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Monday, Dec 1, 2008
The village of Nuiqsut -- Inupiaq for "a beautiful place over the horizon" -- may be one of the most isolated towns in America. No public roads link it to the outside world; I arrived on an ancient Cessna that runs supplies to the village store. The town, abandoned in the 1940s, was resurrected in 1973 after Congress required the Inupiat to create village corporations in order to claim land rights. Nuiqsut families lived in tents for the first year, eventually building a grid of raised gravel roads and small plywood houses perched on pylons that they pounded into the permafrost. The town displays hallmarks of the rural poor; cars are not so much abandoned as forsaken, windshield-less and wheel-less, amid a landscape of oil drums, snow machines and children's toys. But look closer and you'll see signs of Inupiat self-reliance, a way of life that has endured for thousands of years. Bull moose racks of impressive size adorn the doorways of several homes; fox and caribou skins cure in front of others; a collection of musk oxen skulls peer out from one rooftop.
People in Nuiqsut live not so much off the land as with the land. Since agriculture is virtually impossible in a place with a two-month growing season, villagers depend on subsistence hunting for much of their food. Once the ice melts and the waterways open up in early summer, the Inupiat hunt seal and caribou. By August, there will be moose, ripening salmonberries and more caribou. There are whales in autumn, wolf and wolverine in winter, geese in the spring. At different times throughout the year there are whitefish, Arctic cisco, char, grayling and other fish. Each Nuiqsut resident eats 750 pounds of subsistence-gathered meat and fish per year, a high-fat diet essential to survival in the harsh Arctic environment. The Inupiat desire to protect wildlife like caribou from oil drilling has nothing to do with a knee-jerk, save-the-seals reaction. They just want to make sure there are enough tuttu to shoot. The continued dependence on hunting and gathering makes even more sense after a trip to the AC Store, the only one in town. A dozen eggs cost $3.69, a loaf of Wonder Bread is $5.39, a half gallon of milk runs $7.59, and a half gallon of Tropicana orange juice goes for $9.99. Villagers frequently talk about the exorbitant price of what they call "store-bought food." With relatively few full-time jobs in Nuiqsut, hunting remains a necessity for everyone. "Even for me, I need the subsistence resource," says Isaac Nukapigak, president of the Kuukpik Village Corp., one of the best-paid jobs in town.
These days hunters around Nuiqsut use modern tools such as high-powered scopes and global positioning systems, but that doesn't mean the old ways are forsaken. "My son likes Froot Loops," says Rosemary Ahtuanguruak, the mayor of Nuiqsut. "But he prefers quaq" -- the Inupiaq word for a frozen snack of raw meat or fish. Ahtuanguruak has just finished emceeing a fish-scaling contest at the annual Fourth of July games, where the village's reliance on subsistence hunting is evident in the day's scheduled events. Adults line up at the local community center to see who can gut whitefish the fastest, and toddlers at a baby Eskimo fashion show model parkas lined with red fox and traditional boots made from caribou and bearded seal skin.
Ahtuanguruak first started getting alarmed about oil development in her former role as a health aide at the village clinic. After the oil pad went in at Alpine, she began noticing high rates of asthma among local residents, especially when gas flares were noticeable. Rates of heart disease, diabetes, hypertension and thyroid disorders rose -- and so did truancy, vandalism, drug abuse and other social problems associated with oil development. Fish became sick or infected with parasites from pollution. Hunters talked about being driven away from traditional hunting areas by security patrols for the oil companies, and caribou began passing farther and farther from the town. Up here, seeing the caribou change their migration routes to avoid drilling rigs isn't just inconvenient -- it's as alarming as if every grocery store in your town suddenly moved 30 miles away, and the only way to shop entailed a long and arduous trip in sub-zero weather. "The land is our store and our garden," Ahtuanguruak says. "We know that development is going to occur. We just ask that it happens without taking food off our tables."
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