Gates of the Arctic Gaunt Beauty ... Tenuous Life Historic Resource Study for Gates of the Arctic National Park & Preserve

Walter Johnson, whose association with the upper Koyukuk goes back more than 40 years, is a reflective man. He sees the long span of history in the region in terms of cultural perspectives: the land as viewed and used by aboriginals, by miners and traders, by conservationists and preservationists. He has distilled these perspectives to primary terms: game, gold, athletics/esthetics. During the historic period these categories blended somewhat and crossed cultural lines. But throughout, the archetypes remained: the Native hunter, the miner after gold, and, in the latter days, the wilderness adventurer/philosopher--embodied by Marshall and his followers. It is to the evolving yet stable perspective of historic-period Native people that we now turn. In the life histories of two men, and in the history of Anaktuvuk Village, we shall see how steady the Native perspective has been despite the buffetings of recent history and the eagerly grasped opportunities provided by the coming of the white man.

Joe Sun, preeminent elder of Shungnak, kin of the prophet Maniilaq, was born January 3, 1900, at Coal Mine near the Kobuk River village of Kiana. This was his mother's village. His father descended from upriver people with some distant Indian antecedents centered around the historic settlement of Qala (Kalla), near the Pah River. When 3 or 4 years old, Joe moved with his family to Sun Camp, 10 miles down the Kobuk from present Shungnak. He grew up in the traditional Eskimo way, moving between seasonal camps in the Kobuk Valley. Early in his life he began working at gold mines in the Shungnak district. During World War II he worked as a carpenter in Nome, and some years later as a miner in the Fairbanks area. In recent years, concerned about the erosion of traditional life and language, he has been active in the cultural revitalization efforts of the Spirit Program, sponsored by NANA, the Native regional corporation based in Kotzebue.¹

Until very recent years, when age forced Joe Sun to slow down, he divided his time between two worlds, able and competent in both: the world of the white man and that of the traditional Eskimo. His knowledge of his hunting territory in the upper Kobuk and Noatak rivers is profound and one of a kind in today's world. With the aid of his daughter-in-law Susie Sun and ethnohistorian David Libbey, he has done his best to convey that knowledge to his people and to the rest of us.²

Joe Sun became a tradition bearer by virtue of an early life nearly devoid of contact with white people and their manufactures until he was well into his teens. His early memories recall Native foods, seasonal camps that responded to hunting and fishing cycles, journeys by dogteam, and trading with Native partners. In the sod houses and bark shelters of his boyhood days, he absorbed not only the stories of the elders but also the language and rhythms of oral culture. His tutelage in hunting, travel, and survival followed the organic educational pattern of mimicry--accompanying his father, learning by observation, then being pushed to the front to try it himself. Constant critique by his father perfected his methods. His mother taught him how to snare small game. His father helped him set his first muskrat trap, then showed him how to dispatch the trapped animal with a stick before removing it from the trap. After learning to stalk game with a bow-and-arrow, requiring knowledge of animal behavior and perfection of stealth, he was given an old, single-shot .22 rifle and one bullet a day. When he finally shot a duck, early one morning, he waited outside camp until his parents awoke, then came in bearing his game. His father taught him how to make everything--snowshoes, sleds, survival camps, deadfalls, fishtraps. His recounting of these exciting times, when he tapped into a venerable tradition and became one of its functioning members, is full of phrases that tell the how, when, where, why of employing natural things to carryon a life integrated with nature. On field trips to the old sites, he made old-style deadfalls. He named places on the map; sketched shelters made of snow, willows, and skins.

While still a boy, he graduated to long trapping trips by himself, often for several months at a time. Because the family had only one set of dogs, he would depart in the fall, transporting his gear with the dogs to his distant base camp; then he would return them for his father's use and backpack out to his camp. In spring, after winter trapping, he would hike back home to get the dogs so he could retrieve his outfit.

After his marriage in 1927 he got his own dogteam. Then Joe, his wife, and his children began the annual cycle of long trips to the upper Noatak, leaving in the fall, returning in March. When his children started school, he would take them out for a short time in the fall, then bring them back for school. As winter progressed he brought caribou and sheep meat back to his family, then returned to the trapline on the Noatak.

I've gone out there and spent the whole year with people, elders born before me, and learned about the area from them. That's how I know that area out there. That's why white people come to me and ask for advice about how to go about living out there.³

Until he was in his mid-sixties Joe continued the seasonal journeys to trap and hunt in the Nunataaq (upper Noatak) country. As late as 1982 he ran a trapline near Shungnak.

As a mine laborer, heavy-equipment operator, and carpenter, Joe had adapted to the white man's world. He had visited and lived in cities and successfully raised his family in the new socioeconomic network of stores, schools, and modern transportation and communications systems. Yet, each year he left that modern world for extended periods and renewed his association with the older world known and conveyed to him by his ancestors.

Ernest S. Burch, Jr., has studied the cultural revitalization movement among Northwest Alaskan Eskimos. This movement is large in scope, involving legal, psychological, economic, political, and land tenure factors. The overall objective of the movement is a culturewide adaptive response to change that artfully blends sustaining traditional ways (language, hunting and domestic skills, sharing patterns, homeland integrity) with those selected elements of modern society that benefit the evolving Native culture yet do not destroy continuity with the past.⁴ Control of land and the pace and direction of cultural evolution by the Natives themselves is the essence of the movement. Joe Sun's life--his choices and blendings--provides an individual and familial exemplar relevant to the larger cultural objective. He is, by the example of his life, a bearer of both tradition and the new code for cultural survival.

Joe Sun's life was not intentionally shaped for such high purpose. It was simply his way. When Willie Hensley of NANA first asked Joe to participate in the Elders Conference, he did not fully understand its purpose. But in time, the idea of the elders helping young people perpetuate their Inupiaq identity--countering the pervasive influences of modern society--became a moving force in Joe's life. He became president of the Elders Conference. The elders' meeting place, a cluster of cabins on the Noorvik River, is called Sivunniugvik, "a place where you plan before you start going further ahead on your future."⁵

The Elders Conference itself is an adaptive form of ancient practice. Always the elders have met and counseled the next step in the future of the people. They gather now by invitations over the radio rather than having them delivered by fleet-footed messengers as in old times. The results of their deliberations are broadcast across the land by radio, TV, or tape cassette rather than in the intimacy of igloo or community house. But the purpose is the same. Such adaptations to a changing world are nothing new. The Eskimo people of the Kobuk Valley have faced change and the need for choice many times before. They have been here a long time.

*****

Arctic John Etalook, dead only a year at this writing, was the last old-time survivor of a lost band of mountain Eskimos, the Ulumiut. The center of their historic territory was the Ulu Valley ("Oolah" on USGS maps) in the upper reaches of the Itkillik River. The early people had probably moved eastward across the north face of the Brooks Range during the mid-19th Century, coming from the Noatak-Colville headwaters area. They were part of the migration toward better caribou hunting grounds that brought Eskimos into conflict with western Kutchin Athapaskans, forcing the Indians southeastward across the divide into Chandalar country. Into the vacuum thus created filtered Nunamiut bands to occupy the river valleys of the northern Endicott Mountains.

In 1981, anthropologist Grant Spearman realized the value of documenting the history of the Ulumiut--and the urgency of doing so, for Etalook was then very old. Previous studies of the Nunamiut had mentioned the Ulumiut band only in passing. Almost nothing was known about them. Their cultural geography--camps, hunting and fishing sites, sacred places, landmarks, and place names--was represented by only a scattering of names. With the help of Etalook's daughter Louisa Riley, Spearman began a series of interviews and mapping sessons with Etalook, lasting well into 1982. He also consulted with Ben Kavik Aguk, an Anaktuvuk Pass elder who had been a member of the Ulumiut band during its last days in the period 1938-42. Later, overflights of the Ulumiut territory with Etalook pinpointed historic sites and allowed Spearman to groundproof them on foot. The result of all this was published in a preliminary report that catalogues 243 historic Ulumiut sites and localitites, most of them identified as to resources and uses important to the band.⁶

Etalook, adopted son of Aqsiataaq, began life toward the end of the 19th Century during a period of profound change in the life of northern Eskimos. Declining caribou populations; the attractions provided by whalers, traders, and explorers on the Arctic coast; and death-dealing new diseases caused hardship and disruption among the people. Many of them died from starvation and epidemics loosed upon hitherto isolated populations with no immunity. One of Etalook's earliest memories was the summer 1903 measles epidemic, brought by the ships, that swept away his grandparents and many others who had gone to the coast to trade. When the survivors returned upriver in the fall, the sickness spread to more of the inland people.

Even with its dangers, the coast still attracted families from the Ulumiut and other inland bands. The dearth of caribou meant hard times, even starvation, for those who stayed upriver. For a while, jobs as crewmen on whaling ships or as hunters of fresh meat for overwintering whalers sustained the migrant Eskimos. As the whaling industry faded after 1900, trapping for Arctic fox took its place in the economy of the displaced inland people. Trading posts along the coast bought their furs and provided the manufactures and staples they craved.

