# “I’m Not the Great Hunter, My Wife Is”: Iñupiat and Anthropological Models of Gender

> “I’m not the great hunter, my wife is,” said one Iñupiaq hunter in Alaska. In this classic paper, anthropologist Barbara Bodenhorn shows why: for Iñupiat, animals give themselves to the hunter because of his wife’s generosity and her skilful sewing, so hunting includes far more than the kill. She uses this to challenge long-held ideas about men, women and hunting societies.

Summary by Kersey Lawrence, Original Wisdom. Updated 9 November 2026. Page: https://www.originalwisdom.com/tracking-literature/1990-bodenhorn-im-not-great-hunter/

## Citation and access

- **Authors:** Barbara Bodenhorn
- **Year published:** 1990
- **Journal or source:** Études/Inuit/Studies
- **Full citation:** Bodenhorn, B. 1990. “I’m not the great hunter, my wife is”: Iñupiat and anthropological models of gender. Études/Inuit/Studies 14(1-2): 55-74.
- **Access status:** Publisher link only
- **Where to find it:** https://www.jstor.org/stable/42869683

## Tags

- **Species:** Humans
- **Region:** North America > United States
- **Methods and technology:** Ethnographic fieldwork; Indigenous knowledge; Interviews; Literature review
- **Data type:** Existing data; New field data
- **Observer qualification:** Not needed
- **Discipline:** Anthropology; Human dimensions; Indigenous knowledge; Just interesting; Social science
- **Year published:** 1990

## Detailed keywords

- **Species:** Studied: humans (Iñupiat hunters, wives and whaling couples of Alaska’s North Slope). Hunted animals discussed but not studied: bowhead whales, beluga, seals (including bearded seal), walrus, polar bear, caribou, fish, ducks and other water fowl. Wolves and dogs come up in a comparison with the Chipewyan of Canada. No scientific names are given.
- **Location and habitat:** Barrow and Wainwright (spelled “Wainright” in one place), North Slope Borough, Arctic coast of northern Alaska, United States; also Point Hope and Nuiqsut. Comparisons with Canadian Inuit (including Belcher Island and Pelly Bay), Nelson Island Yup’iit of Southwest Alaska, and the Chipewyan of Canada.
- **Topics:** gender and hunting; hunter-gatherer models in anthropology; the meaning of hunting; wives as hunters; animals giving themselves to hunters; animal souls (iñua) and ritual treatment of killed animals; whaling captains (umialiit) and the “whaling couple”; sewing and clothing as a “second skin” that attracts animals; “shares” (ningik) versus “sharing”; meat distribution and community feasts (Nalukataq, Thanksgiving, Christmas); the qargi (“men’s house”, better translated as ceremonial or communal house); public and private spheres; male dominance debates (female infanticide, “wife-swapping”); waged work, oil development and subsistence; naming, personhood and the spirit (ilitqusiq); shamans (angatkuq); women as land and dog handlers and “often better trackers” (a personal communication from Ernest S. Burch, Jr.).
- **Statistics or models:** No statistics. Four anthropological models of gender are compared with Iñupiaq models: men hunt; Inuit societies are male dominated; men control the public sphere; development feminizes the subsistence sphere. Simple counts only, such as 252 Iñupiaq men and 229 women employed in Barrow in 1980.
- **Data type:** New field data: ethnographic interviews and conversations with Iñupiat between 1980 and 1986 (fieldwork 1984 to 1986; further information while the author worked for the Iñupiat Community of the Arctic Slope, 1980 to 1983; final interviews in spring 1986). Existing data: 19th and 20th century ethnography, diaries and recorded elders’ accounts (for example Murdoch 1892, Rainey 1947, Pulo 1980, the 1980 Elders’ Conference tapes). Small inconsistencies in the paper: Kruse is cited as 1981 in the text but listed as 1982 in the references, and the English abstract has several misprints (“Whife”, “Hunther”, “interpedence”).

## Synopsis

### 1. What they did

Anthropologists have often used hunter-gatherer societies, and Inuit societies in particular, to build general theories about men and women. Barbara Bodenhorn tested four of these widely used models against what Iñupiat of Alaska’s North Slope told her about their own lives:

- Men hunt, women gather, and only men regularly hunt big game.

