Yes!!! This is so important to me as a topic in my field!!! Maintaining, supporting, and especially restoring indigenous peoples’ right to hunting is a topic of the utmost importance.

People want to cry “even the populations of concern??” but the fact is they were almost never of concern until colonizers started overhunting. The decline of the polar bear in North America (and in most of its range) is a perfect example of how in very little time, white colonizers decimated a healthy population of animals that indigenous people had been responsibly surviving on for hundreds and often thousands of years.

It doesn’t just stop at us white people letting indigenous people hunt for subsistence though. It’s extremely important that we ask for and use indigenous knowledge and ideas when we create hunting laws and treaties. We need to hand over the power.

Again, the international agreement on polar bears is a good example of indigenous hunting traditions and knowledge being used to actually make informed decisions on hunting regulations.

I’m not trying to lecture or inform OP, but to make sure white people reading this understand how important it is that moving forward, indigenous communities are included in hunting regulations and treaties, because it is not their fault their survival has been threatened by colonial overhunting, and often they have vital knowledge about species range, migration, populations, and behaviors that non-native biologists haven’t figured out yet.

Here is a read on why the largely held white idea on “saving the animals” (especially seals that advocacy groups love to claim indigenous people club constantly, all the time) is a racist, misinformed, tunnel-vision view of a much larger picture made of way bigger problems:

http://www.ppehlab.org/blogposts/2017/3/18/1y0q4mmk9vzjfe135r5cbdv0pljwox

I say it a lot, but it deserves repeating:

Always always always: wildlife conservation efforts without the consideration and voices of indigenous people is a conservation effort without a soul.

Honestly the people I know who care the MOST about the wellbeing of animals and the environment are the people who are serious, experienced, non-recreational hunters. 

And not just when it’s hunting for food. The Indigenous fur trappers up here care way the fuck more about the wild species they trap than any of the white vegans who try to ban them from earning a living. Just because it’s a White tradition to disrespect the animals you kill and hunt them to extinction, doesn’t mean that’s how everybody does it.

My sister works with some tribes in the Pacific Northwest because they know MORE about the habits and health of the local wildlife than anyone else, including the researchers (like my sister). 

She’s a big proponent of just staying the hell out of indigenous people’s hunting practices, because “It was just fine until we came along and fucked it all up.”