In the fall of 1913, the fur trade brought Aqsiataaq and his family to the coast where explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson and anthropologist Diamond Jenness visited their camp that fall. Jenness stayed on to study the Eskimos who had come to the Colville delta area to trap, living part of the time with Aqsiataaq's family. His descriptions of lanky, 18-year-old Etalook draw a picture of a self-reliant, skilled young man, already a superior trapper. Jenness noted that the inlanders were viewed as country cousins by the coastal Eskimos, whose contact with white men went back many years. One of Jenness' problems was the spartan diet in Aqsiataaq's household. Fresh meat and fish were not plentiful, and Utuyok, Etalook's mother, was frugal with the biscuits and other store foods that supplemented the wild-food diet. She made no compensation for the relative lack of nourishment in the store foods, as compared to the high energy in the normal meat and fat diet of the Eskimos.⁷

By the 1930s the fur trade had faltered and the caribou were coming back to the inland foothills and mountains. Aqsiataaq and Etalook spent time in the Colville's mountain tributaries beginning in the Twenties, on occasion drifting down to the Wiseman mining district. Etalook and his brother took long winter hunting trips in the high valleys, discovering plentiful caribou and furbearers. Based on this news, some of the inland families began the return from the coast. Small groups of families filtered into the north-face valleys, from the Killik River on the west to the Sagavanirktok on the east. In time Aqsiataaq became headman or Umealik of a group centered in the Ulu Valley.

Reconstitution of the Ulumiut band lasted only a few years. Aqsiataaq and Utuyok were very old, there was pressure from territorial authorities to enroll children in school, and some of the young people were attracted to Fairbanks. Coming of the war made resupply of store goods and ammunition difficult for isolated groups. By 1942, some of the Ulumiut had gone to Wiseman: others to Fairbanks. Etalook and his family split the difference. They had a cabin in Wiseman but spent most of their time at a camp on Nugget Creek to the north, where they continued hunting and fishing in traditional manner. Finally, age caught up with them, too. In 1970 they moved to Anaktuvuk Pass, then to Fairbanks in 1972.⁸

Marshall had known the Aqsiataaq (Oxadak) family in Wiseman during his 1930-31 residency. He described Etalook (Itashluk) as

a surly-looking Native of perhaps thirty-five years. He seems solemn and morose, and this impression is accentuated by his very dark skin, the other Eskimos being as light as dark complexioned Whites. He dresses exquisitely, mostly in furs, and seems to take great pride in his personal appearance.⁹

Walter Johnson, who knew and hunted with Etalook in the 1940s, seconded Marshall's comments about Etalook's always immaculate dress. His dignity was impressive. When Walter returned seasonally to Wiseman from school, a ritual of reacquaintance ensued: Etalook waited a day, then sent his daughters to Walter's cabin with an offering of sheep liver. Only after another day had passed would Etalook himself formally call, attired in fancy furs for the occasion. Walter interpreted this as part of a larger village-life ritual that buffered and made indirect the relationships of few people living in isolated proximity. Another example of this social cushioning was the care taken not to box people in with direct questions or requests. If Etalook needed to borrow an axe, he did not pose a direct question. Instead, he would casually remark that he seemed to have misplaced his axe. Walter could respond with a loan if he felt like it, or simply note the remark.

Other stories seem to confirm Marshall's early judgment that the young Etalook may have been difficult to get along with. But 15 years later Walter knew a man composed and gracious. He was also capable of joviality. During Wiseman dances in the Forties, when folk and round dances grew tiresome, Etalook, Arctic John to his Wiseman friends, would bring out the drums and lead Eskimo dances until dawn.¹⁰

Both Walter and USGS geologist W.P. Brosge recorded that Etalook, his wife Esther, and his daughter continued to live at Nugget Creek as traditional hunters and trappers, avoiding too much integration into town life. Brosge's observations date from 1959 when Etalook was well into his sixties.¹¹

The lives of Joe Sun and Arctic John Etalook have spanned a time whose early years reached back toward the dawn of human history in northern Alaska. As traditionalists--initiated by elders who would have been at home with their ancestors of a thousand years before--they have seen and experienced Brooks Range landscapes in ways that more modern men can never know. Consider the richness of their visions: compounded of ancient knowledges and skills, conveyed by evolved language and thought processes attuned to practical and spiritual realities beyond the range of our dulled and ignorant sensitivities. The fragments of these realities gathered by Libbey and Spearman and other workers in these fields give only a hint, an incalculably valuable hint, of the gestalt visions that such a cultural background could provide. We can see but dimly and partially through the eyes of the ancient people. And those whole visions become yet fainter as their beholders grow old and die and fold into icy graves. Worlds are lost this way whole species of human perception go to ground.

In remote Alaskan villages where significant dependence on wild resources persists, where the seasonal imperatives of hunted animals still name the passing months (October: nuliagvik, caribou breeding time), critical elements of those older visions still shape Native perceptions. What is now called the subsistence way of life, but was always before simply the life way of hunters and gatherers, "...still links the village in many ways with its past, ... informs the present, and ... is the means whereby the village can survive in the future. The land, of course, provides the resources and remoteness on which this way of life depends."¹²

Some people view this way of life as an anachronism, a residual thing in the last spasm of phase out. But traditionalist Natives of all ages reject this dismissive idea, this linear progression toward cultural oblivion concocted by outsiders.

These traditionalist people speak of ancestors learning to live in a land of strong winds and cold temperatures, sharing to survive, teaching the young to carryon. They look at the land as source and sustainer of their lives. In Western Civilization they see dollar signs but little spirituality. For them, profit is the good life derived from land and sea. Land is the heritage, and what they do on that land--as communities, families, and individuals--is their culture.

Amazing as it may seem, these traditionalist people want to continue being what they are. They do not want to join the rest of us. Being Indians or Eskimos, they believe, is what they were created to be. They conceive the passing on of this identity to their children--with the knowledge, skills, language, and land base to sustain it--as their preeminent cultural duty.

Subsistence living, in this view, is more than survival. It is life itself. It is the only worthwhile way to live.¹³

In our study region, a century of the growing influence of Anglo-European culture--including both imposed and chosen elements--has altered irrevocably the bases of traditional Native life. Imported technology, social and educational programs, missionary efforts, and the economic, governmental, and political forces that have created new land-tenure systems and industrial developments, have swept like giant waves over the societies and cultural landscapes of upper country Natives. Erosions have occurred. But rimrocks and hard cores have resisted and still hold. An evolved way of life--part old, part new--is the result of this transition. In practical terms, this evolution can be described as a mixed cash and subsistence economy. More profoundly, it is a cultural high-wire act that strives to maintain the essence of ancient values in an environment already much changed and still accelerating.

Objectively, given the arrayed forces of modern times, the prospect for survival of indigenous people and cultural pluralism in arctic Alaska seems bleak. But the history of these people is a history of survival. For generations and millennia they have proved their steadfastness in a demanding environment. During the period of recent history, since about 1850, they have seen wave after wave of outsiders come into their world, extract something from it, and leave. Traditionalists are confident that the current inundation--largely oil-and-mineral based; partly sport-and-recreation based--is similarly transient, at least as a major, disruptive force. Their sense is that as long as environmental wisdom and sociocultural equity are guides to the future, they can survive this wave also. During a time like this one, they see the need to exert themselves strongly upon both the external forces that threaten their homeland and the disintegrative forces within their own societies that have been spawned by recent change. Daily they face the dilemma of being both effective modernists to protect their homeland and sustaining traditionalists to preserve their culture.

The village of Anaktuvuk Pass exemplifies the will to survive these stressful times. Its history and its current outlook on the world offer a window on the experiences and perspectives of a people caught in the intersection where the old and the new have only recently met.

The country around Anaktuvuk Pass is one of austere beauty. Crenelated cliffs rise to the west. Wide valleys of the Anaktuvuk and John rivers fall away gently to north and south. High mountains march eastward. Narrower valleys and canyons channel side streams and dry courses toward the main rivers, lacing the rugged terrain with narrow vistas that bend out of sight between the mountain buttresses guarding their secrets. Past these walls and bends, high ridges trend east-west, their flanks cut by headwater streams that step down toward distant valley floors. Lakes large and small dot valleys and isolated plateaus. In the watered places clumps of willow nod a few feet above the dense tundra mat. Great boulders stand alone or in groups where glaciers left them. Scree and surges of rock debris mark the transition to barren slopes and steeps, whose nakedness is barely tinged at lower elevations by lichen colors.

In the midst of this panoramic country, at the point where a gust of wind determines whether rain drops flow to the Arctic Ocean or the Yukon River, stands a cluster of buildings bordering a gravel airstrip. It seems incongruous. Who could live here? In winter, when all hint of green is gone and wind drives veils of snow over darkened, treeless expanse, that question gets urgent.

