BELUGA WHALE HUNT | Inupiat and The Whales| 2007 | 30x40 inches

Inupiat communities of Arctic Alaska primarily depend on marine mammals, including Bowhead and Beluga whales, seals, walrus, for subsistence food. Their cultural and spiritual identities are intimated tied to the whales and the Sea. The off-shore oil and gas development on the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas of the Alaskan Arctic is a human-rights issue for the Inupiat communities and they oppose these development projects. In 2008 the United States Government sold off over 33 million acres of the Chukchi Sea to oil companies in the historically highest oil lease sale ever. Many leases were sold off in the Beaufort Sea in 2006 and 2007 for oil and gas development. The following article by Peter Matthiessen provides a good background on this issue.

Alaska: Big Oil and the Inupiat-Americans. By Peter Matthiessen. Photographs Subhankar Banerjee. The New York Review of Books, Volume 54, Number 18, November 22, 2007 | READ ONLINE