Here’s how the story starts:

HOOPER BAY, Alaska — As the remnants of Typhoon Merbok lashed the plywood walls of the house she shared with her children and grandchildren, Frieda Stone wrote a Bible verse on a small card.

The severe weather, which hit Alaska’s western coast on Sept. 16, was the most powerful early-season storm scientists had ever measured there. The jet stream steered it north from abnormally warm waters east of Japan. As it approached, meteorologists recorded hurricane-force winds and 50-foot swells in the Bering Sea. In this remote Yup’ik village, the ocean came closer as each breaking wave of the storm surge roared in.

Ms. Stone, 68, slipped the card in a sandwich bag and shuffled outside. Using a red string, she tied the bag to one of the posts that held her house 4 feet above ground, asking God for a specific mercy.

“I asked him to watch over the freezers,” she said.

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Here’s the beginning….

The 30-day whale diet started as a joke. It was Christmastime 2016 and Josh Ahsoak’s sister, AnnaFlora, was visiting him in Anchorage. She was doing a 30-day CrossFit diet and was trying to get him to join her. Ahsoak wasn’t sold on her regimen, but it did make him think.

“I had a bunch of life stuff I was dealing with, including trying to get my health and my weight under control,” he said.

Ahsoak, 38, is an Anchorage-based attorney by education. By avocation, he’s a hunter. Ahsoak is Inupiat, with roots in Barrow, where he is on his family’s whaling crew. He travels frequently in the state and estimates he spends about a third of the year subsistence hunting and fishing.

As his sister listed her new dietary restrictions, his thoughts turned to his freezer and the array of wild food inside: fish, birds, seal, walrus, bowhead. “At any given time, I will have anywhere between 50 and 500 pounds of just incredibly good meat and fish on hand from all the hunting and fishing activities,” he said. What would happen, he wondered, if he switched to a traditional Alaska Native diet for a month?

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Here is a meal we shared with his family:

Here is how the story begins:

Gambell, Alaska — Before his story made the Anchorage paper, before the first death threat arrived from across the world, before his elders began to worry and his mother cried over the things she read on Facebook, Chris Apassingok, age 16, caught a whale.

It happened at the end of April, which for generations has been whaling season in the Siberian Yupik village of Gambell on St. Lawrence Island on the northwest edge of Alaska. More than 30 crews from the community of 700 were trawling the sea for bowhead whales, cetaceans that can grow over 50 feet long, weigh over 50 tons and live more than 100 years. A few animals taken each year bring thousands of pounds of meat to the village, offsetting the impossibly high cost of imported store-bought food.

A hundred years ago — even 20 years ago, when Gambell was an isolated point on the map, protected part of the year by a wall of sea ice — catching the whale would have been a dream accomplishment for a teenage hunter, a sign of Chris’ passage into adulthood and a story that people would tell until he was old. But today, in a world shrunk by social media, where fragments of stories travel like light and there is no protection from anonymous outrage, his achievement has been eclipsed by an endless wave of online harassment. Six weeks after his epic hunt, his mood was dark. He’d quit going to school. His parents, his siblings, everybody worried about him.

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This week I hosted a program on discussions happening in communities across coastal Alaska about how to adapt to climate changes. There was lots of talk about how Alaska’s new climate reality is changing practical things like hunting, fishing and traveling.

Listen here.

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“As the news spread Monday, some Alaskans expressed dire worries about the ripple effect on the state’s oil-dependent economy, which has already suffered a blow from low oil prices. Others saw the move as a reprieve for the state’s fragile northern ecosystem that many Alaska Native communities rely on for food….”

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The post For The Guardian: Alaskan opinions divided as Shell halts Arctic drilling appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

Anyway, here’s what I brought back from the trip on my phone, mainly food photos, from one of America’s most northern communities.

The post Point Hope (food) in iPhone snaps appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

POINT HOPE, Alaska — At this community’s original town site, abandoned decades ago because of creeping beach erosion, the bleached remains of a few houses still stand on the treeless landscape. In one of them, you can make out “1957” carved into a driftwood corner post. That’s the year this Inupiat village first got electricity. Up until then, light in the winter came from seal oil.

Change has been washing over this ancient place, one of the oldest continuously inhabited town sites in North America, rapidly the last 100 years. Here on this ever-thinning peninsula in the Chukchi Sea, people have gone from existing completely off the land, traveling by dog sled, living in homes built from sod and whalebone, to a world of four wheelers and Facebook, big screen TVs and toaster waffles in the span of two generations. Someday soon, offshore, high-tech Shell platforms will likely begin drilling for oil.

But, the 900 people who live here hold on to a ritual that dates back 2,000 years: the spring hunt for the bowhead whale. This year, the village took three.

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The post For Al Jazeera America: A whaling village preserves its past appeared first on Julia O'Malley.

(For a real treat, check out Katie’s slide show.)

Point Hope, Alaska — For the Inupiat villagers who have made their homes on this finger of land in the Chukchi Sea for generations, nothing is more important than the bowhead whale.

The calendar revolves around seasons for hunting, fishing and gathering. It’s a lifestyle Alaskans call “subsistence”, which is as much cultural tradition as economic necessity in one of the state’s most northern villages.

About 900 people live in Point Hope. The village store prices are double what people pay 700 miles south in Anchorage. A gallon of milk might be $12. Two pounds of hamburger patties: $23. In most homes, wild and foraged foods make up at least half of the menu. The village has two stores, a school, several churches and a restaurant that serves pizza, Chinese food and hamburgers. Alcohol can’t be legally possessed, sold or imported.

All year, the village looks forward to spring whaling, when crews of men thread through leads in the sea ice, quietly paddling in seal-skin boats, looking for smooth black shapes rising out of the water.
The few massive bowheads taken by villagers each year supply thousands of pounds of dense protein. Beyond that, whale meat is considered an Alaska Native soul food. Hunting, butchering and distributing the animal, village leaders say, is how elders teach young people the culture.

“Without the whale,” said Steve Oomittuk, the former mayor of the city and former vice-president of the tribe, “we wouldn’t be who we are.”

In recent years, however, the much-anticipated whale hunt has run up against a warming Arctic. A bowhead can be 60 feet long and weigh 75 tons. Successful whaling crews have always hauled the massive animals on to the ice using a block and tackle. The last few seasons, the ice has been more unstable than elders in the village have ever seen.

“It’s getting harder and harder, the ice is thinner,” Oomittuk said. “We can’t pull up the whale.”

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KOTZEBUE, Alaska—In this Far North village, no animal provides more protein to fill freezers than the bearded seal. A single seal can supply hundreds of pounds of meat, enough to feed a large, extended family for a winter.

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