Oil Age Eskimos [Reprint 2020 ed.] 9780520337664

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Oil Age Eskimos

Oil Age Eskimos JOSEPH G. JORGENSEN

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley Los Angeles Oxford

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press O x f o r d , England Copyright © 1990 by T h e Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jorgensen, Joseph G. Oil age eskimos / Joseph G. Jorgensen, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references ISBN 0 - 5 2 0 - 0 6 8 4 3 - 2 (alk. paper) 1. Eskimos—Alaska—Economic conditions. 2. Eskimos—Alaska— Social conditions. 3. Petroleum industry and trade—Alaska—Social aspects. I. Title. E99.E7J634 1990 89-49213 330.9798' 705'089971—dc20 CIP Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 T h e p a p e r used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984 ©

To the memory of Robert N. Jorgensen, brother, master prosecutor, polyglot, man of letters, computer junkie, teacher, guide, keeper of the hymns and the memories

Contents

Tables, Figures, Maps

ix

Preface

xiii

1. THE PROBLEM

1

2. THE STUDY VILLAGES

20

3. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

54

4. THE AVAILABILITY AND HARVESTING OF NATURALLY OCCURRING RESOURCES: SUBSISTENCE ECONOMY, PART 1

75

5. THE ORGANIZATION OF EXTRACTION: SUBSISTENCE ECONOMY, PART 2

95

6. AN EXPLANATION OF DEPENDENCY AND SUBSISTENCE: VILLAGE ECONOMICS, PART 1

133

7. THE CONTEMPORARY MODE OF PRODUCTION: VILLAGE ECONOMICS, PART 2

154

8. KINSHIP AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION, PART 1

203

9. KINSHIP AND SOCIAL ORGANIZATION, PART 2

230

10. IDEOLOGY

258

Epilogue

287 vii

viii

Contents

APPENDIXES A.

METHODOLOGY

315

B.

OBSTACLES IN THE PATH OF THE INQUIRY

323

C.

THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENTS

336

Bibliography

373

Index

387

Tables, Figures, Maps

TABLES

1. 2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10.

11. 12.

Native/Nonnative Populations in the T h r e e Villages, 1982 Estimated Annual Meat Consumption by Dogs in the Three Villages, 1965 and 1982, and Projected Consumption for 1982, Assuming Total Dog Traction Expenses Incurred by Families and Walrus/ Bearded Seal Crews for Extraction Trips, Unalakleet, Wainwright, and Gambell, 1982 Annual Equipment Expenses for Subsistence Extraction, Unalakleet, Wainwright, and Gambell, 1982 Estimate of Annual Subsistence Consumption per Household, Gambell and Unalakleet, 1982 Infrastructure, Unalakleet, Gambell, and Wainwright, 1982 Ownership of Businesses, Unalakleet, Gambell, and Wainwright, 1982 Full-time Employment, Unalakleet, Gambell, and Wainwright, 1982 Employment in Private, Family-held, and Family-operated Businesses, in Unalakleet, Gambell, and Wainwright, 1982 T h e Household Balance Sheet: Relations between Expenses and Income in Unalakleet, Gambell, and Wainwright, 1982 Some Food Prices in Unalakleet, Wainwright, and Newport Beach, California, 1982 Commercial Salmon Harvest, Average Numbers of Fish and Dollars, Unalakleet, 1961-1982 tx

47

90

106

108 132 155 162 170

171

182 184 194

X

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. C1. C2. C3. C4. C5.

Tables, Figures, Maps

Comparisons of Salmon Catches, Total Values, and Prices per Fish, Unalakleet, 1981-82 Seasons A Commercial Salmon Fisherman's Start-up Costs, Unalakleet Prices, 1982 A Commercial Salmon Fisherman's Annual Operating and Maintenance Costs, Unalakleet Prices, 1982 Equipment Costs to Penetrate the Commercial Herring Fishery, Unalakleet, 1982 Average Household Sizes in Unalakleet, Gambell, Wainwright, and the United States, at Unequal Intervals, 1955-1982 Household Composition in Unalakleet, Wainwright, Gambell, and the United States, 1982 Populations, Birth/Death Ratios and OutMigration, Unalakleet, Gambell, and Wainwright, 1982-1987 Native Employment, Full-time for 1982 and Estimates of Full-time Equivalents for 1987 in Gambell, Wainwright, and Unalakleet Public Sector Transfers : Combined Values of Food Stamps, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, and Adult Public Assistance in Gambell, Wainwright, and Unalakleet, 1984-1987 Market Basket Prices, Three Villages and Newport Beach, California, 1988 Comparisons of the Three Climates Availability and Harvests of Marine Mammals in Unalakleet, Wainwright, and Gambell, 1981-82 Availability and Harvests of Land Mammals in Unalakleet, Wainwright, and Gambell, 1981-82 Availability and Harvests of Fish in Unalakleet, Wainwright, and Gambell, 1981-82 Average Weights, Calories per Edible Pound, Relative Concentrations of Vitamins, Abundance,

196 197 198 201 215 217 304 304

306 307 352 354 355 358

Tables, Figures, Maps

C6. C7.

C8. C9.

xi

and Extractability of Several Important Arctic and Subarctic Fish Genuses Availability and Harvests of Birds in Unalakleet, Wainwright, and Gambell, 1982 Comparisons of the Extraction of Commonly Available Avian Species in Gambell, Wainwright, and Unalakleet, 1982 Marine Invertebrates Harvested in Gambell, Unalakleet, and Wainwright, 1982 Marine Plants and Land Plants Harvested in Unalakleet, Gambell, and Wainwright, 1982

360 363

367 368 370

FIGURES

1.

Mandated and Optional Governmental and Economic Organizations of Contemporary Eskimo Villages 2. Gambell and Total St. Lawrence Island Population, over 130 Years (1852-1982), at Unequal Intervals 3. Unalakleet Population, over 146 Years (18361982), at Unequal Intervals 4. Wainwright Population, over 93 Years (18901983), at Unequal Intervals 5. Population Trend Lines, Unalakleet, Gambell, and Wainwright (1880-1982) 6. Yearly Subsistence Cycles, Three Villages, 1981-82 7. Typical Walrus (Beluga, Bearded Seal) Crews at Gambell, Wainwright, and Unalakleet, 1982 8. Typical Whaling Crew Composition in Wainwright and Gambell, 1982 9. Representative Young-Bird and Egg-Collecting Crews, Gambell, 1982 10. Subsistence Seine Techniques, Unalakleet, 1982 11. Schematic Representation of Kindreds, Unalakleet and Wainwright, 1982

14 61 70 73 73 86 119 120 120 121 240

Xll

12. 13.

Tables, Figures, Maps

A St. Lawrence Island Patrician with Clan Segments in Gambell and Savoonga, 1982 A Kinship Sharing Network, Gambell, 1982

252 257

MAPS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. C1.

Location of the Villages in the Study Gambell St. Lawrence Island Region, Bearing Sea Unalakleet Eastern Norton Sound Region Wain wright Chukchi Sea Region, Arctic Ocean Distribution of Unalit (Yupik), Malemiut (Inupiaq), and Kawerak (Inupiaq) about 1836 (from Nelson 1899) Total Resource Extraction Area of Unalakleet Villagers, 1982 Total Resource Extraction Area of Gambell Villagers, 1982 Total Resource Extraction Area of Wainwright Villagers, 1982 Vegetation Areas of the Three Villages

25 26 27 36 42 44 51

64 103 104 105 351

Preface

Oil age Eskimos are different from pre-oil age Eskimos but not that different. Like their predecessors, indeed, like themselves twenty years ago, oil age Eskimos are hunters, fishers, and gatherers. They have "subsistence life-styles" in which the bulk of their diet is extracted from their environment. The oil age for Eskimos is very recent; it has not even spanned a single generation. Aided and abetted by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA), which extinguished native claims to land, water, and naturally occurring, renewable resources in Alaska, multinational corporations swooped onto Prudhoe Bay on the coast of the Beaufort Sea in northeastern Alaska. Oil wells were drilled, oil pipelines and holding tanks were constructed, and oil was pumped. The oil reserves (and presumed reserves) became the property of the federal government (offshore) and the state government (onshore). Each established agencies to lease the tracts that were presumed to contain oil. Oil-related developments had many unintended consequences for Alaska's natives. Many who had resided in urban areas throughout the United States, pursuing educations or occupations, returned to their natal villages as the ANCSA's provisions began to be implemented. And many others, who otherwise would have migrated from their natal villages for elementary and secondary educations, benefited from the construction and staffing of schools in their own villages and therefore stayed at home. Village populations have grown rapidly, then, by natural increase and by return migration. When Congress enacted ANCSA, it was presumed that whereas Eskimo villages would prosper from the creation of native corporations, still they would not experience much growth, and educated Eskimos would continue to migrate to urban areas through selfselection. Eskimo villages have not created successful, for-profit corporations, nor have Eskimos gained more than token emmi

xiv

Preface

ployment in oil-related occupations. Rather, the villages have become deeply dependent on federal and state income transfers to supply cash, jobs, services, and welfare. Eskimo villages are resilient places, however, and natives have successfully integrated public sector dependencies with subsistence life-styles. This is an analysis of three modern Alaskan Eskimo villages and an account of how they came to be as they are today. By law, the agencies charged with leasing federal resources must assess the probable impacts on the environment from the exploration and extraction of oil before tracts can be leased to oil companies and before exploration can commence. The writing of Oil Age Eskimos has been made possible by environmental legislation, specifically, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA). The data on which it is based were collected in field research in the western Alaskan villages of Unalakleet (Norton Sound) and Gambell (St. Lawrence Island, Bering Sea) and the north Alaskan village of Wainwright (Chukchi Sea). The studies were contracted by the Department of the Interior (originally the Bureau of Land Management, subsequently the Minerals Management Service) so that, as leasing agent for outer continental shelf oil, it could prepare environmental impact statements for Norton Sound, the Chukchi and Bering seas, and the Navarin Basin. Thus, the requirements of environmental legislation would be satisfied and leasing (and drilling) could proceed in those places. This work is not an environmental impact statement, nor are any of the reports on which this comparative study is based. The Minerals Management Service, Alaska Outer Continental Shelf Region, Department of the Interior, awarded to the John Muir Institute, Napa, California, and to me, as principal investigator, Contracts AA851-CTI-59 and 14-12-001-29024 to conduct research in three villages and to base several technical reports on this research. Those reports provide the basis for several environmental impact statements that the Minerals Management Service must prepare. They also provide the basis for this book, which also was supported by Contract 14-12-001-29024. On completion in 1983 of the comparative research on the relations among the harvests of naturally occurring, renewable resources, private and public economic forces, and contempo-

