Coping with extremes at the top of the world

Published on December 28th, 2009

By VICTORIA BARBER

Issues that hit the nation hard seemed to hit the Arctic harder in 2009 - a deepening recession, inflation, global climate change. For the North Slope and the Northwest Arctic regions, 2009 was a year wracked by extremes. Temperatures were hotter in the summer, snow fell thicker in the winter and sea ice grew thinner. Food was more expensive to buy and, as gas prices soared, harder to go out and harvest. The region continued to struggle with eroding villages, inadequate infrastructure and high rates of unemployment and suicide.

Yet some of the most memorable stories from 2009 were tales of courage and creativity, resourcefulness and self-reliance. In recounting 2009, I think almost anyone would agree - it was a tough year. But if the Arctic peoples are known for anything, it is the ability to thrive in the face of adversity.

Atqasuk woman's grit, ingenuity

Wanda Kippi, secretary of Mead River School in Atqasuk, mother of eight and, most importantly, a hunter and expert in the Arctic outdoors, survived six days lost on the tundra last October.

Kippi was traveling by four-wheeler to her family's cabin, a trip she'd made hundreds of times before, when she stopped to look for caribou and became disoriented as snow began to fall. Complicating matter further, she'd lost a contact lens in one eye and her GPS unit stopped working.

First by four-wheeler, then by foot, Kippi tried to find her way back for six days, navigating by compass and by the flight paths of passing planes. Along the way, she chipped ice for water, ate cranberries on the tundra and constructed shelters to withstand five-degree temperatures at night.

All the while she could see the search-and-rescue plane and helicopter sweeping by looking for her and the lights of distant searchers. Yet no one saw her. Finally she saw with her one good eye what looked like four four-wheelers about to pass her by. She quickly pulled out her rifle and shot off all five of her remaining shots. She cried out - "let them find me!" They did.

Few searches of such a length have had a happy ending. Kippi had made her way to within two miles of her family's cabin. She suspects she walked 30 miles; some think it was over 40. Kippi said she wasn't ready for being lost and doubts if anyone could be completely prepared. But certainly her ingenuity and survival skills showcase the remarkable attributes of a true arctic woman.

Caribou case goes on

Charges were filed last March against eight Point Hope residents for the wanton waste of caribou. Alaska State Troopers opened the investigation in July 2008, initially saying they had found 120 caribou killed and left to rot about 25 miles east of Point Hope (charging documents brought that number down to 37).

The investigation sparked a firestorm of negative publicity against the village, which was widely perceived as protecting the hunters. Point Hope leaders fought for the right to punish the responsible parties according to their own traditional law, and began questioning the troopers' allegations - asserting that the number of caribou wasted was highly exaggerated and that the animals left behind were either unhealthy or that injury prevented harvesting.

As the trial date nears in February, three of the men accused have pleaded guilty and received fines and community service but no jail time. The trial has highlighted the conflict between traditional hunting practices, where diseased-looking animals were left behind as a threat to human health, and law, which mandates that all animals killed must be entirely harvested. It also raised the question of whether young hunters were following the traditional hunting principles that their elders espoused.

Local and regional leaders stepped in to support the men after they were charged, saying the case constitutes an attack on Natives' traditional subsistence rights. The North Slope Borough put up $56,000 to pay for the legal defense of the men.

Rare rape conviction by Barrow jury

A Barrow judge sentenced Guy Yazzie Jr. to 10 years in prison last March in a case that included the community's first jury conviction of rape in about five years.

Sexual assault is prevalent in Barrow, but remains hidden in part because few people report it, according to Robin Koutchak, an assistant attorney general for the state.

According to the victim's testimony, she and Yazzie were drunk when the incident occurred. She fell asleep and woke to find Yazzie forcing himself on her. After telling a friend what had happened, she agreed to talk to police and undertake DNA testing.

During the jury selection in Barrow, several people admitted that they did not think that this kind of rape - having sex with a woman who is incapacitated - was something that the state should pursue, Koutchak said. Finding a jury pool for the trial was an enormous challenge because "so many who would make up the jury pool have been victims of sexual assault themselves and often request to be left off the jury."

In the end, only one Native woman and two Native men served on the 12-member jury. Yazzie received the minimum sentence.

After the conviction was handed down, when the judge and jury had left and only lawyers were present, Koutchak said Yazzie apologized to the victim.

"He looked right at her and said, "I am so sorry. I know you trusted me, and I betrayed that trust and I was just so drunk I didn't I didn't know what I was doing," she said.

"She just very quietly accepted," Koutchak said.

Ban on Native dancing lifted

Last September, Noorvik's elder's council and the Noorvik Friends Church body voted to allow traditional dancing in that community for the first time. Traditional dancing has never been a part of the village as far as anyone can remember, because it was associated with shamanism and forbidden by missionaries around the time that Noorvik was settled around the early 1900s.

"It's a long story of how Eskimo dancing was taken away from our culture," said Hendy Ballot Sr., tribal administrator for the Native Village.

School principal Doyle Horton said that the idea to bring dancing to Noorvik came from the upcoming U.S. census. On Jan. 25, Noorvik will be the first town in the U.S. to be counted, and the community wanted to include traditional dancing as part of the celebration. Because no one knew how to dance, the City of Noorvik and Noorvik IRA brought in dancers from Kotzebue to hold dance classes for the whole community. Even after the census is over, Horton said the school plans to include dancing as part of its curriculum.

"This is history, history in the making," Horton said.

U.S. Senate probes Native businesses

Last May, Sen. Claire McCaskill launched a probe into Alaska Native corporations and the legislation that has helped some win million- and billion-dollar federal contracts without bidding for them.

