Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Iñupiat Family from Noatak, Alaska, 1929. Subsistence hunting of the bowhead whale is permitted by the International Whaling Commission, under limited conditions.While whaling is banned in most parts of the world, some of the Native peoples of North America, including the Inuit and Iñupiat peoples in Alaska, [1] continue to hunt the Bowhead whale.
Bowhead whales are now hunted on a subsistence level by native peoples of North America. [94] In 2024, the Inuit hunters of Aklavik, Northwest Territories were permitted to hunt and kill one bowhead whale to distribute the whale meat, an important part of Inuit cuisine, to Inuvialuit and Gwich'in communities in the region. [95]
In 2016 they caught 59 bowhead whales, two minke and one humpback whale; [10] The latter two species were not authorized, though no one was prosecuted. [11] Annual catches vary between 300 and 500 belugas and 40 to 70 bowheads. The hunt takes the bowhead whales from a population of about 10,000 in Alaskan waters.
In 2007, Inupiat whalers conducting a traditional subsistence hunt killed a 50-ton bowhead with a modern bomb lance, kicking off a flurry of research into species longevity when it was revealed that the whale's body also contained fragments of an older bomb lance manufactured back in the 19th century, leading to the discovery that the whale was ...
Catches have increased from 18 whales in 1985 to over 70 in 2010. [4] The latest IWC quota regarding the subsistence hunting of the bowhead whale allowed for up to 336 to be killed in the period 2013–2018. [3] Residents of the United States are also subject to U.S. Federal government bans against whaling as well. [5]
Canada left the IWC in 1982, and the only IWC-regulated species currently harvested by the Canadian Inuit is the bowhead whale. [53] As of 2004, the limit on bowhead whale hunting allows for the hunt of one whale every two years from the Hudson Bay-Foxe Basin population, and one whale every 13 years from the Baffin Bay-Davis Strait population. [54]
For other groups, especially the Haida, whales appear prominently as totems. Hunting of cetaceans continues by Alaska Natives (mainly beluga and narwhal, plus subsistence hunting of the bowhead whale) and to a lesser extent by the Makah . Commercial whaling in British Columbia and southeast Alaska ended in the late 1960s.
Whaling in Canada encompasses both aboriginal and commercial whaling, and has existed on all three Canadian oceans, Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic.The indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast have whaling traditions dating back millennia, and the hunting of cetaceans continues by Inuit (mostly beluga and narwhal, but also the subsistence hunting of the bowhead whale).