A Heart-to-Heart with Mythical Alaska

At the Alaska Bioneers conference in October, I attended Jaime Van Lanen’s workshop on regional wild food procurement. Jaime, an anthropologist studying Alaskan subsistence patterns, has a passion for indigenous ways of procuring food. Last year, he successfully hunted a Moose with a primitive bow.

Jaime started the workshop with some myth busting: rather than the land of abundance that many of us envision, Alaska is a biological desert. Typical of northern climes, Alaska has a low biomass and not much diversity of plant and animal species. “But what about all the Moose, and the Caribou herds?” I can hear some of you asking, “and the rivers teeming with Salmon?” Moose hunters have only a 19% success rate, stated Jaime, and it is even lower for Caribou. Unless you are a subsistence hunter, you must enter a lottery in hopes of getting a tag, and for an open hunt you need to go all the way up to the North Slope. The total Caribou population is 950,000, while Michigan, a state only 15% the size of Alaska, has a Whitetail Deer herd numbering twice that of Alaska’s Caribou.

After Jaime and the other participants stated that many residents can take advantage of seasonal protein concentrations such as running Salmon and migrating Caribou, Jaime recounted an interview he did several years ago with an over 90-year-old Athabascan elder who lived his whole life on the Black River. “Tell me more about [life in] the 1800s,” Jaime asked. The elder replied, “Straight meat, you gotta like it.”

In order to live off of such a thinly-spread biomass, Jaime said that all subsistence hunters today, including Natives, rely on four wheelers, motorboats, and snow sleds. Gas is already $10 a gallon in some communities, and when it and the subsidies to purchase it are no longer available, Jaime believes there is going to be a mass population exodus. He says that without fuel and ammo, even the state’s best hunters will go hungry.

What did all of this mean to the workshop participants? Most of them felt strengthened in their commitments to climate-adapted gardening, supplemented by subsistence hunting and fishing. Jaime, on the other hand, said he’ll continue collecting as much as he can of the little-remaining knowledge of regional foraging and preservation methods. He added that that sedentary living and reliance on carbon fuels have erased irreplaceable knowledge in just two generations.

For me, the workshop was further confirmation that if it doesn’t come from your bioregion, it doesn’t contribute to sustainability. In fact, it accelerates the downward spiral to unsustainability. I don’t know of anything better at destroying while creating the illusion of helping than fossil fuels and firearms. As the Elders have told me, Earth Mother provides all that we need within our regional Hoop of Life.