Preferred Citation: Jorgensen, Joseph G. Oil Age Eskimos. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1990 1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt567nb8vs/

Oil Age Eskimos Joseph G. Jorgensen UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley · Los Angeles · Oxford © The Regents of the University of California

Preferred Citation: Jorgensen, Joseph G. Oil Age Eskimos. Berkeley:  University of California Press,  c1990 1990. http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/kt567nb8vs/

To the memory of
Robert N. Jorgensen,
brother, master prosecutor,
polyglot, man of letters,
computer junkie, teacher,
guide, keeper of the hymns
and the memories

Preface

Oil age Eskimos are different from pre-oil age Eskimos but not that different. Like their predecessors, indeed, like themselves twenty years ago, oil age Eskimos are hunters, fishers, and gatherers. They have "subsistence life-styles" in which the bulk of their diet is extracted from their environment.

The oil age for Eskimos is very recent; it has not even spanned a single generation. Aided and abetted by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 (ANCSA), which extinguished native claims to land, water, and naturally occurring, renewable resources in Alaska, multinational corporations swooped onto Prudhoe Bay on the coast of the Beaufort Sea in northeastern Alaska. Oil wells were drilled, oil pipelines and holding tanks were constructed, and oil was pumped. The oil reserves (and presumed reserves) became the property of the federal government (offshore) and the state government (onshore). Each established agencies to lease the tracts that were presumed to contain oil.

Oil-related developments had many unintended consequences for Alaska's natives. Many who had resided in urban areas throughout the United States, pursuing educations or occupations, returned to their natal villages as the ANCSA's provisions began to be implemented. And many others, who otherwise would have migrated from their natal villages for elementary and secondary educations, benefited from the construction and staffing of schools in their own villages and therefore stayed at home. Village populations have grown rapidly, then, by natural increase and by return migration. When Congress enacted ANCSA, it was presumed that whereas Eskimo villages would prosper from the creation of native corporations, still they would not experience much growth, and educated Eskimos would continue to migrate to urban areas through self-selection.

Eskimo villages have not created successful, for-profit corporations, nor have Eskimos gained more than token em-

ployment in oil-related occupations. Rather, the villages have become deeply dependent on federal and state income transfers to supply cash, jobs, services, and welfare. Eskimo villages are resilient places, however, and natives have successfully integrated public sector dependencies with subsistence life-styles. This is an analysis of three modern Alaskan Eskimo villages and an account of how they came to be as they are today.

By law, the agencies charged with leasing federal resources must assess the probable impacts on the environment from the exploration and extraction of oil before tracts can be leased to oil companies and before exploration can commence. The writing. of Oil Age Eskimos has been made possible by environmental legislation, specifically, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1970 (NEPA). The data on which it is based were collected in field research in the western Alaskan villages of Unalakleet (Norton Sound) and Gambell (St. Lawrence Island, Bering Sea) and the north Alaskan village of Wainwright (Chukchi Sea). The studies were contracted by the Department of the Interior (originally the Bureau of Land Management, subsequently the Minerals Management Service) so that, as leasing agent for outer continental shelf oil, it could prepare environmental impact statements for Norton Sound, the Chukchi and Bering seas, and the Navarin Basin. Thus, the requirements of environmental legislation would be satisfied and leasing (and drilling) could proceed in those places.

This work is not an environmental impact statement, nor are any of the reports on which this comparative study is based. The Minerals Management Service, Alaska Outer Continental Shelf Region, Department of the Interior, awarded to the John Muir Institute, Napa, California, and to me, as principal investigator, Contracts AA851-CTI-59 and 14-12-001-29024 to conduct research in three villages and to base several technical reports on this research. Those reports provide the basis for several environmental impact statements that the Minerals Management Service must prepare. They also provide the basis for this book, which also was supported by Contract 14-12-001-29024.

On completion in 1983 of the comparative research on the relations among the harvests of naturally occurring, renewable resources, private and public economic forces, and contempo-

rary Eskimo village life, my colleagues and I spent a couple of years analyzing the data and on occasions—some opportunistic, some serendipitous, some fortuitous—made return trips to the villages.

In 1986, about six months after I had completed the second draft of this book, I, as principal investigator, was awarded a second contract from the Minerals Management Service to create and validate a social indicators system by studying thirty-one Eskimo villages over the 1987-1990 period. The three villages analyzed here—Gambell, Wainwright, and Unalakleet— are in the social indicators study sample. Return visits to these villages in 1987, 1988, and 1989 on the social indicators project have allowed me to analyze recent changes and current conditions within the village. This analysis appears in the epilogue. It is important because of the consequences to Eskimos from the downturn in international oil prices and the ever-decreasing federal programs and public transfers of the Reagan administration to Native Americans. It is also important because in 1988, ANCSA was amended to rectify some of its worst provisions. It is too early to assess the consequences of the changes to ANCSA. It is also too early to assess the effects of the Bush administration on Alaska's Natives.

In the fieldwork conducted in 1982, some of which spilled over into 1983, Harry Luton served as field investigator and Charles F. Cortese as senior investigator in the village of Wainwright. The major report on the village is Luton's Effects of Renewable Resource Harvest Disruptions on Socioeconomic and Sociocultural Systems: Chukchi Sea (1985). As is true for the major reports for Unalakleet and Gambell as well, only a limited portion of the detail pertinent to Wainwright is employed in this comparative analysis. Interested readers are referred to Technical Report Number 91, available from the Minerals Management Service, Alaska OCS Region, 949 East 36th Avenue, Room 110, Anchorage, AL 99508-4302.

Lynn A. Robbins, as field investigator, and Ronald L. Little, as senior investigator, conducted the research in the village of Gambell. The major report for that village is Little and Robbins, Effects of Renewable Resource Harvest Disruptions on Socioeconomic and Sociocultural Systems: St. Lawrence Island (1984). Jean A.

Maxwell, as field investigator, and I, as principal investigator, are responsible for the field research and major report on Unalakleet: Jorgensen and Maxwell, Effects of Renewable Resource Harvest Disruptions on Socioeconomic and Sociocultural Systems: Norton Sound (1984).

We learned how significant subsistence ways of life are to the natives in the three villages before we were allowed to conduct even the tiniest amount of research within any village. At the same time, and of a piece with the way in which villagers regard their life-style, we learned how threatening oil developments are to them. We were struck by the importance of hunting, fishing, and gathering in contemporary native households. In all of the villages, a majority of the diet is obtained from naturally occurring resources. I developed three rather huge appendixes for this volume presenting and analyzing the data on environmental resources and the ways in which they are harvested, processed, stored, and used. But such information appears to be more for specialists than general readers, even knowledgeable social scientists. Because the information on harvests of natural resources is so extensive, I refer interested readers to the original reports cited above. Oil developments threaten the native resource base, and the villagers know it.

We also learned that, unlike migrants from rural America, Eskimos who have left their natal villages to acquire educations, pursue occupations, or both, can and do return to their villages and resume subsistence life-styles. They do go home again. Indeed, they have returned home—or decided not to venture from their natal villages—in large part because federal legislation (such as the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act) and income transfers from oil tax revenues have made it possible to do so.

Yet the oil age has not stimulated healthy, growing economies in any of the three villages. It has not even provided employment in the oil industry for more than a handful of natives. Rather, as in the rural western United States, the energy industry has created boom growth, but the jobs have gone to outsiders, and profits have been drained from the region. Infrastructure to service the industry and government has been developed; populations have grown; and inflation has plagued

some of the villages as it has plagued the western U.S. communities that have become the centers of boom activities.

In the rural American West, residents often anticipate energy developments with optimism and hope, no matter how many boom-bust cycles they have experienced in their lifetimes. Such is not the case in the three villages analyzed here. Threats to sea mammals, waterfowl and seabirds, fish, plants, the beauty of the landscape, and even to the integrity of native culture are anticipated, and some are already being experienced. Moreover, in expropriating native resources, the state also arrogated control over the animals that provide the basis for native subsistence. Dependency, then, has been accompanied by domination.

Natives, however, eschew domination. They take their traditional sovereignty very seriously. Several villages, including Gambell, have gone to court repeatedly to protect their environments from harm and have won injunctions against leasing and exploration in the Bering Sea and Bristol Bay. In fall 1985, successful cases were heard in the U.S. District Court for Alaska (Village of Akutan v. Hodel , D. Alaska Civ. 85-701) and the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals (Village of Gambell v. Hodel , 85—3877). Yet in March 1987, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Circuit Court decisions and lifted the injunctions.

It is not possible to deal with each village in the great detail that we have marshaled for the technical reports, but the comparisons that I make here should provide some generalizations that cannot be made in single-case analyses and some modest validity checks as well. There are several topics that we did not pursue in our inquiries which will undoubtedly hold interest for many readers. We did not request or gain the informed consent of villagers—leaders and nonleaders—to study alcohol or drug abuse, interpersonal violence of any kind, suicide, or crimes (alcohol-related or otherwise). As a consequence, I do not report on these issues. We did not pursue these questions in part because they were peripheral to our research interests but also because these topics are extremely vulnerable to bias and errors in reporting (threats to validity). In two separate analyses of social indicators in Alaska, we studied these topics among large samples of villages (Jorgensen, McCleary, and McNabb 1985;

Jorgensen and McCleary 1987; Jorgensen 1988). We did not obtain positive correlations among these presumed measures of social dislocation or between them and factors that are assumed to cause them.

