Gateway to ANWR - 3rd Quarter 1998

'Midnight Sun' borough mayor says no harm will befall land from oil drilling

(The following is a speech that North Slope Borough Mayor Ben Nageak delivered recently to the National Association of Counties. NACo represents nearly 1,800 counties in the U.S., providing a collective voice on issues relevant to local governments. The association holds four major conferences each year including the Western Interstate Region (WR) Conference, which focuses on public lands. Nageak was the keynote speaker for the 1998 WR Conference held May 20-23 in Juneau, Alaska.)

My name is Ben Nageak. I am an Inupiat Eskimo from Alaska's North Slope. This presentation about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will give you an overview of one of the most difficult issues we are grappling with in Alaska today. It is an issue that … in one form or another … is dealt with by each and every one of you. And that issue is: Who has the right to determine local land use? How much authority should the federal government have to tie up valuable economic resources in our states and counties. The issue is also about whether resource development can occur within safe parameters that protect the land and the animals on it.

Before I go into any details about ANWR, let me give you a brief introduction to the land my family and I have called home for thousands of years. My Municipality, the North Slope Borough, is the size of Minnesota. It covers almost 90,000 square miles from the Brooks Range of mountains to the south, to the Beaufort Sea to the north. It stretches from the Chukchi Sea on our western coast to the Canadian border on our eastern boundary. It has the sweep and vastness that Texas brags about, but Alaska owns.

Contained within this area are seven Inupiat Eskimo villages and one village of Nunamiut Eskimos. The Inupiat Eskimos are people who depend mostly on the sea for our subsistence needs. We hunt polar bears, seals, walrus and whale as well as caribou and various birds. The Nunamiut people are Inland Eskimos and depend more on caribou and Dahl sheep for their subsistence needs. All our people have traditionally traded and bartered together. The Nunamiut give us sheep meat and we give them seal oil.

The population of the North Slope is about seven thousand permanent residents, not counting Prudhoe Bay, which is not a permanent settlement but an industrial site. Our villages range in size from about 4000 in Barrow, the seat of municipal government, to 250 in our smallest village. There are no roads connecting our villages and no roads connecting the North Slope to the rest of the state except for the Pipeline Haul Road, which is also called the Dalton Highway. To get anywhere on the North Slope, you have to fly on small commuter planes or be willing to drive a skidoo for a long time in very cold weather.

The North Slope is completely above the Arctic Circle so the sun does not rise from the end of November till the end of January. Conversely, it does not set from the beginning of May through the beginning of August. This is why we are called the Land of the Midnight Sun.

Trying to explain the North Slope to the world through the media can sometimes be very trying. Every year when the sun comes back, we inevitably get calls from news people who want to know what strange rite we will be observing to welcome back the sun. To tell you the truth, half the time we don't even see the sun the first day it comes back because it's foggy. And by the time we do see it, we're so busy making plans to go to Hawaii the minute the kids get out of school that we don't notice.

It's the same thing when the sun goes down. Calls come from all over the lower 48 as media try to figure out what trauma we suffer when we see the sun set for the last time that year. Since we don't tear our clothes off and run naked through the snow in a gesture of despair at seeing the sun go down for the last time that winter, I always feel obligated to come up with something to give these poor news people who seem desperate to have something different to say. So I tell them that we cheer when the sun goes down because it means that on New Year's Eve we can have our July 4th fireworks; fireworks we can't have in the summer when the sun is up twenty-four hours a day.

There's another myth I want to dispel now and that is the myth that the North Slope is a barren, wind swept land that makes up some sort of pristine wilderness into which man has never stepped. The Inupiat people have been in the Arctic longer than our collective memory can recall. Our footsteps are all over the North Slope and we are proud of them. Our history is one of people who are good stewards of the land God has given them. We are the first environmentalists. We took only what was needed from our land and seas and we used all that we took to feed, clothe and house our families. Even though there is more money in our economy today than ever before, our subsistence way of life is still critical to our survival as a people.

In fact, one of the greatest challenges facing us today is how to blend the old with the new; how to live in a moneyed economy without losing our roots in the land. When a gallon of car gas costs over $2.50 and a small takeout pizza costs over $10.00, we are forced to face the fact that we need some sort of steady income in our lives. But even the highest paid executive is still an Inupiat at heart and needs to return to his or her roots in our rivers, land and seas.

I remember when oil was first discovered on the North Slope. My people had many concerns about the problems development would bring. Our Elders were fearful that our culture would not survive if the land on which we subsisted was spoiled. They thought the caribou would leave and never come back. They thought the birds would nest somewhere else. They feared they would be the last people to practice the Inupiat subsistence way of life. They did not want their way of life to die.

It's now more than 25 years later, and our worst fears were never realized. The oil industry made a concerted effort to cooperate with the Inupiat people in addressing their concerns. They listened to us. Together, we have refined practices and rules for safe development. Today, the oil industry is no longer seen as an adversary by the Inupiat people. It is now viewed as a partner. And our Inupiat culture is still alive and thriving.

Revenues from oil development have been directly responsible for the revival of our traditions, language and dance. When I went to school at a Bureau of Indian Affairs school, we were forbidden to speak our language. Because there were no schools in our villages past 8th grade, we had to leave our homes and our families and travel thousands of miles away to boarding schools for our high school education. Our families had no money for airline tickets so we only came home for summer vacation. There were no holidays or birthdays spent with our families until we graduated and went home for good.

This absence meant that I missed the opportunity to learn many of my cultural traditions. At a time when the young men in our community should have been by their Elder's side learning how to hunt and fish, how to survive on the land … at a time when I should have been learning how to care for my future family … I was over a thousand miles away immersed in a culture that had very little to offer me once I went home.