Preface

xv

rary Eskimo village life, my colleagues and I spent a couple of years analyzing the data and on occasions—some opportunistic, some serendipitous, some fortuitous—made return trips to the villages. In 1986, about six months after I had completed the second draft of this book, I, as principal investigator, was awarded a second contract from the Minerals Management Service to create and validate a social indicators system by studying thirtyone Eskimo villages over the 1987-1990 period. T h e three villages analyzed here—Gambell, Wainwright, and Unalakleet— are in the social indicators study sample. Return visits to these villages in 1987, 1988, and 1989 on the social indicators project have allowed me to analyze recent changes and current conditions within the village. This analysis appears in the epilogue. It is important because of the consequences to Eskimos from the downturn in international oil prices and the ever-decreasing federal programs and public transfers of the Reagan administration to Native Americans. It is also important because in 1988, ANCSA was amended to rectify some of its worst provisions. It is too early to assess the consequences of the changes to ANCSA. It is also too early to assess the effects of the Bush administration on Alaska's Natives. In the fieldwork conducted in 1982, some of which spilled over into 1983, Harry Luton served as field investigator and Charles F. Córtese as senior investigator in the village of Wainwright. T h e major report on the village is Luton's Effects of Renewable Resource Harvest Disruptions on Socioeconomic arid Sociocultural Systems: Chukchi Sea (1985). As is true for the major reports for Unalakleet and Gambell as well, only a limited portion of the detail pertinent to Wainwright is employed in this comparative analysis. Interested readers are referred to Technical Report Number 91, available from the Minerals Management Service, Alaska OCS Region, 949 East 36th Avenue, Room 110, Anchorage, AL 99508-4302. Lynn A. Robbins, as field investigator, and Ronald L. Little, as senior investigator, conducted the research in the village of Gambell. T h e major report for that village is Little and Robbins, Effects of Renewable Resource Harvest Disruptions on Socioeconomic and Sociocultural Systems: St. Lawrence Island (1984). Jean A.

XVI

Preface

Maxwell, as field investigator, and I, as principal investigator, are responsible for the field research and major report on Unalakleet: Jorgensen and Maxwell, Effects of Renewable Resource Harvest Disruptions on Socioeconomic and Sociocultural Systems: Norton Sound (1984). We learned how significant subsistence ways of life are to the natives in the three villages before we were allowed to conduct even the tiniest amount of research within any village. At the same time, and of a piece with the way in which villagers regard their life-style, we learned how threatening oil developments are to them. We were struck by the importance of hunting, fishing, and gathering in contemporary native households. In all of the villages, a majority of the diet is obtained f r o m naturally occurring resources. I developed three rather huge appendixes for this volume presenting and analyzing the data on environmental resources and the ways in which they are harvested, processed, stored, and used. But such information appears to be more for specialists than general readers, even knowledgeable social scientists. Because the information on harvests of natural resources is so extensive, I refer interested readers to the original reports cited above. Oil developments threaten the native resource base, and the villagers know it. We also learned that, unlike migrants f r o m rural America, Eskimos who have left their natal villages to acquire educations, pursue occupations, or both, can and do return to their villages and resume subsistence life-styles. They do go home again. Indeed, they have returned home—or decided not to venture f r o m their natal villages—in large part because federal legislation (such as the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act) and income transfers f r o m oil tax revenues have made it possible to do so. Yet the oil age has not stimulated healthy, growing economies in any of the three villages. It has not even provided employment in the oil industry for more than a h a n d f u l of natives. Rather, as in the rural western United States, the energy industry has created boom growth, but the jobs have gone to outsiders, and profits have been drained f r o m the region. Infrastructure to service the industry and government has been developed; populations have grown; and inflation has plagued

Preface

XUll

some of the villages as it has plagued the western U.S. communities that have become the centers of boom activities. In the rural American West, residents often anticipate energy developments with optimism and hope, no matter how many boom-bust cycles they have experienced in their lifetimes. Such is not the case in the three villages analyzed here. Threats to sea mammals, waterfowl and seabirds, fish, plants, the beauty of the landscape, and even to the integrity of native culture are anticipated, and some are already being experienced. Moreover, in expropriating native resources, the state also arrogated control over the animals that provide the basis for native subsistence. Dependency, then, has been accompanied by domination. Natives, however, eschew domination. They take their traditional sovereignty very seriously. Several villages, including Gambell, have gone to court repeatedly to protect their environments from harm and have won injunctions against leasing and exploration in the Bering Sea and Bristol Bay. In fall 1985, successful cases were heard in the U.S. District Court for Alaska {Village of Akutan v. Hodel, D. Alaska Civ. 85-701) and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (Village of Gambell v. Hodel, 8 5 3877). Yet in March 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Circuit Court decisions and lifted the injunctions. It is not possible to deal with each village in the great detail that we have marshaled for the technical reports, but the comparisons that I make here should provide some generalizations that cannot be made in single-case analyses and some modest validity checks as well. There are several topics that we did not pursue in our inquiries which will undoubtedly hold interest for many readers. We did not request or gain the informed consent of villagers—leaders and nonleaders—to study alcohol or drug abuse, interpersonal violence of any kind, suicide, or crimes (alcohol-related or otherwise). As a consequence, I do not report on these issues. We did not pursue these questions in part because they were peripheral to our research interests but also because these topics are extremely vulnerable to bias and errors in reporting (threats to validity). In two separate analyses of social indicators in Alaska, we studied these topics among large samples of villages (Jorgensen, McCleary, and McNabb 1985;

xviii

Preface

Jorgensen and McCleary 1987; Jorgensen 1988). We did not obtain positive correlations among these presumed measures of social dislocation or between them and factors that are assumed to cause them. I do not wish to give the impression that there is no public drunkenness, or violence, or drug abuse in these three villages or that suicides do not occur within them. Each of the three villages has an ordinance prohibiting alcohol; public drunkenness was not common or even noticeable; and violence within families was not noticeable. During 1982 and subsequently, I have visited Gambell and Unalakleet. Residents of both villages have visited me as well, and I have maintained correspondence and other communications with persons there and in Wainwright. My research associate, Jean Maxwell, conducted research in Gambell and subsequently took u p residence in Unalakleet for three years. Thus, the ethnography that underpins this study is well informed. During 1987 and 1988, as part of the social indicators project, Steven McNabb, Morgan Solomon, and Muriel Hopson conducted research in Wainwright. In 1989, Mike Galginaitis conducted research for me there. In 1988 and 1989, Lynn A. Robbins conducted research in Gambell. He was joined by Donald Callaway in 1988 and Allan Alowa in 1989. Steven McNabb and Helga Eakon conducted research in Unalakleet in 1988, and McNabb was joined there by Steve Ivanoff in 1989. I am deeply indebted to the villagers of Wainwright, Unalakleet, and Gambell for the information they have provided and to Charles F. Cortese, Virgil Katchatag, Paul Katchatag, Ronald L. Little, Barbara Luton, Harry Luton, Jean A. Maxwell, Delbert Ozoovena, Lynn A. Robbins, Timmy Slwooko, and Vernita K. Zyllis for their careful research. I thank my colleague and fishing partner, James J. Flink, for his careful reading and useful comments. Max Linn, president of the J o h n Muir Institute, has been an excellent associate and friend over the past twenty years. He contributed to the entire research project with his good sense and his managerial skills, but he also brought his keen mind

Preface

xtx

and sharp editing skills to several of our reports and to this book. Jack Heesch, the Contracting Officer's Technical Representative (COR) who inherited our project a few months after its inception and guided it to the completion of the Unalakleet report and near completion of the other two, was superb at his task. He provided help when necessary and showed understanding all of the time. Timothy O'Leary, fabled ethnographic bibliographer and director of files research at the Human Relations Area Files, New Haven, provided an extremely careful reading of the text, caught a thousand errors, and painstakingly checked (correcting as necessary) every one of the Linnean binomials. Professor Wendell Oswalt, a bold (he identified himself), knowledgeable (he too is fabled as the most erudite of scholars working in the Alaskan arctic and subarctic), and very helpful reader for the University of California Press provided good insights for generalizations I had not made and appropriate challenges to some shaky claims. I thank him but do not hold him responsible. A second UC Press reader remains anonymous, but I thank that reader for useful comments. I hope that this work assists readers in understanding contemporary Alaskan Eskimo village culture and the way in which federal legislation and oil-related developments have influenced village life. J u n e 1989

Joseph G. Jorgensen

1 THE PROBLEM

In late 1981, the Minerals Management Service, United States Department of the Interior, was conducting a public hearing in the village of Unalakleet for a proposed oil lease sale in Norton Sound. Public hearings on draft environmental impact statements are required by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 before final statements can be prepared and tracts can be leased. Although officials from agencies that prepare reports also conduct the public hearings, it is not required that they respond to comments or questions from the public at those hearings. Representatives of two oil companies testified that the modern sciences of oceanography, marine petroleum geology, mechanical engineering, and related disciplines had developed information to understand ice, wind, water, and technologies to control the extraction and transport of oil in arctic and subarctic waters. They assured the government that the oil lease sale could proceed without risk to the environment.1 Among the natives who packed into the hearing and waited their turn to speak was a Unalakleet Eskimo man in his early eighties. Although the following is a paraphrase, he said, I have listened to the learned scientists from the oil companies who have studied the ice and the wind. I too am a student of ice and wind. I have been a student of ice and wind all of my life. I wonder if one o f you learned men can tell me what will happen to those 1. To inform government officials, environmentalists, and other interested parties about the way oil companies integrate harmlessly with the environments in which they extract, transport, and refine oil, EXXON publishes a quarterly magazine entided EXXON, each issue of which carries at least one article on oil-related activities in Alaska and the way modern petroleum science complements the arctic and subarctic environments. 1