Yet, people have lived here for thousands of years. This writer had a chance to visit a few of the old sites with archeologist Jack Campbell and Grant Spearman in summer 1985. First we went four miles northeast of Anaktuvuk Pass village to the Tuktu Site, situated on a well drained glacial terrace. Notched projectile points and other artifacts found here have been dated to 6,000 years B.P. The assemblage identifies a people who hunted big game, people who could move from forest to tundra to coastline as the seasons' offerings came around. They were probably people of the Northern Archaic Tradition, ancestral to the Athapaskan Indians, who came into the Brooks Range passes to hunt caribou. At an adjoining site, artifacts possibly 10,000 years old have been found.

Next we visited a spit jutting into Natvakruak Lake, about 15 miles north of the village. Here, scattered over an extensive site, were the remains of an ancient occupation of about 4,000 years ago. Microblades and cores, and thousands of tiny flakes indicate an inland Denbigh Flint Complex site. The people who left these small tools may have been ancestral to the Eskimos.

We then moved southeast to Tulugak Lake, about 12 miles northeast of the village. On the ridges above this lake we saw great stone meat caches excavated out of scree slides. When stocked with caribou or sheep meat, they were covered by corbelling flat rocks over the top. Below, in the valley leading toward Tulugak Lake, we retraced the wings of an old caribou surround, first shown to Campbell by Anaktuvuk Pass elder Simon Paneak in the Fifties. Cairns of stone 40 feet apart marked the fan-shaped wings leading to the killing site. To these cairns, willows were lashed, giving the visual effect of a person standing there. Other cairns, Inuksuk, bordered the sidehills to keep the caribou from breaking toward high ground. (In later years, Simon told Campbell, the Eskimos inserted strips of toilet paper in the rock cairns: their wind-blown motion animated the Inuksuk.) Tulugak Lake is ringed by ancient and historic-period sites, for it has long been a favored camping place, with fish in the lake, caribou trails nearby, and good access to sheep. The nearby scree provided excellent meat storage, a critical necessity for people whose seasonal hunts during times of abundance supplied meat for periods of scarcity. When the inland Eskimos returned from the coast beginning in the Thirties, Tulugak Lake again became a main camp. In 1949 a number of small bands merged here. Later they would move to the present village site in Anaktuvuk Pass.

At a ridge site southwest of Anaktuvuk Pass, high on the east side of John River valley, we found an impressive stone ring, which probably served two functions: as a wind shelter for spotters who signalled the approach and direction of caribou to hunters in the valley below, and as a spotting blind for sheep hunters. On down the ridge, other works of stone included more shelters and cache boxes.

Finally, with Anaktuvuk Pass elder Elijah Kakinya (born 1895; died 1986), we flew west to visit the Chandler Lake area, where Elijah and Grant Spearman traced the geography and events of the last traditional kayak caribou hunt conducted by the Nunamiut in 1945. The Chandler Lake environs, as those at Tulugak, had been the center of a band territory, with access to game and fish the compelling attraction. On the flight back to Anaktuvuk Pass, over the lake and across the intervening mountains via the canyons of Kollutarak Creek, Elijah and his interpreter, Anna Nageak, carried on animated discussion in the Inupiaq language, with Elijah pointing out old hunting sites, camps, travel routes, and locations of historic events. We poked around the mountains at his direction to see the sheep he knew would be there. It had been many years since Elijah had last traversed that landscape on the ground, but he remembered, as it seemed, every rock in it.

*****

Beginning in the mid-Thirties, we have a picture of inland people returning from the coast, the fur trade there down, the wildlife in the mountains resurgent. Remnants of the old bands trickle back to their ancestral territories--Killik River, Chandler Lake, Ulu Valley. For a decade and more, their lives revert to an approximation of traditional times. It is not quite the same, for they have rifles, they periodically travel south to Koyukuk and Kobuk villages to trade furs for store goods, they have a touch of white man's religion. But they are more than less dependent on the old ways and the old landscapes and resources. They are still doing some communal hunting, storing their meat in the old caches, roaming the known places. Until the mid-Forties they see few white men, at least in their home territories.

Pilot Sig Wein did fly in ammunition and other supplies during the war, trading them for wolf hides and other furs. In 1945 a party of USGS geologists poked around the Chandler River looking for oil. In 1947, Wein convinced the Chandler Lake band to relocate in the Anaktuvuk Valley, promising improved air service and the possibility of schooling for the children. This led, in 1949, to the band consolidation at Tulugak Lake. Through the winter of 1949-50, Helge Ingstad, a Norwegian explorer, lived with the Nunamiut. His book about them brought these old-style Eskimos to world attention, starting a train of scientists toward their little settlement. Also, during this turning-point time, trader Pat O'Connell staged up from the Koyukuk to Hunt Fork and finally Anaktuvuk Pass, where he built a log store. In 1951 came a post office, located in a tent at postmaster Homer Mekiana's hunting camp. Thus did Anaktuvuk Pass, with its store and post office, become a base camp for resupply. In 1958, Presbyterian missionaries came to the pass from Barrow. The Nunamiut went down the John River to good spruce timber at Hunt Fork, cut logs, hauled them to the pass, and built their own church. The church doubled as a school until 1960 when a permanent school was started with full-time teachers.

With school attendance mandatory, Anaktuvuk Pass became a permanent village. The clincher came when an airline-company Cat walked up from the oil-exploration base at Umiat (on the Colville River) and dragged out a landing strip along the creek. The progression of domiciles during this period reflected the changing times: from the caribou-skin tents of a hunting camp, to wall tents, to permanent houses made of spruce logs covered with sod.¹⁴

Glimpses of these changing times come from the writings of the Nunamiut themselves and of the scientists and observers who visited them. Census enumerator Ethel Ross Oliver hired Simon Paneak in 1950 as interpreter and guide while she visited the remote Nunamiut camps. Entranced by the stories he told, she encouraged him to write of the days when the inland people came back from the coast.¹⁵

Simon and his family, along with the families of Elijah Kakinya and Frank Rulland, migrated to the Killik River in summer 1940 after the coastal fur trade broke down. By this time trader Jack Smith at Beechey Point was nearly broke. In trying to carry the Eskimo trappers through hard times "...he let out credit too much to his customers, away behind in his book." Word had got out that there might be a market for marmot skins for parkas, so Simon and his partners headed for the mountains. Simon's father, Tonngana, knew the Killik country from boyhood days. But Elijah's father, Poyah, hailed from the Anaktuvuk Pass-Ulu Valley-Itkillik-upper Koyukuk country. So Tonngana would guide them to good marmot country in the Alatna-Hunt Fork headwaters.

The families used pack dogs on their trip. They hunted as they traveled, and one night May Kakinya grabbed a 30/30 and shot a grizzly that intruded their camp.

Simon's only weapon was a .22 bolt-action rifle. He wrote that it could kill any animal in the mountains if it were hit in the right place with the first shot. He proved it by killing a grizzly that had found his meat cache. He used three "little bullets" to do it. From 100 yards he hit the bear in the ear with the first shot, which knocked him down, but "make him mad," so he rolled and roared and charged. The second bullet knocked him down again, but he sprang up and ran to the side, giving Simon a shot at the shoulder blade, which dropped him for good.

The younger men hiked into the high country and used stone deadfalls to get the marmots. Every few days they brought back a load of heavy, greasy skins for the women to clean and dry. The old men hunted near camp for meat.

After the summer's marmot hunting, with about 300 skins taken, Simon and Elijah decided to go down to Sam Dubin's store in Bettles to trade. They had exhausted all store-bought supplies and were living on meat and meat broth only. No tea, tobacco, "no every things." Loading up 10 pack dogs, the two men hiked down Hunt Fork to John River, which had plenty of water to float a boat. They made a skin boat from bull caribou and ram sheep skins fitted over a spruce frame and lashed with willow roots. They had to watch carefully for riffles and rocks because these skins would rip easily. They tied the dogs so they would not move around. Simon steered.

Along the way they killed a bull moose, because they knew that Bettles people needed meat. With their marmot skins and meat, they had something to trade. A few poor summer wolf pelts were good for bounty money.

Downriver they ran into Big Charlie Suckik. He had killed two moose and was building a raft to get his meat to Bettles. He needed something to trade because Dubin was not extending anymore credit.

After leaving Big Charlie, Simon and Elijah got another wolf, which stood and looked at them from a sandbar. It had been curious about the approaching boat and waited too long.

From upper Hunt Fork it took them 2-1/2 days to get to Bettles. They stayed 3 or 4 days trading furs for store goods, which Simon noted, were reasonably priced. Then, packing up the dogs, they walked home. Nine and a half days later after spotting beaver, muskrat, grizzlies, and lots of moose, they got back to home camp. "It take us little less than twenty days round trip. Everybody glad see us."

