.d.). Grey, humpback, right, and fin whales are named historically, grey central to the revival (Renker, 2007). Ceremonial detail families have not published is not described.
• Treaty of Neah Bay, 1855. Documented fact: Signed 31 January 1855, the treaty records the Makah ceding most of their land and reserving in Article 4 “the right of taking fish and of whaling or sealing at usual and accustomed grounds and stations” (Treaty of Neah Bay, 1855). Makah sources stress they are the only U.S. tribe with whaling explicitly reserved in a treaty in those terms (MCRC, n.d.).
• Stop, recovery, 1999. Documented fact: Makah whaling ceased in the 1920s as commercial whaling depleted grey whales — a voluntary stop in Makah accounts (Makah Tribe, n.d.; Renker, 1997). The eastern North Pacific grey whale was delisted under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 1994 (NOAA Fisheries, 1994). After IWC approval of a U.S. aboriginal-subsistence request for the Makah, a crew from cedar canoe Hummingbird harpooned a grey whale on 17 May 1999 off Cape Alava and killed it with a high-powered rifle immediately after, under the plan’s humane-kill provision — the first documented Makah whale in over 70 years (NOAA / IWC, 1997–99). Further hunting was halted in litigation, notably Metcalf v. Daley (9th Cir., 2000). No later Makah take is asserted.

Nuu-chah-nulth Whaling

• A distinct, related people. Documented fact: The Nuu-chah-nulth, on the west coast of Vancouver Island and closely related to Makah and Ditidaht, were with Makah the principal Indigenous whalers of the Northwest Coast, taking grey and humpback whales from large cedar canoes with harpoons, lanyards, and sealskin floats, followed by lancing — parallel Wakashan practice, not copying (Drucker, 1951; Arima & Dewhirst, 1990).
• Chiefly office. Documented fact: Whaling was the prerogative of hereditary chiefs (ha’wiih). Grounds, gear, crews, names, and displays were inherited, publicly validated property, extending to offshore waters, salvage, songs, and ceremonial privileges (Drucker, 1951). A chief’s distribution of oil, blubber, and meat carried prestige beyond food value; a drift whale ashore in his territory was itself a chiefly right (Drucker, 1951).
• Antiquity and decline. Debated / Claim: McMillan (1999) and McMillan & St. Claire (2005) argue for whaling at least 1,500–2,000 years on this coast (Yuquot, Barkley Sound); organised whaling, versus use of beached whales, is debated site by site. Documented fact: The hunt declined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as commercial whaling depleted stocks and colonial regulation and mission and residential-school pressure disrupted chiefly organisation. No modern Nuu-chah-nulth take is claimed (Arima & Dewhirst, 1990).

Disruption: The Commercial Era

• Western Arctic, 1848–1914. Documented fact: In 1848 Captain Thomas Welcome Roys, in Superior, took the first Bering Strait bowheads for the American fleet (Bockstoce, 1986). Bockstoce estimates about 18,600 bowheads killed in that region to 1914, first for oil, then for baleen. Shore stations employed Iñupiaq, Yupik, and Chukchi hunters commercially, while disease and walrus and caribou depletion brought hunger (Bockstoce, 1986).
• Eastern totals. Debated / Claim: Higdon (2009) estimates roughly 58,000–69,000 bowheads commercially caught in the eastern Canadian Arctic, about 1530–1915 — a modelled range, not comparable with Bockstoce’s single-region figure. Woodby & Botkin (1993) modelled a global pre-whaling minimum near 50,000 falling to under 8,000. No single original population is asserted.
• Indigenous hunts curtailed. Documented fact: By the early twentieth century bowheads and Pacific grey whales were so depleted that millennia-old hunts could no longer rely on them. Canadian Inuit bowhead hunting largely ceased, was later prohibited, and revived under licence only in the 1990s (Higdon, 2009). The Geneva Convention (1931) and London Agreement (1937) banned commercial taking of right and grey whales for their parties; the 1946 convention created the IWC (1948–49), preserving an aboriginal-subsistence exception in principle (ICRW, 1946).
• Commercial sealing — two histories apart. Documented fact: The Newfoundland and Gulf harp-seal fishery industrialised in the nineteenth century, taking seals in the hundreds of thousands in peak years. In the Arctic the blow fell differently: trade demand, walrus-ivory trade, depletion by commercial vessels, and later a sealskin cash market that became a key income source in many Inuit communities (Bockstoce, 1986; Wenzel, 1991).
• Market collapse. Documented fact: An EEC ban on whitecoat pup imports (1983) and a broader EU seal-products ban (2009, Inuit exemption of limited market value) followed campaigns against the Atlantic pup hunt. The 1983 ban, not aimed at Inuit, collapsed ringed-seal skin prices for Canadian Inuit (Wenzel, 1991; Inuit Circumpolar Council, 2006 onward). Inuit organisations distinguish their ringed-seal economy from the Atlantic commercial hunt; this entry preserves that distinction.