The Problem

2

wells out there in the sea during one of those storms that occur around here. You know what I mean, those times when you're out on the ice hunting seals and the wind starts blowing and keeps on blowing. You know what I mean, when the wind blows at 100 knots for several days and you can't move. You have to make do as best you can on the ice. You know what I mean, when the temperature is -40°F and the wind keeps blowing until it dislodges the short-fast ice and hundreds of miles of ice are moved by the wind. When that happens, no force on earth can stop the ice, as you learned men know. So what I want to know is how you are going to stop that oil that is going to come out of that well when those pipes are destroyed by the moving ice? Where is that oil going to go? How much of it will stay attached under the ice as the ice moves north at breakup? What will happen to the seals, and walrus, and whales, and birds and fish? No answers were forthcoming. T h e 12-million-gallon Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on March 24, 1989, has not surprised the Eskimos and Aleuts with whom my associates and I have spoken subsequently. As of J u n e 1, 1989, the oil had diffused sufficiently to attach to rocks, pebbles, and sand along 500 miles of the Alaska coast. On that same date, one mile of that area of coasdine had been cleaned. T h e technology used was steam blasting, which dislodged the oil from the rocks and forced it back into the sea while killing all surface and subsurface animal and plant life to seven inches below the surface. T h e cleanup technology appears to be part of the problem. It is not likely that the spill, or the technology to control it, or the management of the removal operation surprised the elderly student of ice in Unalakleet or, for that matter, Yale University sociologist Charles Perrow, either. Perrow's book, Normal Accidents (1984), forecasts "accidents" such as Exxon Valdez, T h r e e Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Bhophal as normal consequences of combinations of unanticipated system failures in complex technologies. We can expect more in Alaska. Natives expect them, and they fear for their environments and their subsistence ways of life. T h e basic ethnographic research that my colleagues and I conducted in the Alaskan Eskimo villages of Gambell, Unalak-

The Problem

3

leet, and Wainwright is inherently interesting as well as timely. But oil-related developments and their consequences lie behind the inquiry, and the basic ethnography cannot be understood without an analysis of the political economic context in which contemporary Alaskan Eskimos live. We sought to determine contemporary subsistence, economy, polity, kinship, and ideology in each village, so that a larger question could be asked: for Eskimo society, what are the consequences in the 1980s of the major legislation and economic programs that were implemented in the 1970s? The intention of our field research was to collect comparable information for the three villages, so that we could explain those consequences by using a comparative ethnological perspective (see Appendix A). As so often happens in comparative primary research projects, some of the data collected in each of the three villages are not comparable, and some data that were sought were not obtained. And because some of the data that are available for one village are not available for other villages, comparisons on all topics that are of interest to me cannot be made. In several places, therefore, comparative ethnology yields to ethnography, and I analyze a single village, or two villages, rather than all three. It is also the case that hypotheses of the "why, possibly" and "how, possibly" types must serve as temporary conclusions, while providing direction to the next round of research. Well before the "normal accident" of Exxon Valdez, I considered it important to write this book because although a very large amount of research under federal and state government sponsorship has been conducted on Eskimo subsistence and culture in the past fifteen years, a very tiny amount of that research has seen the light of day in scholarly journals or in book form. Inasmuch as I am not dependent on government contracts, it has been possible to break from the pattern of moving from one contract to another and to write. T h e government agency that sponsored the basic research also wanted the fruits of its contract dollars to be distributed beyond its own walls, and it provided some support for writing Oil Age Eskimos. As is well known to ethnologists of the Alaskan arctic and subarctic, perhaps no feature of Eskimo life has commanded more

4

The Problem

attention than their subsistence pursuits and the influence such pursuits exercise on all other aspects of Eskimo culture. For a full century, scholars have been concerned to explain the ways in which Eskimo populations developed and maintained adaptations to the sea, spreading along the coasdines from eastern Siberia to eastern Greenland and from above 80°N latitude to about 60°N latitude (see, e.g., Boas 1964; E. Nelson 1899; Birket-Smith 1929; Spencer 1959; VanStone 1962; Oswalt 1967; Bandi 1969; R. Nelson 1969; Burch 1975; Laughlin and Harper 1979; Dumond 1983). The availability of natural resources and the uses to which they are put have been central to practically all analyses of Eskimo organizations of labor, distribution, kinship, settlements, ceremonials, and sodalities. Moreover, Eskimo ideology, in particular the beliefs associated with illness, health, and success in subsistence pursuits, has been analyzed in relation to the quantities and variability of naturally occurring resources. Indeed, most of the great ethnographies of Eskimo cultures focus on the adaptations of Eskimos to environments that are often brutally harsh (see, e.g., Jenness 1964; Birket-Smith 1929; Gontran de Poncins 1979; Hughes 1960). The pre-Contact tool kits and the techniques of their uses that have accommodated Eskimos to the rigors of the Far North have been referred to as the "arctic genius." The formerly widespread practices of infanticide and geronticide2 have been recognized as mechanisms that were employed in the most life threatening of circumstances, by means of which productive members of Eskimo groups could relieve themselves of unproductive kinspersons, so as to sustain Eskimo societies. More recent inquiry, particularly studies conducted since the conclusion of World War II, have focused on the changes that have occurred in the technologies and economies of Eskimo populations which, in turn, have stimulated the concentrations of erstwhile disparate family settlements into larger villages and influenced changes in other aspects of Eskimo society. The 2. The practice of disposing of the aged and infirm, often at the will of the fated person, has been mentioned by several students of Eskimo societies, including Boas (1964), Weyer (1932), Rainey (1947), and Balikci (1970).

The Problem

5

widespread adoption by Eskimos of rifles, shotguns, outboard motor boats, and snowmobiles ("snowmachines," in Eskimo usage) have altered hunting, fishing, and collecting practices. Carving, trapping, commercial fishing, and public funds have stimulated the use of cash in local economies. But the seasonal cycles of subsistence activities have remained much the same as they have been for centuries among most of the communities that have been studied (see VanStone 1962; Graburn 1969; R. Nelson 1981; Fienup-Riordan 1983). Postwar research often suggests that even though the seasonal cycle of subsistence activities remains much the same as it was sixty years ago, the seemingly inevitable shift to a "cash" economy is unalterably dissociating Eskimos from their subsistence life-styles. Richard Nelson (1969), in his brilliant analysis of the village of Wainwright on the Chukchi Sea in the early 1960s, foresaw a death of hunting in the near future. Yet about two decades later, on restudying the village, Nelson (1981: 111) wrote, [In the] 1960s I believed that growing contact with the outside world would soon eliminate subsistence as the basis of village economy and culture. . . . [A]lmost 20 years later the material aspects of life in Wainwright have undergone a steady and progressive change, resulting in far greater modernity than I could have foreseen.. . . [Yet] the continuation of traditional patterns is nowhere more evident than in subsistence resource harvesting. . . . Subsistence has persisted here for a number of reasons, most of them related to its prominent position in Inupiat culture, social organization, and value system.

The most recent research conducted in the Alaskan arctic, of which Nelson's (1981) study is representative, does not reiterate the forecasts of ten and twenty years ago that the waning of subsistence pursuits and the full integration of Eskimos into a modern market economy was inevitable and imminent. (See Ellana 1983, Jorgensen and Maxwell 1984, Luton 1985, Little and Robbins 1984, Wolfe 1981, and Worl, Worl, and Lonner 1981 for a sampling of the most current literature.) To the contrary, political and economic events since 1970 have had the

6

The Problem

contradictory consequences of causing Alaskan Eskimos to become increasingly dependent on the public and private sectors of the national economy but also to hunt, fish, and collect more efficiendy. Furthermore, the economic and political forces of the past fifteen years have triggered a renascence of Eskimo dancing and singing, a return migration to villages from urban areas in and outside of Alaska, and a growing struggle for claims to natural resources and to the rights to harvest those resources. In short, there is a determination on the part of Eskimos to maintain traditional Eskimo culture and at the same time to adopt a pragmatic acceptance of the benefits of modern technology. ANCSA AND OIL

Because ANCSA was passed in 1971, thereby making possible the extraction of Alaskan oil, the watershed year is 1971 for the renaissance of Eskimo culture and for the contradictory development of Eskimo dependency on (1) petroleum products to heat their houses and to propel their snowmachines and boats and (2) earned and unearned income derived from public sources to purchase homes, the technology to aid in subsistence endeavors, and petroleum products to make the technology go and to heat their homes. This is not to say that at least some Eskimos in many villages had not converted to oil to heat their homes or begun to use motorboats or snowmachines before 1971. These technologies that enhanced subsistence and economic pursuits were employed by many Eskimos before 1971. But that is not the issue here. Eskimos seem to have adopted these technologies as soon as they were able to do so. This is not surprising. Eskimos have always been quick to adopt new technologies that can better assist them in coping with harsh conditions. They converted to oil, snowmachines, and motorboats in greater numbers after 1971, but the consequences of the adoption were no longer the same. The issue is the dependency that major oil developments and ANCSA, because of its provisions and its intent to facilitate oil discoveries and extraction, caused for Eskimos.

