Oomingmak Musk Ox Cooperative
Sigrun Robertson
604 H Street
Anchorage, Alaska 99501
(907) 272-9225

"Oomingmak," the sturdy, long-haired creature that Alaska's Native people call "The One With the Long Beard", is the perfect Arctic animal, Sigrun Robertson says. Short, squat and stocky, these 400- to 800-pound grass-eating animals, related to goats and sheep, have short legs, short tails and tiny ears under the downward-curling horns that give the bulls their unique appearance. Their long "guard hairs" protect Oomingmak from the elements; and when winter's snows begin to blow, a soft and woolly underhair that the Natives call "Qiviut" ("KEE-vee-oot") grows beneath the guard hairs like a warming blanket. In springtime, when Oomingmak no longer needs the warmth, this wool is shed ... and therein lies the story of the Oomingmak cooperative.

The dream started many years ago, when the late John J. Teal Jr. met the Icelandic Arctic explorer Williamur Steffanson and learned about the musk ox, an integral part of the Arctic native subsistence economy with its roots in the Ice Age. Oomingmak was hunted to extinction in Alaska during the last century, re-introduced from Greenland and allowed to return to the wild. Teal became fascinated with the idea of domesticating the musk ox as an indigenous economic base for Natives, whose traditional economy lacked a cash basis. He rounded up private money and a Kellogg Foundation grant to capture 33 animals and establish them as a domestic herd on the campus of the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. By 1968, researchers had collected enough qiviut wool to have it spun into yarn.

During the Christmas season that year, project worker Ann Schell went to Nunivak Island, off the West Coast of Alaska, and taught 25 Native women how to knit. They became the core of the cooperative, and through a combination of word-of-mouth and outreach to a dozen other Native villages on Nunivak and in the nearby Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, Alaska's poorest region, the group of knitters eventually grew to between 200 and 250, virtually all of them Native women. Every village creates clothing products with its own distinctive "signature" pattern, and the items -- caps, scarves, stoles and the unique "Eskimo smoke ring" cap-scarf combination -- are sold in the Co-op's little retail shop in downtown Anchorage or by mail order. The "ash-brown" garments are eight times warmer than sheep's wool by weight, never shrink, and are softer than silk ... all powerful advertising points that justify the clothing's breath-taking prices, which range from $65 for a child's cap to $165 to $250 for scarves and stoles and $425 for a tunic. At that, the cooperative sells all it can make, and could do with much more, pumping needed cash into an area with few jobs. A single knitter may earn as little as $9 to as much as, rarely, $5,000 for a year's work, Robertson said. The group's herd of 70 musk oxen produce about 300 pounds of wool a year, and she scrapes up that much more from other sources, including the University of Alaska's experimental herd, zoos, and a small amount of wild qiviut from Native collectors, enough to make about 3,500 garments per year. That sustains the co-op's $450,000 annual budget and puts between $75,000 and $100,000 annually into the village economy, a figure substantial enough to represent between 10 and 20 percent of the village's total work income for the year.

That's half of Teal's dream. The other half, creating self-sustaining musk ox herds in the Native villages, has been harder to realize. An effort to start one such herd at Unalakleet, on the shore of Norton Sound, eventually had to be abandoned, because of the difficulty of air-freighting hay for the animals to eat and in getting Native caretakers for the herd, which requires constant attention during the spring and summer season when people are most occupied with hunting and fishing. Accordingly, the herd was moved back to Palmer, in an agricultural area about 50 miles northeast of Anchorage, where it is administered by the staff of the Musk Ox Farm, a subsidiary non-profit.

The gossamer qiviut garments appeal to tourists, and crowds stream through the co-op's Anchorage store and visit the green, mountain-bordered Matanuska Valley that houses the farm. But all's not well. Even after 25 years, domesticating musk oxen is an experimental project, and the herd is slowly dying, down now from 100 animals to fewer than 70. Bolstering the herd with another large roundup may be the only way to keep it at a commercially feasible size, but that would require an investment of $150,000 to $250,000 that the group doesn't have. Further, Robertson has her eye on a supply of qiviut wool that she could claim for $50,000 -- if she had $50,000 -- that co-op knitters could convert into 10 times that amount with their quick needles and their skills.

In trying to improve the economics of Native villages, one is walking a thin line," observed Robertson and M. Bruce in an unpublished paper about the project. "Improve too much, and the culture may be destroyed. On the flip side, the Co-operative may be not helping enough: knitting is hardly something that will someday allow a young Native Alaskan to get a job working with computers. Is a purposefully labor-intensive cottage industry really the way to improve people's chances for a better future? Not for everyone. The Musk Ox Producers' Co-Operative, however, provides a way for many villagers to continue living in the way that they prefer, and makes it a little easier to survive."

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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