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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
At one point during my all-night hunting trip with Jeffrey Long and Eli Kilapsuk, the two men pull their boat up to a ramshackle cluster of cabins along the water. Lydia Sovalik, a village elder, stands at a wooden table, elbow-deep in a caribou carcass, hewing hunks of meat with her ulu, a curved Eskimo knife. Sovalik asks Long and Kilapsuk to pull in her fish net from the channel. They return with a white plastic bag full of writhing whitefish, which Sovalik will dry and cure with driftwood to make what people say is the best smoked fish in Nuiqsut. She worries aloud that the current oil push is causing too many problems, multiplying construction zones and driving away the caribou. "Now we got troubles," she says, sounding like an Eskimo version of a Southern blues singer. "Things are changing so fast."
Back at the village, I ask around and learn that Gordon Brown and his 16-year-old son Curtis Ahvakarna had bagged the caribou I saw feeding the eagles out near Alpine. Two caribou, in fact. With the twin heads perched on top of their boat, Curtis recounted how he had circled a herd of 500 caribou while his dad took down two big bucks. They field-dressed the animals, loaded them in the boat, and proceeded to share the meat with family and neighbors. "My favorite is caribou," Curtis confides. "I don't really like moose."
Brown, a newly elected member of the native corporation's board of directors and a mechanic for the North Slope Borough, doesn't think that outsiders understand that subsistence hunting isn't some quaint, archaic hobby -- it's what holds the Inupiat culture together. "It's still a way of life here," he says. "That's what's being jeopardized by the oil companies coming through." Like many other Nuiqsut residents, Brown openly expresses his anger at the oil firms and the Bush administration -- outbursts unusual in a culture that values comity more than conflict. "It's irreversible if it all goes wrong," he says. "When you say 'irreversible,' it scares you."
From Brown's house, I walk across town to visit Margaret Pardue, a village council member who has just returned from testifying at a public hearing on the NPR-A in Washington, D.C. A soft-spoken woman raised in a traditional household, Pardue is still riled up from the trip. She complains that the administration scheduled the hearing over the Fourth of July weekend "so nobody would attend" and scoffs at the suggestion that her testimony might influence federal officials. "It goes in one ear and out the other," she says. All the administration wants, she contends, is to "get the oil as quick as they can and who cares what they leave behind."
The White House insists that more domestic energy production is essential to improving national security. A month after 9/11, President Bush told reporters that "a critical part of homeland security is energy independence" and urged Congress to pass his energy bill that included more Alaska drilling. Vice President Dick Cheney's controversial national energy policy task force recommended more oil and gas leasing in the NPR-A as one of its top priorities.
But the irony is, more drilling in the Arctic would have no effect on gas prices at the pump and would never equal more than 2 percent of America's oil supply -- not nearly enough to pry the nation from its dependence on foreign oil. Even top energy executives admit that there's not enough oil in Alaska to make a difference. "We periodically hear calls for U.S. energy independence as if this were a real option," ExxonMobil chairman Lee Raymond said in a speech in June. "We do not have the resource base to be energy independent."
The Bush administration does have a few supporters among the Eskimos. Its most powerful ally is the Arctic Slope Regional Corp., an $1-billion-a-year organization that funnels oil money to the Inupiat community in the form of services and cash dividends. Richard Glenn, vice president of lands for the ASRC, says the corporation supports "responsible development" in the NPR-A because oil drilling is the only way to pay for schools, healthcare and other essential services. "We've been walking this tightrope between stewardship and development," he says. "That's the story of our lives." Glenn understands the local opposition to drilling in crucial areas like Teshekpuk Lake, but dismisses it as short-sighted. "Asking someone in Nuiqsut today how they feel about the oil industry," he says, "is like asking a patient in the middle of a root canal how he feels about dentistry."
In Nuiqsut, however, residents see the Bush administration's push to expand oil drilling in the NPR-A as far worse than a temporary toothache. "We're just going to be another lost people in this world," says Leonard Lampe, the former mayor. "If it were up to us, we'd have no development, period, in the Teshekpuk Lake area. We were assured that there would be no development up there. Now they come back and say, 'Sorry, we found some oil.' That makes us very mad."
Lampe, whom I had seen in another boat hunting seal while I was out with Long and Kilapsuk, grew up subsistence hunting and works hard to pass on the traditions to his children. He says that his 7-year-old already knows how to pluck a goose, and his 11-year-old will "throw temper tantrums" if he doesn't get caribou stew at least once a week. Lampe doesn't over-romanticize the modern subsistence life, but emphasizes how central it remains to everybody in the village. "We're a struggling people," Lampe says. "Like any culture, we're trying to keep a self-identity and move forward. We're desperate to hold on to our lifestyle and culture. We're just little boys compared to Bush and everybody else. But they should care about us because we're just like an endangered species. Once we're gone, there's no bringing us back."