A special law in the Small Business Administration's 8(a) program allows Alaska Native corporations to partner with experienced contractors who are required to do less than half the work. It's helped the Native companies win huge contracts for such things as testing military equipment and providing maintenance at bases.

Arctic Slope Regional Corp. said the controversy was "an opportunity for ASRC to tell our story." While villages benefit from many more of the modern day amenities than they used to - such as running waters, local schools, flush toilets and police and fire protection - "we still have a long way to go on the spectrum."

Point Lay's whale harvest

The Atkaan whaling crew landed a bowhead whale on May 5, the first whale that community harvested in about 72 years.

In the last century the village of Point Lay had dwindled to just two people. Now 250 strong, the entire village was required to pull the 49 foot, 7 inch bowhead onto the ice and harvest the meat.

Getting to that landing was a long journey, Atkaan captain Julius Rexford

Rexford worked for years to earn Point Lay the right to a bowhead whale quota. Jawbones from the old town site were uncovered and records in the school library unearthed to prove that whaling was a part of the town's cultural heritage. Also, wildlife studies had to be conducted and resolutions drafted and presented to the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission.

In 2008, Point Lay was awarded a quota of one bowhead whale a year. That spring, Rexford and four others brought whaling gear down from Barrow to Point Lay, hauling outboard motors, dart guns, shoulder guns, floats and lines and bomb equipment on sleds hitched to their snowmachines. "All the equipment you normally use taking a whale," Rexford said.

Sea ice conditions were too treacherous the first season for a successful hunt, but last May the Atkaan crew landed a whale. As the village rejoiced and worked together on the harvest, word spread like wildfire throughout the Arctic by phone, e-mail even Facebook - "Point Lay got a whale!"

Ancient remains in Kivalina

Construction workers unearthed the remains of three humans in Kivalina last July. The bodies are believed to have been members of a mysterious tribal group from about 1,000 years ago.

The Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium was excavating for Kivalina's new wastewater treatment plant when it found three sets of human remains, two together and one in what could have been a wooden house, with items including stone points and carved ivory artifacts.

Archaeologists believe the remains may have been from members of the Ipiutak - a group that lived in Alaska from about 500 to 900 A.D. The discovery shows that Kivalina was occupied by humans about a thousand years longer than historians previously knew.

It also sheds light on a mysterious group which is culturally distinct from the ancestors of the modern Inupiaq. Ipiutak hunted seals and smaller mammals on the coast but don't seem to have hunted whale. Caribou bones and the use of wood suggest that they also used areas in the Interior.

As for the bones unearthed in Kivalina, city administrator Janet Mitchell said that after excavation is complete they will be turned over to the church for Christian burial, their plots marked with a simple cross and a plaque reading "unknown."

Barrow mayor resigns

Michael D. Stotts stepped down as mayor of the City of Barrow three days after being asked to resign.

Barrow City Council members asked Stotts to resign last February, saying that he'd run up thousands of dollars in personal charges on a city-owned credit card, including posting bail for a drunken driving charge, paying for damages to a rental car he drunkenly drove into a pipe post and paying for his legal defense.

Stotts said that he could understand why the council asked him to resign, not because of any wrongdoing, but because he'd had a "failure to perform duties on business trips." He explained his behavior while traveling as mayor as doing "as the Romans do ... go out to dinners, have some drinks and socialize with people."

An investigation by city attorney Louisiana W. Cutler of K&L Gates law firm also found Stotts had racked up as much as $28,735 in charges, including credit card charges, per diem for out-of-town meetings he didn't show up for and buying alcohol. One charge was for a family emergency - Stotts used the card to pay for the accommodations for his family when his son fell from the third story of a building in Anchorage. Stotts said he believed that he'd reimbursed the city but "That's apparently not the case," Stotts said.

Councilman Bob Harcharek succeeded Stotts as mayor pro tem, then mayor by special election.

Arctic sea ice thinnest ever

Last spring, it was reported that more than 90 percent of sea ice in the Arctic was only one or two years old, according to researchers at NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Colorado. Thin ice usually accounts for about 70 percent of the ice cover.

In normal winters, thick sea ice (about 10 feet thick or more) extends from the northern boundaries of Greenalnd and Canada almost to Russia. In 2009, the thick ice cap barely penetrated the bull's-eye of the Arctic Circle.

The amount of thick sea ice hit a record wintertime low of just 378,000 square miles, down 43 percent from 2008. The amount lost was larger than the size of Texas.

The Arctic essentially acts as a refrigerator for the rest of the globe. Thick ice traps ocean heat and keep the planet in its current state of balance.

Arctic dream home

It is so expensive to fly construction material to Anaktuvuk Pass that even a small home can cost about $1.5 million to build. That's probably the reason that no new homes have been built there in more than a decade - until now.

Ilisagvik College, Tagiugmiullu Nunamiullu Housing Authority and the Cold Climate Housing Research Center embarked on a project last summer to build a highly efficient, 1,000-square-foot home in Anaktuvuk Pass for less than $150,000. It was finished on time and under budget.

Six students from Ilisagvik College in Barrow spent a month working six days a week, 10 hours a day constructing the house. Though thoroughly modern, the design includes elements of the sod homes traditional to that region. Instead of pilings, the house was built with earth berms on two or three sides, the roof is covered in sod, and rooms in the house are oriented to capture the sun's head and deflect snow drifts. The house is highly insulated and solar voltaic panels were installed in front of the house to further save on fuel costs.

Ilisagvik instructor John Howlett said that the home was so well insulated that just closing the doors caused it to warm up, even before heat was installed.

The house is a prototype for more planned homes, and will be monitored this winter for any possible improvements.