I do not wish to give the impression that there is no public drunkenness, or violence, or drug abuse in these three villages or that suicides do not occur within them. Each of the three villages has an ordinance prohibiting alcohol; public drunkenness was not common or even noticeable; and violence within families was not noticeable.

During 1982 and subsequently, I have visited Gambell and Unalakleet. Residents of both villages have visited me as well, and I have maintained correspondence and other communications with persons there and in Wainwright. My research associate, Jean Maxwell, conducted research in Gambell and subsequently took up residence in Unalakleet for three years. Thus, the ethnography that underpins this study is well informed.

During 1987 and 1988, as part of the social indicators project, Steven McNabb, Morgan Solomon, and Muriel Hopson conducted research in Wainwright. In 1989, Mike Galginaitis conducted research for me there. In 1988 and 1989, Lynn A. Robbins conducted research in Gambell. He was joined by Donald Callaway in 1988 and Allan Alowa in 1989. Steven McNabb and Helga Eakon conducted research in Unalakleet in 1988, and McNabb was joined there by Steve Ivanoff in 1989.

I am deeply indebted to the villagers of Wainwright, Unalakleet, and Gambell for the information they have provided and to Charles F. Cortese, Virgil Katchatag, Paul Katchatag, Ronald L. Little, Barbara Luton, Harry Luton, Jean A. Maxwell, Delbert Ozoovena, Lynn A. Robbins, Timmy Slwooko, and Vernita K. Zyllis for their careful research.

I thank my colleague and fishing partner, James J. Flink, for his careful reading and useful comments.

Max Linn, president of the John Muir Institute, has been an excellent associate and friend over the past twenty years. He contributed to the entire research project with his good sense and his managerial skills, but he also brought his keen mind

and sharp editing skills to several of our reports and to this book.

Jack Heesch, the Contracting Officer's Technical Representative (COR) who inherited our project a few months after its inception and guided it to the completion of the Unalakleet report and near completion of the other two, was superb at his task. He provided help when necessary and showed understanding all of the time.

Timothy O'Leary, fabled ethnographic bibliographer and director of files research at the Human Relations Area Files, New Haven, provided an extremely careful reading of the text, caught a thousand errors, and painstakingly checked (correcting as necessary) every one of the Linnean binomials.

Professor Wendell Oswalt, a bold (he identified himself), knowledgeable (he too is fabled as the most erudite of scholars working in the Alaskan arctic and subarctic), and very helpful reader for the University of California Press provided good insights for generalizations I had not made and appropriate challenges to some shaky claims. I thank him but do not hold him responsible. A second UC Press reader remains anonymous, but I thank that reader for useful comments.

I hope that this work assists readers in understanding contemporary Alaskan Eskimo village culture and the way in which federal legislation and oil-related developments have influenced village life.

JOSEPH G. JORGENSEN
JUNE 1989

1
The Problem

In late 1981, the Minerals Management Service, United States Department of the Interior, was conducting a public heating in the village of Unalakleet for a proposed oil lease sale in Norton Sound. Public hearings on draft environmental impact statements are required by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 before final statements can be prepared anti tracts can be leased. Although officials from agencies that prepare reports also conduct the public hearings, it is not required that they respond to comments or questions from the public at those hearings.

Representatives of two oil companies testified that the modern sciences of oceanography, marine petroleum geology, mechanical engineering, and related disciplines had developed information to understand ice, wind, water, and technologies to control the extraction anti transport of oil in arctic and sub-arctic waters. They assured the government that the oil lease sale could proceed without risk to the environment.^[1]

Among the natives who packed into the heating and waited their turn to speak was a Unalakleet Eskimo man in his early eighties. Although the following is a paraphrase, he said,

I have listened to the learned scientists from the oil companies who have studied the ice and the wind. I too am a student of ice and wind. I have been a student of ice and wind all of my life. I wonder if one of you learned men can tell me what will happen to those

[1] To inform government officials, environmentalists, and other interested parties about the way oil companies integrate harmlessly with the environments in which they extract, transport, and refine oil, EXXON publishes a quarterly magazine entitled EXXON , each issue of which carries at least one article on oil-related activities in Alaska and the way modem petroleum science complements the arctic and subarctic environments.

wells out there in the sea during one of those storms that occur around here. You know what I mean, those times when you're out on the ice hunting seals and the wind starts blowing and keeps on blowing. You know what I mean, when the wind blows at 100 knots for several days and you can't move. You have to make do as best you can on the ice. You know what I mean, when the temperature is —40°F and the wind keeps blowing until it dislodges the short-fast ice and hundreds of miles of ice are moved by the wind. When that happens, no force on earth can stop the ice, as you learned men know. So what I want to know is how you are going to stop that oil that is going to come out of that well when those pipes are destroyed by the moving ice? Where is that oil going to go? How much of it will stay attached under the ice as the ice moves north at breakup? What will happen to the seals, and walrus, and whales, and birds and fish?

No answers were forthcoming.

The 12-million-gallon Exxon Valdez oil spill in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on March 24, 1989, has not surprised the Eskimos and Aleuts with whom my associates and I have spoken subsequently. As of June 1, 1989, the oil had diffused sufficiently to attach to rocks, pebbles, and sand along 500 miles of the Alaska coast. On that same date, one mile of that area of coastline had been cleaned. The technology used was steam blasting, which dislodged the oil from the rocks and forced it back into the sea while killing all surface and subsurface animal and plant life to seven inches below the surface. The cleanup technology appears to be part of the problem.

It is not likely that the spill, or the technology to control it, or the management of the removal operation surprised the elderly student of ice in Unalakleet or, for that matter, Yale University sociologist Charles Perrow, either. Perrow's book, Normal Accidents (1984), forecasts "accidents" such as Exxon Valdez , Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Bhophal as normal consequences of combinations of unanticipated system failures in complex technologies. We can expect more in Alaska. Natives expect them, and they fear for their environments and their subsistence ways of life.

The basic ethnographic research that my colleagues and 1 conducted in the Alaskan Eskimo villages of Gambell, Unalak-

leet, and Wainwright is inherently interesting as well as timely. But oil-related developments and their consequences lie behind the inquiry, and the basic ethnography cannot be understood without an analysis of the political economic context in which contemporary Alaskan Eskimos live.

We sought to determine contemporary subsistence, economy, polity, kinship, and ideology in each village, so that a larger question could be asked: for Eskimo society, what are the consequences in the 1980s of the major legislation and economic programs that were implemented in the 1970s? The intention of our field research was to collect comparable information for the three villages, so that we could explain those consequences by using a comparative ethnological perspective (see Appendix A).

As so often happens in comparative primary research projects, some of the data collected in each of the three villages are not comparable, and some data that were sought were not obtained. And because some of the data that are available for one village are not available for other villages, comparisons on all topics that are of interest to me cannot be made. In several places, therefore, comparative ethnology yields to ethnography, and I analyze a single village, or two villages, rather than all three. It is also the case that hypotheses of the "why, possibly" and "how, possibly" types must serve as temporary conclusions, while providing direction to the next round of research.

Well before the "normal accident" of Exxon Valdez , I considered it important to write this book because although a very large amount of research under federal and state government sponsorship has been conducted on Eskimo subsistence and culture in the past fifteen years, a very tiny amount of that research has seen the light of day in scholarly journals or in book form. Inasmuch as I am not dependent on government contracts, it has been possible to break from the pattern of moving from one contract to another and to write. The government agency that sponsored the basic research also wanted the fruits of its contract dollars to be distributed beyond its own walls, and it provided some support for writing Oil Age Eskimos .

As is well known to ethnologists of the Alaskan arctic and sub-arctic, perhaps no feature of Eskimo life has commanded more

attention than their subsistence pursuits and the influence such pursuits exercise on all other aspects of Eskimo culture. For a full century, scholars have been concerned to explain the ways in which Eskimo populations developed and maintained adaptations to the sea, spreading along the coastlines from eastern Siberia to eastern Greenland and from above 80°N latitude to about 60°N latitude (see, e.g., Boas 1964; E. Nelson 1899; Birket-Smith 1929; Spencer 1959; VanStone 1962; Oswalt 1967; Bandi 1969; R. Nelson 1969; Burch 1975; Laughlin and Harper 1979; Dumond 1983).

The availability of natural resources and the uses to which they are put have been central to practically all analyses of Eskimo organizations of labor, distribution, kinship, settlements, ceremonials, and sodalities. Moreover, Eskimo ideology, in particular the beliefs associated with illness, health, and success in subsistence pursuits, has been analyzed in relation to the quantifies and variability of naturally occurring resources. Indeed, most of the great ethnographies of Eskimo cultures focus on the adaptations of Eskimos to environments that are often brutally harsh (see, e.g., Jenness 1964; Birket-Smith 1929; Gontran de Poncins 1979; Hughes 1960).