Simon's account is priceless. So many old and new things come together here: Knowledge of the land and the bear's vulnerable anatomy when using "little bullets." The mix of rifles and stone deadfalls. Speed and assurance in travel--for subsistence resources, for trade. Family division of labor. Hankering for store goods. Cashing in on every opportunity for trade or bounty.

Notable is the major shift from the white-dominated coastal trading economy back to the subsistence-based mountain life, with trapping-trading a sideline for acquiring essential ammunition and a few luxuries. This ability to swing with the boom-and-bust cycle, going back to the homeland-hunting life when opportunities in the white economy slacken, illustrates a critical adaptive strategy still employed.

These combinations of the old-new mix are further developed in representative historic sites near Anaktuvuk Pass. With Johnny Rulland, son of Frank in the above account, Grant Spearman visited a number of these sites, with concentration on two of them: Puvlatuuq, to the south in the John River valley just inside the margin of the spruce forest, and Kungomovik, alongside the creek by that name a few miles north of the village.

Puvlatuuq is a place of seasonal occupation in the forest zone, south of the Continental Divide and within the winter range of caribou. A nearby salt lick attracts sheep. And Puvlatuuq is a good base for trapping forest-dwelling furbearers.

Kungomovik, in a lush Willow Grove providing wind-shelter and fuel, has long been a gathering place for festive and trading activities. Nunamiut from other mountain bands and trading partners from the Kobuk and Noatak, as well as Athapaskans, could join here under truce conditions at appointed times. At this place occurred the initial falling out between Nunamiut and Kutchin Athapaskans that precipitated the nearby Battle of Itikmalakpuk, which drove the Indians southeastward. As well, .the nearby terrain of narrow creek valleys funnels migrating caribou to intercept-hunting sites ideal for close-in killing. The upper Kungomovik Creek drainage is a favored summer hunting area for fat caribou bulls, and provides a base for sheep hunting in the surrounding mountains.

Dwellings at these sites track the evolution of house styles, from traditional caribou-skin tents, itchalik, and moss houses, ivrulik, to more modern sod houses and log cabins.

Artifacts and debris combine the bones of hunted animals and adaptive uses of all manner of white man's packaging and cast out goods. A sled runner shoe is made from metal strips cut from coffee cans. Chunks of metal have been fashioned into a homemade stove. Sections of old oil drums and 5-gallon cans were used to make dogfood cooking vats and feeding bowls.

These sites, with archeological components reaching far back in time and with historic components of the recent past--identified as to individual families of the ongoing village--"serve as living links and stabilizing ties" between today's people and their cultural heritage. The strategic locations of these sites, proximate to the resources of game, timber, shelter, fuel, and good water, provide a communication with the past and an educational base for the future. Here, in favored parts of the natural environment chosen by their ancestors, village elders can instruct young people in the skills and activities of those who hunt to live.¹⁶

In summer 1945, USGS geologist George Gryc led a survey party that descended Chandler River from Chandler Lake to the Colville. This was one of four parties that year exploring and doing stratigraphic work in the Naval Petroleum Reserve. The cook in Gryc's party, Charles R. Metzger, was then a student and later became a professor of English at the University of Southern California. Some years after the expedition, Metzger turned his notes and observations into a narrative recollection of Arctic adventure.¹⁷

Though not an anthropologist, Metzger was a good observer, and he came into Nunamiut country about midpoint in the last phase of their seminomadic existence. From the moment he landed at Chandler Lake to set up base camp in late May, he began recording his impressions of the Eskimos residing there. The first visitor was Simon Paneak, who ran on snowshoes to the airplane with a bag of fox furs, which he requested the pilot to deliver to the N.C. Co. in Fairbanks, via the next flight from Umiat. "He was, in effect, making a deposit to his account ... on which ... he could draw for tea, or ammunition, or traps, or whatever else it was he wanted to buy." Metzger noted that Simon, except for a poplin overparka, was dressed entirely in fur and skin clothing: caribou-skin underparka, moosehide mitts with beaver cuffs, sheepskin pants, and waterproof spring boots of sealskin with bearded-seal soles, worn over caribou-fur socks. Simon's snowshoes were short and narrow, allowing him to run fast, as he had for over a mile that Metzger could see, to catch the plane before it took off. They were made of caribou-skin webbing on willow frames, with skin harnesses. These harnesses, a simple loop wound over instep and around ankle, were efficient yet could be removed by a twist of the foot in emergency.

The design of this harness like that of all Eskimo equipment we ever saw represented triumphant use of local materials to produce artifacts that were supremely light in weight, simple, and efficient.¹⁸

One of the tasks of the survey party was to find a rock cairn--marking a point of known latitude, longitude, and elevation--set up the previous winter by Alaskan Army Scouts. The search was complicated by the fact that around its supposed location, the Eskimos had erected their own cairns, Inuksuk, to aid in driving caribou into the lake for spearing from kayaks. Even Simon could not be sure which was the Army cairn, so the surveyors started over with new observations. The expense and difficulty of getting ammunition made these Brooks Range Eskimos lay their rifles aside whenever they could get meat without them. Persistence of the communal caribou drive was one example; using ground nets to snare ptarmigan was another.

Metzger admired Simon's large dogs and big sled. They symbolized a good hunter, a rich man among the Eskimos. Simon confided that he needed three caribou a week to feed his family and his seven dogs. The sled, made of driftwood slabs, was about 8 feet long. "The other Eskimos such as Elijah [Kakinya] used smaller, lighter willow sleds drawn by fewer and smaller dogs." The hitching arrangement was a lead dog followed by pairs of dogs attached on either side of a lead line, which extended from the sled to the harness of the lead dog.

Simon's first formal visit to the geology camp began with the gift of a haunch of caribou from one of the three carcasses in his sled. Metzger sensed that curiosity, caution, and calculation had combined to draw Simon into camp. As co-umialik (with Elijah) of the band, and one of its two English-speaking members (the other being Elijah), Simon wanted to know what the surveyors were up to, whether they were a threat to the area, and if there were opportunities for trade or other benefits from their presence.

Immediately, mutualism set in. Simon needed some line for harnesses. The surveyers needed help getting their tons of supplies down past the rapids and shallows of the upper river before breakup made dogs and sleds useless. Simon also knew where there were "rocks that burned," outcrops of oil shale or oil-bearing sandstone. So guiding and transport services from the Natives would be exchanged for rope, foodstuffs, and other supplies.

That night Simon stayed for dinner, because he had provided it and because the USGS party of seven had an 8-place setting. Subsequently, except when hunting or other business called them elsewhere, Simon and Elijah alternated each night as dinner guests. Simon particularly liked cooked dried vegetables, strong coffee with plenty of sugar and powdered milk, and pudding desserts.

During his first visit, Elijah Kakinya related some life history, including the information that he had attended a mission school on the Koyukuk where he had learned his English and had been converted sufficiently to Christianity to know some of its hymns.

Accordingly he began to sing hymns by way of verifying his Christian education and possibly of testing ours. Inviting us to join in, he led, or tried to lead us in a group sing. He knew the tunes and the words to "The Old Rugged Cross," "Abide With Me," and "Onward Christian Soldiers."

As it turned out, he knew both the tunes and the words a good deal better than we did. We could fake the tunes after a fashion, but the words escaped us; we were in effect led by Elijah to reveal that we had never learned them. Although we tried to respond to Elijah's attempts at establishing rapport with us on Christian missionary terms, we failed him miserably. He was, at least in missionary terms, a much better Christian than we were. Eskimos being eminently adept at one-upmanship, this revelation of our ignorance may have been what Elijah had in mind all the time. But Elijah, not being in direct competition with us, I suspect that his embarrassing triumph was fortuitous. There is a fair chance anyway that he was, like most Eskimos, like most students of missionary education, both a tolerant convert and a syncretist. As one of the more candid Eskimo "converts" admitted to R.F. Spencer the ethnologist, "It is true that God made the heavens and the earth. But Raven made them first!"

Failing to make contact with us on what he considered culturally to be our own terms, Elijah wisely chose to make overtures in terms of his own culture. He just happened to have in his possession an endless string of about 30" compass with which he proceeded to demonstrate with fascinating agility the craft of cat's cradle, i.e. ayaraq artistry.

With fingers as nimble as any surgeon could ever hope to develop, he portrayed for us, using the string, symbolic pictures, both still, and in motion. First he constructed with the string looped over his fingers the standard elementary abstractions well known to anyone who has served time as a kid in the Pacific Northwest. Then he progressed to making abstract portraits and landscapes in string. Then he moved on to more difficult figures, a weir for example, which required him to use his teeth as well as his fingers in order to stretch the string into a complex pattern suggesting a taut dip net. Finally he moved into mobile figures, one of the more interesting portraying, as he said, "Eskimo chasing caribou," during the performance of which one loose knot chased another across the string screen stretched between the carefully manipulating fingers of his two extended hands. Finally he produced his masterpiece, "Mouth Eating," involving a complicated knot loosely and flexibly extending and contracting so that the loops of string simulated the lips of a mouth chewing. Dinner being long since ready, and we having been thoroughly well entertained, it finally occurred to us that the man wanted to be fed. So we fed him. He trotted off toward his home on snowshoes, well fed, immediately after dinner.¹⁹

On a visit to the Eskimo camp, Metzger noted its "eminently shrewd" location near the top of an alluvial fan next to the creek that had made the fan.

