What Inughuit hunters can teach us about the revered narwhal

Qillaq Kristiansen directed his kayak away from the ice edge and onto the open water in pursuit of a narwhal. The 35-year-old Inughuit hunter and his companions had traveled to the spring ice edge last year—half a day by dogsled from Qaanaaq, Greenland. About 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, it is one of the northernmost towns in the world. The muffled puff of a whale’s breath escaped the glassy waters near the western end of Qeqertarsuaq, or Herbert Island. The narwhal paused at the surface—seemingly offering itself to the hunter, as some Inughuit might say.

In a single sweep of his right hand, Qillaq untethered his harpoon and hurled it into the dapple-gray smudge of the narwhal’s back. Splashing its tail, the whale dived. But the harpoon, its toggle head firmly lodged in the narwhal’s body, was tied to a buoy of inflated sealskin, making it difficult for the wounded animal to escape. Qillaq raised his paddle above his head in celebration.

His companions quickly joined him in their kayaks and caught up with the injured whale, striking it with a second harpoon, then killing it with a rifle shot. They towed the narwhal, tailfirst, to a cleared spot near their camp and pulled it from the water. Knives were out as soon as the whale was hauled onto the ice. The hunters savored deliciously nutty mattak, what Inughuit call the narwhal’s skin and underlying layer of fat, loaded with vitamins and minerals. “I am not interested in European food. I want to eat my own food from the sea, like our ancestors,” said Qillaq through a translator.

To Inughuit, the narwhal hunt is an integral part of living and thriving on their ancestral territory around Pikialasorsuaq, an open-water region north of the Arctic Circle that in midsummer can cover more than 30,000 square miles. The North Water Polynya, as it’s also called, is an overwintering ground for narwhals, belugas, walruses, and bowhead whales. Its waters teem with Greenland halibut, arctic cod, and other fish, and its rocky shores provide nesting habitat for tens of millions of little auks. It is an irreplaceable source of physical and spiritual nourishment for Inughuit, who for centuries relied on wildlife around their homeland that once included hunting grounds—known to Inughuit as Umimmattooq—on Canada’s Ellesmere Island.

“There were many rituals among my people,” said Hivshu R.E. Peary, a keeper of Inughuit heritage. These were rituals forbidden by missionaries and mostly lost. “Every animal was believed to be our ancestor that would come and feed us with its own body. This is why in our language we call the food inumineq, or a former human being. This means that we eat our ancestors and get power through our ancestors, whose blood runs through our body.”

Inughuit’s narwhal hunting practices are rooted in traditions of caring for the animals they depend on. To prevent needlessly harassing the whales inside the fjord where they calve and begin nursing their young in the summer, the hunters restrict the use of motorboats, instead choosing stealthier kayaks. To avoid losing narwhals that sink quickly when shot, the hunters harpoon them first. To ensure that not a single part of the harvested animal is wasted, respected Inughuit hunters share their catch with everyone involved in the hunt and, when possible, their community.

(How Greenlanders preserve their heritage through kayaking.)

But these practices are under threat, say many Inughuit hunters. “Narwhal hunting culture is disappearing … because of the quota system,” explained Hivshu’s son, Aleqatsiaq, a hunter and musician from Qaanaaq. “The quota is so small that the hunters have to keep everything to themselves, instead of sharing, because they need to make money.”

Inughuit speak Inuktun and, while Inuit themselves, they identify as culturally distinct from the Kalaallisut-speaking Greenlandic Inuit majority. Despite their linguistic, historical, and cultural differences, Inughuit are not recognized as a sovereign Indigenous people by either Denmark or Greenland. About 700 Inughuit live in Qaanaaq and a handful of smaller settlements around Inglefield Bredning, a fjord also known as Kangerlussuaq. Qaanaaq was permanently settled in 1953 when the colonial Danish government relocated Inughuit families more than 60 miles north from their longtime settlement of Uummannaq, to make room for an expansion of America’s new Thule Air Base, now Pituffik Space Base.

(Qaanaaq is one of the last places on Earth to explore an ancient Arctic life.)

