Word: bowhead
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Eskimos in Kaktovik also hunt caribou, but they depend more heavily on the sea, where captains like Isaac Akootchook go out in 18-ft. boats after seal and bowhead whale. The Inupiat (as they prefer to be called), who chose to participate in the 1971 claims settlement, have benefited from oil revenues in the form of a school, a community center and other projects. "We feel caught in the middle," says Akootchook. "We don't like exploration, but if we oppose it and they impose it anyway, we get nothing...
...their rescue caused some observers to scratch their heads -- not at the behavior of the whales, but at that of their would-be human saviors. Such entrapment in ice, they know, is commonplace. Less than 30 miles from the rescue effort, polar bears feasted on the remains of a bowhead whale that had had the misfortune to become trapped before the arrival of the press...
...press flocked to the site, the oil companies, biologists and Eskimos discovered they had unleashed a juggernaut they could not control. The Eskimos quickly abandoned their seasonal hunt for endangered bowhead whales in the belief that it would not look good on network news. The oil companies found themselves in a no-win situation. Lampooned by an Anchorage Daily News cartoon that showed oil-company workers competing in a race for a "Public Relations Cup," the rescuers also faced the possibility of inadvertently killing the whales with kindness. Would the shock of heavy equipment hammering the ice pack panic...
...regulate whaling, has been setting annual quotas ever since. For this season the permissible commercial take had dwindled to 13,851 whales, 80% of them small minkes. That was less than a third of the total eight years ago. Hunting of such endangered species as the blue, bowhead, right and humpback is now forbidden altogether, except by or on behalf of Eskimos and other native peoples, while sperms may be taken only by coastal-based ships...
...Beaufort Sea, where significant oil and gas have been found. But in U.S. territory near the famous North Slope fields oil explorers have not sunk many wells because of court actions brought by Indians and environmentalists who are worried about, among other things, disturbing the migration of the bowhead whale...