The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska conducted a Species Status Assessment in response to a petition to list the Alexander Archipelago wolf under the Endangered Species Act. This federal undertaking could not be adequately prepared without including the voices of the Indigenous People who have a deep connection with the subspecies. The Indigenous knowledge presented in this report is the cultural and intellectual property of those who have shared it. The purpose of the report is to communicate the knowledge shared with us to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to help inform the Species Status Assessment and future tribal consultations, wildlife research, and management. Due to a constrained regulatory timeline, we employed rapid appraisal research to expeditiously develop a preliminary understanding of Indigenous People’s ecological knowledge of wolves. We applied the social scientific methods of qualitative ethnography and inductive coding from grounded theory for text analysis. We conducted archival research and literature reviews on the cultural significance of wolves in Tlingit society and social organization to supplement in-depth conversations with traditional knowledge holders who are local wolf experts. The study was informed by two tribal consultations.

Sustainable Indigenous resource use reflects balance between animal populations and levels of human consumption, influenced by natural cycles of faunal abundance, community size and subsistence needs, procurement technologies, and the requirements of trade or commodity production. Sustainability is “epiphenomenal” when animal populations are preserved, and community needs met, without deliberate measures to prevent overharvesting. Alternatively, Indigenous conservation—cultural practices that moderate use of a resource to prevent its depletion—may play a determinative role. In this study from the Tlingit community of Yakutat, Alaska in the Northwest Coast cultural region, we interweave Indigenous and scientific perspectives to trace the use and conservation of harbor seals (Phoca vitulina) from before Western contact through the Russian and American colonial periods to the present. Harbor seals, which concentrate in large numbers at a summer ice floe rookery near Hubbard Glacier, are the community's most important subsistence food and a key to its culture and history. The Smithsonian Institution and Yakutat Tlingit Tribe undertook collaborative research in historical ecology and archaeology in 2011–2014 including oral interviews with elders and subsistence providers, excavations at sealing sites, archaeofaunal analysis, historical and archival research, and consideration of climate cycles and biological regime shifts that influence the harbor seal population in the Gulf of Alaska. We compare technologies and hunting practices before and after Western contact, estimate harvest levels in different periods, and evaluate the effectiveness of traditional conservation practices that included hunting quotas enforced by clan leaders and the seasonal delay of hunting with firearms to prevent abandonment of the rookery by the seal herd.