Decline and Conservation

While many Alaskan industries, such as mining, fishing, and agriculture, expanded in the wake of the Gold Rush, the animal harvesting industry declined.

By the first decades of the 1900s, most of Alaska's economically valuable animal populations were in serious or catastrophic decline from overhunting. Starting in the 1920s, the federal government created the Alaska Game Commission to regulate trapping in Alaska. Regulations required trappers to buy licenses, limited the number of animals that could be taken, and prescribed permissible trapping methods.

The most serious decline was with marine mammals. Both sea otters and fur seals were near extinction in Alaskan waters by 1900. The dire state led to international conservation efforts. In 1911, the Fur Seal Treaty between Great Britain, Japan, Russia, and the United States banned commercial hunting of sea otters and pelagic (open-sea) hunting of fur seals. In 1937, the International Whaling Agreement ended the commercial hunting of whales in Alaskan waters. More recently, the Federal Marine Mammal Act of 1977 ended the hunting of walrus.

With all these conservation efforts, Alaskan Natives retained some subsistence hunting rights. For many Native communities, hunting of marine mammals was an integral part of their economy, subsistence, and culture. They viewed it as essential to the survival of their communities and traditional way of life. In the words of a Yupik hunter from the Bering Strait:

You don't know what it is to be an Eskimo. Out here hunting is our way of life. Carving ivory is our livelihood. We don't want welfare supporting us and we don't want to be forced from the villages. 

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