The Problem

7

ALASKA NATIVE CLAIMS SETTLEMENT A C T

In 1971, ANCSA was ratified by Congress and signed into law by President Richard Nixon. It extinguished Eskimo and Indian claims to aboriginal hunting, fishing, and land rights on the 400 million acres that comprise Alaska and on the territorial waters off its shoreline. It dissolved the six reservations that had been established in Alaska and revoked the Native Allotment Act of 1906, which allowed natives to claim 160 acres, devoid of mineral rights, to be held in trust by the secretary of the interior. Inasmuch as Alaska's Eskimos have maintained maritime subsistence economies for millennia, the government's restrictions on the uses of many subsistence resources of land and sea since 1971 have fostered apprehension among natives about governmental management of naturally occurring resources and have created conflicts over the harvesting and uses of some of those resources. ANCSA provided to Alaska's 80,000 Natives—Eskimos, Aleuts, and Indians of at least one-fourth Native blood quantum—44 million acres of land and $962 million, and although it revoked the previous forms of native government that had been recognized by the federal government, it mandated a formidable framework of new native organizations: village profit corporations, regional profit corporations, and regional nonprofit corporations. Village nonprofit corporations were optional. The profit corporations are destined by ANCSA to go public in 1991. T H E PROFIT CORPORATIONS

Village Profit Corporations. The village profit corporations, literally stock shareholder corporations in which natives declared membership and were awarded shares and voting rights, were awarded land in and around the village. The village corporations, through conveyance, received half of the land allocated to the regional corporations (22 million of the 44 million acres). Shareholders within the villages can claim parcels of the land conveyed to the village corporations for homesites. Ownership

8

The Problem

of the surface of each parcel is conveyed to the shareholder from the village corporation. Subsurface rights to village and shareholder land, however, are held by the regional profit corporation. Each village profit corporation is empowered to use the funds made available to it through the $962 million ANCSA provision to develop and control village businesses. It is also empowered to seek federal grants, contracts, and awards for business and community development projects. The corporation's Board of Directors is elected. The board hires a manager for the corporation. Regional Profit Corporations. The more than two-hundred native villages were organized into and subsumed under twelve regional profit corporations (a thirteenth, for Alaskan Natives residing outside Alaska, received no land and was based in Seattle). Funds from the $962 million ANCSA provision are also disbursed to each of the regional corporations to develop and control business for the region. Each native person chose membership in a regional corporation, usually the regional corporation that encompassed the village in which the native resided, and each was awarded shares of the corporation's stock. Twelve of the thirteen regional profit corporations were originally awarded the 44 million acres, but they retained only half of that acreage after conveyance to the village corporations. Yet the land allocation to the regional corporations included the subsurface rights to regional land as well as to the land owned by village corporations and villagers (on conveyance). The regional profit corporations, rather than the village profit corporations, were presumed to be the organizations that would generate the business sufficient to accommodate the economic needs of Alaska's natives. The vesting in regional corporations of subsurface rights to village and individual property had created conflicts in Alaska within a decade after the passage of ANCSA. The regional corporations, too, were empowered to seek government contracts, grants, and awards for the development of business and for the infrastructural developments considered to be prerequisite in business growth. Roads, airstrips, utilities,

The Problem

9

sewers, docks, commercial buildings, and the like, were sought as being necessary for corporate development. THE NONPROFIT CORPORATIONS

Regional Nonprofit Corporations. Regional nonprofit corporations were created to separate business affairs from other affairs of government. The intention was to avoid the confusion so frequently experienced on American Indian reservations since 1934. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 allowed Indian tribes to ratify both constitutions and charters. Constitutions vested tribal councils with executive, legislative, and judicial authority—subject to the veto powers of the secretary of the interior—whereas charters incorporated the tribes as nonshareholder corporations. On the typical American Indian reservation, the authority to conduct business for a tribe as well as to conduct all governmental functions—executive, legislative, and judicial—is vested in the tribal council (sometimes called the business committee). The vesting of governmental and business authority within a single body, whose sovereignty is extremely limited by Congress and the secretary of the interior, has been accompanied by a hoary history of repeated business failures, factionalism among tribal members, bad advice from federal officials and non-Indian corporations, competing claims for the allocation of tribal funds, federally imposed receivership over tribal finances, nepotism, and high turnover rates of elected officials (see Bee 1979a, 19796; Gross 1978; Hertzberg 1982; Jorgensen 1978a, 19786; Owens and Peres 1980; Pratt 1978). ANCSA did not provide the regional nonprofit corporations with executive, legislative, and judicial powers. Rather, it provided them with a plethora of service functions, including health care, employment assistance, job training, social services, college assistance, recreation development, and oversight and research pertaining to natural resources and their uses by natives. Funding for these and other programs comes from the same $962 million pie that is shared by the regional and village profit corporations. But, in addition, the regional nonprofit corporations compete for federal and state grants, contracts, and awards to maintain health programs, sponsor management

10

The Problem

classes, conduct research, and both staff and purchase books for libraries, to mention a few of the functions accorded them. Village Nonprofit Corporations. If native villagers chose to create village nonprofit corporations, these corporations work in conjunction with the regional nonprofit corporations for the development and delivery of services and programs. Some villages did not create nonprofit corporations at all, however, and others created them but did not use them. In such instances, the regional nonprofit corporation usually accommodates the service needs of the villagers. A common form of the village nonprofit corporation is the local Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) government. Many villages had created IRA governments following the extension of the IRA to Alaska's natives in 1936. But ANCSA stripped Alaska's natives of police and judicial authority, corporate business activities, and the power to levy taxes. It also imposed limits on their executive and legislative domains. Nevertheless, villages frequently chose to use IRA governments—a form of government through which they had access to the federal government and to which many villages had become accustomed— as their nonprofit corporations. Subsequently, IRA governments have frequently become the major organizations through which federal programs are made available at the village level. Each IRA government is directed by an elected council, which deals with the regional nonprofit corporation, jointly sponsoring such services as health care delivery, family counseling, and college assistance. Our observations in Unalakleet and Gambell further impress us that the local IRAs in those communities also provide thoughtful philosophical and practical counsel to village members while at the same time establishing village policies. AFTER ANCSA: FEDERAL A N D STATE POWER AND POLICIES

Several federal laws enacted in the mid-1970s expanded some features of village sovereignty, even as ANCSA places considerable limits on other features. The Indian Financing Act of 1974, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Act of 1975, the

The Problem

11

Indian Health Care Improvement Act of 1976, and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 constitute the legislation that enables IRA governments to assume authority over many services formerly provided by the Indian Health Service (IHS) and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). And those acts have thereby liberated natives from many of the controls that were once exercised by these federal administrative offices. As if the regional and village profit and nonprofit corporations have not created sufficient changes in Eskimo village affairs, the State of Alaska has acquired new powers in relation to natives, becoming responsible for law and order, the regulation of natural resources and businesses conducted within the state, education, taxation, public education, and many social and health care services, some of which overlap with the services provided by the regional and village nonprofit corporations. Under state law, it is possible for areas encompassing many villages to organize into boroughs—the equivalent of counties elsewhere in the United States—with responsibilities that include the authority to levy taxes and to share in state revenues. And villages, whether or not they belong to a borough, can be chartered as city governments by the State of Alaska. Inasmuch as there was but one borough (the North Slope Borough) in coastal Alaska north of the Alaska Peninsula when we began this research (more recently, boroughs have been formed in Bristol Bay and in the Northwest Alaska Native Association [NANA] region of northwestern Alaska), city governments are the usual vehicles through which natives gain access to state revenuesharing funds and block grants for municipal purposes. City governments—directed by elected councils, which, in turn, elect mayors from among their council members—levy taxes, provide fire-fighting equipment, maintain roads and public buildings, and make decisions and pass local ordinances as allowed under state law. The state provides police protection and judicial authority over natives, pursuant to Public Law 280. The North Slope Borough (NSB) encompasses oil-rich Prudhoe Bay and the arctic coast villages from the United StatesCanada border to the Bering Strait. Wainwright is one of these villages. Many of the villages in the borough are chartered, thereby possessing the rights of cities. Yet they usually re-

12

The Problem

strict their governance to rather limited local issues, while following the policies and programs that are implemented by the borough. City and borough governments are the vehicles through which nonnatives participate with natives in local governance. Nonnatives are usually transitory professionals who are employed by the schools, state agencies, and native corporations. Even if nonnatives are elected to serve on city councils whose majorities are nonnative, they soon learn that those councils do not follow independent courses. In their decision making, a city council either follows the lead of the village's IRA government (or some other nonprofit village corporation that provides access to federal resources while maintaining traditional practices) or they become surrogates for the erstwhile traditional IRA councils. Thus, city governments provide access to state resources and to state government, but their decisions are shaped by native governance organizations, usually the IRAs. NATIVE CONCERNS ABOUT POSSIBLE CONSEQUENCES FROM ANCSA

If the reader finds this layering of governments and organizations bewildering, so do natives. But natives, who had come to fear the probable consequences of some of these corporations and governments, also learned how to shape the local institutions to respond to their needs. At several points hereafter, we will focus our attention on the manner in which natives have responded to the different loci of authority and shaped village activities in relation to them. When I first began working in Alaska in 1981, ANCSA had been in force for a decade. In this short time, natives throughout the state had begun to focus on a single, significant provision of ANCSA that would take effect in 1991: the for-profit corporations, regional and village, would then go public. In early 1984, an independent commission, headed by a former Supreme Court Justice from British Columbia, Canada, began an investigation of ANCSA on behalf of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (an organization of Eskimos representing Alaska, Canada, and Greenland [Denmark]). ANCSA had become the flagship for recent proposals by the Canadian and

The Problem

13

Danish governments for the settlement of Eskimo claims to titles in those countries. In a series of conferences held in Anchorage and visits made to villages throughout the state, the commission learned precisely what my colleagues and I had learned during our stays in three villages over the preceding three years. T h e major fear expressed by Alaskan Eskimos was the unknown consequences to them which might occur from the requirement that native shareholder corporations must go public in 1991. Because most land in Alaska, by law, is unavailable for private purchase and ownership, and because much Native land is presumed to be mineral rich, natives feared the loss of their land and subsurface rights. T h e most likely purchasers are multinational energy corporations, who would offer prices for stock shares which could hardly be refused. In addition, they feared that banks would demand payment on outstanding debts incurred by regional corporations in faltering business ventures and take stock as compensation. T h e commission's early investigation made it clear that natives were poorly informed about ANCSA's possible consequences at the time it was passed and that they feared the loss of their native space and places—indeed, their unique ways of life. 3 Sweeping changes were made to ANCSA in 1988 (PL 100241 [Feb. 3, 1988]), several years after the most intensive parts of the field research on which this book is based was completed. T h e amendments have alleviated some of the worst fears that natives expressed in the preceding seventeen years and allowed them to amend their articles of incorporation so as to protect their land but not the subsurface estates. These changes will be discussed in the epilogue. It is difficult to keep in focus these several forms of economic, service, and governmental organizations that have been layered on Eskimo villages. Figure 1 shows the levels of governance and profit corporations to which all Eskimos are subjected (mandated) as well as the ones they can choose to create or charter (optional). 3. Videotapes of the Round Table Hearings and a "Summary Report" (n.d.) are available through the Alaska Native Review Commission, 429 "D" St., Suite 304, Anchorage, AL 99501.