It was close to a spring and summer water supply. It was exposed enough to the wind so that in early spring drifting snow would not settle around it and bury it. It was high enough so that its residents could look down on the Chandler Lake valley from just a few yards outside their doors and spot migrating or wandering caribou, and it was masked from the view of either caribou or man looking up at it from below on the valley floor.²⁰

The seven or eight houses in the camp suggested no distinctions of status or wealth. Simon's house was typical, about 10 feet in diameter and dome-shaped. Among other things, this shape conserved heat and provided maximum headroom for the space covered.

Its floor, about a foot thick, was composed of willow twigs, which provided not only insulation from the permafrost underneath, but a ready supply of fire wood. This twig floor, when carpeted with caribou skins was resilient, soft, and warm. The overhead frame of the house was formed by about twelve willow poles stuck in the frosted ground at more or less regular intervals around the perimeter of the house. These poles from long usage had become permanently bent, each pole joining its opposite to form a low arch. To the under side of the skeletal dome formed by these poles, the Eskimos fastened caribou skins, fur side down. Outside and over the skins and the frame, the Eskimos draped a large piece of canvas, analagous to the flies over our own tents and to the poplin outer parkas that the Eskimos wore in cold weather over their inner fur ones. The insulation against cold provided by such a structure was impeccable. Our own tents, though suitable enough for our purposes, were grossly inefficient by comparison. Their flat vertical walls when buffeted by the usual winds in that pass fluttered and snapped and admitted cold air through the tough but permeable fabric at a great rate. The flies spread over the tops of our tents, by virtue of the double insulation they suggested, provided some measure of protection against heat loss through the roof, as long as there was not much wind, but there usually is in any Arctic pass a good deal of wind. Thus a half filled bucket of water left in the cook tent over night would be frozen solid by morning.

In Simon's house heat retention was not so much the problem as heat escapement. That problem as well as a good many other problems of survival and comfort had long since been solved by the Eskimos. When overwarm in his house, the Eskimo takes care of the matter simply by opening the door, namely by lifting the canvas and removing one of the skins to form, between the willow pole supports, an opening chosen for the usual good reasons of location relating to wind and view.

Simon's wife hospitably brewed us up a quick pot of tea over her Yukon stove. It appeared to have been made of two of the more or less square five gallon gasoline cans that had been left at the lake by the bush pilots who commuted regularly between Fairbanks and Barrow, and as regularly left such empty cans at their refueling cache by the lake. The two cans had been opened, each at its punctured end, and brazed or otherwise fastened together to form a fire box about three feet long and twelve to fourteen inches wide and high. With a stove pipe fixed to the top surface at one end and running up through a hole in the roof, and with an opening for the admission of twig fuel and air at the opposite end, the lady of the house had at her disposal a usable and efficient stove. Eskimos do not cook much, which for them is a good thing, since their major source of vitamin C is from the blood in the raw meat that they regularly eat. They do however brew tea and bake sourdough bread in a frying pan over these stoves. They also use these stoves when need be to provide heat. For caribou Eskimos at least such stoves are a good deal more efficient, economical, and clean than the seal or whale oil lamps used by the coast Eskimos.

Simon's wife was young and pretty. Her skin was pale, being untanned from hunting. She wore a printed calico garment, a long sleeved, fur fringed and hooded version of the Hawaiian mu mu over whatever it might have been that she had on underneath. On her feet she wore calf length spring boots with oogruk (bearded seal) soles, and tuktu (caribou skin) uppers, with the fur scraped off, and ornamented at the tops, that barely showed under her Eskimo mu mu, with strips of colorful rick rack tape garnered from such distant trading posts as Fort Yukon, Bettles, and Point Barrow.

Near the back of Simon's house, prominent yet out of the way, sat his mahogany veneered Zenith all wave receiving set. Its antenna, cadged from God knows where, was a line of insulated copper wire. Simon admitted, if indeed he did not brag, that he listened to our communications with our other two parties, KWYDX-2 and KWYDX-3, and to our reports to WUUR-Umiat over his set. He had also been listening to "G.I. Jill," and "The Voice of America," and "Tokio Rose". ...

Hanging from one of the willow supports near the door of his house, Simon had suspended a calendar for the year 1945, the January sheet, now in May, still exposed, and along with it an alarm clock, unset, unwound, and silently not ticking. The Eskimo's view of time is refreshingly unlike our own. Living in an area of the globe where nights and days vary considerably, where either the night or the day may be as much as 24 hours long, or anywhere in between, the Eskimo lives out the time of his life on quite different terms from our own. Clockwise the Eskimo appears carefree to the point of negligence; but he lives strictly enough according to his own time. When he runs low on food, it is time for him to go hunting. When he runs low on fuel, it is time for him to go and gather wood. When the game upon which he lives moves, it is time for him to move. Comfortable and conveniently located as it was, the Eskimo village [camp] that we were visiting was there only temporarily, i.e. for as long as the caribou kept moving up through the pass in search of forage, and later on to escape the mosquitoes.²¹

During the wait for the right traveling time, Metzger recorded many events and practices of the Chandler Lake band. One day they buried an Eskimo child who had died of illness. Following Christian custom, they spent all day chipping a grave out of the frozen ground, a departure from traditional surface burials. Afterwards, to relieve themselves of sorrow and the frustration of the day's labor, the men got their teams together and held a race up and down the frozen lake. Periodically, the Eskimos jigged through the ice for arctic char and other fish. As the lake-edge ice melted, they fished with gill nets. Simon set his net using a salvaged prospector's boat from an abandoned cache in the Anaktuvuk valley. Metzger was assured that Simon had waited the required two years after discovering the cache before taking the boat and sledding it to Chandler Lake. He was told that anyone in the Arctic who raided a man's cache before that grace period was up faced death from the injured party. All over the arctic caches containing valuable items were immune from pilfering, for a raided cache could mean death for those counting on it during their travels.

Unexpectedly, at 11 o'clock one night, the Eskimos showed up--sleds, dogs, families, and all--ready to haul the geologists' supplies downriver as earlier agreed. Simon and the rest of the Eskimos knew it was time to go. The thaw was on. But the geologists, unaware that sled travel would be over for the season within 3 days, protested that they were not ready. "Simon answered by saying that, given the situation as he knew it, the Eskimos 'couldn't afford to fool around'."²² It was now or never, so the gear was piled hurly-burly in the sleds, along with the advance geology party, and they took off. On the return to camp the Eskimos took advantage of their obligatory trip to haul back willow fuel from the downriver thickets.

During the last stage of waiting for breakup, which would allow the USGS canvas boats to be floated down the rapids, Metzger joined a typical caribou hunt from the Eskimos' Chandler Lake camp. While having tea and sourdough bread in Elijah's "fur house," the sun and the cookfire made the tent too warm. Elijah folded back some skins for ventilation, incidentally giving a good view of a lookout who was watching for wandering caribou. Seeing the signal for "caribou coming," Elijah grabbed his rifle and called to Metzger to come along.

The caribou still being several miles away, we walked without hurrying much up to the top of a flat rise and sat down near its forward edge, close enough to the edge that we could look down upon the flat area below the alluvial fan where the caribou would be coming by ...yet far enough back so that they could not see us. The caribou as well as our caribou Eskimo neighbors moved to the high country in the spring as soon as the mosquitoes started coming out, in order to escape them. Each Eskimo in our hunting party was armed with two indispensable instruments: a .25-35 lever action carbine from which the blueing had long since worn off the barrel, and a collapsible brass telescope about nine inches long when extended and made in France a long time ago. The Eskimos' carbines were eminently suited to Arctic conditions. They were light in weight, their shouldered shells of ammunition were also light weight but powerful and produced a flat trajectory which in the Arctic is indispensable. While we were waiting around for the caribou to show up, the Eskimos ... [kept] fairly close tabs on them through their brass telescopes. ...

Shortly thereafter, as the caribou came within range still upwind of us, each Eskimo lever ejected from his carbine the cartridge case left from the most recent shot he had fired, presumably in most instances only a few days before.

Leaving the spent case in the breach after firing was a very effective safety precaution. ...

