Wielding a sharpened piece of volcanic glass, Tim Ackerman sliced into the thawing carcass of a harbor seal.
“You want to keep parallel to the hide like this, as close as you can to the skin,” Ackerman said, narrating his deft movement separating skin from fat to a dozen chefs, nutritionists and cultural practitioners on a recent weekday in the kitchen of a patient housing building at the Alaska Native Medical Center.
They crowded around the stainless steel table’s seal centerpiece. Chefs in black coats with plastic gloves reaching their elbows silently tracked Ackerman as he showed them how to cut around the seal’s fin so as not to tear the hide.
Then — with a “whoever wants to try it” — he offered his tool to a novice.
Ackerman, a 66-year-old Tlingit seal hunter from Haines, has been donating seal meat to the hospital’s traditional foods program for years “to promote and preserve the harvest of seals for consumption,” he said.
This year, the Alaska Native Medical Center’s food and nutrition staff decided to try something new. Rather than provide chefs with an already butchered seal to make soup and other meals, they requested Ackerman ship up the whole 160-pound carcass bled and gutted. They brought Ackerman up too, to teach the hospital’s food staff a cultural practice, a food system and a way of life.
The next seal hunters
Nichole Thoms, the hospital’s kitchen manager and a lead chef, had never broken down a seal before. None of her roughly 125-person kitchen staff had either.
Thoms is Yup’ik and Iñupiaq, and grew up in Palmer. As a Native chef, she relies on her elders to show her the culturally correct way to process and prepare traditional foods, she said.
“When we got a moose donated to us a couple years ago, I didn’t know how to break (it) down, and now I’ve already broken down two moose,” Thoms said, her gloves slick with seal fat. “It’s just knowing the right person.”
Although the hospital accepts several thousand pounds of donated subsistence foods annually to feed patients as part of its “culturally sensitive” care model — including game, seafood and plants — seal meat is harder to come by, said Cynthia Davis, the hospital’s Food and Nutrition Services business manager. Ackerman has been the lone donor of seal meat since 2016, she said.
That’s in part because there’s a smaller group of people who are legally able to hunt seals, compared to moose, deer and salmon. Under federal law, hunting marine mammals — including seals — for subsistence is permissible only for coastal Alaska Native people. (Currently, federal agencies are in the process of reviewing the law’s narrow eligibility requirements. Previously, the law limited eligibility to a coastal hunter with at least one-quarter of Alaska Native blood, but officials are now considering adjusting that eligibility requirement to instead hinge on tribal enrollment.)
A shrinking seal hunting season, the rising cost of fuel to power motorized boats and the aging of the “old-timer” hunters have further diminished the seal hunting community, Ackerman said. He can count the number of seal hunters in Southeast Alaska on one hand, he added. NOAA Fisheries does not track the number of subsistence seal hunters in Alaska, a spokesperson said.
Others in the group, Ackerman’s adult nieces Kimberley and Crystalyn Lemieux, said they wanted to eventually take over the seal hunting tradition from their uncle.
Kimberley Lemieux works as a lead chef at the Alaska Native Medical Center. While she’s never processed a seal before, she did go hunting with her uncle for two weeks in 2022, supported by the tribal corporation she worked for at the time, NANA.
“I think it’s the most experienced thing that almost every Indigenous person should learn how to do,” said Lemieux, whose mother’s family comes from the Deisheetaan clan in Angoon. She demonstrated for the group how to strike the right baritone of a seal call.
While hunting is typically a male role in families, the Lemieux sisters want to fill the gaps for their community when Ackerman retires in a few years.
“Traditionally, our aunties and uncles would train us on how to do this work, so it’s very cultural,” said Crystalyn Lemieux, who works as the senior manager of cultural engagement at the Alaska Native Heritage Center.
“We don’t have a lot of men in our family that do this work, so Kim and I just have to suck it up and do it,” Crystalyn Lemieux said as she trimmed fat off the seal pelt. She and her sister have plans to tan the hide and make clothing from it, including a vest, a hat for Ackerman and ceremonial rattles from the claws and teeth. They’ll make seal oil from the fat and earrings from the whiskers, she said.
“Tim is training us up so that we can become the next seal hunters (and) provide to our community.”
Seal soup
In addition to always-available traditional food menu items, the Alaska Native Medical Center’s food staff prepares a traditional meal for patients and delivers it door-to-door weekly. “Traditional Tuesdays,” Thoms said.
Lately, they’d been offering caribou stew, but patients would soon be offered seal soup, she said.
Ackerman calls seal a power food. It’s healthy for him to hunt — from paddling his plastic canoe to dragging a 200-pound carcass to shore — and healthy for people to eat. The meat is high in protein and low in cholesterol, offering about 3,000 calories per pound.
“In a cold climate, that’s your power,” he said. “You eat it, and it feels like a flame on the inside,” he said.
It’s also high in iron and and can be used to treat those with iron deficiency or diabetes, said Olga Guy, a program evaluator for the food and nutritional services department. But more than anything else, food staff said, it brings the healing powers of home.
“This is going to be a big surprise,” said Karissa Sampson, the hospital’s patient services manager who oversees meal delivery, as she helped skin the final portion of the pelt.
“It lights up their day. When we bring (patients) foods they grew up with, it brings them healing so they can get back to their families.”
This story was originally published by the Anchorage Daily News.