- Men’s say in social affairs rises with the share of hunted meat in the diet, so Inuit, eating almost all meat, should be among the most male-controlled societies.

- Men dominate the public and political sphere, while women hold power, if at all, in the home.

- Development worsens the position of women, who take on more subsistence work and earn fewer wages.

Her material comes from conversations and interviews with Iñupiat in Barrow and Wainwright between 1980 and 1986, together with older ethnography, diaries and recorded elders’ accounts. The paper was presented at the 1990 Inuit Studies conference.

### 2. What they found

A gendered, not a natural, division of labour

- Men make tools, hunt and fish; women fish, hunt occasionally, butcher, preserve and prepare food, tan skins, sew and care for children. The married couple is the ideal working unit.

- No task is thought to be beyond the other sex. Women joined whaling crews when hands were short, and a woman who was “a crack shot” was seen as skilled, not unwomanly. Women brought the meat home, so they knew the land as well as their husbands, were better dog handlers, and were “often better trackers”. Men’s hunting kits always held sewing tools.

Wives as hunters

- Iñupiat see hunting as a sacred act. Animals give themselves to men whose wives are generous and skilful. “The whale comes to the whaling captain’s wife,” one man told her, and a successful inland hunter said simply, “I’m not the great hunter, my wife is.”

- The wife offers marine animals a drink of fresh water, butchers the animal and shares the meat. The animal’s spirit sees her generosity and gives itself to the hunter again. Her sewing makes a “second skin” that pleases and attracts the animals.

- Wives once asked the moon for animals, and whaling captains’ wives still move slowly, think peaceful thoughts and act generously during whaling season.

- A man who loses his wife is said to be unable to manage, because an animal needs a wife to give itself to.

Shares and sharing

- A “share” (ningik) is earned by anyone who contributes to a hunt, by owning the harpoon, butchering, or even fetching ducks from the water, whatever their gender. “Sharing” is giving that keeps the animals coming back.

- Smaller animals (seals, caribou, walrus) are divided among those who took part. Polar bear, beluga and bowhead whales are shared with the whole community, and whaling couples feast the community three times a year.

Work, wages and leadership

- In 1980, about as many Iñupiaq women as men worked for wages in Barrow (229 and 252). Through the 1980s women held posts such as mayor, city manager, school principal, state legislator and director of the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission.

- Leadership as a whaling captain or shaman rests on knowledge and skill, which are not gendered. Elders recalled women shamans and men acting as ritual partners for them.

### 3. What they concluded

- Men hunt: for Iñupiat, hunting includes attracting, killing, butchering, turning the animal into food and clothing, and the proper rituals. Women’s sewing, butchering and sharing count as hunting. The anthropological model starts from an unexamined definition of hunting as finding and killing animals with tools.

- Male dominance: women control their own labour and the shares it earns, can start a divorce, and are central to good relations with animals. The claim that this society is male dominated is hard to sustain, and “domination” cannot be judged from one or two practices.

- Public and private: for Iñupiat the public sphere is organised around animals, not gender. Whales belong to the whole community, smaller animals to households, and both men and women act in both.

- Development: because women’s ritual work is based in the community and their labour is their own, they move into waged jobs more easily, while men struggle to combine jobs with hunting. Men “have a harder time of it.”

- Behind all four models lies a Euro-American assumption that gender is fixed and tied to biology. Iñupiaq ideas about names, kinship and animals stress constant change, so gender there is not fixed either.

### 8. Implications for tracking (Original Wisdom's observations)

_These are Original Wisdom's observations, not the authors'._

- The paper does not study tracking, but it passes on a striking remark: because Iñupiaq women traditionally brought the hunted meat home, they knew the land as well as their husbands and were “often better trackers” (Ernest S. Burch, Jr., personal communication). It is a reminder that tracking skill can sit with people who are left out of the usual picture of “the hunter”.

## Cite this summary

Lawrence, K. 2026. Summary of: “I’m Not the Great Hunter, My Wife Is”: Iñupiat and Anthropological Models of Gender (Bodenhorn, 1990). Original Wisdom, Tracking Literature. https://www.originalwisdom.com/tracking-literature/1990-bodenhorn-im-not-great-hunter/