Meanwhile the caribou, about six of them, came loping up through the pass. They were running toward the south, down on the rough but flat tundra about two hundred yards below and to the west of us. At almost exactly the same time the Eskimos began firing at their running targets. I counted seven shots and saw five caribou drop. A sixth stood, gut shot and patiently bleeding to death internally, until about four sled dogs that had gotten loose from their staked tethers in the village, charged down the slope toward the poor thing. As the dogs approached the wounded caribou, it decided that it would be less painful to run, though wounded, than stay around and try to make friends. The caribou, making very good time considering that it was better than half dead, fled back north about a quarter of a mile and out into the center of a small pond of water recently formed in the now melting tundra. The pond was about 100 yards in diameter and around three feet deep near the center where the caribou finally dropped and died. Only one of the more eager and inexperienced dogs bothered to swim out after it, and finding the caribou dead and therefore no longer any fun, swam back to the shore, shook himself off, and then joined the others in trotting back to the village. Meanwhile Elijah, who was pretty darned irritated by the dogs' escape and by their chasing approximately 120 pounds of meat an unnecessary distance from camp and into water, jokingly offered me his carbine and said, "Wanna shoot a dog?"

With the exception of the wounded caribou chased by the dogs all of the caribou shot by the Eskimos lay within a hundred feet of each other. ... I followed Elijah down to where they lay in order to watch him "skin out" the two caribou that he had just shot. Caribou are relatively small, standing about four feet high at the shoulder. Their split hooves are unusually large and flat, enabling them to run easily over tundra or snow as if they were wearing miniature snowshoes. Their antlers being large for so small an animal, the caribou when running are obliged to tilt their heads back, on account of the weight and the wind resistance of the antlers. Immediately upon arriving at the nearest caribou that he had shot Elijah took out from somewhere underneath his parka a skinning knife and a sharpening stone. Holding the knife in his left hand, cutting edge of the blade turned toward himself, he, with his right hand holding the stone, briskly rubbed the stone with horizontal strokes against each side of the rapidly sharpening blade. This method of sharpening a knife is much more efficient than the usual method for us of moving the knife against the stone.

Starting at the hooves, Elijah slit the skin along the insides of the four legs until he got to the torso of the animal, then slit the skin from crotch to neck, and loosening the connective tissue underneath the skin all the way around the back, pulled the skin away from the carcass as though he were removing a bathrobe. Then he cut off the head, separating it from both the carcass and hide, and without skinning the head cut out the tongue, which is as much of a delicacy for Eskimos as for other people. In the process he showed us one of the still living bots lodged and wiggling in the throat of the caribou. Caribou are plagued not only by Eskimos and wolves and mosquitoes, but also by botflies which deposit their eggs underneath the caribou's skin. These eggs develop into white flattish larval bots, about the size of a stretched out quarter, which lodging and moving underneath the skin of the caribou must make him miserable. When the caribou licks or chews eggs from his body these get into his throat where developed into bots they compound the animal's misery. Gryc said later that the Eskimos eat these bots as a delicacy.

After skinning the animal so that the meat could cool " promptly without spoiling, and after removing the entrails for the same reason, Elijah threw the skin over the carcass as one might a blanket and resharpening his knife moved over to perform the same service for the second animal he had shot. Later on he or his wife would remove the meat and skin and bones and place these on a raised cache about four feet high made of willow poles and located just outside the door of their house.²³

Soon after Charles Metzger's visit, the scattered Eskimo bands started shifting to the permanent base camp and eventually the village of Anaktuvuk Pass. This move resulted in part from increasing scientific interest in the area, which brought with it more airborne contact centering on the pass. Geologists, botanists, zoologists, and anthropologists entered the Nunamiut world to study the people and their environment. They brought new technology and opportunities for employment as guides and informants. The pace quickened with establishment of Pat O'Connell's store and the post office, which led to weekly air service. Visiting hunters, government officials, teachers, and preachers followed. Old people began to move from the distant camps to the easier and more secure life of the village. Families came in with their children for school and the religious and social ties of the church.²⁴

Homer Mekiana, Anaktuvuk Pass hunter and first postmaster, kept a diary throughout this transition period, from May 1950 to April 1964.²⁵ The diary records the incongruities of an isolated world of hunters suddenly thrust into the 20th Century. Helicopters, airplanes, and the new landing field compete with notes about wolf hunters and the sighting of 2,000 caribou north of the pass. "Snowshirts," men wearing business suits, sit in council with skinclad Eskimos. Families with pack dogs head down the John River or to Kungomovik to hunt and live in skin tents as a C-46 transport drops supplies, including a gas drum that smashes flat-- "no parachute." As hunters gather in a distant tent to exchange information about caribou herds and the price of marmot skins, a radio blares forth news of the world. "Still war on in Korea" is followed by this Stone Age comment: "I ground some bones with stone hammer. Our fat to eat. About 2 pots full of grinding bones."²⁶

In the early Fifties, Anaktuvuk Pass was still more a base camp than a village. During most of the year, many families were out at camps on creeks and lakes, coming back to the pass for resupply, then going out again. People like Homer, tied to village-based jobs and responsibilities, still went out nearly every day to hunt or check traps. This latter pattern became the norm as time went on and more people became sedentary because of the school and other ties. Even "village" families, however, went out to camps when school and village affairs slackened seasonally. Men without family responsibilities and families without young children continued to range the country. These hunters brought back meat to share with families stuck at the pass. Village men would go out to help haul in the meat. Homer, who talked to everyone who came in between hunting trips, passed on information about animal movements and concentrations to the next group coming through. Thus evolved a division of labor between those who ranged and those who mainly stayed home. These and other adaptive responses, such as rapid transit to and from distant hunting places, set the scene for a primarily village-based lifestyle that still depended heavily on far-ranging hunting for livelihood.

These social responses joined with environmental, technological, and economic ones to create a veritable sea change in the life of the people. Villagers restricted to short trips for meat soon depleted resident species in the near environs of the pass. To go far, yet be back in time for work or school, hunters needed machines. By 1970, the dogs that had admirably served a slowly but constantly shifting nomadic people were all but gone. Snowmachines in winter and ATVs (all-terrain-vehicles) in summer provided the rapid transit needed by village hunters.²⁷

These changes reduced the amount of meat needed for feeding dogs. But they brought on a whole new set of pressures on the people. Machines and their maintenance and fuel cost money. This meant that jobs and cash flow became central to the hunting way of life--perhaps the most difficult to understand of the compounding sets of changes brought by a 20th Century running rampant. In the landlocked, mountain-stream country of the central Brooks Range, costs and complications became intense. Given the lack of coastal or riverine waters accessible by small boat-and-motor, summer trips in a village that could no longer depend on working dogs required cross-country vehicles.

One upshot of these progressions was a wedge into the integrity of family life and insulating remoteness. Some people went out for jobs, leaving their families. At Anaktuvuk Pass, this phenomenon was not as pronounced as in many other Alaskan villages. For-- with the onset of big-time oil development on the North Slope in the Seventies--money, construction, and jobs came to the village.

The transportation revolution, dictated by permanent village living, produced many more short- and long-term effects. One of these, totally unforeseen at the time of inception, arose from the summer use of ATVs across fragile arctic landscapes. It would become an environmental issue a few years later, related to the new land-tenure system that overlaid a national park on the central Brooks Range homeland.

Beginning in 1959 with Alaska's achievement of statehood, a series of momentous events, interlocking and reinforcing one another, would sweep across the far north. Together, the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay, the settlement of Native land claims, and the Alaska Lands Act of 1980 would create entirely new systems of governance, land management, and development in the region. The "old days" of intermittent visits and quick exists by outsiders were over. Within 20 years, the remote village of hunters at Anaktuvuk Pass would become part of the world.

As the pieces fell in place for these later developments, Homer Mekiana and his fellows continued their busy lives, becoming, in a sense, dual persons living two kinds of lives--partly in the new age, partly in the old. During January and February 1951, the families were scattered to the south and to the north, from Hunt Fork to Tulugak Valley and on many creeks between. A few weeks later Homer took his first airplane ride, going to Fairbanks for medical examinations at Ladd Field's Aeromedical Lab, which was studying Eskimo physiological adaptations to arctic conditions. At the army base he saw a jet fighter--"fast."²⁸ A few days later Homer was packing caribou meat back to the village with his dogs. The next year wolf-pup hunters had a tough season because small-plane hunters from other places were beating them to the dens. In July 1952, a number of hikers and recreational floaters (down the John to Bettles) visited the village. On the 25th a photographer from Life magazine flew in, snapped a few shots, and flew out to Bettles.

The comings and goings of the hunters, their information-sharing conclaves, their seasonal attention to sifting and repairing gear in anticipation of the next round of trips contrast forcefully with the boredom of those who were tied to the village. One of these was Rachel, Homer's daughter. A surrogate mother in Homer's broken-marriage home, she was taking care of her little brothers--"always fighting." When Homer was gone she made entries in the diary:

Gosh! Lonesome around here.

My dad went up to get some meat. ... Tonight we are going to have service at 7:00 p.m., after that I don't know what else we are going to have. Maybe show, I suppose that is, if we only have film. I wonder what shall I do today.

