Seth Kantner is as Alaska as it gets. Born and raised in a sod igloo on the tundra of northwest Alaska, harsh weather and isolation was the norm, and hunting, fishing and trapping were necessary means for survival. Seth’s dad, Howard, moved to Alaska from Ohio as a young man in search of adventure. School didn’t pan out, and several odd jobs weren’t satisfying. But after spending time on the Chukchi coast conducting a biological census of the caribou herd, and then living in a remote igloo with an Inupiak couple, the Arctic grew on him.
Howard met Erna at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, and after a couple of years bouncing around, they decided to move to that remote Arctic coast and live the subsistence lifestyle he’d grown to love a few years before. They were married in Kotzebue. With a group of friends who had similar ambitions, they left civilization in 1964, building sod igloos dug into the ground on a remote stretch of the Kobuk River near Ambler. The friends dispersed over the years, but Howard and Erna stayed. They raised two boys in their sod house along the river, with no neighbors for miles and miles.
The Kantner family lived more Eskimo than the Eskimos. In an era of government funding, Native corporations and centralized schools, the people who once lived out along the rivers and on the tundra had now concentrated in villages and towns. Electricity, television and sports brought comfort and entertainment. Microwave dinners and candy bars replaced the feast and famine of a hand-to-mouth existence, and motorboats and snowmobiles made it easy to harvest caribou and salmon most any time they were needed.
Meanwhile, the Kantners lived out. They had a dog team for transportation and Howard made sleds by hand. Fishing and hunting supplied virtually all of their fat and protein needs. They lived in sync with the seasons, and wasted precious little. For the supplies they couldn’t make or gather, they trapped and sold furs for cash. They lived in the old ways, and they did it virtually alone.
For two white boys growing up alone on the tundra, it was a unique life. They were home schooled, and extracurricular activities included digging tunnels in the snow and trapping mice. There wasn’t much social life, except during salmon netting season or on the rare visit to town, where Seth and his brother Kole felt the pressures of being minorities and outcasts. As they grew older, mouse trapping transitioned to fur trapping with a dog team, and during the fur boom they made a healthy sum of money to pay for college.
Decades later, Seth Kantner still visits and often uses the sod home he grew up in, but memories are most of what’s left. Kole moved to town and became a computer whiz, navigating a successful career as a computer specialist at the University of Washington. Howard and Erna left their home of decades when Erna got sick. They moved to Hawaii and started a farm, of all things. Seth attended college at Fairbanks and in Montana, but ‘city’ life wasn’t for him.
Seth moved home, and immediately found himself in a struggle between the life of the past and the future that was just on the horizon. Fur prices had tanked, so a career as a trapper was no longer an option. He fell in love with photography, but it was super difficult, and wouldn’t pay bills for some time. The subsistence lifestyle – hunting with dog teams and living on foot – while alluring, was difficult to justify when everyone around him was buzzing about on snow machines and power boats. It was an internal conflict that many face, and there are no easy answers.
It took several years, but Seth Kantner finally found his place in life. He’s a skilled photographer and successful writer, and lives with a family of his own in Kotzebue, not far from his boyhood home. He still fishes and hunts the old country, but the Alaskan Arctic has changed since Seth was a kid. The life he lived provides a unique perspective on policy in the North, and Kantner isn’t afraid to speak his mind on controversial topics of resource development, climate change and other hot button issues.
“Shopping for Porcupine” is a collection of stories about Seth Kantner’s life in Alaska, but it isn’t just that. It’s a piece of art, deep and emotional, reflective and amusing. It leaves record of the last bit of true subsistence Arctic lifestyle that most people thought was gone, and perhaps now is. With a polished writing style and breathtaking photos throughout, Kantner captured it beautifully.
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