The Makah people on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State have also unjustly been hounded by save-the-whalers. The Canadian Inuit are another case in point. All of these cultures and more should be supported and congratulated for being able to keep alive their traditions in the face of misguided and wrong opposition.

For the Chukotkan people, the reality is all too stark. These native people of Russia’s far north have been pushed back to subsistence on a scale rarely, if ever, seen in modern times, the Seattle Times states. The more than 120 gray whales killed each year in hunts are not for keeping culture alive, such as the Makah, but to keep families alive.

These people are the Chukchi and the Yup'ik Eskimos. The Chukchi who today whale were once traditional reindeer herders, who have had to turn to the sea for sustenance. Even less than 12 months ago, August 2000, the shelves in the remote village stores were bare. Some families had nothing to feed their children but gray whale.

This is the same gray whale that appear to have depleted its food supplies in the areas in which they live. The estimated 26,000-strong population, which roams from near Mexico, along the West Coasts of the United States and Canada to the shallow waters of the Bering Strait to feed on shrimp, crab, kelp and seaweed, had exceeded the area in which their population lives.

This has been determined from a number of experiments, including the measurements of blubber thickness of whales washed up on the beach along the West Coast of the North Americas. The blubber thickness was sizeably smaller suggesting the whales were not getting enough food. The direct result of giving one part of a fisheries management area – in this case the whales – total protection over all other areas of the same fishery. The imbalance results in the growth of one part of the fishery over all others.

The point is this. With the 120 gray taken from the Russian Far North, five taken each year by the Makah, the gray whale population could handle a take of more.

Anthropologists firmly believe that customary diet is even more important in establishing and maintaining an individual’s cultural identity than any other distinctive attribute, including even language.

The harvesting of whales for food is a cultural tradition. Unfortunately for the coastal villagers of Chukotka, it is very much for survival. But the reasons to keep whaling for food are mostly cultural, not economic, and to say otherwise is to deny the Chukotkan people, the Makah and many other cultures their right to a full future.