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Culture Bearer: Catching village spirit with a harpoon

Published on November 16th, 2009

By VICTORIA BARBER

When Dorcus Neakok died about a year and half ago, she took with her the last living memory of whaling in Point Lay. She alone was left of those that had hauled muktak by dog team in 1930s, and in the years after she had witnessed the village decline to the point where she, her husband and son were its sole inhabitants.

Neakok would have been gladdened to see the village - now numbering 250 strong - help pull the 49-foot, 7-inch bowhead whale out of the ocean this spring. Harpooned by Julius Rexford's Atkaan Crew, it was the first whale landed in the village in 72 years.

Getting to that harvest was a long journey, and Rexford was honored for his part with the "Culture Bearer" President's Award last month.

"It was a lot of work over the years, a lot of people contributed to starting our whaling culture again," Rexford said.

Born and raised in Barrow, Rexford began whaling when he was 9 years old as part of the Luther Leavitt whaling crew. Around 1994 Rexford moved to Point Lay but he continued to whale out of Barrow every year, traveling 200 miles north by snowmachine each spring and staying a month or longer.

Rexford had heard stories of whale hunts out of Point Lay, which had ended when the village got too small to handle the harvest. But by the mid-90s there were almost 200 people living in the village. Like Rexford, many of them were traveling to other communities for whaling season each year. He soon began petitioning for Point Lay to have its own whaling quota.

What followed was a long and daunting bureaucratic process to earn Point Lay the right to its own bowhead whale hunt. Jawbones from the old town site were uncovered and records in the school library unearthed to prove that whaling was a part of the town's cultural heritage. Also, wildlife studies had to be conducted and resolutions drafted and presented to the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission.

The hard work was rewarded in 2008, when Point Lay was awarded a quota of one bowhead whale a year. That spring, Rexford and four others brought whaling gear down from Barrow to Point Lay, hauling outboard motors, dart guns, shoulder guns, floats and lines and bomb equipment on sleds hitched to their snowmachines. "All the equipment you normally use taking a whale," Rexford said.

Sea ice conditions were too treacherous the first season for a successful hunt, but in May 2009 the Atkaan crew landed a whale. As the village rejoiced and worked together on the harvest, word spread like wildfire throughout the Arctic by phone, e-mail even Facebook - "Point Lay got a whale!"

"Oh man, it was awesome. I mean, we didn't expect to become a whaling community so quickly," Rexford said.