The pre-Contact tool kits and the techniques of their uses that have accommodated Eskimos to the rigors of the Far North have been referred to as the "arctic genius." The formerly widespread practices of infanticide and geronticide^[2] have been recognized as mechanisms that were employed in the most life threatening of circumstances, by means of which productive members of Eskimo groups could relieve themselves of unproductive kinspersons, so as to sustain Eskimo societies.

More recent inquiry, particularly studies conducted since the conclusion of World War II, have focused on the changes that have occurred in the technologies and economies of Eskimo populations which, in turn, have stimulated the concentrations of erstwhile disparate family settlements into larger villages and influenced changes in other aspects of Eskimo society. The

[2] The practice of disposing of the aged and infirm, often at the will of the fated person, has been mentioned by several students of Eskimo societies, including Boas (1964), Weyer (1932), Rainey (1947), and Balikci (1970).

widespread adoption by Eskimos of rifles, shotguns, outboard motor boats, and snowmobiles ("snowmachines," in Eskimo usage) have altered hunting, fishing, and collecting practices. Carving, trapping, commercial fishing, and public funds have stimulated the use of cash in local economies. But the seasonal cycles of subsistence activities have remained much the same as they have been for centuries among most of the communities that have been studied (see VanStone 1962; Graburn 1969; R. Nelson 1981; Fienup-Riordan 1983).

Postwar research often suggests that even though the seasonal cycle of subsistence activities remains much the same as it was sixty years ago, the seemingly inevitable shift to a "cash" economy is unalterably dissociating Eskimos from their subsistence life-styles. Richard Nelson (1969), in his brilliant analysis of the village of Wainwright on the Chukchi Sea in the early 1960s, foresaw a death of hunting in the near future. Yet about two decades later, on restudying the village, Nelson (1981:111) wrote,

[In the] 1960s I believed that growing contact with the outside world would soon eliminate subsistence as the basis of village economy and culture .... [A]lmost 20 years later the material aspects of life in Wainwright have undergone a steady and progressive change, resulting in far greater modernity than I could have foreseen ....

[Yet] the continuation of traditional patterns is nowhere more evident than in subsistence resource harvesting .... Subsistence has persisted here for a number of reasons, most of them related to its prominent position in Inupiat culture, social organization, and value system.

The most recent research conducted in the Alaskan arctic, of which Nelson's (1981) study is representative, does not reiterate the forecasts of ten and twenty years ago that the waning of subsistence pursuits and the full integration of Eskimos into a modern market economy was inevitable and imminent. (See Ellana 1983, Jorgensen and Maxwell 1984, Luton 1985, Little and Robbins 1984, Wolfe 1981, and Worl, Worl, and Lonner 1981 for a sampling of the most current literature.) To the contrary, political and economic events since 1970 have had the

contradictory consequences of causing Alaskan Eskimos to become increasingly dependent on the public and private sectors of the national economy but also to hunt, fish, and collect more efficiently. Furthermore, the economic and political forces of the past fifteen years have triggered a renascence of Eskimo dancing and singing, a return migration to villages from urban areas in and outside of Alaska, and a growing struggle for claims to natural resources and to the rights to harvest those resources. In short, there is a determination on the part of Eskimos to maintain traditional Eskimo culture and at the same time to adopt a pragmatic acceptance of the benefits of modern technology.

Ancsa and Oil

Because ANCSA was passed in 1971, thereby making possible the extraction of Alaskan oil, the watershed year is 1971 for the renaissance of Eskimo culture and for the contradictory development of Eskimo dependency on (1) petroleum products to heat their houses and to propel their snowmachines and boats and (2) earned and unearned income derived from public sources to purchase homes, the technology to aid in subsistence endeavors, and petroleum products to make the technology go and to heat their homes.

This is not to say that at least some Eskimos in many villages had not converted to oil to heat their homes or begun to use motorboats or snowmachines before 1971. These technologies that enhanced subsistence and economic pursuits were employed by many Eskimos before 1971. But that is not the issue here. Eskimos seem to have adopted these technologies as soon as they were able to do so. This is not surprising. Eskimos have always been quick to adopt new technologies that can better assist them in coping with harsh conditions. They converted to oil, snowmachines, and motorboats in greater numbers after 1971, but the consequences of the adoption were no longer the same. The issue is the dependency that major oil developments and ANCSA, because of its provisions and its intent to facilitate oil discoveries and extraction, caused for Eskimos.

Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act

In 1971, ANCSA was ratified by Congress and signed into law by President Richard Nixon. It extinguished Eskimo and Indian claims to aboriginal hunting, fishing, and land rights on the 400 million acres that comprise Alaska and on the territorial waters off its shoreline. It dissolved the six reservations that had been established in Alaska and revoked the Native Allotment Act of 1906, which allowed natives to claim 160 acres, devoid of mineral rights, to be held in trust by the secretary of the interior. Inasmuch as Alaska's Eskimos have maintained maritime subsistence economies for millennia, the government's restrictions on the uses of many subsistence resources of land and sea since 1971 have fostered apprehension among natives about governmental management of naturally occurring resources and have created conflicts over the harvesting and uses of some of those resources.

ANCSA provided to Alaska's 80,000 Natives—Eskimos, Aleuts, and Indians of at least one-fourth Native blood quantum—44 million acres of land and $962 million, and although it revoked the previous forms of native government that had been recognized by the federal government, it mandated a formidable framework of new native organizations: village profit corporations, regional profit corporations, and regional nonprofit corporations. Village nonprofit corporations were optional. The profit corporations are destined by ANCSA to go public in 1991.

The Profit Corporations

Village Profit Corporations.

The village profit corporations, literally stock shareholder corporations in which natives declared membership and were awarded shares and voting rights, were awarded land in and around the village. The village corporations, through conveyance, received half of the land allocated to the regional corporations (22 million of the 44 million acres). Shareholders within the villages can claim parcels of the land conveyed to the village corporations for homesites. Ownership

of the surface of each parcel is conveyed to the shareholder from the village corporation. Subsurface rights to village and shareholder land, however, are held by the regional profit corporation.

Each village profit corporation is empowered to use the funds made available to it through the $962 million ANCSA provision to develop and control village businesses. It is also empowered to seek federal grants, contracts, and awards for business and community development projects. The corporation's Board of Directors is elected. The board hires a manager for the corporation.

Regional Profit Corporations.

The more than two-hundred native villages were organized into and subsumed under twelve regional profit corporations (a thirteenth, for Alaskan Natives residing outside Alaska, received no land and was based in Seattle). Funds from the $962 million ANCSA provision are also disbursed to each of the regional corporations to develop and control business for the region. Each native person chose membership in a regional corporation, usually the regional corporation that encompassed the village in which the native resided, and each was awarded shares of the corporation's stock.

Twelve of the thirteen regional profit corporations were originally awarded the 44 million acres, but they retained only half of that acreage after conveyance to the village corporations. Yet the land allocation to the regional corporations included the subsurface rights to regional land as well as to the land owned by village corporations and villagers (on conveyance).

The regional profit corporations, rather than the village profit corporations, were presumed to be the organizations that would generate the business sufficient to accommodate the economic needs of Alaska's natives. The vesting in regional corporations of subsurface rights to village and individual property had created conflicts in Alaska within a decade after the passage of ANCSA.

The regional corporations, too, were empowered to seek government contracts, grants, and awards for the development of business and for the infrastructural developments considered to be prerequisite in business growth. Roads, airstrips, utilities,

sewers, docks, commercial buildings, and the like, were sought as being necessary for corporate development.

The Nonprofit Corporations

Regional Nonprofit Corporations.

Regional nonprofit corporations were created to separate business affairs from other affairs of government. The intention was to avoid the confusion so frequently experienced on American Indian reservations since 1934. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 allowed Indian tribes to ratify both constitutions and charters. Constitutions vested tribal councils with executive, legislative, and judicial authority—subject to the veto powers of the secretary of the interior—whereas charters incorporated the tribes as non-shareholder corporations. On the typical American Indian reservation, the authority to conduct business for a tribe as well as to conduct all governmental functions—executive, legislative, and judicial—is vested in the tribal council (sometimes called the business committee). The vesting of governmental and business authority within a single body, whose sovereignty is extremely limited by Congress and the secretary of the interior, has been accompanied by a hoary history of repeated business failures, factionalism among tribal members, bad advice from federal officials and non-Indian corporations, competing claims for the allocation of tribal funds, federally imposed receivership over tribal finances, nepotism, and high turnover rates of elected officials (see Bee 1979a , 1979b ; Gross 1978; Hertzberg 1982; Jorgensen 1978a , 1978b ; Owens and Peres 1980; Pratt 1978).