Me and my girl friend, Ada Rulland, are ... listening to the radio. Some of the records make us lonesome, especially the ones we used to hear in school.²⁹

These expressions symbolize another effect of modern times: the break between generations and genders brought about by school, church, and permanent village life. As family and communal travel and hunting expeditions--involving all members--were replaced by a pattern of hunter specialists and home-based domestics, the older, integrated life ways weakened. Those who became dysfunctional in the old ways sought modern entertainments to fill the hours. The critical role of women in the old-style subsistence way of life--as harvesters, processors, and distributors of its products--could not atrophy without major consequences. Native traditionalists recognize that this trend must be stopped if cultural revitalization is to succeed.

As the diary dates get closer to the present the pace quickens. In October 1962, Simon Paneak flies to Kotzebue "to have Inupiat Conference meeting," a significant early step in the arctic phase of the Native land claims movement. Paneak's baby comes in by plane after treatment at the Native hospital in Tanana. A state trooper flies in to discuss Anaktuvuk Pass problems--they meet in the church on this. The last entry in the diary, April, 3, 1964, signifies yet another quantum leap into the future: "The cat train from Fairbanks reached Anaktuvuk Pass."

Four years later, pushed by the Prudhoe Bay oil discovery, the State Department of Highways punched a winter road--called the Hickel Highway after Alaska Governor Walter J. Hickel--from the Yukon, across the Koyukuk, up John River, through Anaktuvuk Pass, and across the Arctic Slope to Sagwon, where it joined an existing trail to Prudhoe. For a few weeks huge trucks rushed tons of backlogged freight to the developing oil field. An observer at Anaktuvuk Pass noted that the Eskimos watched silently as the construction tractors moved through the pass. "Their lives, and their children's lives, never to be the same." For the first time Anaktuvuk Pass was connected by road to the rest of the world.³⁰

The Hickel Highway symbolized the frustration of an undeveloped frontier state. Finally, with discovery of the giant Prudhoe oilfield, Alaska would realize its destiny as a mineral trove for the Nation. But federal regulations and ownership of land had threatened to choke off oil development. Sea and air logistics were inadequate to the task. A freeze on federal land transfers, including rights-of-way, pending settlement of Alaska Native land claims, further complicated matters. Eventually, under pressure from oil and trucking companies and the active intervention of the state, the winter-road construction was allowed over federal land administered by the Bureau of Land Management. Speed of construction doomed the road with the next thaw. Essentially an ice road lacking the thick insulating gravel base of advanced permafrost road construction, the freight track melted and gullied in 1969's summer sun. Exposed permafrost, its tundra mat scraped off by the tractors, turned to muck. Grades became canals.³¹

The truck invasion of Anaktuvuk Pass was short-lived. But the ice-turned-to-muck road and the pressure for oil development and land disposition, of which the road had been symptomatic, precipitated hot debates and big decisions. In Alaska and nationally, conservation groups were galvanized by the ill-advised road, which had scarred the Nation's last great wilderness and provoked crisis at Anaktuvuk Pass. Larger questions about arctic conservation and development, licensing and right-of-way for a proposed trans-Alaska oil pipeline, and settlement of Native land claims clamored for solution. Ultimately, the political and economic forces generated by Prudhoe Bay helped to break the land-freeze and license logjams. With great speed the way was opened for oil development and transport via pipeline, resumption of federal land transfers to the State of Alaska as provided by the Statehood Act of 1958, settlement of Native land claims, and conservation of large tracts of wilderness. Resolution of such vast issues could flow from only one source, the National Congress. The central instrument that would allocate for these many purposes Alaska's lands--nearly all federally owned at that time--was the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.

The act was the pragmatic product of a strange-bedfellow alliance. Native land claims had been talked about but had been politically stymied for years. When state land selections under the Statehood Act began to impinge on Native homelands in the early Sixties, the Natives mobilized politically to protest. In partial response, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall instituted in 1966 a freeze on further land transfers until Native land claims could be resolved. Immediately the State of Alaska sued the federal government, jamming the issue in the courts. It was the pressure to deliver newly discovered oil via pipeline from the North Slope to a warmwater port in south Alaska that lent urgency to Congressional consideration of land-claims bills already drafted. To the Natives' plea for justice had been added the potent persuasions of the oil industry, backed by a state desperate for oil-royalty revenues (the state owned the Prudhoe Bay oilfield). With passage of the Settlement Act, the right-of-way for the pipeline and the oil-development haul road could be carved out of the public domain. The routing through the Brooks Range traversed Atigun Pass, some 90 miles east of Anaktuvuk.³²

Meanwhile, back at the pass, the people reacted ambivalently to the new state of affairs brought about by oil and the spotlight of national concern. Correspondent Jane Pender of the Anchorage Daily News, while preparing a 1969 series of articles entitled "Crisis on the North Slope," visited Anaktuvuk Pass to find out how the winter road had affected the village. She found that consternation at the massive intrusion ("We were so free.") was qualified by practical considerations. In 1962 the Anaktuvukers, having exhausted their nearby willow-fuel supply, had considered moving to Umiat--leaving school, church, and homes. They were saved from this by emergency provision of oil and oil stoves by government agencies. But they were still on margin. Simon Paneak thought that the road might help them stay at the pass by making supplies cheaper. Generally, the village people--despite the yearnings of anthropologists for continuation of the old culture--wanted some sustaining mix of the good life, as provided by cash jobs and modern conveniences, and the old ways on the land.

Pender's interviews with traditionalists like Charlie Edwardsen, Jr., of Barrow, showed that the Eskimos feared oil-development pressures on the land. The old free-use-of-the-land culture was in jeopardy. Arctic Slope Native Association attorney Frederick Paul, himself a distinguished Native activist, commented ruefully that the oil companies were coming in and nobody could stop them. "No one cares that this is your homeland." A sense of foreboding was pervasive. The temptation of jobs, access, and affordable goods battled with qualms about restrictions on land use, destruction of subsistence resources, and the social problems that would surely accompany an industrial invasion. All of this was happening suddenly. There was no time for job training and acculturative staging. Where would the people be in a few years? Would they benefit? Or would they be left on the sidelines watching others tear up their homeland?³³

The Settlement Act not only cleared the way for oil development. It also focused the attention of environmentalists and conservationists on the central Brooks Range. The Native people would be wooed by both developers and preservationists. On the one hand, jobs and material progress were promised to the Natives under a regime of environmentally sound development. Environmentalists countered with concern over fragile arctic ecosystems, oil spills, and wildlife depredations. Given the technical problems of arctic development, they urged that national policy in the Arctic should emphasize setting aside of wilderness areas and wildlife habitat in parks and refuges. This would preserve for the Nation the region's recreation and esthetic values, and at the same time protect the homelands of traditional people.³⁴

The Settlement Act also brought a new way of life to the Natives. Statewide, some 44 million acres of land would be conveyed to Native corporations at village and regional levels. Typically, each Native became a shareholder in both a village and a regional corporation. A cash settlement of close to $1 billion would be distributed to the corporations and the shareholders. Suddenly, homelands became property and caribou hunters became executives. Both land ownership and management of business enterprises were alien concepts for most Native people in isolated villages. These new responsibilities, with their legal and administrative burdens, would further disrupt and dilute the subsistence way of life.³⁵

Thus, in rapid succession oil discovery and development, the conservation movement, and the Settlement Act avalanched on Anaktuvuk Pass. On a less structural level was the increasing traffic of casual visitors: day-tourists, hikers, floaters, and hunters. On the good side, these people bought the caribou-skin masks made by the local people--a welcome source of cash. But the seasonal flurry of air traffic was often disturbing. Far worse was the slaughter and waste of game by trophy hunters, who thus took meat from village tables. The synergy of these new forces raised to new levels the pace of change. "Snowshirts" with their briefcases and scenario charts descended in droves on the village. To some extent, to protect their interests, Natives themselves had to join the briefcase brigade. The leaders chosen to represent the village at meetings in the village, around the state, and in Washington, D.C., were often the very ones most admired for traditional skills and prowess. Time on the land for these leaders and tradition bearers became a luxury. Under the prevailing circumstances of stress and disruption, absence or distraction of village leaders from traditional affairs could not help but detract from the social cohesion of the village.

Soon followed capital improvement programs funded by taxes on the Prudhoe Bay oil operation. Construction of new houses and public facilities in the village under sponsorship of the arctic region's municipality, the North Slope Borough, advanced to new heights the villagers' dependence on costly fuel, maintenance services, and other imports from the outside world. Certainly, by any conventional measure, these projects improved the standard of living in the village, and they were welcomed both for their material results and for the infusion of jobs and cash flowing from construction projects. Along with electric power and modern communications came television and other diversions, also welcomed by people increasingly co-opted by a world that only a few years before had been a distant mystery.

To top it off, the caribou hunters of Anaktuvuk Pass--and such they largely remained despite the radical changes--were visited by more and more scientists. Anthropologists crowded in to extract the diminishing base of traditional knowledge before the elders' final slide to mortality. Sociologists recorded the impacts of the changing life style. Natural scientists tapped the remaining fund of traditional science and historical knowledge about animal behavior, cycles, and other phenomena.

