Eskimos have hunted whales for centuries. For at least 2,000 years the cultural and social structure of northern whaling village have centered around the hunt. Landing a whale is most often the most important community event of the year. The entire village hoists the whale up onto the ice and participates in butchering it. A time-honored process of sharing, celebrating and preparing for the next year’s hunt follows. Whaling captains are highly respected village leaders.

The bowhead whale is hunted exclusively by Alaska Eskimos from the ten villages extending from St. Lawrence Island in the Bring Sea to Barter Island in the Beaufort Sea. Today, in accordance with International Whaling Commission (IWC) rules, Alaska’s Native whalers can legally hunt an allocated number of bowhead whales each year for food, oil and Native craft materials. The whaling commission consists of ten villages, including: Barrow, Gambell, Kaktovik, Kivalina, Little Diomede, Nuiqsut, Point Hope, Savoonga, Wainwright and Wales.
The hunters honor the animal by utilizing as much of it as possible as a way of giving thanks to the whale for giving itself to the village. In the past, whalebones were used quite extensively in structural and ceremonial use. The baleen was used to make daily-use items. Whalebones continue to mark grave and festival sites in some villages. Whale meat, blubber, skin and muktuk continue as dietary staples. Oil rendered from the blubber can still be used as fuel when needed.

Four centuries of commercial whaling extended from the North Atlantic in the 1500s to the North Pacific by the mid-1900s. Commercial hunters valued the whales for the large quantities of baleen and oil they yielded (one whale could yield up to a hundred barrels of oil and 1,500 pounds of baleen). The continued demand for oil, meat and products made from baleen would have decimated bowhead populations, but eh introduction of petroleum fuel diminished the demand for whale oil. Whalers however continued to take whales for baleen only, discarding the rest of the animal. This concept was completely foreign to Native whalers. Around 1910, the development of spring steel caused the baleen market to die and commercial whaling came to an end.
In the 1930s bowhead whales came under protection of the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, and in the 1970s of the U.S. Marine Mammal and Endangered Species Acts that established Native-only subsistence hunts for bowhead whales.