ANCSA did not provide the regional nonprofit corporations with executive, legislative, and judicial powers. Rather, it provided them with a plethora of service functions, including health care, employment assistance, job training, social services, college assistance, recreation development, and oversight and research pertaining to natural resources and their uses by natives. Funding for these and other programs comes from the same $962 million pie that is shared by the regional and village profit corporations. But, in addition, the regional nonprofit corporations compete for federal and state grants, contracts, and awards to maintain health programs, sponsor management

classes, conduct research, and both staff and purchase books for libraries, to mention a few of the functions accorded them.

Village Nonprofit Corporations.

If native villagers chose to create village nonprofit corporations, these corporations work in conjunction with the regional nonprofit corporations for the development and delivery of services and programs. Some villages did not create nonprofit corporations at all, however, and others created them but did not use them. In such instances, the regional nonprofit corporation usually accommodates the service needs of the villagers.

A common form of the village nonprofit corporation is the local Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) government. Many villages had created IRA governments following the extension of the IRA to Alaska's natives in 1936. But ANCSA stripped Alaska's natives of police and judicial authority, corporate business activities, and the power to levy taxes. It also imposed limits on their executive and legislative domains. Nevertheless, villages frequently chose to use IRA governments—a form of government through which they had access to the federal government and to which many villages had become accustomed—as their nonprofit corporations. Subsequently, IRA governments have frequently become the major organizations through which federal programs are made available at the village level. Each IRA government is directed by an elected council, which deals with the regional nonprofit corporation, jointly sponsoring such services as health care delivery, family counseling, and college assistance. Our observations in Unalakleet and Gambell further impress us that the local IRAs in those communities. also provide thoughtful philosophical and practical counsel to village members while at the same time establishing village policies.

After Ancsa: Federal and State Power and Policies

Several federal laws enacted in the mid-1970s expanded some features of village sovereignty, even as ANCSA places considerable limits on other features. The Indian Financing Act of 1974, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Act of 1975, the

Indian Health Care Improvement Act of 1976, and the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 constitute the legislation that enables IRA governments to assume authority over many services formerly provided by the Indian Health Service (IHS) and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). And those acts have thereby liberated natives from many of the controls that were once exercised by these federal administrative offices.

As if the regional and village profit and nonprofit corporations have not created sufficient changes in Eskimo village affairs, the State of Alaska has acquired new powers in relation to natives, becoming responsible for law and order, the regulation of natural resources and businesses conducted within the state, education, taxation, public education, and many social and health care services, some of which overlap with the services provided by the regional and village nonprofit corporations.

Under state law, it is possible for areas encompassing many villages to organize into boroughs—the equivalent of counties elsewhere in the United States—with responsibilities that in-dude the authority to levy taxes and to share in state revenues. And villages, whether or not they belong to a borough, can be chartered as city governments by the State of Alaska. Inasmuch as there was but one borough (the North Slope Borough) in coastal Alaska north of the Alaska Peninsula when we began this research (more recently, boroughs have been formed in Bristol Bay and in the Northwest Alaska Native Association [NANA] region of northwestern Alaska), city governments are the usual vehicles through which natives gain access to state revenue-sharing funds and block grants for municipal purposes.

City governments—directed by elected councils, which, in turn, elect mayors from among their council members—levy taxes, provide fire-fighting equipment, maintain roads and public buildings, and make decisions and pass local ordinances as allowed under state law. The state provides police protection and judicial authority over natives, pursuant to Public Law 280. The North Slope Borough (NSB) encompasses oil-rich Prudhoe Bay and the arctic coast villages from the United States-Canada border to the Bering Strait. Wainwright is one of these villages. Many of the villages in the borough are chartered, thereby possessing the rights of cities. Yet they usually re-

strict their governance to rather limited local issues, while following the policies and programs that are implemented by the borough.

City and borough governments are the vehicles through which nonnatives participate with natives in local governance. Nonnatives are usually transitory professionals who are employed by the schools, state agencies, and native corporations. Even if nonnatives are elected to serve on city councils whose majorities are nonnative, they soon learn that those councils do not follow independent courses. In their decision making, a city council either follows the lead of the village's IRA government (or some other nonprofit village corporation that provides access to federal resources while maintaining traditional practices) or they become surrogates for the erstwhile traditional IRA councils. Thus, city governments provide access to state resources and to state government, but their decisions are shaped by native governance organizations, usually the IRAs.

Native Concerns About possible Consequences From ANCSA

If the reader finds this layering of governments and organizations bewildering, so do natives. But natives, who had come to fear the probable consequences of some of these corporations and governments, also learned how to shape the local institutions to respond to their needs. At several points hereafter, we will focus our attention on the manner in which natives have responded to the different loci of authority and shaped village activities in relation to them.

When I first began working in Alaska in 1981, ANCSA had been in force for a decade. In this short time, natives throughout the state had begun to focus on a single, significant provision of ANCSA that would take effect in 1991: the for-profit corporations, regional and village, would then go public.

In early 1984, an independent commission, headed by a former Supreme Court Justice from British Columbia, Canada, began an investigation of ANCSA on behalf of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference (an organization of Eskimos representing Alaska, Canada, and Greenland [Denmark]). ANCSA had become the flagship for recent proposals by the Canadian and

Danish governments for the settlement of Eskimo claims to rifles in those countries.

In a series of conferences held in Anchorage and visits made to villages throughout the state, the commission learned precisely what my colleagues and I had learned during our stays in three villages over the preceding three years. The major fear expressed by Alaskan Eskimos was the unknown consequences to them which might occur from the requirement that native shareholder corporations must go public in 1991. Because most land in Alaska, by law, is unavailable for private purchase and ownership, and because much Native land is presumed to be mineral rich, natives feared the loss of their land and subsurface rights, The most likely purchasers are multinational energy corporations, who would offer prices for stock shares which could hardly be refused. In addition, they feared that banks would demand payment on outstanding debts incurred by regional corporations in faltering business ventures and take stock as compensation. The commission's early investigation made it dear that natives were poorly informed about ANCSA's possible consequences at the time it was passed and that they feared the loss of their native space and places—indeed, their unique ways of life.^[3]

Sweeping changes were made to ANCSA in 1988 (PL 100-241 [Feb. 3, 1988]), several years after the most intensive parts of the field research on which this book is based was completed. The amendments have alleviated some of the worst fears that natives expressed in the preceding seventeen years and allowed them to amend their articles of incorporation so as to protect their land but not the subsurface estates. These changes will be discussed in the epilogue.

It is difficult to keep in focus these several forms of economic, service, and governmental organizations that have been layered on Eskimo villages. Figure I shows the levels of governance and profit corporations to which all Eskimos are subjected (mandated) as well as the ones they can choose to create or charter (optional).

[3] Videotapes of the Round Table Hearings and a "Summary Report" (n.d.) are available through the Alaska Native Review Commission, 429 "D" St., Suite 304, Anchorage, AL 99501.

Figure 1.
Mandated and Optional Governmental and Economic Organizations of Contemporary Eskimo Villages

Oil

ANCSA and oil are intimately related. To understand why ANCSA was passed into law, thereby denying natives 90 percent of their ancestral estate, and also to understand the current context in which Eskimo societies operate, we must assess the significance of the discovery of what is presumed to be 10 billion barrels of oil at Prudhoe Bay, along the shores of the Beaufort Sea on Alaska's North Slope. This study, in fact, results from that discovery, the subsequent successful drilling and pumping of oil at Prudhoe Bay, and the search for more oil and gas deposits in the outer continental shelf region of Alaska, particularly the Norton Sound-Bering Sea area, in which the villages of Gambell and Unalakleet are situated.

Oil was first discovered on Alaska's North Slope in 1948, but it was not until the massive reserves of Prudhoe Bay were discovered in the 1960s that oil companies, their lobbyists, and state and federal legislators engaged in sufficient activities and applied sufficient pressures to enact ANCSA. The threat issued to Alaskan natives, whose advice on the bill was sought, was to accept what was offered to them—assuming certain modifications suggested by these natives—or to receive no compensation

at all for the extinguishing of their claims to title (Arnold 1978; Parker 1984). Natives were deeply concerned about the preservation of their homelands and the spaces in which they obtained their livelihoods and which they wished to leave to future generations as a legacy of past generations (Fienup-Riordan 1984). They feared encroachment and significant alteration of the natural resource base.

The trans-Alaska oil pipeline project connecting Prudhoe Bay on the far north with the port of Valdez, about 600 miles to the south, was begun soon after ANCSA was passed. Rebellious acts in defense of native subsistence territories occurred here and there during the project, as some natives fired rifles at planes conducting reconnaissance, at geologists and surveyors plying rivers, and at oil company employees hunting and fishing in territory traditionally used by natives (Clark and Clark 1978).

Social movements flickered in response to oil developments—one disavowing modern technology and calling for a return to the use of dog teams, human traction, native watercraft, and hand-thrust harpoons. And natives registered complaints with federal and state officials about encroachment and alterations to the availability of natural resources and about federal and state regulations on hunting and fishing.

