The Struggle to Balance New Rules and Old Customs in Alaska Bush : Wildlife: Federal agent Kim Speckman tries to reconcile Eskimos’ reliance on walrus hunting for subsistence with laws regulating such activity.

Kim Speckman patrols an area roughly the size of California, trying to find the slippery balance between age-old traditions and very 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 now have powerful outboard engines, bolt-action rifles have given way in some cases to assault rifles, and dogsleds largely have been replaced by snowmobiles.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 year-long drugs-for-ivory sting that netted two dozen suspects, mostly Natives. 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 Fish and Wildlife’s “interference” with 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 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 wanton 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 Native leaders.

It gave Native subsistence hunters who follow the law a bad name, they said, 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 depend 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 big 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 almost fill her tiny office in the federal building basement. She flies her own plane, a requirement in this region where roads are few and wouldn’t be passable most of the year even if they did exist.

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

Jim West, owner of the shop and the subject of an ongoing investigation into illegal ivory trading, contends 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 Native 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, Native 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 assure that they understood how the marine mammal act is interpreted and what the rules are.

That may not stop all 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.”