16 The New York Review
survival lay in the adoption of Chris-
tian and American standards, both so-
cial and economic. Convinced that the
newly absent whales and walruses were
punishing humans for their misbehav-
ior, Beringians became increasingly
hostile to foreign hunters who killed
so many more animals than they could
possibly need.
Though Americans didn’t know it,
the decimation of whale populations
had effects that resonated through
the Arctic and even global ecosystem.
Ocean water moves from the North At-
lantic to the Bering Sea, carrying nutri-
ents shed by rivers farther south. At the
Bering Strait, turbulence mixes warm
and cold water, bringing iron, nitro-
gen, and phosphorus up to the surface,
where, along with summer sunlight and
carbon in the atmosphere, they nour-
ish billions of photosynthetic plankton.
These feed hundreds of species of zoo-
plankton. Whales then spend decades
filtering krill and converting it into
flesh. The movement of their huge bod-
ies through the water pushes nutrients
up from the bottom of the ocean, and
their excrement feeds marine plants.
When a dead whale sinks down into the
ocean, sharks, hagfish, smaller sea crea-
tures, and bacteria feed successively on
its carcass. All of this activity serves to
increase the marine ecosystem’s capac-
ity to capture carbon and convert much
of it into oxygen. Recent studies have
found that whale populations can help
sequester as much carbon as hundreds
of acres of forest.
The Russian Empire, which had
never developed its own whaling in-
dustry, watched America’s profitable
predations in Beringia with mounting
indignation. Who was to say that the
whales and walruses were American
rather than Russian? The dramatically
reduced availability of sea mammals,
combined with a new need for currency
and desire for imported and manufac-
tured goods, led Beringians to begin
trading fox furs with the Americans;
this was too much for the Russians,
who had been getting rich on pelts for
centuries. There ensued a competition
to enclose the spaces of Beringia, and
to bring law into a place that had be-
come a frigid Wild West.
It is almost impossible to enclose the
bodies of free-ranging animals in far-
off lands. Gold deposits, on the other
hand, stay put. At the end of 1896, the
discovery of large gold deposits on the
Klondike River started the Alaskan
gold rush. In 1898, three Swedish men
and two Iñupiaq boys sailed up creeks
where they collected $2,000 worth of
gold in a few months, with minimal
equipment. (The boys likely guided
the Swedes: the Iñupiat had long been
aware of the gold in the area, but they
had little use for it.) At the peak of the
Gilded Age, ordinary Americans leapt
at the chance to dig a fortune out of the
rocks, and to achieve a class mobility
that was otherwise nearly impossible.
In 1900 20,000 people arrived in the
new frontier town of Nome.
The General Mining Law of 1872
permitted any US citizen or person with
a publicly stated desire to become a cit-
izen to claim a plot on public land with a
“valuable deposit” of minerals. This was
an effective way of enclosing remote but
valuable areas: as Demuth puts it, “The
M i n i n g L aw m ad e l a nd A mer ic a n by g iv-
ing it to Americans.” Another law rec-
ognized Iñupiaq claims to land “actually
in their use,” but it was unclear whether
their fishing trumped Americans’ min-
ing, or vice versa. The advantage went to
those inclined to marking their twenty-
acre claims with wooden stakes and
then filing the relevant paperwork, and
to those who were white American citi-
zens. Disputes proliferated. The Swedes
restaked the claims of the Iñupiaq boys,
on the basis of their youth and race,
and Americans challenged the Swedes’
claims, arguing that the Swedes were
insufficiently American.
The gold close to the surface was
soon gone; the larger reserves un-
derground could be mined only
with the help of heavy machinery.
Many of the unhappy prospectors
fled, though not before
infecting locals with
diseases like measles,
which killed hundreds
of Iñupiat in 1900.
They found little sym-
pathy from the for-
eigners who remained.
One missionary began
persuading Iñupiat to
leave Nome and move
to a settlement called
Quartz Creek, reason-
ing that “the struggling
pioneers of northwest-
ern Alaska should not
be required to take up
the heavy burden of
the helpless Eskimo.”
The Russian Em-
pire, which like the US
was on the gold standard, was keen to
have Russian subjects settle and mine
Chukotka before foreigners beat them
to it, but the Russian strategy of en-
closure proved far less effective than
the American approach. Russia only
granted concessions and did not permit
miners to stake a permanent claim to a
plot of land, which was a serious obsta-
cle in attracting the necessary foreign
capital and labor. The main stockholder
of the company formed to mine the
Siberian concession was a Norwegian-
American who lured workers with
false promises of stakes; in response,
the Russian government banned for-
eign investment in Chukotka. Over the
coming years, Chukotka was mined er-
ratically and inefficiently, sometimes
by foreign miners who slipped in ille-
gally, and with much theft.
Expensive, energy-intensive corpo-
rate machine mining arrived in Nome
in 1903, a return to the old reality of
capitalist control of the means of pro-
duction—or rather, of extraction.
