New Rules of the Wild Clash With Eskimo Traditions : Culture: Some natives kill walrus for valuable ivory. They say Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to keep them from hunting--and staying alive.

Kim Speckman patrols an area roughly the size of California, trying to find the slippery balance between age-old traditions and modern realities.

A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service enforcement agent, Speckman heads the government’s efforts to control illicit hunting by Inupiat and Yupik Eskimos of walrus, polar bears, migratory birds and other species in northwest Alaska.

The Eskimos’ lifestyle has changed rapidly in recent decades, but economic opportunities in the Alaska bush remain limited.

Poverty forces some Eskimo hunters to poach walrus for their valuable ivory tusks, and modern hunting tools make it easy: Traditional skin boats have powerful outboard engines, bolt-action rifles have given way in some cases to assault rifles and dog sleds largely have been replaced by snowmobiles.

“They are stuck with one foot in each culture,” Speckman said. “The old ways are no longer pertinent. Subsistence is not central to their life anymore.”

And in an economy where jobs are short, ivory remains a common currency.

Speckman is the first enforcement agent in seven years to be stationed in Nome, located on the Bering Sea coast about 550 miles north of Anchorage.

In February, undercover agents concluded a yearlong drugs-for-ivory sting that netted two dozen suspects, mostly Eskimos. Speckman helped gather information in the case--and she’s the one who has had to answer for it to the Eskimos.

When she travels to villages, hunters, elders and others lambaste her for government interference in their traditional ways, she said. She listens, learns and tries to defuse the anger. She hopes to make a difference.

“She’s brand new,” said hunter Matthew Iya of Nome, director of the Alaska Eskimo Walrus Commission. “Hopefully, we’re leading her along in the right direction.”

The Marine Mammal Protection Act prohibits most walrus hunting. But under a unique racially based exemption to the law, Alaska native hunters may kill the tusked behemoths for food and--in the face of worldwide elephant hunting prohibitions--increasingly valuable ivory.

The law is “pretty vague,” Fish and Wildlife spokesman Bruce Batten said, but it prohibits waste and illegal transport of walrus ivory.

The recent sting--and a videotape played to reporters that showed hunters on the ice in the Bering Sea slaughtering walruses and dumping headless carcasses into the water--angered Eskimo leaders.

It gave subsistence hunters who follow the law a bad name, they say, and the publicity surrounding it portrayed an entire culture as corrupt.

The Alaska Eskimo Walrus Commission has condemned the illegal hunt and the video, and plans to produce a video of its own showing the positive aspects of the subsistence culture.

Some villages are dependent on walrus hunting. Someone from every household in Little Diomede, with 170 residents, hunts walrus and carves ivory, according to Geri Milligrock, the city clerk. With few regular jobs to speak of, income from the ivory makes a difference.

“It is very important. That is their source of food and income,” Milligrock said. And most hunters abide by the walrus hunting regulations, she said.

In Nome, Speckman’s heavy winter parka, filing cabinets and flight suit nearly fill her tiny office in the federal building basement. She flies her own plane, a requirement in a region where there are few roads and existing ones aren’t passable most of the year.

About half a block from her office is the storefront window of an ivory shop offering whole tusks and carved trinkets. Much of the ivory is illegally bought, agents say.

Jim West, owner of the shop and the subject of an ongoing investigation into illegal ivory trading, says federal agents are picking on him because he so adamantly defends the trade and because he’s so visible.

West has sold ivory for 32 years and hires 15 to 20 Eskimo carvers in Nome, but does not break the law, he said. He believes Fish and Wildlife agents are ruining the ivory business and cutting off the carvers’ only income.

“These people are welfare cases. How are they going to make a living?” West said. “All I do is try to help them. Of course, I help myself too.”

In some villages, where a walrus tusk can equal a month’s wages, Eskimo hunters and carvers long have treated ivory as a prime resource to be exploited and sold.

Iya, the walrus commission director, said hunting is “linked to the survival of the native people.” Hunters who abide by the laws are working closely with federal officials for walrus conservation, he said.

Fish and Wildlife agents throughout northern and western Alaska met in April with villagers and walrus hunters to explain the Marine Mammal Act and its regulations.

That may not stop illegal ivory traffic, however. Some of the ivory showing up in Nome is Russian in origin, brought across the Bering Sea by Siberian Eskimos, Speckman said.

“They’ve got the same problem you have in the villages (in Alaska),” she said. “They have to find some way to survive.”