The effects of oil extraction and transportation projects were felt by natives in several ways, and some of the responses were surely unintended by the oil companies and the framers of ANCSA. It was presumed, for instance, that a fair share of oil industry jobs would be available to natives and that benefits from the sale and extraction of oil would benefit all Alaskans. To further assist our understanding of the context in which the research being reported here was undertaken, there follows a brief assessment of the effects of energy development at Prudhoe Bay on the Eskimo groups of Alaska's North Slope.

Consequences to North Slope Eskimos from Energy-Related Developments

Kruse, Kleinfeld, and Travis (1982) have summarized some of the effects of ten years of energy extraction at Prudhoe Bay. They point out that the agreements reached among oil com-

panies and state and federal legislators led to passage of ANCSA, while, among other things, also providing the State of Alaska with title to the land under which the Prudhoe Bay oil reserves were located. State legislation made it possible to form regional governments (boroughs akin to counties) with a taxing authority on property. Natives seized the opportunity made available by law and formed the North Slope Borough, which they dominated by sheer numbers. The NSB secured its taxing authority only after protracted litigation against the State of Alaska and the oil companies.

In the decade following ANCSA and the actual production of oil from Prudhoe Bay, few natives gained employment in the private sectors of the energy and energy-related industry, and fewer yet gained permanent employment. Gross receipts and profits accrued to the transnational oil companies and the firms that supplied them, and major revenues in the form of lease rents and royalties accrued to the state. North Slope natives received few direct benefits from oil production. Yet the NSB, through its taxing authority, received large revenues from Prudhoe Bay oil production. These revenues, or public sector unearned income sources, were supplemented by ANCSA award payments, federal and state contracts and grants, some federal and state agency employment, and many types of federal and state transfer payments to create a dependency economy that is atypical among Native Americans. It is atypical in the sense that public sector income from all sources is extremely high in comparison with that of, for example, Navajo, Ute, Northern Cheyenne, Crow, Hopi, Zuni, Wind River Shoshone, Jicarilla Apache, or other western American Indian societies (Jorgensen 1984b ).

Tax revenues totaling hundreds of millions of dollars have been used in myriad community improvement projects planned for and approved by the North Slope Borough. Employment on such projects, which have developed community infrastructures of varying sorts and configurations throughout North Slope villages, fell far short of being either full or permanent for those employed. Low multipliers operated to keep some monies circulating locally which were earned on borough, Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, state, and feder-

ally related jobs, but investments and/or industries or businesses that would provide sustained employment and economic growth for North Slope inhabitants were not developed. Oil revenues and ANCSA award monies, when depleted, have no foreseeable replacements. And petroleum and motorized equipment dependencies have increased.

The wealth of the North Slope is illusory, inasmuch as it is based on public sector funds, many of which derive from the extraction of nonrenewable resources and many others of which derive from one-time legislation for the extinguishing of native claims to resources and from legislation sustaining human services programs (McBeath 1981; Luton 1985). Job training and skill development in community improvement project employment have been inadequate to make workers competitive in the private labor market (McBeath 1981). Interest in such work opportunities among residents of Wainwright, a North Slope village, has been low, because living away from the village so as to work at Prudhoe Bay or on offshore stations interferes with and disrupts important and highly valued subsistence activities (Luton, 1985).

Kruse, Kleinfeld, and Travis (1982) report that 35 percent of the North Slope residents in their sample "perceived that village living conditions worsened [since before the oil revenue period]... and only 7 [percent] observed that village living conditions had improved." Residents believed that the borough had met their needs, but they did not know whether it had controlled oil development. Community institutions proliferated, single-family housing proliferated, and average household size decreased. Yet groups of persons organized for subsistence extraction, consumption, and distribution have maintained much of their pre-1970s character, both in scope and in the relations that connect them, at least in Wainwright (Luton 1985).

Intended and Actual Consequences of ANCSA and Oil Extraction Projects

It was not anticipated that ANCSA's provisions would lure na-fives to their natal villages from urban areas in Alaska and elsewhere, but the prospects of employment, land, and money have

had that effect. Furthermore, a renaissance of native culture—subsistence pursuits, native lore and legends, and native singing and dancing—had not been anticipated. But it is occurring, nevertheless. And it was not anticipated that natives who had attended Bureau of Indian Affairs schools in the activist period of the 1960s would learn political lessons from those activities and return to participate in and guide village affairs. But indeed they have. Village leaders in Bering Sea and Yukon Delta villages have challenged Minerals Management Service oil lease sales in federal court, and North Slope village whaling captains have challenged federal restrictions on the hunting of sea mammals.

It was anticipated that ANCSA would provide work for some villagers but would also provide the educational base that would prepare natives to move from the villages to employment in urban areas and stay there. In short, it was assumed that Eskimos would adopt behavior patterns consonant with the economic marketplace: they would locate wherever necessary to apply their skills; they would make the most of their scarce resources, saving as necessary, so as to maximize the benefits that would accrue to them and to their nuclear families; and they would use their particular skills in a highly differentiated society, not use their generalized skills in a relatively undifferentiated society.

Whereas it is not the intention of this study to analyze all the changes that have come about from ANCSA and oil and gas activities, the combination of these factors since 1971 has had remarkable influences on the economies, polities, and demographies of every Native Alaskan village. Changes to these aspects of village culture, in turn, have had the unintended consequences of effecting changes in family and kinship organization, ideology, sentiments, and relations to the state. Unintended consequences from ANCSA continue to emerge, and they often create ripples throughout villages, affecting ideas, sentiments, political actions, intravillage or intraregional disputes, and related phenomena.

ANCSA has been a primary source of change to many aspects of village culture, extinguishing aboriginal hunting, fishing, and land rights; providing for the reorganization of the govern-

ment and corporate structures; providing new recognition of sovereignty and authority (self-government) to villages; providing new sources of unearned income; providing for village-level institutions that seek and acquire state and federal funds; providing regional institutions (profit and nonprofit corporations) and formal relations with them; and providing for title to land, some of which is conveyed to each village and some of which, in turn, is conveyed to individuals. Although these are but a few of the provisions in ANCSA, the point is that changes to villager access to fish, game, and land and to the political and economic institutions of the village have had wide consequences, affecting relations among residents, household economies, family-household organizations, subsistence pursuits, and other key elements of village culture.

2
The Study Villages

Because significant oil and gas activities were anticipated for the Chukchi Sea, the Bering Sea, and Norton Sound (the eastern-most waters of the Bering Sea), we sought a village for study in each area. Significant ethnographies had been written for Gambell, a village on St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea (Hughes 1960), and for Wainwright, a village on the Kuuk Lagoon of the Chukchi Sea (Nelson 1969). We recognized that these ethnographies would provide bases for comparisons with the recent past, so we selected these villages. No village in Norton Sound had been analyzed so well as Gambell and Wainwright, but an unpublished dissertation on Unalakleet language and culture (Correll 1974) was available, so we selected Unalak-leet to represent Norton Sound.

It was important to us that each of the three villages had been investigated a few years prior to passage of ANGSA.^[1] Although we studied these ethnographies and several other, more minor, reports on these villages, in a very important sense we were not prepared for what we observed and what we learned about these communities in the early 1980s. There was little reason to predict that economic and social changes that occurred in any of the villages between the 1960s and 1980s would not occur in all of the villages in the same fashion and at the same rate.

In the 1960s, there was a small commercial fishing industry in Unalakleet engaged in by natives, and residents of Wainwright and Gambell had some modest access to international markets from ivory sculpture carved from walrus tusks. A few residents in all villages trapped arctic foxes, and in Unalakleet

[1] Hughes (1957) studied Gambell in the early and mid-1950s, Nelson (1967) studied Wainwright during the mid-1960s, and Correll (1974) studied Unalakleet in the late 1960s.

other fur-bearers such as mink and ermine were trapped as well. But during the 1950s and 1960s, there was not a big market for peltries. Commercial whaling had long since disappeared from these villages.

The villages were small, with few public sector jobs, very few buildings, and almost no public buildings or buildings housing private businesses. Dog traction for sleds (and often for pulling boats upriver) was the rule rather than the exception for most families. Families in the villages were dependent for most of their diets on the resources that they harvested from their local environments through hunting, gathering, and fishing.

We soon learned that in little over a decade since the enactment of ANCSA and the onset of oil-related developments, the villages were different from one another in several crucial features, particularly household incomes, public services, and public and private infrastructure. But there were differences in the ways in which local governments and corporations operated and the ways in which decision-making authority was invested in them. The differences among the three villages could be traced to differential access to ANCSA benefits or to the benefits that derive from oil revenues. One thing that was similar in all of the villages was the reliance on snowmachines, motorboats, and all-terrain vehicles for transport and to harvest resources. It was evident that if new technologies provided benefits over old ones, the Eskimos in the villages that we studied acquired those technologies as soon as they could afford them. Dog traction, except for a few families in two of the villages who maintained dog teams for racing, was a luxury.

