My second time eating whale

Saturday was so awesome, I needed to create this extra blog post to cover it all.  So... yesterday... grand opening... music... okay, here we go:

After the gospel singers finished, a native man played songs that he wrote on his electric guitar, along with his wife and brother.  He was a fabulous guitarist (Hendrix good).  He sang a hilarious song called "Empty Kayak Blues" about how he'd get no lovin' when he came back from a seal hunt without any seal to show for it.  After he sang "Inupiaq Whalers" he told everyone that he had a bunch of black muktuk in his freezer and anyone was invited to his house (he gave us the address over the microphone) if we wanted to try some.  Muktuk is a small slab of whale skin and blubber, black because it was from a bowhead whale (white muktuk is from beluga).  I haven't heard one bad thing about it even though it sounds disgusting.

I try not to pass up an opportunity to try a new food when it is made available to me, so I told him I would be right over after I finished cleaning up after the event. This was a good idea because I was able to give him a gallon bag full of leftover vegetables that I collected after the grand opening.

My roommate/co-worker knocked on his door later that day.  We were invited into the living area, full of the muktuk man's family. For my own blogging ease, his name is Wendell and his white wife is named Mary.  They were expecting me and they gave me the muktuk from the freezer.  They invited me to sit down and try it since I had no idea how to eat it.  You eat it raw with some salt, although I heard it is also good boiled with mustard.  The stuff is extremely tough and chewy.  It has a slight coconutty flavor, which is actually pretty darn good, you just have to get past the texture  The black skin gets kind of stringy after you work at it for a while.  The blubber is just tough to get through.  It's so chewy that if you bite too hard, your jaw will bounce open.

As I ate they told us of the whale hunting parties.  The Kotzebue Sound is quite shallow and the only whale that really comes in this area is beluga.  Really bowhead whale harvests happen in Barrow and villages along the wide ocean coast.

In the winter, the whole village will pick up and move supplies on sleds across the sea ice until they set up camp near the open water.  The whaling crew heads out in the ocean in a large voyageur-sized, sealskin canoe, called an umiaq.  They return to the camp, dragging a harpooned whale and somehow are able to pull in onto the ice.  Families help with butchering it and receive their fair share of the meat.

The whalers are well-fed at the camp, where cooking stations are found everywhere you turn.  Women compete to see who can cook the best food.  There is no squabbling between families or children as games are played.  Everyone gets together to toss lighter individuals up in the air with walrus-skin blankets.  Oftentimes, the one being tossed in the air will carry a paper bag full of goodies, such as pelts and jewelry, that she will rip open while in the air. As the items fall to the ground, little old ladies push past each other to grab the good stuff.  Wendell and Mary said it was the funniest thing in the world.  I think I sounds better than a pinata.

One more thing before I end this: whale and seal oil is very good for you. It is made out of the blubber, but it is unlike any fat you've ever experienced.  The stuff doesn't solidify, even when frozen.  Therefore, it doesn't really build up in your arteries.  It's high in some vitamins, I guess.  It is also a fantastic preservative.  You can put strips of meat into a jar of seal oil and it will keep for a long time in the same state as when you put it in there.  It apparently has a warming effect on the body, so pieces of muktuk are often brought along on winter hunting expeditions.  So there is no reason to send me Clif Bars in the mail, I have muktuk (that's a lie; please send me Clif Bars).

P.S.  My first time eating whale was in Iceland.  The meat is red and tastes like venison.