14

The Problem TYPE OF ORGANIZATION

Level of Organization

Economic

Governmental

Governmental

Region

Profit Corporation (M)

Nonprofit Corporation (M)

Borough (0)

Village

Profit Corporation (M)

Nonprofit Corporation (O)

Chartered City (0)

[Usually IRA] M = Mandated

O = Optional

Figure 1. Mandated and Optional Governmental and Economic Organizations of Contemporary Eskimo Villages

OIL

ANCSA and oil are intimately related. To understand why ANCSA was passed into law, thereby denying natives 90 percent of their ancestral estate, and also to understand the current context in which Eskimo societies operate, we must assess the significance of the discovery of what is presumed to be 10 billion barrels of oil at Prudhoe Bay, along the shores of the Beaufort Sea on Alaska's North Slope. This study, in fact, results from that discovery, the subsequent successful drilling and pumping of oil at Prudhoe Bay, and the search for more oil and gas deposits in the outer continental shelf region of Alaska, particularly the Norton Sound-Bering Sea area, in which the villages of Gambell and Unalakleet are situated. Oil was first discovered on Alaska's North Slope in 1948, but it was not until the massive reserves of Prudhoe Bay were discovered in the 1960s that oil companies, their lobbyists, and state and federal legislators engaged in sufficient activities and applied sufficient pressures to enact ANCSA. The threat issued to Alaskan natives, whose advice on the bill was sought, was to accept what was offered to them—assuming certain modifications suggested by these natives—or to receive no compensation

The Problem

15

at all for the extinguishing of their claims to title (Arnold 1978; Parker 1984). Natives were deeply concerned about the preservation of their homelands and the spaces in which they obtained their livelihoods and which they wished to leave to future generations as a legacy of past generations (Fienup-Riordan 1984). They feared encroachment and significant alteration of the natural resource base. T h e trans-Alaska oil pipeline project connecting Prudhoe Bay on the far north with the port of Valdez, about 600 miles to the south, was begun soon after ANCSA was passed. Rebellious acts in defense of native subsistence territories occurred here and there during the project, as some natives fired rifles at planes conducting reconnaissance, at geologists and surveyors plying rivers, and at oil company employees hunting and fishing in territory traditionally used by natives (Clark and Clark 1978). Social movements flickered in response to oil developments—one disavowing modern technology and calling for a return to the use of dog teams, human traction, native watercraft, and hand-thrust harpoons. And natives registered complaints with federal and state officials about encroachment and alterations to the availability of natural resources and about federal and state regulations on hunting and fishing. T h e effects of oil extraction and transportation projects were felt by natives in several ways, and some of the responses were surely unintended by the oil companies and the framers of ANCSA. It was presumed, for instance, that a fair share of oil industry jobs would be available to natives and that benefits from the sale and extraction of oil would benefit all Alaskans. T o further assist our understanding of the context in which the research being reported here was undertaken, there follows a brief assessment of the effects of energy development at Prudhoe Bay on the Eskimo groups of Alaska's North Slope. CONSEQUENCES T O N O R T H SLOPE ESKIMOS FROM ENERGY-RELATED DEVELOPMENTS

Kruse, Kleinfeld, and Travis (1982) have summarized some of the effects of ten years of energy extraction at Prudhoe Bay. They point out that the agreements reached among oil com-

16

The Problem

panies and state and federal legislators led to passage of ANCSA, while, among other things, also providing the State of Alaska with title to the land under which the Prudhoe Bay oil reserves were located. State legislation made it possible to form regional governments (boroughs akin to counties) with a taxing authority on property. Natives seized the opportunity made available by law and formed the North Slope Borough, which they dominated by sheer numbers. The NSB secured its taxing authority only after protracted litigation against the State of Alaska and the oil companies. In the decade following ANCSA and the actual production of oil from Prudhoe Bay, few natives gained employment in the private sectors of the energy and energy-related industry, and fewer yet gained permanent employment. Gross receipts and profits accrued to the transnational oil companies and the firms that supplied them, and major revenues in the form of lease rents and royalties accrued to the state. North Slope natives received few direct benefits from oil production. Yet the NSB, through its taxing authority, received large revenues from Prudhoe Bay oil production. These revenues, or public sector unearned income sources, were supplemented by ANCSA award payments, federal and state contracts and grants, some federal and state agency employment, and many types of federal and state transfer payments to create a dependency economy that is atypical among Native Americans. It is atypical in the sense that public sector income from all sources is extremely high in comparison with that of, for example, Navajo, Ute, Northern Cheyenne, Crow, Hopi, Zuni, Wind River Shoshone, Jicarilla Apache, or other western American Indian societies (Jorgensen 19846). Tax revenues totaling hundreds of millions of dollars have been used in myriad community improvement projects planned for and approved by the North Slope Borough. Employment on such projects, which have developed community infrastructures of varying sorts and configurations throughout North Slope villages, fell far short of being either full or permanent for those employed. Low multipliers operated to keep some monies circulating locally which were earned on borough, Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, state, and feder-

The Problem

17

ally related jobs, but investments and/or industries or businesses that would provide sustained employment and economic growth for North Slope inhabitants were not developed. Oil revenues and ANCSA award monies, when depleted, have no foreseeable replacements. And petroleum and motorized equipment dependencies have increased. The wealth of the North Slope is illusory, inasmuch as it is based on public sector funds, many of which derive from the extraction of nonrenewable resources and many others of which derive from one-time legislation for the extinguishing of native claims to resources and from legislation sustaining human services programs (McBeath 1981; Luton 1985). Job training and skill development in community improvement project employment have been inadequate to make workers competitive in the private labor market (McBeath 1981). Interest in such work opportunities among residents of Wainwright, a North Slope village, has been low, because living away from the village so as to work at Prudhoe Bay or on offshore stations interferes with and disrupts important and highly valued subsistence activities (Luton, 1985). Kruse, Kleinfeld, and Travis (1982) report that 35 percent of the North Slope residents in their sample "perceived that village living conditions worsened [since before the oil revenue period] . . . and only 7 [percent] observed that village living conditions had improved." Residents believed that the borough had met their needs, but they did not know whether it had controlled oil development. Community institutions proliferated, single-family housing proliferated, and average household size decreased. Yet groups of persons organized for subsistence extraction, consumption, and distribution have maintained much of their pre-1970s character, both in scope and in the relations that connect them, at least in Wainwright (Luton 1985). INTENDED AND ACTUAL CONSEQUENCES OF ANCSA AND OIL EXTRACTION PROJECTS

It was not anticipated that ANCSA's provisions would lure natives to their natal villages from urban areas in Alaska and elsewhere, but the prospects of employment, land, and money have

18

The Problem

had that effect. Furthermore, a renaissance of native culture— subsistence pursuits, native lore and legends, and native singing and dancing—had not been anticipated. But it is occurring, nevertheless. And it was not anticipated that natives who had attended Bureau of Indian Affairs schools in the activist period of the 1960s would learn political lessons from those activities and return to participate in and guide village affairs. But indeed they have. Village leaders in Bering Sea and Yukon Delta villages have challenged Minerals Management Service oil lease sales in federal court, and North Slope village whaling captains have challenged federal restrictions on the hunting of sea mammals. It was anticipated that ANCSA would provide work for some villagers but would also provide the educational base that would prepare natives to move from the villages to employment in urban areas and stay there. In short, it was assumed that Eskimos would adopt behavior patterns consonant with the economic marketplace: they would locate wherever necessary to apply their skills; they would make the most of their scarce resources, saving as necessary, so as to maximize the benefits that would accrue to them and to their nuclear families; and they would use their particular skills in a highly differentiated society, not use their generalized skills in a relatively undifferentiated society. Whereas it is not the intention of this study to analyze all the changes that have come about from ANCSA and oil and gas activities, the combination of these factors since 1971 has had remarkable influences on the economies, polities, and demographies of every Native Alaskan village. Changes to these aspects of village culture, in turn, have had the unintended consequences of effecting changes in family and kinship organization, ideology, sentiments, and relations to the state. Unintended consequences from ANCSA continue to emerge, and they often create ripples throughout villages, affecting ideas, sentiments, political actions, intravillage or intraregional disputes, and related phenomena. ANCSA has been a primary source of change to many aspects of village culture, extinguishing aboriginal hunting, fishing, and land rights; providing for the reorganization of the govern-

The Problem

19

ment and corporate structures; providing new recognition of sovereignty and authority (self-government) to villages; providing new sources of unearned income; providing for village-level institutions that seek and acquire state and federal funds; providing regional institutions (profit and nonprofit corporations) and formal relations with them; and providing for title to land, some of which is conveyed to each village and some of which, in turn, is conveyed to individuals. Although these are but a few of the provisions in ANCSA, the point is that changes to villager access to fish, game, and land and to the political and economic institutions of the village have had wide consequences, affecting relations among residents, household economies, family-household organizations, subsistence pursuits, and other key elements of village culture.

2 THE STUDY VILLAGES

Because significant oil and gas activities were anticipated for the Chukchi Sea, the Bering Sea, and Norton Sound (the easternmost waters of the Bering Sea), we sought a village for study in each area. Significant ethnographies had been written for Gambell, a village on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea (Hughes 1960), and for Wainwright, a village on the Kuuk Lagoon of the Chukchi Sea (Nelson 1969). We recognized that these ethnographies would provide bases for comparisons with the recent past, so we selected these villages. No village in Norton Sound had been analyzed so well as Gambell and Wainwright, but an unpublished dissertation on Unalakleet language and culture (Correll 1974) was available, so we selected Unalakleet to represent Norton Sound. It was important to us that each of the three villages had been investigated a few years prior to passage of ANCSA.1 Although we studied these ethnographies and several other, more minor, reports on these villages, in a very important sense we were not prepared for what we observed and what we learned about these communities in the early 1980s. There was litde reason to predict that economic and social changes that occurred in any of the villages between the 1960s and 1980s would not occur in all of the villages in the same fashion and at the same rate. In the 1960s, there was a small commercial fishing industry in Unalakleet engaged in by natives, and residents of Wainwright and Gambell had some modest access to international markets from ivory sculpture carved from walrus tusks. A few residents in all villages trapped arctic foxes, and in Unalakleet 1. Hughes (1957) studied Gambell in the early and mid-1950s, Nelson (1967) studied Wainwright during the mid-1960s, and Correll (1974) studied Unalakleet in the late 1960s.

