Harpoon
Object Type: harpoon
Museum number: Am1944,02.104
Production ethnic group:
Eskimo-Aleut
British Museum
Found/Acquired: Bering Strait
Pacific Ocean: Bering Sea:
Bering Strait: North America: USA: Alaska
Materials: bone
The Indigenous People living in the Northern Bering Sea Region have an innate connection to the lands and waters and have been stewards to this area for millennia. Indigenous Peoples continue to be sustained by the incredibly productive Bering Sea by the countless species of seabirds, marine mammals, fish and other wildlife. The region, home to one of the largest marine mammal migrations on the planet, has been experiencing climate change at a rate three times the rest of the planet. Along with a loss of sea ice, populations of red king crab, ice seals, walrus, and other marine species we depend on have been devastated. These unprecedented environmental changes are coupled with increased vessel traffic, destructive commercial fishing, oil and mining exploration and extraction, marine debris, increased militarization and unusual seabird and marine mammal mortality events. In 2022, we had to respond to a major foreign marine debris event in the Bering Strait, that later reached the Pribilof Islands. A Russian LNG tanker travelling south through the Bering Strait in January 2021, lost engine power, only narrowly avoiding a major catastrophe.
Our communities—approximately 100 Tribal communities living in relationship with the Bering Sea—are experiencing major threats to food sovereignty and are on the verge of famine. We cannot overstate the urgency of this crisis. As we write, temperatures warm, ice moves out of our watersheds, and salmon should be returning to Alaska’s waters. But we are experiencing a multi-decadal, multi-species salmon crash: our nets, our tables, our freezers, and our stomachs will—again—be empty. Emptiness has replaced abundance as the norm for far too many communities in Western Alaska.
Photos courtesy of NOAA (top) and AVCP (bottom).
Climate change is causing loss of seasonal sea ice in these regions and has led to increased vessel traffic—which, in turn, brings threats to the region, our people, and the wildlife that we rely on. These include increased air, water, and subsea noise pollution and the potential for large oil and/or fuel spills. It also brings risks such as greywater and sewage discharge, litter, oily wastes, and invasive species, as well as other threats. While Federal authorities have put in place some management measures designed to reduce these threats, more action is needed to safeguard our region and our people.
Maps courtesy of US Coast Guard (top) and Marine Exchange of Alaska (bottom)
Community Climate Change Planning, Adaptation, and Resilience
The impacts of climate change are wide-ranging and have a demonstrably negative impact on Alaska Native communities living on eroding coastlines on thawing permafrost. Climate adaptation and resilience concerns not only mitigation strategies but designing and provisioning critical infrastructure, which federal policies over the last seventy years have ensured are insufficient, inappropriate to the climate, and subject to breakdown. Adaptation and resilience are holistic concepts that require attention to the complex roots of inequity, vulnerability, and food sovereignty.