Two weeks ago, I spoke at the 8th grade graduation of my son and daughter. They were graduating from our own middle school. This fall they will attend our local high school. Their commute time will be twenty minutes, not two days. They will not leave home for the privilege of a high school diploma.

Having a local School Board means our school year calendar is scheduled to fit our subsistence activities. We start in August and the kids are out by the middle of May so they can whale, hunt, go to fish camp and participate in their traditional activities. But most importantly for those of us who are parents, they will stay at home with us during this crucial time in their development.

Our language, once forbidden in BIA schools, is now taught in our schools. Through other activities such as Kivgiq, our traditional midwinter dancing and bartering festival, we revived customs that had been lost since the turn of the century. Resources provided by our tax base made it possible for our young people to learn our traditions from our Elders.

This was critical to us because our one nonrenewable resource, our Elders, was becoming lost to us through aging. Those Elders with knowledge of Kivgiq and other cultural activities were sought out to perpetuate our traditions for us and our children.

I want to make sure you understand how basic some of our needs are. When I grew up in Kaktovik, the village on the Canadian Border that is closest to ANWR, we melted ice for water and used a honeybucket for a toilet. I'll leave it to your imagination to figure out what a honeybucket is. The property tax generated by the oil industry on the North Slope has helped us get basic amenities in our villages that most Americans take for granted; safe water and sanitary sewage disposal. Most homes in Barrow, our biggest village, now have these services. Our villages are getting them installed even as we speak.

The past few years have seen a lot of angry words expressed in Alaska over the issue of the subsistence use of our fish and wildlife. I don't pretend to have a solution to that dilemma, but I can offer this: No matter what the results or our subsistence debate, there is one thing we all agree upon whether we are from urban, rural or bush areas of this state; and that is that we all want our resources protected. No one wants development to come at the expense of our land, our seas, or our wildlife. Whether we want to shoot them with cameras or harvest them to feed our families, the wildlife of Alaska must be protected from harm.

In this area, the North Slope oil industry has an excellent record. Over the past thirty years, the industry has improved their technology and land use planning. The footprint they leave behind at each development site grows smaller and smaller. That's the good news. The bad news for the North Slope Borough is that every time that footprint shrinks, so does our largest property tax base. Think of the implications for your county, if your biggest property tax payer was continually working to lessen their presence and in doing so was gradually eating away at your main source of municipal revenue.

I want to make it clear to you here, and to those who are opposed to the development of the ANWR Coastal Plain, that ANWR is in the land of the Inupiat and we have a right to do what is best for us. This land and its wildlife are our sacred cultural trust. We will never allow it to be harmed for so long as we have the ability to protect it. But we also believe it was given to us to use to provide for our families and our future. Safe exploration and development is one of those uses.

The development of the Coastal Plain area of ANWR will help both the state and the North Slope Borough fulfill their promises to their residents. The North Slope envisions being able to provide its residents with police and fire protection, flush toilets and clean, safe water. We also see these revenues as a way of providing the education for our children that was never available to us before.

We know the cost of business on the North Slope is high. That's why for over 100 years, the federal government has practiced an institutionalized form of benign neglect towards Alaska natives. The government was not willing to provide our villages with these basic services. What they were willing to do was provide us with the largest source of pollution in the Arctic. Throughout the early years of the cold war, the government's support of the Dew Line Sites and the Naval Arctic Research Lab called for enormous military participation. All materials had to be flown up. But since it was considered too costly to fly that same 50 gallon fuel drum off the Slope once it was empty, the military just left them scattered across our landscape like scabs on a festering wound. Anything brought to the Arctic was left in the Arctic after it's usefulness to the military ended. During my people's thousands of years in the Arctic, we never created a tenth of the pollution that the federal government created in just a few decades.

The North Slope Borough stands firmly committed to the responsible development of the Coastal Plain area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We believe this development can happen without destruction of habitat or wildlife. We have been stewards of this land since time immemorial. We have a greater stake than anyone in seeing that nothing is harmed by oil development. This land and its creatures are our culture. We will not let anyone or anything harm them, not the federal government, not the oil industry - no one. This is the trust we inherited from our parents and the trust we hold for our children.

We are committed to working with industry and we are committed to holding their feet to the fire when it comes to the protection of our renewable resources. We will never allow our land to be degraded.

Over the past 20 years, companies like ARCO, BP, EXXON and CHEVRON have proven themselves good neighbors and partners by their safety records at Prudhoe Bay and other developed sites on the North Slope. They also contribute to activities in our communities. These companies have sponsored youth events like the ARCO/Jesse Owens games and the BP Science Fairs. They have also provided scholarships to our local scholarship funds. Both ARCO and BP have made an effort to provide education and information to our communities to explain the advances that have been made in developing oil fields safely. They've also contributed to a multitude of other worthy North Slope causes.

The North Slope Borough, its residents and most other Alaskans, are ready for ANWR to be developed. In a time when this state is split into an urban versus bush battle, ANWR is an area of common ground we can all embrace. The future of our state is tied directly to the safe development of our North Slope resources. No matter what else divides us, this unites us. We all want to provide our children with a better world. We all want our families to live in decent housing. We want our children to receive a good education. We want our residents to have the chance to work. We want job opportunities and economic growth available for all Alaskans.

We need to let the people in the lower 48 and the U.S. Congress know that we are good stewards of our land. We can be trusted to use it wisely while still preserving it for generations to come.

I hope that someday you will all get an opportunity to visit the North Slope and see the wonderful world of the Arctic. My people have been inspired by its breathtaking beauty for thousands of years. I think you would be too. Thank you. Quyanaqpak.