More ominous than these innocent seekings were the radiation ecology studies conducted by the Los Alamos and other national scientific laboratories. Radioactive elements from worldwide weapons testing descended from arctic skies to concentrate in the slow-growing lichen eaten by caribou. The caribou hunters of Anaktuvuk Pass contained significant concentrations of these elements in their bodies.

Truly, this little village, which entered the period of rapid change with barely a hundred souls, this last outpost of inland Eskimo culture, had come into the world, and the world had come into it.³⁶

From the beginning of scientific inquiry at Anaktuvuk Pass, foreboding about the future of this relict culture group has been expressed. More than 20 years ago, when the process of change was still largely "...taking place within the framework of traditional Nunamiut culture," Nicholas Gubser predicted:

A generation hence, most Nunamiut activity, including future change, will take place in an already acculturated context. The Nunamiut of Anaktuvuk Pass will become another typical small north Alaskan native town.³⁷

In 1972, Ed Hall noted that hunting peoples were disappearing the world over. Turning to Anaktuvuk Pass, he wondered what change would do.

Certainly these Eskimos are acquiring a new view of the world, along with a new technology. Their desire for education and the other apparent riches offered by Western civilization continues unabated. I do not know if the combination of newly available material goods and a growing awareness of other possible lifeways will be the end of the caribou hunters of Anaktuvuk pass.³⁸

Seven years later Grant Spearman tabulated all of the forces for change noted above, and a few more:

• Oil and mineral development in the north-neighboring National Petroleum Reserve.
• Interdiction of caribou movements by the oil pipeline.
• Easy public access via the haul road into the eastern perimeter of Nunamiut hunting and fishing territory.
• Village population increase (1982 population, 215), causing more hunting pressure on wildlife.
• Creation of a new, surrounding national parkland that, among other things, invites still more visitors to intrude into the cultural privacy of the villagers.

He urged Park Service planners and managers to take careful account of this need for privacy, for, "... with any society in the process of acculturation, a large influx of outside influences (in this case, visitors) can easily upset the balance of the community."³⁹

As earlier noted, the prospect for survival of cultural pluralism in arctic Alaska may seem bleak. But the tool kit of the professional survivors at Anaktuvuk Pass contains a multitude of implements, including tenacious ties to the past and hard-headed ideas about the desired future. Fortunately for their cause, Inupiat leaders had foreseen the coming massive change. During a conference of village leaders at Barrow in 1961, named Inupiat paitot (Peoples' Heritage), they defined the problems they must solve: "(1) Aboriginal land and hunting rights. (2) Economic and social development."⁴⁰

When the Settlement Act was passed, the Anaktuvukers had already plotted the main outlines of lands they must have to perpetuate their village life. With the aid of resource advisors such as David Hickok, a major contributor to the 1968 Federal Field Committee study, Alaska Natives and the Land, and under the direction of their own land chief, Riley Morry, the Anaktuvuk people prepared the maps and other documents needed to make their land selections.

Hunting areas for various species were defined, their travel routes were illustrated, the places of wood harvest, berry picking, all were indicated. Additionally, the people noted other knowledge of oil seeps, coal outcrops and mineral occurrence, and of springs and gravel sources.

To their own knowledge was added the input of legal counsel on the potential effects of ... [conservation-unit] land classification over lands they used, the impact of selection regulations and the portent of the alleged highway right of way through Anaktuvuk Pass. Resource advisors investigated surface and subsurface land values, and it was all put together. The Arctic Slope Regional Corporation and the Nunamiut Corporation of Anaktuvuk developed a joint land selection strategy with its first priority of serving to retain the people's "subsistence way of life," and secondly, to maximize potential opportunities for economic reward and progress within their value system.⁴¹

By virtue of their early planning and systematic approach to the land selection requirements of the Settlement Act, "... the Nunamiut of Anaktuvuk Pass became the first village in all of Alaska to completely file their village land selections on November 14, 1973."⁴²

Special negotiations were undertaken with the Secretary of the Interior to assure that critical areas at ancestral sites, marked for inclusion within the proposed Gates of the Arctic National park, would be available for Native selection or, failing that, would be recognized as Native use areas under established subsistence patterns. Among other safeguards sought at this time was elimination of any proposal for a transportation corridor through Anaktuvuk Pass.

At a higher level of strategy, the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation and the Nunamiut Corporation of Anaktuvuk Pass proposed a Nunamiut National Park that would be jointly managed by the Native people and the federal government to assure protection of both local subsistence and national interests. This proposal and later variations on it did not survive the legislative process that created Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. But the documentation of traditional subsistence-use areas incident to that proposal continues to bear on management of the parkland, which, under the terms of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, allows subsistence activities to continue in traditional-use areas within the park.⁴³

Consistently, since passage of the Settlement Act in 1971 and on through the creation and early management stages of Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, the people of Anaktuvuk Pass have accommodated new plans and developments when they could and sharply contested them when they could not. In their relationships with the larger world--state and federal agencies, development interests, and their own regional corporation and municipality--they have won some and they have lost some. The struggle for cultural integrity and sustaining land uses goes on. At the time of this writing, negotiations for land exchanges and other agreements that would assure access to key subsistence areas are underway between the people of the village, the National Park Service, and other interested parties. The task before all parties is to find common ground and build amity upon it. For in truth, no matter how apparently divergent may seem the interests that converge at Anaktuvuk Pass, no matter how intricate the new boundaries of land tenure and jurisdiction that wind through its environs, this is one geography comprising both a homeland and a wilderness park.

Some years ago, the noted conservationist Raymond Dasmann, reflecting on the relationship between indigenous people and national parks around the world, said this:

National parks must not serve as a means for displacing the members of traditional societies who have always cared for the land and its biota. Nor can national parks survive as islands surrounded by hostile people who have lost the land that was once their home.

These words still offer fresh counsel.

*****

For all the learned commentary and the often pessimistic analyses of societal and psychological impacts brought by 20 years of rapid change, the pragmatic people of Anaktuvuk Pass continue to go their own way. Through the long winter--when cold and darkness reign and visitors taper off--hunters and trappers go out in the country as they always have, camping at the old sites, pursuing the same animals, though with an access of motorized technology. During holiday breaks from school, families trek to the camps to join the hunters. In summer the tent camps can be seen scattered through the country at the lakes and along the creeks. In systematic fashion a cadre of young people is being coached in the skills of living off the land.⁴⁴

There is an awareness in the village that the heyday of construction projects and wage employment is over, that another boom has crested and that older dependencies on the land and its wild resources are coming to the fore again. It is an old rhythm. A recent study of village subsistence economies in Alaska demonstrates that those communities "... far from urban centers, not connected by roads to urban areas, with lower degrees of settlement entry, and with lower community mean household incomes" must for survival continue to depend heavily on wild harvests.⁴⁵ These criteria apply with special force at landlocked Anaktuvuk Pass--even the last one now, as the construction-based flirtation with the wage economy cools.

In a recent study of Anaktuvuk Pass subsistence strategies and adaptive responses through time, Ed Hall has summarized the current view of the villagers:

For the Anaktuvuk Pass Inupiat, the subsistence issue remains basic to life itself. They continue to teach their children, though word and example, the tenets and techniques of the subsistence quest, though most, always seeking survival alternatives, also emphasize the importance of securing marketable skills through formal education. They are continually made aware that subsistence as a means of survival today balances on the razor edge of politics. They know that the contribution of subsistence activities to their everyday existence cannot fall below a certain critical level, given the economic realities of today's world, without rendering their traditional relationship with the land untenable.

From the perspective of an urban and wage economy based society, it may be difficult to understand how the nature of the Anaktuvuk Pass Inupiat subsistence quest can change so dramatically over time and yet the adaptation itself be seen by many as remaining a distinctive response to the modern Arctic environment. The present subsistence quest is inextricably intertwined with that of the past, woven, from the threads of antiquity which both fashioned and constrained a world view that derives from a holistic understanding of the Arctic environment and encompasses a wide range of alternative strategies focussed on survival in the most comfortable and rewarding fashion possible. Still, the present Anaktuvuk Pass Inupiat subsistence quest is a unique response to the circumstances of the present. Even so, as long as subsistence hunting remains part of the Anaktuvuk Pass Inupiat lifeway, the adaptative responses chosen in the future will reflect the lessons of both the present and the past. Experience is not only the teacher, the guide, but also the body of today's existence and the spirit of tomorrow's hope. Innovation, experimentation, shifts in emphasis, fluctuations in the relative importance of particular resources, the importance of specific areas, and the importance of specialized techniques will all continue to interplay with the accumulated wisdom of the past as the Inupiat struggle in the future to retain their unique adaptation. Mobility, recognition of alternatives, and access to resources will remain the key concepts of that quest, all directed towards the provision and the promise that the land will continue to provide.⁴⁶