In the early 1970s, the notion that indigenous peoples had anything of substance to offer Western science about wild animals, any important contribution to make to the overall study of wildlife, was either scoffed at by professionals in wildlife science or gently dismissed because the indigenous information, purportedly, “lacked rigor.” The report by Stephenson and Ahgook flew directly in the face of this idea. In my mind, their observations on wolf behavior were far and away the most interesting in Fox’s volume, though few recognized the revolutionary nature of this piece back then.
Immediately after reading the Stephenson/Ahgook paper I wrote to Stephenson, a wolf biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G), and asked if I could fly up to Fairbanks to speak with him. I’d not yet come across his perspective in the literature on wolves but very much wanted to listen to what he had to say, both about wolves and about his interactions with the Nunamiut. I arrived in Fairbanks in March 1976, which was late winter in interior Alaska. Bob picked me up at the airport and offered me a bed at his cabin outside the city, in Goldstream Valley. Three days later I was sitting next to him in the back seat of a Bell 206 JetRanger, a four-passenger helicopter, flying across Nelchina Basin, in the drainage of the Susitna River south of the Alaska Range. We were looking for wolves to radio collar. (...)
In June of 1979, Bob and I journeyed up to Anaktuvuk Pass—a village of just 110 people back then—where I finally met Bob Ahgook, Justus Mekiana, and some of the other hunters Bob had worked with in the early seventies. The afternoon our plane landed there, nearly every woman in the village rushed down to the airstrip to greet Bob. Some years before this, after Bob started living sporadically at Anaktuvuk in a sod house he purchased from Justus, a flu swept through the settlement. Bob nursed dozens of people through this epidemic, emptying honey buckets, changing and washing bed linen, and cooking meals. The senior women in particular never forgot his courtesy and allegiance.
I listened in on his conversations with the hunters during our time in Anaktuvuk as they caught up with each other’s lives. The regard in which they held Bob was obvious. Relations between ADF&G personnel and indigenous hunters in many of the villages back then were less than friendly. Bob, however, had not originally come to the village to lecture people about adhering to state hunting regulations; he’d come to hear what the local hunters had to say. He was eager to get their insights into the nature of amaguk, the wolf, especially about the parts of its life that had not yet made it into the professional journals. No wonder, when he initially approached them about it, they had welcomed him to travel with them as they set out in early summer to look for wolf dens.
Beyond his own empathetic personality, his obvious lack of racial prejudice, and his respect for people with backgrounds very different from his own, Bob had a sharp sense of humor. One day when we were all sitting around telling stories, especially about wolverines as I remember, Bob told a story about an arrogant man and his humiliating comeuppance. The Nunamiut men roared at the well-delivered punchline. One leaned so far sideways on his stool he fell over. Another man nearly spit his dentures.
Bob helped pioneer something new and unprecedented in Western wildlife science— the inclusion of traditional indigenous knowledge (TIK) in peer-reviewed wildlife publications. (There were a few others in the Fairbanks office of ADF&G at the time who sought out indigenous knowledge and gave it equal standing with Western-based knowledge. I think immediately of two marine mammalogists, John Burns and Bud Fay, and of Kathy Frost and Lloyd Lowry, both of whom I worked with later when I was researching another book, Arctic Dreams; but the road to advancing mutual cultural respect in Alaska was to be long and hard.)
On that first trip with Bob, to radio collar wolves in Nelchina Basin, I saw first-hand an exhibition of the knowledge Bob had acquired by choosing to turn first to the Nunamiut instead of investing his allotted ADF&G funds in flying aerial surveys. (He had been charged by ADF&G with learning how the Alyeska pipeline might be affecting the lives of wolves. He believed he’d learn much more by traveling with Nunamiut hunters first, questioning them about wolf behavior in general, before setting off to study wolves along the pipeline corridor.) One day we spotted a wolf trail in Nelchina Basin—seven wolves walking single-file across a frozen, snow-covered lake. They were more than a mile ahead of us when we sighted them nearing the edge of the taiga; when they heard the helicopter approaching, they bolted. We caught up with a group of three. Bob was able to dart two, one of whom entered a dense copse of trees before going down. As we got out of the helicopter in knee-deep snow, Bob said, “Female. Maybe six or seven.” In my naive way I jokingly said, “Oh, come on. You can’t sex and age that animal at this distance.”
“Well,” he answered. “That’s what those guys taught me to do, anyway.”
by Barry Lopez, LitHub | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. See also: Barry Lopez on the Life of a True Naturalist (Richard Nelson) in Raven’s Witness: The Alaska Life of Richard K. Nelson by Hank Lentfer. At the time I started at ADF&G Jack Lentfer was one of the world's leading polar bear experts (I don't know if this is his son). I just missed meeting Nelson a few times out in the villages.]
