Alaskan Villages Coming to Grips With Oil : Neighboring Towns View the Future in Vastly Different Ways

ARCTIC VILLAGE, Alaska — As an old Indian peers into a telescope toward the mountains, looking for caribou to kill and eat, while the image of Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III testifying on Capitol Hill peers out from the television, it is easy to forget what decade it is.

Here in Arctic Village and 150 miles to the north in Kaktovik, a village on the Beaufort Sea where skins from fresh-killed seal dry on backyard racks alongside a hunter’s Honda all-terrain vehicle, the past and the future seem in perpetual collision.

Despite the distance between the two communities, they are neighbors. Kaktovik is the only human settlement in the South Carolina-sized Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, and Arctic Village lies a couple of miles outside it. As such, they have become players in the environmental dispute over oil drilling in the northernmost part of the refuge.

But they view it from strikingly different perspectives. Kaktovik’s 210 people, mostly Inupiat Eskimos, have embraced the present and future that oil and its money offer. A whaling village, Kaktovik relies less for food on the caribou, whose numbers, some fear, will be diminished by oil fields. And its lands extend over one of the area’s potentially rich oil deposits.

Arctic Village, an Athabascan Indian settlement of 130 people on the south slope of the Brooks Range, seems to cling to the past. It voted to reject the benefits of the Alaska Native Claims Act in 1971 and thus is denied some oil benefits shared by other native villages. And caribou, many of which winter here after returning from the prospective oil fields where they calve, are the critical source of food.

Loren Ahlers, a Californian who married an Eskimo woman and is now mayor of Kaktovik, recalls the early 1970s when Alaska’s oil boom was getting under way at Prudhoe Bay, just 120 miles to the west.

“In the ‘70s, this community had exactly the same concern about Prudhoe as Arctic Village has now,” says Ahlers, 43. “Today, Arctic Village doesn’t have a health clinic like we have, or street lights.”

Declares Isaac Akootchook, a member of Kaktovik’s local council: “The oil is good for all of us.”

A dreary settlement on Barter Island jutting into the Arctic Ocean’s Beaufort Sea, Kaktovik is usually fogged in during the brief, cool summer and is frozen-in the rest of the time. In July, the ice pack, home to the area’s 1,800 polar bears, is visible a few hundred yards from shore. The current village site is adjacent to an Air Force radar outpost on the island.

Until now, Kaktovik has shared in Alaska’s oil revenue from a distance. As one of the communities whose residents are shareholders in the Arctic Slope Regional Corp., one of 13 private corporations created by the Native Claims Act, it benefits from oil royalties as well as from the oil-based tax revenue that flows indirectly to all state residents.

The new proposal--to drill for oil in the coastal plain of the wildlife refuge, right in Kaktovik’s backyard--stands to further enrich what remains a rundown community by modern standards. But drilling has its risks.

In 1985, when Shell Oil and Unocal did exploratory drilling in the shallow waters offshore from the coastal plain, the people of Kaktovik did not land any whales. The villagers suspected that the drilling and the shipping activity surrounding it scared off the whales.

The next year, said local lodge operator Mark Simms, the oil industry provided the whalers with a radio tower and other navigational aids to promote safety in the increasingly congested waters. But use of the equipment seems to have had another result: The villagers took three bowhead whales in 1986.

“We want some limits on the oil development,” Ahlers said. “The fact is that some caribou have been displaced from Prudhoe. And we’re worried about offshore drilling. We want to protect the areas important to our subsistence. But we have learned that to fight the oil industry as the environmental groups are doing, you gain nothing.”

As a symbol of the gap between the two villages, the quality of television reception is as good as any: Kaktovik receives 13 channels, while Arctic Village gets along with one. It reflects the degree to which each settlement has shared in Alaska’s oil riches so far.

Made up of Indians who followed the caribou until establishing the settlement in about 1903, Arctic Village is a long way from the proposed oil sites. But it is on a main migratory route of the 180,000-head Porcupine caribou herd. The villagers kill upward of 500 caribou per year versus the 100 typically used for food in Kaktovik, according to state officials.

Arctic Village is a poor, dusty town with scenic surroundings--mountains, fir trees and lakes. From the air, caribou can be seen crossing the remote, majestic hills. It is country that, to men like Van Nuys-born commercial pilot Richard Reid, banking his single-engine Cessna for a closer look at the caribou, “beats the hell out of the Harbor Freeway.”

Pro-oil forces argue that the experience with caribou at the Prudhoe Bay oil fields suggests that oil development 150 miles north of Arctic Village will not mean major changes in the route of the caribou. But nervous leaders here wish the whole issue had not come up.

“This place is here because of the caribou. We have to assume the worst,” Lincoln Tritt, chief of the village council, said. “And we’re not going to benefit monetarily from the oil.”

Benefits of Oil

Tritt, 40, a Navy veteran, talks wistfully of the old native traditions and fears that oil money in other Indian and Eskimo communities is raising false hopes and inflating local economies that one day must collapse. Yet he understands the modern lure and concedes that it would be hard to oppose oil if it were here, instead of near Kaktovik.

“I don’t blame them,” he said of other communities. “It would be hard to go back to the harsh life. But I always wonder what they’ll do when the oil runs out. . . . Today we have teen-agers who are not qualified for either culture.”

It is not entirely correct that Arctic Village would not benefit from another oil discovery. Certain benefits reach all citizens, notably the unique annual dividend the state has allocated from oil revenues. This year, it is expected to be $700 for every man, woman and child, and a large family might realize several thousand dollars.

Already, a cash economy has begun to develop in Arctic Village as a result. Most families here appear to own televisions, videocassette recorders, snowmobiles and other modern equipment. In a ramshackle building without running water where overnight visitors can plunk down their sleeping bags, it is possible to get a cheeseburger and french fries. That sort of food is flown in from Fairbanks.

(Friendlier to outsiders than some native communities, the village charges $35 a night for lodging and $6 for the burger and fries. Oil company geologists who frequent the Alaskan bush country on field trips say they have had to pay $180 and up for lesser accommodations.)

But only the postmaster, the teacher and a few others in Arctic Village earn wages. If the caribou dwindled in number or went elsewhere, Tritt figures that the village would fade away and its residents would disperse. Many would probably end up in Fairbanks, he says.

Steve Lee, a Connecticut man who moved here eight years ago and married Athabascan Rose Lee, said he shoots seven to 10 of Arctic Village’s 500 caribou a year. Altogether, the village might also bag a dozen moose each year, he said. The several meat caches outside his cozy log cabin are full of caribou and other meat. Lee says he understands the need for oil but that the drilling makes him nervous.

“I wish they’d save it for an emergency,” he said.

Main story, Part I, Page 1