Infrastructure and jobs of all kinds formed a continuum from least to most among the three villages by the time we arrived in the early 1980s. Gambell was demonstrably poorer and less developed in terms of housing and public and private infrastructure than the other two villages. It had the fewest jobs of all kinds, and Gambell households gained more of their diets from harvests of natural resources than any of the other villages. Some aspects of village life neither formed a continuum nor were they similar among the three villages. It was apparent to us that several interesting and important facets of village organizations were very different among the three villages.

Among the features of social organization to which social scientists have paid especially dose attention for over a century are kinship and descent organization. They have done so because kinship and descent factors often account for property ownership, the ways in which labor is organized for cooperative subsistence pursuits, the ways in which inheritance and succession are determined and marriages are regulated, the places where couples reside after marriage, and the expectations for the relations of members with nonmembers. In general, social scientists—from the evolutionists in the late nineteenth century to the economic development specialists of the present—expect that as hunters and gatherers or the simpler horticulturalist societies modernize and develop, kinship organization is replaced by organization based on property and territory relations and that families and households decrease in size.

We learned that Gambell residents comprise several tightly organized patricians—organizations of several households by descent traced through the father and the father's father and so on in the paternal line. Members of a clan provide a network of assistance and support for other members of the clan, sharing products of the chase and labor and responding to exigencies of the moment.

Gambell shares ownership of St. Lawrence Island with the village of Savoonga, which is located about forty-five miles to the northeast. The pioneers who settled Savoonga separated from their Gambell kinspersons, but they maintain close contacts through their patricians. The St. Lawrence Island villagers are consummate walrus hunters. They pursue walrus year-round for food and for ivory. Ivory carvings are a principal means by which most Gambell families eke out the cash they require to purchase the technology they need to hunt, fish, and gather and the fuel to heat their homes and drive their machines.

Wainwright was by far the wealthiest of the three villages. It enjoyed a remarkable development of public infrastructure, housing, and public services. Employment was abundant. Essentially any adult who sought work could find it on at least a temporary basis. Naturally occurring resources constituted only about half of the annual food consumption of Wainwright

families, and those were the most preferred and not necessarily the most abundant or available resources in the Wainwright environment.

Because of the large number of construction, education, health, and other public service projects undertaken by the North Slope Borough in Wainwright in the early 1980s, in almost any week, the village of about 500 was host to 100 or more nonnatives who were employed on those projects. The availability of employment, services, housing, and cash made households relatively independent and made it possible for them to satisfy many of their daily needs with cash alone. There was demonstrably less hunting and gathering, say, than in Gambell and demonstrably less time to engage in those pursuits as well. The Wainwright households, which traced their descent bilaterally through the mother's and the father's side, seemed not to engage in sharing practices quite so widely and quite so often as the Gambell villagers—a function of resources, time, and place we came to understand, not an indication that sharing had been replaced by family-household independence.

Unalakleet was the largest of the three villages and when we first arrived enjoyed a rather well developed public and private infrastructure. It had become a secondary transportation hub for the Norton Sound-Bering Strait area, so it provided considerably more public and private sector employment than Gambell and more private employment than Wainwright. Unalakleet families, which, similar to Wainwright families, traced descent bilaterally, were engaged in more extensive sharing among wider networks of kinspersons than the Wainwright villagers but somewhat less than the Gambell villagers. It was also the case that Unalakleet families gained more of their diets from naturally occurring resources than the residents of Wainwright but less than the Gambell villagers. Moreover, Unalakleet natives put more time into hunting, gathering, and fishing than Wainwright residents.

The differences we observed on a few key features of village life suggested to us that oil and ANCSA had affected the villages differently, particularly the manner in which the bedrocks of native societies were organized—the role of kinship and descent in organizing the harvesting, distribution, and consump-

tion of plants, fish, and game (sea mammals, land mammals, and birds). We had not yet puzzled out how kinship, descent, and affinal relations worked in modern Eskimo villages or why the various kinds of corporations that were mandated and Optional under ANCSA's provisions were so different in Wainwright from those in Gambell and Unalakleet.

It will take some time and care to describe the villages and analyze how they came to be as they are in the 1980s. We will do so throughout the chapters by discussing Gambell, Unalakleet, and Wainwright in that order. The reason for the organization is that Gambell is the poorest and Wainwright the wealthiest, and Unalakleet is in between. The reasons for the differences are not simple and constitute an important part of the analysis.

Gambell is the poorest partly because of a choice the village made under one of ANCSA's provisions to accept fee simple title to St. Lawrence Island rather than to participate in the $962 million ANCSA money award. Wainwright is the wealthiest because of its proximity to North Slope oil and because the natives in the North Slope villages, including Wainwright, created the North Slope Borough to gain bonding authority that, in turn, gave them access to some of the oil revenues that derive from North Slope oil whose tracts are within the borough. This created jobs and public infrastructure while also allowing North Slope residents to participate in ANCSA money awards. Unalakleet, like Gambell, is not located in the North Slope Borough, so it has limited access to oil revenues (through state distributions of various kinds; these same distributions are available to all three villages), but it does have a small commercial fishing economy, some jobs derived from the transportation industry, and a considerable development of public infrastructure and services. Secondary effects of the oil economy and of ANCSA drive Unalakleet.

The histories of the three villages reflect differences similar to those that we have observed in the 1980s. Truncated histories of the villages are presented in chapter 3.

Below I introduce the villages as they were in 1982. Details, especially dates, quantifies, and the like, are spare in the following pages. The specific details will appear in later chapters when

Map 1.
Location of Villages in Study

we undertake a more comprehensive assessment of the consequences of ANCSA and oil-related developments for each village.

An Introduction To The Villages And Their Settings

Gambel

Gambell, situated at the northwestern tip of St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea, is located at 63°38'N, 171°50'W. The island, located 40 miles south of Siberia's Chukotsky Peninsula and 200 miles west of Nome, is about 100 miles long by 20 miles wide. It is primarily basaltic and is dotted with several volcanic cones and many lakes, three of which are quite large. The area near

Map 2.
Gambell

Map 3.
St. Lawrence Island Region, Bering Sea

Gambell comprises both igneous and sedimentary formations. Lagoons are frequent around the shoreline, and many short-course rivers empty into them or directly into the Bering Sea.

In 1970, just prior to ANCSA, the Gambell population was 372. It had grown to 465 by 1982 and 522 by 1989. About 15 nonnatives reside in Gambell. The 25 percent population increase in the first eleven years following ANCSA and the 12 percent population increase since 1982 represent far more rapid growth than had been experienced at Gambell since the turn of the century.

Infrastructure, Utilities, And Services

Gambell enjoys few conveniences of public infrastructure. It has few public buildings and does not have sewers, running water, or an all-weather airport. Air transport has become the major form of transportation in the Alaskan bush. To be without an all-weather airport means that transportation is limited to windows of good weather, and in a fog-enshrouded village such as Gambell, there is not a lot of good weather for flying. The village has some public conveniences, such as a community "washateria" (automatic clothes washers and a public bath) and community water pumps. Water for culinary and other household uses is hauled from community pumping sites and distributed at each house.

Gambell is electrified, although electricity is not cheap, costing 49.5 cents per kilowatt-hour in the 1980s. The state of Alaska absorbs 12 cents of each kilowatt-hour cost through an "equalization" program,^[2] but even 37.5 cents per kilowatt-hour causes Gambell households to use electricity with great care. Gambell houses are heated by oil. In the early 1980s, the average household paid about $2,700 annually for heating oil. There is no timber or outcroppings of coal and very little driftwood on St. Lawrence Island, so coal or wood-burning stoves are not used.

[2] "Equalization" formulas for energy costs vary by villages and by the household needs, so all villages do not receive the same amount of assistance per kwhr from the State of Alaska.

Regularly scheduled bush flights from Nome, weather permitting, carry mail, freight, and passengers to and from Gam-bell. The almost ever-present cloud cover and recurrent nasty Bering Sea storms cause frequent flight cancellations of the small, twin-engine Cessnas and Otters that fly between Nome and Gambell. Flights, which should occur about twice a week, are often delayed for two weeks by unfavorable weather.

Most of the heavy freight to the village, such as skiffs, outboard motors, snowmachines, all-terrain cycles, building supplies, oil furnaces, and canned goods, arrives on the two annual visits (one going north and one coming south) of the BIA's ship, the North Star . The ship sets anchor offshore, and the freight is brought in on a barge. Oil is also lightered from a distributor in Norton Sound.

The state of Alaska received billions of dollars in revenues from Prudhoe Bay oil operations during the late 1970s and early 1980s. It redistributed many of these funds to projects statewide, including among the native villages. In Gambell, state and federal funds were used to construct a small community center, which houses three village organizations—the village profit corporation, the city government, and the IRA government. Federal funds were also used to construct over thirty houses for Gambell families.

Corporation And Government

Under ANCSA's mandated provisions, Gambell chartered the Sivuqaq Native Corporation (SNC) as its for-profit village corporation. It is guided by an elected Board of Directors who serve without remuneration. It also has an IRA government, which serves as its nonprofit corporation, and a city government.