This forced move displaced the community from some of their traditional hunting grounds. Yet Qaanaaq had a comparative advantage—from spring to late summer it was rich in narwhals, or qilalukkat as many locals call them. The enigmatic Monodon monoceros—Latin for “one tooth, one horn”—is recognized for its long tusk, or tooth, spiraling counterclockwise from the upper left jaw and reaching up to nine feet in length. These small whales can weigh nearly two tons and measure almost 18 feet long without their tusks.

Today most of the world’s narwhals—by recent scientific estimates, numbers exceed 100,000—are found in coastal waters off northern Canada and Greenland, and are managed as distinct stocks. Since 2017, the narwhal has been listed as a species of least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature. While Greenland has prohibited the export of narwhal tusks since 2006, domestic trade of mattak and tusks is permitted. Greenland’s Minister of Fisheries and Hunting annually sets how many narwhals vocational hunters can harvest in a specific region. In deciding the hunting quota for Qaanaaq, the minister seeks to balance the scientific recommendations of the Canada/Greenland Joint Commission on Conservation and Management of Narwhal and Beluga (JCNB)—informed in part by population estimates from the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources—with input from members of Greenland’s Fishermen and Hunters Association (KNAPK).

(Greenland could lose more ice this century than it has in 12,000 years.)

The institute’s current estimate for the Inglefield stock is between 2,000 and 6,000 narwhals, a range based on aerial surveys conducted in 2007 and 2019. (It accounts for animals not visible from the surface based on movement data from a single narwhal fitted with a satellite tag.) For 2024, the JCNB recommended reducing the quota from 84 to about 50 narwhals. After taking hunters’ concerns into account, however, the minister left the quota at 84.

For generations, Inughuit’s relationship with narwhals has been based on real-world empirical evidence accumulated from regular observations of the whales’ behavior during the year, while the institute’s scientists are constrained by competing priorities, their budget, and time. They are based in Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, and travel to Qaanaaq can take two days.

Many hunters feel excluded from the institute’s narwhal counting process and don’t trust its population estimates. “The scientists don’t want us to participate in their research,” said Jens Danielsen, a local hunter for most of his 65 years, through a translator. “They don’t know the animals that they are trying to count.”

Some hunters call for increasing or completely abandoning government-imposed limits. Inughuit want to steward their homeland themselves. “We live together with the animals we hunt, year around,” said Qillaq. “The biologists who count these animals need to come and spend time with the hunters to learn from us.”

(Pristine Arctic reserves will benefit wildlife and Inuit communities.)

Hunters must earn at least half their annual income from hunting to be eligible for vocational hunter status, qualifying them for government-issued permits to pursue narwhals and other wildlife. In a 2021 letter to the journal Science, the institute’s scientists described the domestic narwhal market as a commercial enterprise—rather than a subsistence harvest—noting that an average narwhal’s mattak had a market value of about $10,000 in 2020. “The narwhal is by far the most valuable hunting product in Greenland,” the institute’s Mads Peter Heide-Jørgensen, a scientist who’s studied narwhal populations for more than 30 years, recently wrote via email. “And the hunters depend heavily on the income from that resource. Of course, that also affects their perception of the status of the resource.”

The institute’s job, he explained, is to generate the best scientific advice based on internationally accepted methods, not to co-manage stocks. “This doesn’t preclude developing methods for estimating status of the stocks together with local hunters,” he wrote, pointing to the institute’s last hiring of hunters in 2015 to help collect scientific data and participate in interviews. But, he noted, stock estimation of marine mammals requires “knowledge about population dynamics which is only fully understood by a few professional assessment scientists.” A survey conducted around Qaanaaq in 2022 is still being analyzed, and the next one is planned for 2030 or later.

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Globally, there are many examples of how Indigenous knowledge enriches scientific understanding of nature in general and whale counts in particular. In Alaska the International Whaling Commission banned the bowhead whale harvest in 1977, eroding the Alaska Inuit’s traditional way of life. U.S. researchers soon partnered with Alaska Inuit to revise their census methodology to incorporate Inuit knowledge of whale migration behavior under the ice and far offshore. As a result, bowhead whale population estimates roughly tripled to more than 15,000 over the next three decades, leading to a gradual increase in the number of whales Alaska Inuit can harvest.