20

The Study Villages

21

other fur-bearers such as mink and ermine were trapped as well. But during the 1950s and 1960s, there was not a big market for peltries. Commercial whaling had long since disappeared from these villages. The villages were small, with few public sector jobs, very few buildings, and almost no public buildings or buildings housing private businesses. Dog traction for sleds (and often for pulling boats upriver) was the rule rather than the exception for most families. Families in the villages were dependent for most of their diets on the resources that they harvested from their local environments through hunting, gathering, and fishing. We soon learned that in little over a decade since the enactment of ANCSA and the onset of oil-related developments, the villages were different from one another in several crucial features, particularly household incomes, public services, and public and private infrastructure. But there were differences in the ways in which local governments and corporations operated and the ways in which decision-making authority was invested in them. The differences among the three villages could be traced to differential access to ANCSA benefits or to the benefits that derive from oil revenues. One thing that was similar in all of the villages was the reliance on snowmachines, motorboats, and all-terrain vehicles for transport and to harvest resources. It was evident that if new technologies provided benefits over old ones, the Eskimos in the villages that we studied acquired those technologies as soon as they could afford them. Dog traction, except for a few families in two of the villages who maintained dog teams for racing, was a luxury. Infrastructure and jobs of all kinds formed a continuum from least to most among the three villages by the time we arrived in the early 1980s. Gambell was demonstrably poorer and less developed in terms of housing and public and private infrastructure than the other two villages. It had the fewest jobs of all kinds, and Gambell households gained more of their diets from harvests of natural resources than any of the other villages. Some aspects of village life neither formed a continuum nor were they similar among the three villages. It was apparent to us that several interesting and important facets of village organizations were very different among the three villages.

22

The Study Villages

Among the features of social organization to which social scientists have paid especially close attention for over a century are kinship and descent organization. They have done so because kinship and descent factors often account for property ownership, the ways in which labor is organized for cooperative subsistence pursuits, the ways in which inheritance and succession are determined and marriages are regulated, the places where couples reside after marriage, and the expectations for the relations of members with nonmembers. In general, social scientists—from the evolutionists in the late nineteenth century to the economic development specialists of the present—expect that as hunters and gatherers or the simpler horticulturalist societies modernize and develop, kinship organization is replaced by organization based on property and territory relations and that families and households decrease in size. We learned that Gambell residents comprise several tightly organized patricians—organizations of several households by descent traced through the father and the father's father and so on in the paternal line. Members of a clan provide a network of assistance and support for other members of the clan, sharing products of the chase and labor and responding to exigencies of the moment. Gambell shares ownership of St. Lawrence Island with the village of Savoonga, which is located about forty-five miles to the northeast. The pioneers who settled Savoonga separated from their Gambell kinspersons, but they maintain close contacts through their patricians. The St. Lawrence Island villagers are consummate walrus hunters. They pursue walrus yearround for food and for ivory. Ivory carvings are a principal means by which most Gambell families eke out the cash they require to purchase the technology they need to hunt, fish, and gather and the fuel to heat their homes and drive their machines. Wainwright was by far the wealthiest of the three villages. It enjoyed a remarkable development of public infrastructure, housing, and public services. Employment was abundant. Essentially any adult who sought work could find it on at least a temporary basis. Naturally occurring resources constituted only about half of the annual food consumption of Wainwright

The Study Villages

23

families, and those were the most preferred and not necessarily the most abundant or available resources in the Wainwright environment. Because of the large number of construction, education, health, and other public service projects undertaken by the North Slope Borough in Wainwright in the early 1980s, in almost any week, the village of about 500 was host to 100 or more nonnatives who were employed on those projects. The availability of employment, services, housing, and cash made households relatively independent and made it possible for them to satisfy many of their daily needs with cash alone. There was demonstrably less hunting and gathering, say, than in Gambell and demonstrably less time to engage in those pursuits as well. The Wainwright households, which traced their descent bilaterally through the mother's and the father's side, seemed not to engage in sharing practices quite so widely and quite so often as the Gambell villagers—a function of resources, time, and place we came to understand, not an indication that sharing had been replaced by family-household independence. Unalakleet was the largest of the three villages and when we first arrived enjoyed a rather well developed public and private infrastructure. It had become a secondary transportation hub for the Norton Sound-Bering Strait area, so it provided considerably more public and private sector employment than Gambell and more private employment than Wainwright. Unalakleet families, which, similar to Wainwright families, traced descent bilaterally, were engaged in more extensive sharing among wider networks of kinspersons than the Wainwright villagers but somewhat less than the Gambell villagers. It was also the case that Unalakleet families gained more of their diets from naturally occurring resources than the residents of Wainwright but less than the Gambell villagers. Moreover, Unalakleet natives put more time into hunting, gathering, and fishing than Wainwright residents. The differences we observed on a few key features of village life suggested to us that oil and ANCSA had affected the villages differently, particularly the manner in which the bedrocks of native societies were organized—the role of kinship and descent in organizing the harvesting, distribution, and consump-

24

The Study Villages

tion of plants, fish, and game (sea mammals, land mammals, and birds). We had not yet puzzled out how kinship, descent, and affinal relations worked in modern Eskimo villages or why the various kinds of corporations that were mandated and optional under ANCSA's provisions were so different in Wainwright from those in Gambell and Unalakleet. It will take some time and care to describe the villages and analyze how they came to be as they are in the 1980s. We will do so throughout the chapters by discussing Gambell, Unalakleet, and Wainwright in that order. T h e reason for the organization is that Gambell is the poorest and Wainwright the wealthiest, and Unalakleet is in between. T h e reasons for the differences are not simple and constitute an important part of the analysis. Gambell is the poorest pardy because of a choice the village made under one of ANCSA's provisions to accept fee simple title to St. Lawrence Island rather than to participate in the $962 million ANCSA money award. Wainwright is the wealthiest because of its proximity to North Slope oil and because the natives in the North Slope villages, including Wainwright, created the North Slope Borough to gain bonding authority that, in turn, gave them access to some of the oil revenues that derive from North Slope oil whose tracts are within the borough. This created jobs and public infrastructure while also allowing North Slope residents to participate in ANCSA money awards. Unalakleet, like Gambell, is not located in the North Slope Borough, so it has limited access to oil revenues (through state distributions of various kinds; these same distributions are available to all three villages), but it does have a small commercial fishing economy, some jobs derived from the transportation industry, and a considerable development of public infrastructure and services. Secondary effects of the oil economy and of ANCSA drive Unalakleet. T h e histories of the three villages reflect differences similar to those that we have observed in the 1980s. Truncated histories of the villages are presented in chapter 3. Below I introduce the villages as they were in 1982. Details, especially dates, quantities, and the like, are spare in the following pages. T h e specific details will appear in later chapters when

25

The Study Villages

Map 1. Location of Villages in Study

we undertake a more comprehensive assessment of the consequences of ANCSA and oil-related developments for each village. AN INTRODUCTION TO THE VILLAGES AND THEIR SETTINGS GAMBEL

Gambell, situated at the northwestern tip of St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea, is located at 63°38'N, 171°50'W. The island, located 40 miles south of Siberia's Chukotsky Peninsula and 200 miles west of Nome, is about 100 miles long by 20 miles wide. It is primarily basaltic and is dotted with several volcanic cones and many lakes, three of which are quite large. The area near

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O cs LEGEND 1. Department of Transportation and Public Facilities Airport Garage 2. Grade School 3. Gambell Village Corporation Warehouses 4. Health Clinic 5. Old Armory 6. Presbyterian Church 7. Alaska Village Electric Cooperative Powerhouse 8. Boarding House 9. Post Office 10. Alaska Native Industrial Cooperative Association Store 11. G&E Store 12. Well House

13. City Storage 14. Cold Storage 15. City Hall/Indian Reorganization Act/ Gambell Village Corporation Office 16. 7th Day Adventist Church 17. National Guard Armory 18. Community Hall 19. Project Head Start Building 20. New G&E Store 21. United Telephone Office 22. Former Coffee Shop 23. Munz Airline Agent 24. Wien Airline Agent 25. Navy Station (vacant) 26. Public Health Service Washateria 27. High School

Map 2. Gambell

28

The Study Villages

Gambell comprises both igneous and sedimentary formations. Lagoons are frequent around the shoreline, and many shortcourse rivers empty into them or directly into the Bering Sea. In 1970, just prior to ANCSA, the Gambell population was 372. It had grown to 465 by 1982 and 522 by 1989. About 15 nonnatives reside in Gambell. T h e 25 percent population increase in the first eleven years following ANCSA and the 12 percent population increase since 1982 represent far more rapid growth than had been experienced at Gambell since the turn of the century. INFRASTRUCTURE, UTILITIES, AND SERVICES

Gambell enjoys few conveniences of public infrastructure. It has few public buildings and does not have sewers, running water, or an all-weather airport. Air transport has become the major form of transportation in the Alaskan bush. T o be without an all-weather airport means that transportation is limited to windows of good weather, and in a fog-enshrouded village such as Gambell, there is not a lot of good weather for flying. T h e village has some public conveniences, such as a community "washateria" (automatic clothes washers and a public bath) and community water pumps. Water for culinary and other household uses is hauled from community pumping sites and distributed at each house. Gambell is electrified, although electricity is not cheap, costing 49.5 cents per kilowatt-hour in the 1980s. T h e state of Alaska absorbs 12 cents of each kilowatt-hour cost through an "equalization" program, 2 but even 37.5 cents per kilowatthour causes Gambell households to use electricity with great care. Gambell houses are heated by oil. In the early 1980s, the average household paid about $2,700 annually for heating oil. There is no timber or outcroppings of coal and very litde driftwood on St. Lawrence Island, so coal or wood-burning stoves are not used. 2. "Equalization" formulas for energy costs vary by villages and by the household needs, so all villages do not receive the same amount of assistance per kwhr from the State of Alaska.