Though mining work paid decently, liv-
i ng expenses i n Nome were h ig h a nd the
work was dangerous and grueling. A so-
cialist in the 1912 elections for Alaska’s
first Territorial Legislature campaigned
on an alternative vision of enclosure,
in which minerals and the means of
mining them would be owned collec-
tively. But by the end of World War I,
all of Alaska’s socialist politicians had
been suppressed or driven out, part of
the nationwide crackdown on antiwar
socialists under the Sedition Act.When Bolshevik activists appeared
in Chukotka, they were in the odd
position of preaching about a revolu-
tion of collective ownership in a place
where, until recently, collective labor
and ownership had been the only way
of life. After the Red Army took con-trol of the peninsula, the Soviets set
about converting the Chukchi and
Yupik to the Soviet faith, a mission-
ary project not so different from that
of the capitalist-Christian missionaries
sent to the communities on the other
side of the Bering Strait. The Commu-
nists pushed the natives to adopt their
own standards of hygiene and morality,
to become literate, and to cease their
traditional religious practices. Chil-
dren were forcibly sent away to Soviet
boarding schools and began to forget
their native languages.
In principle, the Bolsheviks were op-
posed to the fetishization of money,
and thus to gold. In practice, they des-
perately needed currency with which
to buy foreign food, medicine, energy,and heavy machinery. With the Civil
War over, the Bolsheviks contemplated
the problem of how to extract Chukot-
kan gold. There were less than 20,
people living on the peninsula, mostly
Yupik and Chukchi whose skill and
labor were needed to harvest animals.
Mining would require a large influx of
laborers. Films, novels, and newspapers
promoted the image of Soviet super-
men taming the Arctic and achieving
heroic feats of resource extraction,
but the decisive moment in Soviet gold
mining came with the establishment of
the Gulag. In Kolyma, several hundred
miles downriver from Chukotka, tens of
thousands of prisoners extracted tons of
gold, often dying in the process. In 1939
Gulag prisoners began mining in Chu-
kotka, eventually extracting thousands
of tons of tin and 170 tons of uranium.
By the 1930s, the USSR had suc-
ceeded in enclosing and colonizing
Chukotka at last. Those Chukchi and
Yupik who were not convicted as coun-
terrevolutionaries were sent to work on
collective farms that harvested whales,
walruses, seals, fox, and reindeer. As
elsewhere in the Soviet Union, work-
ers were expected to maximize produc-
tion through fantastical five-year plans
dictated by Moscow. Failure to meet
quotas was seen as “wrecking,” and
w reckers were sent to the Gu lag. Ac c el-
erating production quotas soon imper-
iled animal populations, although the
Bolsheviks had been criticizing capital-
ist rapaciousness just a few years earlier.
Now that the revolution had succeeded,
they had decided the problem had been
capitalism, not over harvesting. By the
1950s, there was severe hunger in the
villages of Chukotka.
Nome emptied out after World
War II: there was less demand for
gold, and cheap tin was imported
from abroad. The Iñupiat and Yupik
in Alaska had been pushed away fromtraditional communal subsistence ac-
tivities and into individual wage work.
The wages were usually low, and there
was widespread poverty, unemploy-
ment, and illness among Beringians.
In 1949 Alaska was permitted to turn
more than a hundred million acres of
federal land into state property. The
federal government stipulated that
this should not be land actively “used”
by indigenous peoples, but Alaska ig-
nored this requirement. In response,
Native Alaskan organizers filed claims
and lobbied to reclaim land that had
been taken from them.
After oil was discovered in Alaska’s
Prudhoe Bay in 1968, the US govern-
ment urgently wanted to gain full con-
trol of the area needed for a pipeline.
President Nixon signed
a law granting Alaskan
Native nations 38 mil-
lion acres and nearly
$1 billion in exchange
for giving up any claim
to another 325 million
acres. The money went
to incorporated villages
and regional organiza-
tions that had to invest
it in local businesses
and make profits in
order not to forfeit the
land they held. This was
hardly a return to the
old way of life. As De-
muth writes, “Berin-
gians had sovereignty,
had enclosed spaces
of self- determination,
but not the power to exist without some
participation in a world valued by dol-
lars.” Well- meaning American and in-
ternational quotas on hunting also posed
difficulties: exemptions for indigenous
peoples usually required that hunting
be practiced as it was two centuries
earlier, not taking into account the dra-
matic changes that had occurred in na-
tive lives.
For whales, too, conservation efforts
yielded mixed results. By the end of
World War II, technological and agri-
cultural advances left the United States
with no need for an industrial whaling
fleet, and it proposed a global plan for
the more sustainable use of whales. In
late 1946 the US, the USSR, the UK,
Norway, Japan, and other countries
signed the International Convention for
the Regulation of Whaling, which im-
posed limits on the number of whales
that could be killed. The Soviets were
especially vigorous in their attempts to
evade conservation efforts, considering
the International Whaling Commission,
established by the ICRW, a capitalist
conspiracy to prevent Communists from
getting their fair share of the money that
could be made from the ocean.
When there were not enough legal
whales to meet government quotas, the
Soviets killed more anyway, falsifying
the reports sent to the IWC. Rushed
Soviet “production” continued to mean
waste, with a third of the gray whales
killed sinking to the bottom of the sea,
not even yielding a profit. But even the
Soviets couldn’t pretend forever that it
was possible to produce something out
of nothing, and the near-extinction of
many species of whale finally forced
the USSR to reduce its quotas. In 1972
the USSR allowed IWC observers to
come on its ships and record their
catch, and it began following whaling
limits—perhaps because there was no
way to continue meeting targets, andWhaling ships wintering at Herschel Island, now part of Canada;
painting by John Bertonccini, circa 1894New Bedford Whaling Museum