Crude Reality (cont.) | Outside Online

Outside Magazine February 2004

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Crude Reality (cont.)

NATIVE CLAIMS
Nowhere are those trade-offs more apparent than among native Alaskans, who, after the discovery of oil on the North Slope in 1967, used federal courts to force passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971. The act established 13 regional and 168 village corporations, which took legal title to surface land and subsurface mineral rights in exchange for relinquishing aboriginal claims on lands along the right-of-way of the new Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Now, in the Inupiat villages of Kaktovik and Nuiqsut, which lie equidistant from Prudhoe Bay in opposite directions, that legacy is strikingly different. Nuiqsut has oil development on its front porch—ConocoPhillips's Alpine field lies inside Nuiqsut village corporation lands—while Kaktovik wants it in its backyard: Its own 92,000 acres, the KIC lands, lie entirely inside the 1002.

I flew into Kaktovik on the day of the first sunset of summer. Sixty miles inside the western boundary of the 1002, Kaktovik sits on the heart-shaped hump of Barter Island, where life seems far removed from oil fields and federal courts. The yards around the small wood-frame houses were cluttered with fishing and hunting gear, ATVs, and snowmobiles left quiet for the summer. At the post office, people asked expectantly about catalog shipments or mail or checks. When the postmaster asked one guy, a heavy-equipment operator, what he needed, he stabbed his finger toward the south: "We need about four oil rigs right out there." For Kaktovik, drilling means jobs, royalties, and the continuation of a way of life that, for many, is the only one they know. Subsistence activities remain a huge part of Kaktovik culture, but oil money comes in the form of seasonal jobs in the oil fields and tax revenues to the North Slope Borough, the largest of Alaska's 27 political divisions. Further moneys come via dividends from the statewide Alaska Permanent Fund and the native Arctic Slope Regional Corporation. A diversified company with 3,000 employees and annual revenues in the $1 billion range, the ASRC holds title to roughly five million acres of land in the name of its 9,000 Inupiat shareholders, including subsurface rights to Kaktovik's lands, where the KIC well was drilled, then plugged and capped, in 1986.

It's the stuff of legend—not even locals know how much, if any, oil was found under their land. Only select corporate officers at Chevron, BP, and the ASRC know, and in the early 1990s they went to court to defend their secret—proprietary information, they said, drilled on private land with private money. The irony remains poignant in Kaktovik: Under ANILCA, the Inupiat can't drill anyway, not until Congress acts. It's like owning a car that's illegal to drive. So Kaktovik waits, a lifeline of cash trickling down from the borough seat at Barrow, a relative metropolis of 5,000.

"Kaktovik is always last," said Lon Sonsalla, 50, a Wisconsin native who moved here in the 1970s and has served as the town's mayor for seven of the last eight years. Like most people in the village, he favors drilling the 1002. Without it, he said, the future is grim: limited education, limited facilities. With it comes money for schools and health care, not to mention one important by-product of oil-field development: natural gas to heat homes.

The village of Nuiqsut has these things. But with drilling have come problems. With jobs and direct royalties from the Alpine oil field, Nuiqsut has more money, but also more crime, fourfold that of Kaktovik: alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence. As in every other North Slope native village, save Barrow, possession of alcohol is illegal in Nuiqsut, but there's a black market in booze and drugs smuggled in on the winter ice road. In Nuiqsut, I was told, "you can get anything."

It's the example of Nuiqsut that has spurred the Gwich'in tribe to push against opening the 1002. Spread out over the southern slopes of the Brooks Range, the Gwich'in derive 75 percent of their diet from the Porcupine caribou herd, which migrates past the settlement of Arctic Village in a bow-shaped path between the Brooks Range and calving areas in and around the 1002.

"The Gwich'in are presented as a traditional tribe that refused to sell out to oil," said ASRC board chairman Oliver Leavitt, who, along with the Inupiat corporation's president and CEO, Jacob Adams, is one of the most powerful native Alaskans in the state. "But the fact is that they invited companies to survey their historic lands, and those surveys showed they had no oil. I'm not saying that makes them bad people, but some characterizations are not accurate. They call themselves Ôpeople of the caribou,' but Inupiat are also people of the caribou."

Luci Beach, the executive director of the Gwich'in Steering Committee, acknowledged that the Gwich'in had invited oil surveyors in the 1970s but said that the areas were not critical habitat, and at any rate the elders had voted to halt exploration. "We are realists," she said. "We know this [oil] is something we use, too, but where subsistence lifestyles are endangered, we oppose development."

The scientific debate over caribou in the 1002 is by no means resolved. Populations in the Central Arctic herd—a 31,800-member herd that calves around Prudhoe Bay—have remained strong despite oil development, and caribou there continue to use the oil field extensively during the post-calving period. But studies also show that females shy away from the noise of oil fields during calving. This could pose problems for the Porcupine herd, which is four times larger than the Central Arctic herd but calves in an area one-fifth the size. Of course, even this is a vast oversimplification: On average, 50 percent of the herd calves in the 1002, but in some years, none of it does.

"When the oil companies first came," said Leavitt, "we felt as the Gwich'in do now—that the animals would leave. But we were wrong. I don't believe the caribou will leave, and if I did, I would not be in favor of drilling the coastal plain."

It's a sentiment echoed all over Kaktovik. While the ASRC's revenue may make the Inupiat seem wealthy, the reality is that their land, and the profits they can get from it, is all they have. The Inupiat are well aware of the problems—that more cash equals more alcohol and more drugs. They know that oil will one day run out and the companies will pack up their equipment, and their jobs, and fly south. But they believe that the 30 years it will likely take to drill the 1002 will provide an invaluable economic transition. "There is no going back," said ASRC vice president Richard Glenn. "Back to what? We can't pretend the world isn't what it is."

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