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Regularly scheduled bush flights from Nome, weather permitting, carry mail, freight, and passengers to and from Gambell. The almost ever-present cloud cover and recurrent nasty Bering Sea storms cause frequent flight cancellations of the small, twin-engine Cessnas and Otters that fly between Nome and Gambell. Flights, which should occur about twice a week, are often delayed for two weeks by unfavorable weather. Most of the heavy freight to the village, such as skiffs, outboard motors, snowmachines, all-terrain cycles, building supplies, oil furnaces, and canned goods, arrives on the two annual visits (one going north and one coming south) of the BIA's ship, the North Star. The ship sets anchor offshore, and the freight is brought in on a barge. Oil is also lightered from a distributor in Norton Sound. T h e state of Alaska received billions of dollars in revenues from Prudhoe Bay oil operations during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It redistributed many of these funds to projects statewide, including among the native villages. In Gambell, state and federal funds were used to construct a small community center, which houses three village organizations—the village profit corporation, the city government, and the IRA government. Federal funds were also used to construct over thirty houses for Gambell families. CORPORATION A N D GOVERNMENT

Under ANCSA's mandated provisions, Gambell chartered the Sivuqaq Native Corporation (SNC) as its for-profit village corporation. It is guided by an elected Board of Directors who serve without remuneration. It also has an IRA government, which serves as its nonprofit corporation, and a city government. The passage of ANCSA threatened St. Lawrence Island's residents because that act stripped the island of its reservation trust status. The residents feared the irretrievable loss of the island, the loss of their subsistence base, and undesired alterations to their life-styles. Rather than participate in the Bering Straits Regional Corporation (profit) and receive cash distributions and some land conveyance through ANCSA's provisions,

30

The Study Villages

the St. Lawrence villagers in both Gambell and Savoonga chose to use a provision of ANCSA that allowed them to take patentin-fee title to land (both surface and subsurface ownership). The two village corporations received title to the 1.1-millionacre island—a land allocation three and one-half times greater than would have been received if they had accepted the cash award and the accompanying more modest land award. Gambell's IRA government constituted the village's nonprofit corporation. Its access to funds is limited to the grants, awards, and contracts that are available from the federal government, some of which are channeled through Kawerak, the regional nonprofit corporation. Many of Kawerak's leaders, including its director, are residents of the island and are, or have been, active in Gambell and Savoonga IRAs. Through Kawerak, St. Lawrence Island natives have been instrumental in guiding many regional affairs, from commissioning subsistence studies to sponsoring conferences for elders. Other St. Lawrence Islanders who are very active in village affairs have headed Eskimo organizations, such as the Eskimo Whaling Commission and the Eskimo Walrus Commission, that defend the interests of Eskimos residing in several regions. The Gambell IRA council provides guidance and counsel concerning the stewardship of the island. It shares responsibility for the island with the Savoonga IRA. Both St. Lawrence Island villages are second-class cities. The Gambell city council seeks state block grants and other programs, including housing, community improvements, and social services. The IRA councils and city councils of the two St. Lawrence Island villages ostensibly have different spheres of authority and are intended to be distinct. Yet the close coordination and similarities of interests and opinions between the members of the IRA and city councils in each village create consensus without acrimony on decisions made by either group. Moreover, officials move from one council to the other, forming a pool of respected leaders. Promising young people, usually men, are drawn into the pool. The SNC owns the island in conjunction with Savoonga's native corporation: neither can overrule the other. A sine qua non of native corporation practice in Gambell is that the Board

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31

of Directors does not act independently and on its own counsel. Rather, the corporation is seen as a public institution, and de facto, not de jure, the SNC's Board of Directors makes crucial decisions for the village in consultation and consensus with the IRA and city leadership. T h e three organizations in Gambell each have seven-member Boards of Directors, and the boards hold joint meetings one or more times annually. T h e importance villagers place on the IRA form of government is most apparent. Many are not comfortable with the separation of spheres of authority among economic, political, and social and health service delivery institutions. Thoughtful, traditional counsel to incorporate all of these functions is synonymous with St. Lawrence Island life: economy, polity, kinship, and counsel are embedded in one another. Gambell residents regard the SNC as a public institution, whose interests are identical to those of the IRA. During the period of field research, several community leaders explored ways to dissolve the SNC and reconstitute all resources and power under the IRA. In this way they hoped to regain federal trust status for the island. Thus, its removal f r o m the state's tax roll could be effected, while obviating hostile purchase of the corporation in 1991—a distinct possibility under ANCSA's original provisions. If necessary, the villagers were willing to forsake their city charters, but they did not want to lose any state benefits to which they were entitled. SNC operates a retail store and a house that it seeks to rent to researchers, public servants, antique ivory buyers, and the occasional bird-watcher who visits the village. T h e store lost money throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. T h e obstacles to profitable development of any SNC venture are imposing. They include the long distances to and f r o m markets, the modest amounts of cash that reach the village each year, the lack of either a resource base or adequate occupational skills among natives, and severely limited access to capital—federal, state, or private sources. Removal of these obstacles is a prerequisite for the development of businesses that can penetrate the market at any level. Furthermore, the meager funds that make their way to the

32

The Study Villages

village must be put to immediate ends, such as clothing, fuel for heating and transportation, technology to extract naturally occurring resources and to make trips safer (e.g., snowmachines, motorboats, rifles, guns, nets, ammunition, radar, sonar, radios), and supplementary foods. Thus, the multiplier potential of the cash within the village is severely limited. Local revenues are modest, and the local sales taxes authorized by the city council are used for public projects and organizations benefiting the entire village, such as providing funds to the IRA. SCHOOLS AND E D U C A T I O N IN GAMBELL

The Bureau of Indian Affairs operates a grade school in Gambell. Since the mid-1970s, a state-funded high school has accommodated the secondary grades. 3 In the past, students received their secondary educations on the mainland. Now that Gambell high school students remain at home, an unintended consequence has been that students participate in subsistence skills year-round, especially from spring through early fall when intensive extraction occurs. DEPENDENCY AND T H E I M P O R T A N C E O F T H E P U B L I C SECTOR

The Gambell cash economy is heavily dependent on transfers of public funds. In 1982, there were not sufficient full-time and part-time jobs in Gambell to provide one per household. Public funds were the basis for the vast majority of those jobs. The few jobs in the private sector were themselves secondarily dependent on public funds, such as purchases by schoolteachers, travel by public servants, and purchases by welfare recipients. The majority of the full-time jobs available in the village were held by nonnatives—jobs such as teaching school, but also including waste collection and disposal. Natives have not qualified for the teaching positions, and they eschew the sole waste collection-disposal job. More than half the households in the village have no wage earners. 3. Gambell, originally called Sivuqaq by its residents, was renamed following the death of Presbyterian missionary Verne C. Gambell in 1898.

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T h e need for cash is pressing, and it is gained in many ways: through paid participation in the local unit of the National Guard; through public transfers of income in some form, such as energy assistance, food stamps, or Aid to Families with Dependent Children; through sales of ivory carvings excavated from old village sites; and through ivory carving and seal skin sewing. T h e St. Lawrence carvers are world renowned. T h e income from carving provides the major source of almost all household incomes, but even the modest sums from transfers and the National Guard are important to sustenance. CHRISTIANITY

T h e Presbyterian church is the dominant Christian denomination in the village, numbering 365 members. More recendy, several families converted to Seventh Day Adventism, and that congregation now numbers 90. Six Baptists reside in the village. About half of the members of the two larger denominations regularly attend services. THE ENVIRONMENT

Gambell's environment is cold, moist, and fog enshrouded, with only about thirty clear days annually. Yet the wind and water currents of the Bering Sea moderate Gambell's climate in the winter and influence its relative harshness during the summer. For example, during the winter months, there are often leads (openings in the pack ice) close to the village, making it possible to hunt walrus, even though pack ice surrounds the island for about six months a year. Winter temperatures around 4°F and summer temperatures around 41°F are in the middle of the expected ranges—very narrow ranges at that—for those seasons. During both summer and winter, persistent winds of over 20 knots are commonplace. In combination with the low temperatures in winter months and the relatively low temperatures during summer months, the winds pose an omnipresent windchill threat to the islanders as do storms over the Bering Sea which interrupt transport. T h e island vegetation is subarctic tundra comprising low

34

The Study Villages

willow and birch shrub, lichens, black crowberry, cranberry, cloudberry, and spring-beauty. There are no large land mammals other than the reindeer herd that is managed by Savoonga which resides on the island year-round, but arctic foxes, tundra voles, snails, and slugs abound. Salmon enter some of the rivers during the summers, and resident whitefish and char migrate down some of those same rivers during the spring and return during the fall. The coastal waters and lagoons are frequented by several saltwater fish species, particularly tomcod, saffron cod, blue cod, sculpin, and herring. Seabirds and waterfowl in remarkable quantities nest during summer months on the island, while other varieties stop over in their annual migrations. Birds are hunted, and eggs are collected from nests on the cliffs of the island. Marine mammals, especially walrus but also several species of seals and whales, inhabit nearby waters or migrate past the island. These mammals provide the most important staple of St. Lawrence Islander existence. Polar bears, which migrate south to the island during the winter months as the ice cap attaches to the island, are also hunted. The bowhead whale is the animal most desired by Gambell residents. The bowhead has symbolic value, is preferred for its taste, and is desired as an item that can be given as a gift to relatives and friends at home, in distant villages, and in cities as far away as San Francisco and Albuquerque. It is also regulated without force of law by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in which the U.S. government participates. An annual quota determined by the IWC is placed on the number of bowhead whales that Gambell hunters can strike (two per year, whether or not they are landed). The controversy surrounding the extraction of bowhead whales is conjoined in the native view with ANCSA, oil and gas company extractions of nonrenewable resources, state and federal arrogation of controls over naturally recurring resources, the expropriation of native land throughout Alaska, and ultimate domination of native affairs by state and federal governments. The relative poverty of Gambell is not apparent, perhaps, from the foregoing, nor will it be apparent on reading the