The passage of ANCSA threatened St. Lawrence Island's residents because that act stripped the island of its reservation trust status. The residents feared the irretrievable loss of the island, the loss of their subsistence base, and undesired alterations to their life-styles. Rather than participate in the Bering Straits Regional Corporation (profit) and receive cash distributions and some land conveyance through ANCSA's provisions,

the St. Lawrence villagers in both Gambell and Savoonga chose to use a provision of ANCSA that allowed them to take patent-in-fee title to land (both surface and subsurface ownership). The two village corporations received title to the 1.1-million-acre island—a land allocation three and one-half times greater than would have been received if they had accepted the cash award and the accompanying more modest land award.

Gambell's IRA government constituted the village's nonprofit corporation. Its access to funds is limited to the grants, awards, and contracts that are available from the federal government, some of which are channeled through Kawerak, the regional nonprofit corporation. Many of Kawerak's leaders, including its director, are residents of the island and are, or have been, active in Gambell and Savoonga IRAs. Through Kawerak, St. Lawrence Island natives have been instrumental in guiding many regional affairs, from commissioning subsistence studies to sponsoring conferences for elders. Other St. Lawrence Islanders who are very active in village affairs have headed Eskimo organizations, such as the Eskimo Whaling Commission and the Eskimo Walrus Commission, that defend the interests of Eskimos residing in several regions.

The Gambell IRA council provides guidance and counsel concerning the stewardship of the island. It shares responsibility for the island with the Savoonga IRA.

Both St. Lawrence Island villages are second-class cities. The Gambell city council seeks state block grants and other programs, including housing, community improvements, and social services. The IRA councils and city councils of the two St. Lawrence Island villages ostensibly have different spheres of authority and are intended to be distinct. Yet the dose coordination and similarities of interests and opinions between the members of the IRA and city councils in each village create consensus without acrimony on decisions made by either group. Moreover, officials move from one council to the other, forming a pool of respected leaders. Promising young people, usually men, are drawn into the pool.

The SNC owns the island in conjunction with Savoonga's native corporation: neither can overrule the other. A sine qua non of native corporation practice in Gambell is that the Board

of Directors does not act independently and on its own counsel. Rather, the corporation is seen as a public institution, and de facto, not de jure, the SNC's Board of Directors makes crucial decisions for the village in consultation and consensus with the IRA and city leadership.

The three organizations in Gambell each have seven-member Boards of Directors, and the boards hold joint meetings one or more times annually. The importance villagers place on the IRA form of government is most apparent. Many are not comfortable with the separation of spheres of authority among economic, political, and social and health service delivery institutions. Thoughtful, traditional counsel to incorporate all of these functions is synonymous with St. Lawrence Island life: economy, polity, kinship, and counsel are embedded in one another.

Gambell residents regard the SNC as a public institution, whose interests are identical to those of the IRA. During the period of field research, several community leaders explored ways to dissolve the SNC and reconstitute all resources and power under the IRA. In this way they hoped to regain federal trust status for the island. Thus, its removal from the state's tax roll could be effected, while obviating hostile purchase of the corporation in 1991—a distinct possibility under ANCSA's original provisions. If necessary, the villagers were willing to forsake their city charters, but they did not want to lose any state benefits to which they were entitled.

SNC operates a retail store and a house that it seeks to rent to researchers, public servants, antique ivory buyers, and the occasional bird-watcher who visits the village. The store lost money throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. The obstacles to profitable development of any SNC venture are imposing. They include the long distances to and from markets, the modest amounts of cash that reach the village each year, the lack of either a resource base or adequate occupational skills among natives, and severely limited access to capital—federal, state, or private sources.

Removal of these obstacles is a prerequisite for the development of businesses that can penetrate the market at any level. Furthermore, the meager funds that make their way to the

village must be put to immediate ends, such as clothing, fuel for heating and transportation, technology to extract naturally occurring resources and to make trips safer (e.g., snow-machines, motorboats, rifles, guns, nets, ammunition, radar, sonar, radios), and supplementary foods. Thus, the multiplier potential of the cash within the village is severely limited. Local revenues are modest, and the local sales taxes authorized by the city council are used for public projects and organizations benefiting the entire village, such as providing funds to the IRA.

Schools And Education In Gambell

The Bureau of Indian Affairs operates a grade school in Gam-bell. Since the mid-1970s, a state-funded high school has accommodated the secondary grades.^[3] In the past, students received their secondary educations on the mainland. Now that Gambell high school students remain at home, an unintended consequence has been that students participate in subsistence skills year-round, especially from spring through early fall when intensive extraction occurs.

Dependency And The Importance Of The Public Sector

The Gambol cash economy is heavily dependent on transfers of public funds. In 1982, there were not sufficient full-time and part-time jobs in Gambell to provide one per household. Public funds were the basis for the vast majority of those jobs. The few jobs in the private sector were themselves secondarily dependent on public funds, such as purchases by schoolteachers, travel by public servants, and purchases by welfare recipients. The majority of the full-time jobs available in the village were held by nonnatives—jobs such as teaching school, but also including waste collection and disposal. Natives have not qualified for the teaching positions, and they eschew the sole waste collection-disposal job. More than half the households in the village have no wage earners.

[3] Gambell, originally called Sivuqaq by its residents, was renamed following the death of Presbyterian missionary Verne C. Gambell in 1898.

The need for cash is pressing, and it is gained in many ways: through paid participation in the local unit of the National Guard; through public transfers of income in some form, such as energy assistance, food stamps, or Aid to Families with Dependent Children; through sales of ivory carvings excavated from old village sites; and through ivory carving and seal skin sewing. The St. Lawrence carvers are world renowned. The income from carving provides the major source of almost all household incomes, but even the modest sums from transfers and the National Guard are important to sustenance.

Christianity

The Presbyterian church is the dominant Christian denomination in the village, numbering 365 members. More recently, several families converted to Seventh Day Adventism, and that congregation now numbers 90. Six Baptists reside in the village. About half of the members of the two larger denominations regularly attend services.

The Environment

Gambell's environment is cold, moist, and fog enshrouded, with only about thirty clear days annually. Yet the wind and water currents of the Bering Sea moderate Gambell's climate in the winter and influence its relative harshness during the summer. For example, during the winter months, there are often leads (openings in the pack ice) close to the village, making it possible to hunt walrus, even though pack ice surrounds the island for about six months a year. Winter temperatures around 4°F and summer temperatures around 4l°F are in the middle of the expected ranges—very narrow ranges at that—for those seasons.

During both summer and winter, persistent winds of over 20 knots are commonplace. In combination with the low temperatures in winter months and the relatively low temperatures during summer months, the winds pose an omnipresent windchill threat to the islanders as do storms over the Bering Sea which interrupt transport.

The island vegetation is subarctic tundra comprising low

willow and birch shrub, lichens, black crowberry, cranberry, cloudberry, and spring-beauty. There are no large land mammals other than the reindeer herd that is managed by Savoonga which resides on the island year-round, but arctic foxes, tundra voles, snails, and slugs abound.

Salmon enter some of the rivers during the summers, and resident whitefish and char migrate down some of those same rivers during the spring and return during the fall. The coastal waters and lagoons are frequented by several saltwater fish species, particularly tomcod, saffron cod, blue cod, sculpin, and herring.

Seabirds and waterfowl in remarkable quantities nest during summer months on the island, while other varieties stop over in their annual migrations. Birds are hunted, and eggs are collected from nests on the cliffs of the island.

Marine mammals, especially walrus but also several species of seals and whales, inhabit nearby waters or migrate past the island. These mammals provide the most important staple of St. Lawrence Islander existence. Polar bears, which migrate south to the island during the winter months as the ice cap attaches to the island, are also hunted.

The bowhead whale is the animal most desired by Gambell residents. The bowhead has symbolic value, is preferred for its taste, and is desired as an item that can be given as a gift to relatives and friends at home, in distant villages, and in dries as far away as San Francisco and Albuquerque. It is also regulated without force of law by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) in which the U.S. government participates. An annual quota determined by the IWC is placed on the number of bowhead whales that Gambell hunters can strike (two per year, whether or not they are landed). The controversy surrounding the extraction of bowhead whales is conjoined in the native view with ANCSA, oil and gas company extractions of nonrenewable resources, state and federal arrogation of controls over naturally recurring resources, the expropriation of native land throughout Alaska, and ultimate domination of native affairs by state and federal governments.

The relative poverty of Gambell is not apparent, perhaps, from the foregoing, nor will it be apparent on reading the

thumbnail sketches of Unalakleet and Wainwright. But the differences are marked, and they will become more obvious later.

Unalakleet

Situated on a spit at the mouth of the Unalakleet River, Unalakleet is backed by the Nulato Hills and fronted by Norton Sound, the easternmost waters of the Bering Sea. The village is located at 65°52'N, 160°47'W. It is about 400 miles northwest of Anchorage and 150 miles southeast of Nome. Nome is the region's economic, transportation, and political hub.

In 1970, just prior to the passage of ANCSA, Unalakleet's population totaled 434. In 1982, it had increased by 82 percent to 790. In the 1980s, about 12 percent of the total were nonnatives, and all of the nonnative adults were employed either by state or regional institutions. The proportional increase between 1970 and 1982 was not phenomenal, as the Unalakleet population had waxed and waned over the previous 150 years.

