From Distrust to a Plan: Managing the Western Arctic Caribou Herd Together

In the mid-1970s, aerial surveys said the Western Arctic Caribou Herd had crashed, and the villagers who depended on it did not believe them. That distrust is the setting for a cooperative management plan for the herd, signed in March 2003, which Don Callaway describes in a series on the legacy of ANILCA.

ANILCA's cooperative clauses

The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) of 1980 was a negotiated congressional compromise among Native, state, mining, sports and environmental interests. Environmental groups saw a doubling of the National Park and Wildlife Refuge systems and a tripling of the National Wilderness Preservation System, and mining and oil interests saw the opening of Prudhoe Bay. Under Title VIII, rural communities could keep hunting and fishing for subsistence in any area traditionally used, even if it is now a conservation system unit such as a national park or wildlife refuge.

Callaway says Title VIII reflects an awareness that local knowledge, values and cooperation have to be built into wildlife management, through three sections. Section 805, Local and Regional Participation, sets up a flow of local information, opinion and input into regulation. Section 812, Research, directs the Secretary to research fish, wildlife and subsistence uses and to consult and use the special knowledge of local residents who live by subsistence. Section 809, Cooperative Agreements, lets the Secretary of the Interior and agents such as the National Park Service share aspects of their authority with other agents.

A herd and the people who depend on it

The herd ranges over territory bounded by Prudhoe Bay on the north, the Yukon River on the south and Unalakleet on the west. At the time of the article it numbered 450,000 animals, one of about 32 herds in Alaska but by far the largest, about half the state's caribou and about 10% of the world total of 5 million. On their migration, which can cover several hundred miles over varying routes, caribou may cross state, Native corporation and federal lands with different management mandates. About forty small communities in the range harvest caribou as part of a traditional subsistence lifestyle, and the herd has other constituencies too: conservationists, sport hunters, hunting guides and transporters.

The communities range from Kotzebue, with slightly more than 3,000 people, 75% of them Inupiat, to Deering, with about 140, more than 90% Inupiat. Those two harvest more than twice the 225 pounds of meat, fish and poultry the typical American consumes per person, and many northwest Alaska communities take about a quarter of their subsistence harvest from caribou, Noatak nearly half. In 1990, food in rural northwest Alaska cost more than twice what it did in Anchorage, and replacing wildlife harvests with store-bought food would have cost between 13% and 77% of per capita income in the four communities the article tabulates. Callaway writes that the social relations of harvesting, processing and sharing matter most to Alaska Natives of the region: these activities define a sense of family and community, teach how to identify and harvest a resource and process it without waste, and, through sharing, establish generosity, respect for elders' knowledge and public appreciation for the hunter.

The crash that was not believed

Caribou lead a precarious existence, and large herds swing through dramatic ups and downs; for herds this size, the main factors seem to be related to climate. Aerial surveys put the herd at about 250,000 animals in 1970 and about 75,000 in 1976, when human harvest was estimated at 15,000-20,000 a year. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game immediately imposed a harvest limit of 3,000 bull caribou. But the main herd was passing closer than usual to coastal and lower Kobuk River communities, so villagers did not believe the biologists' claim of a sharp decline. Callaway argues that, with no collared animals, the surveys had probably missed many animals that Native hunters saw, noting that a survey two years later counted markedly more and that biology is extremely unlikely to explain such a rise in so short a time.

Despite the threat of arrest, local harvest during the crisis substantially exceeded the quota set by the Alaska Board of Game, and the vast majority of harvesters evaded the compulsory harvest reporting. In 1977 the department reported that across the herd's range only 19% of hunters had returned permits as the law required.

From research to a plan

In that atmosphere of distrust and non-compliance, a state biologist, the biologist's supervisor and a National Park Service superintendent for northwest Alaska parks used Park Service research and ANILCA's provisions to start a new management plan. The research was a 1995 draft report, The Western Arctic Caribou Herd: Barriers and Bridges to Cooperative Management, which asked how a cooperative harvest assessment program might build trust among Native hunters and federal and state managers. It looked at how cooperation could work for the four general functions of wildlife management, research, allocation, regulation and enforcement, and covered how subsistence communities responded to wildlife regulations, law enforcement versus self-regulation, why communities did not comply with harvest reporting, the role of Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and three Alaskan cases of harvest allocation.

In the mid-1990s the state biologist spearheaded an initiative for a cooperative plan, and the Park Service superintendent soon partnered. Both agencies, with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Bureau of Land Management, supplied money and administrative support for the Western Arctic Caribou Herd Working Group, created in 1997. Besides federal personnel it had 20 voting chairs for communities and user groups, including hunting guides and conservation groups. Using the 1995 report as its structure, the group met repeatedly, including in August 2000 at Anaktuvuk Pass, where a draft plan was presented. Callaway calls it remarkable, and perhaps unique in Alaska literature, that the group drafted a plan without a pressing crisis, wanting to avoid the breakdown in communication that followed the 1970s crash. The plan, endorsed by twenty-four signatories, was signed in March 2003. Its purpose is to ensure the herd's long-term conservation and maintain traditional and other uses, and it provides for joint management actions at three thresholds. At the lowest, when the herd is below 200,000 animals, the recommendations include banning the harvest of cows or calves, keeping a minimum bull:cow ratio and limiting harvest to local residents.

How it works

Research. After hunters complained that transects flown by observer planes missed pockets of caribou, photographic surveys are often flown with hunters aboard, so biologists get better estimates and hunters are more likely to accept them. Hunters also measure the caribou they kill, noting body fat, bone marrow condition, parasites and body weight, and discuss the results with biologists. Callaway says such efforts tend to bring estimates of herd size and health together, though the two sides may still disagree about why.

Allocation. The plan sets thresholds for cutting human harvests but no community quotas. With the herd at historic highs, formulas for community allocations had not been developed. When a crash comes, the process will probably follow the Kilbuck Caribou Management Agreement, in which Native representatives in the working group assign community harvest limits, which a 1995 report on that agreement saw as an expression of the Native value of sharing: respondents said it is important to share what cannot be owned, such as big game.

Regulation. Section 805 requires Regional Advisory Councils of local subsistence hunters, who develop proposals on who may hunt, when, and how much, and send them to the Federal Subsistence Board. Their proposals carry considerable weight, and the board is under substantial constraints if it rejects them; the grounds center on proposals that might harm the resource. The working group intends to use that process to propose seasons and bag limits.

Two community views

The article closes with two voices. A vice president of a tribal consortium says that without ANILCA, Athabaskan cultural values would almost certainly have gone extinct, because Title VIII, for all its statutory conflicts, gave Indian groups a tool to unite against the state. A project coordinator at a Native fish and wildlife society says subsistence users are studied closely, with harvests and household incomes documented, while their concerns, such as sport hunting and the growing numbers of motorized boats and planes scaring away caribou and moose, are recorded but not acted on.

Sources

• Don Callaway, ANILCA and the Western Arctic Caribou Herd Cooperative Management Plan, part of the series The Legacy of ANILCA, National Park Service; rewritten in hubnx's own words.