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Villages

thumbnail sketches of Unalakleet and Wainwright. But the differences are marked, and they will become more obvious later. UNALAKLEET

Situated on a spit at the mouth of the Unalakleet River, Unalakleet is backed by the Nulato Hills and fronted by Norton Sound, the easternmost waters of the Bering Sea. T h e village is located at 63°52'N, 160°47'W. It is about 400 miles northwest of Anchorage and 150 miles southeast of Nome. Nome is the region's economic, transportation, and political hub. In 1970, just prior to the passage of ANCSA, Unalakleet's population totaled 434. In 1982, it had increased by 82 percent to 790. In the 1980s, about 12 percent of the total were nonnatives, and all of the nonnative adults were employed either by state or regional institutions. The proportional increase between 1970 and 1982 was not phenomenal, as the Unalakleet population had waxed and waned over the previous 150 years. T h e sheer size of the population alarms the villagers, because of the demands that are being placed on the naturally occurring resources and because of the changes that are occurring at such a rapid clip. As a secondary transportation hub with considerable infrastructure and an attractive, resource-rich setting, Unalakleet has become a preferred site for the location (and relocation) of regional public agencies. INFRASTRUCTURE, UTILITIES, AND SERVICES

Unalakleet is electrified and has a water system, a sewer system, and a liquid waste disposal system. Its all-weather airport, with two gravel runways, accommodated scheduled jet flights (Boeing 737) three times a week from Anchorage as well as regularly scheduled flights of smaller commercial aircraft. Unalakleet is home base to the largest and most successful commercial bush airline in Alaska (Ryan Air) owned by a local native family. Ryan Air moved persons and freight among the villages of Norton Sound, St. Lawrence Island, and Nome f r o m its Unalakleet and Nome bases. Most of the 170 houses in the village were built under several

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The Study Villages

IRA government, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and state housing projects between the early 1950s and the 1970s. The newer houses, like those built earlier, are heated by wood- or oil-burning stoves. EDUCATION

The Swedish Covenant School—a twelve-grade boarding school that draws students from Unalakleet and other villages within about a 500-mile radius—and a state elementary and high school are located in town, as are the offices of the Bering Straits School District (BSSD). The influx of employees of the school district offices, relocated from Nome in 1982, accounts for 60 percent of the Unalakleet population increase since 1980 (from 632 to 790). P U B L I C AND PRIVATE SECTORS OF T H E LOCAL ECONOMY

Whereas commercial trapping supplements many family incomes, as does commercial fishing, and although many gain their principal cash income from commercial fishing, it is the public sector that currently drives Unalakleet's economy. The passage of ANCSA had profound effects on the village. Unalakleet created a for-profit corporation, a nonprofit corporation, and also became a chartered second-class city. The IRA government, which had been the village's key institution for thirty years, was reshaped as the village's nonprofit corporation, through which federal programs made available to Native Americans have been channeled and administered. The IRA government has a five-member council that controls tribal operations and works with Kawerak, Inc., in sponsoring various programs for the village and region, such as boatbuilding classes. It also administers many of the federal programs that play significant roles in village affairs, such as social services. The IRA government serves long-term native interests in the environment and also represents native culture in village affairs, particularly in dealing with persons and institutions in the

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village. The IRA leaders work well with elected and appointed officials in the city government (which includes both natives and nonnatives) and in the Unalakleet Native Corporation (the village for-profit corporation). In numerous instances from the earliest to the most recent (February 1989) visits to Unalakleet, we have noted that IRA leaders provide counsel to guide the villagers over rough places and through tight situations. Their lead, although shared by city council members, was followed by heads of other institutions on all of the crucial issues that confronted the village. The City of Unalakleet, incorporated in 1974, has a sevenmember city council from which a mayor and a vice-mayor are elected. Although nonnatives recently have comprised the majority of council members, the mayor and vice-mayor are natives, and the directions taken by the council are agreed on through discussions among IRA and city leaders. The city government appears to be the surrogate for the pre-ANCSA IRA government. The cooperation and coordination of the city council and the IRA council are evident in all important decisions. The city government is not simply the reconstituted government half of the old IRA, because it provides Unalakleet with state revenue-sharing funds and access to block grants for municipal purposes. It levies taxes, provides police protection, provides fire-fighting equipment, maintains the roads, and so forth. The shareholders of the Unalakleet Native Corporation (UNC) elect an eight-member Board of Directors, which, in turn, elects its chairman. The UNC began with 829 original native shareholders, all born prior to December 18, 1971, each with 100 shares of stock. The UNC received 100,000 acres from the Bering Straits Regional Corporation through conveyance and is scheduled to receive another 61,280 acres. The UNC, in turn, is conveying some of the acreage to shareholders. The corporation acquires funds to conduct business through the $962 million settlement award that accompanied ANCSA. The UNC operates a grocery and dry goods store in competition with the Alaska Commercial Company's (ACC) similar operation in Unalakleet. The two also compete in snowmachine,

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The Study Villages

outboard motor, and all-terrain cycle (ATC) repairs. T h e UNC has created a construction contracting division and has been successful in garnering public funds for several construction projects, including buildings and roads. T h e UNC has hired several managers since its creation, usually local natives, although from 1982 to 1984, the UNC manager was an enrolled member of a Nevada Indian tribe (Washo). Unalakleet's villagers regard the UNC as a public institution whose interests are identical to those of the IRA. It is not merely a shareholder corporation in their view. In a similar vein, the members of the board work closely with the IRA and the city leadership on almost all policy issues. T h e Norton Sound Fishermen's Cooperative (NSFC) is presided over by the same group of native men who serve as city, IRA, and UNC leaders. These men change positions in and among organizations, and a few d r o p out of public service for a year or so at a time, but the overlapping nature of personal roles in governing bodies is well established and generates real consensus among institutions. Since enactment of ANCSA, Unalakleet villagers have been drawn deeply into public sector dependencies. But Unalakleet natives have also increased their participation in private sectors of the market economy, principally through commercial fishing and less so through trapping and the sale of by-products from subsistence activities. Significantly, the private sector activities of native villagers are based on the harvests of naturally occurring, renewable resources. Even these items require assistance, financial in particular, from various arms of the public sector. Recognition of the role played by the public sector can be gained from the village's job structure. In 1982, there was more than one permanent, full-time job per household in Unalakleet. About half of the jobs were held by natives. More than four out of five of all full-time jobs were in the public sector. T h e remainder were possible only because of public sector expenditures, such as publicly funded passengers riding in aircraft—guided and regulated by FAA equipment and personnel and landing on federally constructed and maintained runways—to survey projects to be paid for by public sector funds.

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Villages

41

CHRISTIANITY

T h e Swedish Evangelical Mission church (currently, the Swedish Evangelical Covenant church) is the dominant religious influence in the village today. A Catholic priest took u p residence in 1982 to accommodate several Catholic families in town.

THE ENVIRONMENT

T h e Unalakleet River rises in the Kaltag Mountains about fifty miles northeast of the village. Many tributaries feed the Unalakleet, some rising in the Andreafsky Range to the south and others rising in the Debauch Mountains to the north. T h e Unalakleet system is separated from the Yukon River by the former and from the Shaktoolik River by the latter. T h e hills and mountains that are dissected by the Unalakleet system are wooded, predominantly by alpine spruce. Willow and birch shrub, sedges, and forbs are important constituents in the wet tundra, and bilberry, cloudberry, and birch are important constituents in the moist higher tundra. T h e Unalakleet River system teems with spawning salmon during the summer months and hosts sea-run char, whitefish, and grayling that enter the river to spawn and stay for eight or nine months to feast on salmon eggs and salmon grilse (fry). In addition, brown bears wade into the river and fish for migrating or spent salmon. Brown bears also pilfer salmon f r o m the villagers' drying racks and from their set nets (bears strip nets of their fish by standing near the shore and cleaning the nets as they haul them in—paw over paw). These bears are joined by the black bears and the villagers themselves in harvesting the vast quantities of berries and the more limited quantities of roots that mature each year. T h e tundra to the north and to the south supports the caribou herd, which, although diminished from its considerable size of over a century ago, is increasing in numbers. T h e willows and sedges along the river system are inhabited by moose, while snowshoe hares and willow ptarmigan inhabit the moist willow

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tundra nearby. Arctic hares and spruce grouse claim the higher reaches and the wooded zones. T h e tidal marshes of Norton Sound support several species of invertebrates and fish, which are feasted on by migratory and nesting shorebirds, seabirds, and waterfowl. T h e r e is kelp in which fish hide and eat and spawn. Many species of sea mammals feast on the marine invertebrates and fish of the area. These resources, from the herring roe-on-kelp to the beluga whale and the whistling swan, are harvested by Unalakleet villagers, as they have been for more than twenty centuries. Except for salmon, berries, birds, and eggs, the Unalakleet environment of the early 1980s does not yield an absolute surfeit of any natural resource, but there is such a multiplicity of resources available at different times throughout the year that it is appropriate to call the place "bountiful." It is also exquisitely beautiful in all seasons, even though winter winds u p to 60 knots and temperatures near — 20°F are not uncommon. WAINWRIGHT

Wainwright is located 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the coast of the Chukchi Sea at 70°40'N, 159°50'W. T h e arctic tundra bluffs on which the village sits rise twenty feet above a narrow beach. T h e landmass to the west narrows to a spit separating the Kuuk Lagoon from the sea. Barrow, a 3,000resident village 90 miles to the northeast, is the center of political and economic affairs for all North Slope villages. T h e village of Point Lay is 100 miles to the southwest. Wainwright was created as a permanent village site at the turn of the twentieth century. T h e 1970 population of Wainwright was tallied at 350. Except for a few elementary schoolteachers, a Christian minister, and a handful of state and federal employees, Wainwright was a native village. By 1982, the population had grown to 506. It is not surprising, given the large number of projects undertaken by the North Slope Borough in Wainwright, that nonnative residents and visitors constituted a much larger percentage of all persons in Wainwright than was the case in either Unalak-

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