“Local management by local people, including their knowledge—that’s the way forward,” said Kuupik V. Kleist, former Greenland premier and co-author of a 2017 Inuit Circumpolar Council’s report on the future of Pikialasorsuaq. “I can’t see anything else.”

Metronomed by Qillaq’s breaths and paddle strokes, the hunt is a finely choreographed yet precarious water dance. A harpoon cord caught on the kayak, a thrashing narwhal catching the boat with its tail, or a charging walrus can end a hunter’s life just as swiftly as a harpoon can find a narwhal’s back. Qillaq and his companions treat every successful hunt as a gift. They share the meat based on their role—from harpooning to keeping watch on the shifting ice, from butchering to looking after the camp. The first hunter to harpoon the narwhal gets a section of eqqui (meat between the head and fins), uliutaa (meat from along the backbone), sarpiup illua (half the tail, or fluke), nungiallua (tailbone), uummataa (heart), niaqua (head), and tuugaaq (tusk). The next hunter gets itersoraq (lower body), sarpiata aappaa (other half of the fluke), and uliutaa. Additional members of the hunting party receive smaller and less desirable parts, including internal and reproductive organs. The last to be rewarded are the dogs, valued by Inughuit hunters as a more reliable mode of transportation on the spring ice than snowmobiles, which are faster but noisier, more expensive, and prone to breakdowns.

A good narwhal hunting season provides enough meat and mattak for Inughuit to feed their families and dogs, and to share at community events such as weddings. Plus, it provides a supply of mattak and tusks that can be sold locally. An almost 40 percent quota reduction would mean the loss of both sustenance and income. “Sometimes when the quota is used up, they have nothing to hunt for three months,” said Aleqatsiaq Peary, adding that they have to “stop hunting and even sell their equipment.”

About 30 locals make up the Qaanaaq hunters union, a branch of the KNAPK, which represents the economic, social, and cultural interests of its members. They rely on income from hunting and fishing, supplemented by occasional part-time jobs, to make a living and maintain their vocational hunter status.

(A photographic eulogy for Greenland's departing icebergs.)

Union members are confident there are more narwhals around the fjord today than in the past. “It has become very noticeable that the narwhal numbers have been increasing dramatically,” said Danielsen. Similarly, they see narwhals looking and behaving differently from what they remember, which suggests to them the mixing of separate stocks. Inughuit explain that some of the newcomers, unlike narwhals from the Inglefield stock, have more slender bodies and larger tails and don’t recognize their kayaks as a source of danger. The institute has done genetic studies, according to Heide-Jørgensen, and found, in some instances, “the differences the hunters notice.”

Recently, there are encouraging signs that Inughuit knowledge is poised to be more recognized. At the national level, Greenland’s hunting laws were updated in 2023 to require researchers to include hunters’ expertise and observations in the development of population assessments. It gives equal weight to “the science and hunters’ knowledge in the decision-making processes,” said Amalie A. Jessen, a division head in Greenland’s Ministry of Fisheries and Hunting. When determining the quotas, she explained, the government has to listen not only to scientists. “We have to listen to hunters,” she said. “They could tell us about the distribution of narwhal in the area, when they arrive to the area and when they leave, and how the ice condition is impacting the hunt.” And, she added, they can report how many calves they are seeing.

At the international level, Greenland and Canada signed a letter of intent last year to work toward co-managing and protecting the Pikialasorsuaq, which could give Inughuit a greater role in stewarding their ancestral territory, including, perhaps, Umimmattooq.

“It would mean a lot to us to have access to our traditional area again,” said Qillaq, as he cautiously reflected on these recent developments. “It is also good to have stronger language in the hunting law about hunters’ knowledge.” He wondered, though, how long it woud take to see the law in practice—to feel a change. In the meantime, Qillaq’s people will continue to kayak among the narwhals, respect them, learn from them, and depend on them. He and his fellow hunters will be out on the spring ice edge next season, with their harpoons.

(Arctic ice is getting thinner by the day—and sea life is suffering.)