Hess, Bill

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HESS, Bill

PERSONAL:

Born in UT; married, 1974; children: three sons, two daughters.

ADDRESSES:

Home—P.O. Box 872383, Wasilla, AK 99687. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Sasquatch Books, 119 South Main, Suite 400, Seattle, WA 98104.

CAREER:

Writer and photographer. Editor, reporter, and photographer of Fort Apache Scout (newspaper), White Mountain Apache Reservation, AZ; Tundra Times Anchorage, AK, reporter, photographer, and editor, 1981-85; founder of Uiñiq (magazine), North Slope Borough, AK. Alaska's Village Voices, editor and producer; Eyak Echo, Eyak, AK, member of staff. Also an airplane pilot.

AWARDS, HONORS:

W. Eugene Smith fellowship.

WRITINGS:

(And photographer) Taking Control: The North Slope Borough, the Story of Self Determination in the Arctic, North Slope Borough, Public Information Division (Barrow, AK), 1993.

(And photographer) Gift of the Whale: The Iñupiat Bowhead Hunt, a Sacred Tradition, Sasquatch Books (Seattle, WA), 1999.

Contributor to periodicals, including National Geographic, Surfer, Field and Stream, Alaska, Los Angeles Times, Sunday, Natural History, and Anchorage Daily News.

SIDELIGHTS:

Bill Hess is a photographer and writer whose Gift of the Whale: The Iñupiat Bowhead Hunt, a Sacred Tradition is a study of the hunt for bowhead and beluga whales and other prey by the Iñupiat living around Barrow, Alaska. Hess, who grew up in Montana, wrote for Digital Journalist online that he grew up reading books that described a way of life he yearned to live, one with greater freedom than could be achieved even in Big Sky country. He planned to travel to Alaska, but first he moved to Arizona, where he married a woman from the White Mountain Apache tribe. There he began a tribal newspaper and a family. In 1981, Hess, his wife, and four children headed north in a Volkswagen Rabbit, arriving in Anchorage in June.

Once there Hess freelanced, earning twenty-five dollars per photograph while the family lived in pup tents. When the weather turned cold, he accepted a job with a daily newspaper in Kenai, and the family moved into a small apartment. The paper served the Eskimo, Indian, and Aleut communities, and while Hess earned almost nothing for his work, it brought him closer to his vision of freedom. He made his first trip to Barrow in May of 1982.

In Gift of the Whale Hess explains that the hunting of the bowhead was banned in 1977 by the International Whaling Organization (IWO), with the backing of the U.S. government. The claim was that the number of bowheads—estimated to have numbered approximately twenty thousand in the mid-nineteenth century, before the era of the Yankee whalers—had diminished to approximately six hundred. By the mid-twentieth century Iñupiat hunters said that this was incorrect, that numbers were in the thousands and increasing.

The Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission (AEWC) was formed, and members traveled worldwide to argue their case. They succeeded only in securing a quota of twelve bowheads for the entire Alaska whaling community, covering fifteen hundred miles of coastline. The AEWC also secured a promise from the IWO to raise the quota if larger numbers could be proved. As Hess wrote in Digital Journalist article, "When I made my first visit to Barrow, the community had struck and lost all whales allowed as their share of the tiny quota. The hunt was over, yet there was no whale in Barrow. The great communal feasts and celebrations of Nalukataq, Thanksgiving, and Christmas would not take place. The community was bitterly divided between those who felt the hunters must prove themselves responsible managers by honoring the quota, and those who felt they should ignore the white man's law and hunt only by their own."

During his first trip to Barrow, the predicament of the Iñupiat became clear, but as a white man, Hess was primarily an observer. By May of 1985, he returned as a freelancer, and in the same year he founded the community magazine Uiñiq. The publication was funded by the North Slope Borough, which lay seven hundred nautical miles south of Barrow and included nine villages spread out over an area the size of Utah. Hess covered the borough in a spruce-framed, fabric-covered plane he named Running Dog. He followed the whaling crews and took photographs as he earned his place by performing whatever tasks were assigned to him.

A decade after the original ruling, the IWO verified the claim by the Iñupiat that eight thousand bowheads migrate through Alaskan waters each year, and it ruled that fifty-one could be harvested by the ten villages without harming the growth of the population. Hess documents the history of this long dispute and of the role hunting wild animals of Alaska for food is an integral part of the lives of native peoples. Booklist reviewer Nancy Bent noted that the issue "remains controversial, but Hess's book presents a strong case for the cultural and spiritual side of the argument."