Securing the boundaries of wilderness in northern Alaska, 1892–1950

Abstract

This paper examines the socio-ecological implications of reindeer-caribou hybridization during the rise and collapse of the reindeer industry in Alaska. Following their introduction in the late nineteenth century, reindeer populations increased dramatically as herds spread throughout the territory. As populations increased, domesticated reindeer often escaped from their herds and ran off with migratory caribou. By the 1920s, Alaskan wildlife managers and scientists came to view feral reindeer as a form of biological pollution and a threat to the health and purity of the region's wild caribou. Despite divergent evolutionary histories, reindeer and caribou are related at the subspecies level and can interbreed to produce hybridized offspring. I argue that managerial anxieties about reindeer-caribou hybridization were bound up with broader concerns regarding race and related efforts to protect ostensibly pure spaces of wilderness and nature. Throughout the paper, I consider managerial attempts to mitigate reindeer-caribou hybridization in northern Alaska, which included the demarcation and reinforcement of conceptual and spatial boundaries between wild and domesticated forms of life. However, between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, feral reindeer and hybridized caribou repeatedly demonstrated the violability of the biological categories and conceptual boundaries that wildlife managers employed as they sought to order life on the northern tundra.