Subsistence
Iñupiat people are hunter-gatherer such as all Eskimo peoples. Iñupiat people continue to rely heavily on subsistence hunting and fishing. They harvest walrus, seal, whale, polar bears, caribou, and fish. Both the inland (Nunamiut) and coastal (Taġiumiut, i.e Tikiġaġmiut) Iñupiat depend greatly on fish. Ducks, geese, rabbits, berries, roots, and shoots are also food staples throughout the seasons where they are available. The inland Iñupiat also hunt caribou, dall sheep, grizzly bear and moose, where the coastal Iñupiat hunt walrus, seals, beluga whales and bowhead whales. Polar bear is also cautiously hunted. The capture of a whale benefits each member of a community, as the animal is butchered and its meat and blubber allocated according to a traditional formula. Even city-dwelling relatives thousands of miles away are entitled to a share of each whale killed by the hunters of their ancestral village. Maktak, which is the skin and blubber of Bowhead and other whales, is rich in vitamins A and C and contributes to good health in a population with limited access to fruits and vegetables.
In recent years oil and other resources have been an important revenue source for the Inupiat. The Alaska Pipeline connects the Prudhoe Bay wells with the port of Valdez in south central Alaska. However, because of the oil drilling in Alaska’s arid north, the traditional way of whaling is coming into conflict with one of the modern world’s most urgent priorities: finding more oil.
Read more about this topic: Inupiat People
Famous quotes containing the word subsistence:
“All my life I have lived and behaved very much like [the] sandpiper—just running down the edges of different countries and continents, “looking for something” ... having spent most of my life timorously seeking for subsistence along the coastlines of the world.”
—Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)
“Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence. Civilization is the subordination of the latter to the former.”
—Karl Kraus (1874–1936)
“The Roman rule was, to teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The old English rule was, “All summer in the field, and all winter in the study.” And it seems as if a man should learn to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his subsistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and fellow men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)