I am clothed in Regulations....

As an Inupiaq Eskimo that lives a predominantly subsistence lifestyle (which means much of our food comes from the land), I am very heavily regulated by the federal and state government.

Which if you think about it is nothing abnormally really in this day and age.  But the amount of regulations that I wear daily can be pretty staggering, and is often something that people who live a non-subsistence lifestyle have no real grasp on.  

We live in a time where our subsistence rights are being terrorized, mostly by state officials.  All over the state there are cases and cases being brought against Native people that are incredibly ridiculous and fantastic, aimed at smearing the 'morality' of traditional cultural activities.  But we will get to that in a bit.

Now I'm not a expert in these regulations though I do keep one eye out form any new changes in the wind that pertain to my art or my food.  Anything in this post is based off of my personal knowledge, which is gained from perusing websites and the occasional....few and far between....paper in the mail from Fish and Game.  

The first thing people should be aware of it that the regulations that govern us are separated into to three main bodies.  State, Federal, and International.  Easy enough right?   Most of the time ,yes.  Each section usually lords over some section of animals;  State gets local-ish animals, Federal gets U.S. migratory-ish animals, and international is where animals that migrate through different countries or inter-country trade gets haggled out.  Basically State handles animals like caribou and squirrels, Federal has a love affair with ducks and geese, and international gets the animals like whales and endangered marine mammals.  This is a not a totally accurate view but as we all know complexity and masses of words somehow equals more control in big government arena's.   

One thing I should point out here is that in recorded modern history, (we might have something to with the mammoth going round the bend) no animal has ever been hunted to extinction by subsistence hunters in the state of Alaska.  All animals that are endangered or extinct have became that way through western commercial hunting and trade.  Usually whalers looking for easy marks/food/money.  And you have to keep in mind that before the native population declined rapidly from exposure to disease, there were hundreds of thousands of individuals, maybe even millions, living off the population of animals present.  The Inupiaq people alone are estimated to have gone from 500,000 to today's number of 10,000.  So in a way we became one of those endangered species also.