Reindeer in Alaska: Under New Management

segregate and control the now wild and unpredictable reindeer. Merlin was devastated. The herd was his father’s legacy, entrusted to him with the hope of passing it on to his own sons and daughters. Merlin Henry had been a dedicated, compassionate, hard-working herder, and now his family and the village of Koyuk were without a reindeer herd for the first time in sixty years. But all was not lost. Merlin Henry, along with the other members of the Reindeer Herders Association, have been solving problems and overcoming obstacles facing the reindeer industry for many years. All of their efforts to improve the reindeer industry have not been without help. The Reindeer Herders Association (RHA) has been working closely in a partnership with the Reindeer Research Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (RRP) since 1981 to address needs of the industry. Merlin Henry did everything he could to save his reindeer herd. He went out riding his snowmachine across rough, hardpacked snow in the cold and dark, day after day, to keep what was left of his herd from mixing with the caribou. But no matter where he drove his reindeer, to the top of every hill and the bottom of every valley, into the spruce trees, and even close to the village of Koyuk, he encountered caribou wherever he went. It only took a storm and a snowmachine breakdown for him to lose his entire reindeer herd to the migrating caribou. Soon after losing his herd, he was hospitalized and underwent surgery to repair a brain aneurism. Three weeks later, against doctor’s orders, he was out riding a snowmachine across his range in search of the lost herd. He caught glimpses of his reindeer mixed in with thousands of caribou, but was unable to Rural communities of Alaska have been experiencing tremendous environmental and social change over the last thirty years, and Seward Peninsula reindeer herders have been riding this wave of change with amazing adaptability and resilience. Herders have adopted modern range management animal husbandry practices, were instrumental in developing a state-of-the-art, computerized, animal identification and record-keeping system, and adopted radiotelemetry as a conventional herding tool to locate and track reindeer across large ranges. Reindeer herding itself is relative new to the Eskimos of northwestern Alaska. For thousands of years they relied upon the relatively stable populations of marine and terrestrial mammals for their survival. Sea mammals, caribou, and muskoxen provided the mainstay of their diet (Burch, 1975). However, the influence of Euro-Americans changed