are we always the bad guys?’
‘You came over on a jet, right?’ demanded Max. ‘Or was it solar-powered or electric-powered?’ He fixed me with a mocking grin. ‘You sure you’re not from Greenpeace?’
All these mentions of ‘Greenpeace’ were beginning to draw a crowd. I backed off, using the excuse of fetching my press card to show Max.
The policeman followed me. ‘The air here’s clean,’ he persisted. ‘You can’t even burn waste without monitoring emissions.’ He turned to a grizzled man in a Chevron baseball cap: ‘What do you think about global warming?’
The man had just come in from outside, and looked cold. ‘I’m ready for it!’
Like most outsiders, I have long been conditioned to think that indigenous people usually fight against the oil industry, so finding out that the North Slope Eskimo communities were some of the industry’s strongest supporters initially came as a shock.
As the North Slope Borough Mayor George Ahmaogak puts it in a glossy brochure I was given by Cam Toohey’s secretary:
As Mayor, I can state unequivocally that the people of the North Slope Borough enthusiastically support the presence of the oil industry in our land. North Slope oil has already provided immense benefits to our people and to our country. Well-meaning Americans crusading against Coastal Plain development would deny us our only opportunity for jobs – jobs providing a comfortable standard of living for the first time in our history.31
In my last stop before leaving Alaska, I was particularly interested to hear how oil development could be squared with the widespread Native American view of themselves as custodians of the land, and whether anyone was noticing the impacts of global warming or knew any details about its cause. It was time to visit one of the closest Native settlements to Prudhoe Bay, and the only human habitation within the boundaries of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – the Inupiat Eskimo village of Kaktovik.
KAKTOVIK
At first sight, it was clear that Max had told the truth. The oil industry had done well for the people in the area. Many of the houses had pickup trucks as well as snowmachines, and smooth gravelled roads led between the buildings. There was proper water and sanitation too – something which Shishmaref had notably lacked, where ‘honeybuckets’ (a bucket with a bag which is carried out and dumped centrally when full) had been the only toilets. Oil money had also brought the village – which, like Shishmaref, had once been just a few earth houses stuck out on the barrier island – a high school, a fire station, a police department, a community centre, a water plant, a power plant and a municipal services building.
The industry has also brought jobs to Kaktovik. Many of the young men and women work in Native-owned oilfield contracting companies, which is helping to improve the standard of living and keeping unemployment – the scourge of Native communities – down to tolerable levels. As I talked to people around the place, I rapidly got the impression that not even the elders felt nostalgic for the days when the Eskimos had lived entirely off the land. It had been a difficult existence: life expectancy had been much lower, and during the worst winters whole families had starved to death.
That’s not to say that the subsistence aspect of daily life has been completely ditched: Kaktovik’s annual whale hunt, carried out by the men in a flotilla of small boats, is the year’s social high-point, and caribou, seals and fish are still vital parts of people’s diet and culture. In fact, this conscious dependence on a clean sea leads to the one area the Eskimos do stand up and oppose the oil industry – in its moves towards offshore drilling. A spill under the ice would be nearly impossible to clean up, and would spell disaster for fish, whales and seals alike.
I was invited to a family house that afternoon. Jack Kayotuk was slicing up squares of beluga whale blubber in a bucket, a delicacy known as muktuk, when I arrived. ‘Yep, it’s mighty fine tasting stuff,’ he said approvingly, as I chewed some of it. It tasted like fishy rubber, fatty and impossibly rich. Jack carefully peeled the grey skin off the fat and pale-pink meat (it reminded me of pulling sticky tape off a roll). There was caribou and rehydrated mashed potato to go with it. ‘I’ve never been south of the Arctic Circle,’ Jack told me with a grin. ‘It gets too damn hot down there.’
I asked if he supported the oil industry.
‘Yeah, and I’d like to see oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge too. I think it would be all right for Alaska and for this town also. It would give us all the jobs that we need.’ He mentioned how high the cost of living was in remote communities where everything had to be flown in.
Later that evening there was a knock on the door of the Waldo Arms, the homely log cabin-cum-hostel where I was staying, and Ida Angasan came in, stamping the snow from her boots. Fifty-five-year-old Ida was Administrative School Secretary, and fond of talking to visitors. I fetched her a coke, and she plonked down on the sofa in front of the television set. The local channel was broadcasting rolling text messages to all the villages, about the weather, upcoming social events and so on.
‘I’m for drilling,’ she declared enthusiastically. ‘If they do it with safety and caution. After they drill I’ve seen how they put everything back together.’
I asked her why.
‘The main reason is my own students – they are our future. We need a new gym, we need a new school. It’s not big enough to have state championships for basketball and volleyball. I want a full-sized swimming pool too.’ She laughed. ‘I’m not asking for much, am I?’
‘What about the wilderness?’
‘I don’t live in the wilderness. I’m a hundred per cent Inupiat Eskimo. This is our land. We live off the land, we subsistence hunt, we do our three whales every fall…’
And had she noticed any changes in the local environment?
‘Oh, yeah,’ Ida began. ‘There’s no icebergs any more. When we used to go whaling there were icebergs – we used to get fresh water from them. Then in the past few years, it’s like all of a sudden…there’s no ice. It all melts away.’ She paused. ‘I think it’s endangering our polar bears, our seals, our ducks. I was in front of my house tonight and I saw this strange little bird – those birds come down from the mountains, so maybe it’s getting warmer out there.’
She was now in full flow. ‘You go to Barrow and there’s open water in January. That’s very unusual. This is the second year in a row that there is open water. And when it goes out, it doesn’t leave chunks like it used to – it just disappears.’
I asked her how she felt about it.
‘It matters to me. I don’t understand it. Is it because we’re not putting enough oxygen or too much pavement down, or not planting enough trees? I’ve seen how it floods now and gets hot in all of the US.’
Could it be global warming?
‘What else could it be? I don’t know.’ She asked me to explain more about global warming. I told her about greenhouse gases, about the rapidly-rising temperatures, about the disproportionate effect on the Arctic north and how much worse it was likely to get. I told her what I’d heard in Fairbanks from Professor Gunter Weller, and what I’d heard from the Native residents of Shishmaref and Huslia. Her shoulders drooped as she listened.
‘Well,