Modern Co-Management: The 1977 Bowhead Crisis

• The ban. Documented fact: In 1977 the IWC, on an assessment putting the Bering Sea bowhead stock at roughly 600–2,000 — as reported in IWC and AEWC histories — removed bowheads from the aboriginal-subsistence exemption, effectively banning the Alaska Eskimo hunt. Communities had not been heard (IWC, 1977–78; Huntington, 1989; AEWC, n.d.).
• Captains’ counter-estimate. Tradition — the people's own account, as published by the AEWC: Captains held there were at least 4,000 bowheads (AEWC, n.d.) — their published account, not a census result.
• AEWC founded. Documented fact: Captains founded the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission in 1977 — nine founding captains in some accounts, eleven villages in others, flagged here. It adopted a management plan, registered captains, pressed the U.S. to object, and at a special IWC meeting in December 1977 a small quota was restored for 1978 (Huntington, 1989; NOAA, 2008).
• Science that followed. Documented fact: The dispute turned on whales passing under ice or beyond census view. North Slope Borough, NOAA, and AEWC-supported research added acoustic monitoring under ice, later aerial and genetic methods, and correction factors, raising accepted western Arctic estimates into the several thousands and, in later assessments, above 10,000, with an increasing trend (Zeh et al., 1990s–2000s). Figures are assessment-specific; none is asserted as current.
• Co-management in law. Documented fact: Since 1981 the AEWC has managed the local hunt under a Cooperative Agreement with NOAA — allocating strikes among villages, enforcing registration and reporting, representing villages at the IWC (NOAA–AEWC, 1981; NOAA, 2008). Other northern Alaska regimes followed, including the Eskimo Walrus Commission (Huntington, 1992). In Canada, the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board (Nunavut Agreement, 1993) co-manages whale harvesting and licensed revival bowhead hunts in the 1990s. Greenland Kalaallit hunting proceeds under IWC quotas in a separate history. Makah whaling proceeds under treaty right plus U.S. law and IWC quota — legally distinct from the AEWC model.
• Continuance. Documented fact: Umiak bowhead whaling continues in northern and western Alaska under AEWC / NOAA co-management; seal hunting continues across Inuit Nunangat, Alaska, and Greenland, combining harpoon, rifle, snowmachine, and boat as ice dictates.

Sources

AEWC (n.d.); Archaeology Magazine (2022); Arima & Dewhirst (1990); Bockstoce (1986); Boas (1888); Brown (n.d.); Burch (1975); Collins (1937; 1973); Drucker (1951); Fitzhugh & Kaplan (1982); Fitzhugh et al. (2009); Freeman, ed. (1976); Higdon (2009); Hughes (1960); Huntington (1989; 1992); ICRW (1946); IWC (1977–78); Inuit Circumpolar Council (2006– ); Loovers (2022); Makah Cultural and Research Center / Makah Tribe (n.d.); Mason et al. (2019); Mason (2020); Mathiassen (1927); Maxwell (1985); McGhee (1969; 1996; 2000); McMillan (1999); McMillan & St. Claire (2005); Metropolitan Museum of Art (n.d.); Murdoch (1892); National Park Service (n.d.); Nelson (1899); NOAA (1994; 2008); NOAA–AEWC Cooperative Agreement (1981); Nuligak (1966); Penn Museum (n.d.); Rasmussen (1929; 1931); Renker (1997; 2007); Savelle (2002); UAF Geophysical Institute (2008); Spencer (1959); Swan (1870); Treaty of Neah Bay (1855); Usher (1971); Wenzel (1991); Woodby & Botkin (1993); Zeh et al. (1990s–2000s). Key titles: Bockstoce, Whales, Ice, and Men; Boas, The Central Eskimo; Collins, Archaeology of St. Lawrence Island; Drucker, The Northern and Central Nootkan Tribes; McGhee, Ancient People of the Arctic; Wenzel, Animal Rights, Human Rights.

Flagged claims and weakest-sourced points: (1) Toggling-harpoon date — c. 1500 BCE vs. first-millennium-CE fluorescence; do not publish one date without explaining the definition. (2) Thule migration — c. 1000 CE vs. 1200s; climate causation debated. (3) Ozette slide — c. 1700 vs. c. 1750. (4) Makah antiquity — 1,500 vs. 2,000 years. (5) Bowhead totals — Bockstoce, Higdon, and Woodby & Botkin are modelled estimates on different bases, not comparable counts. (6) AEWC founding counts and the 1977 stock figure (600–2,000) are quoted from AEWC / IWC histories, not endorsed. (7) Current bowhead abundance — quote the latest IWC / NOAA assessment at publication. (8) Weakest overall: Dorset whaling, Nuu-chah-nulth antiquity by site, and under-ice netting's relative importance. A Newfoundland sealing figure (c. 13 million, 1830–60, via Mowat) was removed as too weakly sourced.