The sheer size of the population alarms the villagers, because of the demands that are being placed on the naturally occurring resources and because of the changes that are occurring at such a rapid clip. As a secondary transportation hub with considerable infrastructure and an attractive, resource-rich setting, Unalakleet has become a preferred site for the location (and relocation) of regional public agencies.

Infrastructure, Utilities, And Services

Unalakleet is electrified and has a water system, a sewer system, and a liquid waste disposal system. Its all-weather airport, with two gravel runways, accommodated scheduled jet flights (Boeing 737) three times a week from Anchorage as well as regularly scheduled flights of smaller commercial aircraft.

Unalakleet is home base to the largest and most successful commercial bush airline in Alaska (Ryan Air) owned by a local native family. Ryan Air moved persons and freight among the villages of Norton Sound, St. Lawrence Island, and Nome from its Unalakleet and Nome bases.

Most of the 170 houses in the village were built under several

Map 4.
Unalakleet

IRA government, Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and state housing projects between the early 1950s and the 1970s. The newer houses, like those built earlier, are heated by wood- or oil-burning stoves.

Eeucation

The Swedish Covenant School—a twelve-grade boarding school that draws students from Unalakleet and other villages within about a 500-mile radius-and a state elementary and high school are located in town, as are the offices of the Bering Straits School District (BSSD). The influx of employees of the school district offices, relocated from Nome in 1982, accounts for 60 percent of the Unalakleet population increase since 1980 (from 632 to 790).

Public And Private Sectors Of The Local Economy

Whereas commercial trapping supplements many family incomes, as does commercial fishing, and although many gain their principal cash income from commercial fishing, it is the public sector that currently drives Unalakleet's economy. The passage of ANCSA had profound effects on the village. Unalakleet created a for-profit corporation, a nonprofit corporation, and also became a chartered second-class city.

The IRA government, which had been the village's key institution for thirty years, was reshaped as the village's nonprofit corporation, through which federal programs made available to Native Americans have been channeled and administered. The IRA government has a five-member council that controls tribal operations and works with Kawerak, Inc., in sponsoring various programs for the village and region, such as boat-budding classes. It also administers many of the federal programs that play significant roles in village affairs, such as social services.

The IRA government serves long-term native interests in the environment and also represents native culture in village affairs, particularly in dealing with persons and institutions in the

village. The IRA leaders work well with elected and appointed officials in the city government (which includes both natives and nonnatives) and in the Unalakleet Native Corporation (the village for-profit corporation). In numerous instances from the earliest to the most recent (February 1989) visits to Unalakleet, we have noted that IRA leaders provide counsel to guide the villagers over rough places and through fight situations. Their lead, although shared by city council members, was followed by heads of other institutions on all of the crucial issues that confronted the village.

The City of Unalakleet, incorporated in 1974, has a seven-member city council from which a mayor and a vice-mayor are elected. Although nonnatives recently have comprised the majority of council members, the mayor and vice-mayor are natives, and the directions taken by the council are agreed on through discussions among IRA and city leaders. The city government appears to be the surrogate for the pre-ANCSA IRA government. The cooperation and coordination of the city council and the IRA council are evident in all important decisions. The city government is not simply the reconstituted government half of the old IRA, because it provides Unalakleet with state revenue-sharing funds and access to block grants for municipal purposes. It levies taxes, provides police protection, provides fire-fighting equipment, maintains the roads, and so forth.

The shareholders of the Unalakleet Native Corporation (UNC) elect an eight-member Board of Directors, which, in turn, elects its chairman. The UNC began with 829 original native shareholders, all born prior to December 18, 1971, each with 100 shares of stock. The UNC received 100,000 acres from the Bering Straits Regional Corporation through conveyance and is scheduled to receive another 61,280 acres. The UNC, in turn, is conveying some of the acreage to shareholders. The corporation acquires funds to conduct business through the $962 million settlement award that accompanied ANCSA.

The UNC operates a grocery and dry goods store in competition with the Alaska Commercial Company's (ACC) similar operation in Unalakleet. The two also compete in snowmachine,

outboard motor, and all-terrain cycle (ATC) repairs. The UNC has created a construction contracting division and has been successful in garnering public funds for several construction projects, including buildings and roads.

The UNC has hired several managers since its creation, usually local natives, although from 1982 to 1984, the UNC manager was an enrolled member of a Nevada Indian tribe (Washo). Unalakleet's villagers regard the UNC as a public institution whose interests are identical to those of the IRA. It is not merely a shareholder corporation in their view. In a similar vein, the members of the board work closely with the IRA and the city leadership on almost all policy issues.

The Norton Sound Fishermen's Cooperative (NSFC) is presided over by the same group of native men who serve as dry, IRA, and UNC leaders. These men change positions in and among organizations, and a few drop out of public service for a year or so at a time, but the overlapping nature of personal roles in governing bodies is well established and generates real consensus among institutions.

Since enactment of ANCSA, Unalaldeet villagers have been drawn deeply into public sector dependencies. But Unalakleet natives have also increased their participation in private sectors of the market economy, principally through commercial fishing and less so through trapping and the sale of by-products from subsistence activities. Significantly, the private sector activities of native villagers are based on the harvests of naturally occurring, renewable resources. Even these items require assistance, financial in particular, from various arms of the public sector.

Recognition of the role played by the public sector can be gained from the village's job structure. In 1982, there was more than one permanent, full-time job per household in Unalakleet. About half of the jobs were held by natives. More than four out of five of all full-time jobs were in the public sector. The remainder were possible only because of public sector expenditures, such as publicly funded passengers riding in aircraft—guided and regnlated by FAA equipment and personnel and landing on federally constructed and maintained runways—to survey projects to be paid for by public sector funds.

Christianity

The Swedish Evangelical Mission church (currently, the Swedish Evangelical Covenant church) is the dominant religious influence in the village today. A Catholic priest took up residence in 1982 to accommodate several Catholic families in town.

The Environment

The Unalakleet River rises in the Kaltag Mountains about fifty miles northeast of the village. Many tributaries feed the Unalakleet, some rising in the Andreafsky Range to the south and others rising in the Debauch Mountains to the north. The Unalakleet system is separated from the Yukon River by the former and from the Shaktoolik River by the latter. The hills and mountains that are dissected by the Unalakleet system are Wooded, predominantly by alpine spruce. Willow and birch shrub, sedges, and forbs are important constituents in the wet tundra, and bilberry, cloudberry, and birch are important constituents in the moist higher tundra.

The Unalakleet River system teems with spawning salmon during the summer months and hosts sea-run char, whitefish, and grayling that enter the river to spawn and stay for eight or nine months to feast on salmon eggs and salmon grilse (fry). In addition, brown bears wade into the river and fish for migrating or spent salmon. Brown bears also pilfer salmon from the villagers' drying racks and from their set nets (bears strip nets of their fish by standing near the shore and cleaning the nets as they haul them in—paw over paw). These bears are joined by the black bears and the villagers themselves in harvesting the vast quantifies of berries and the more limited quantities of roots that mature each year.

The tundra to the north and to the south supports the caribou herd, which, although diminished from its considerable size of over a century ago, is increasing in numbers. The willows and sedges along the river system are inhabited by moose, while snowshoe hares and willow ptarmigan inhabit the moist willow

Map 5.
Eastern Norton Sound Region (Villages Underlined)

tundra nearby. Arctic hares and spruce grouse claim the higher reaches and the wooded zones.

The tidal marshes of Norton Sound support several species of invertebrates and fish, which are feasted on by migratory and nesting shorebirds, seabirds, and waterfowl. There is kelp in which fish hide and eat and spawn. Many species of sea mammals feast on the marine invertebrates and fish of the area. These resources, from the herring roe-on-kelp to the beluga whale and the whistling swan, are harvested by Unalakleet villagers, as they have been for more than twenty centuries. Except for salmon, berries, birds, and eggs, the Unalakleet environment of the early 1980s does not yield an absolute surfeit of any natural resource, but there is such a multiplicity of resources available at different times throughout the year that it is appropriate to call the place "bountiful." It is also exquisitely beautiful in all seasons, even though winter winds up to 60 knots and temperatures near -20°F are not uncommon.

Wainwright

Wainwright is located 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the coast of the Chukchi Sea at 70°40'N, 159°50'W. The arctic tundra bluffs on which the village sits rise twenty feet above a narrow beach. The landmass to the west narrows to a spit separating the Kuuk Lagoon from the sea. Barrow, a 3,000-resident village 90 miles to the northeast, is the center of political and economic affairs for all North Slope villages. The village of Point Lay is 100 miles to the southwest.

Wainwright was created as a permanent village site at the turn of the twentieth century. The 1970 population of Wainwright was tallied at 350. Except for a few elementary schoolteachers, a Christian minister, and a handful of state and federal employees, Wainwright was a native village. By 1982, the population had grown to 506.

It is not surprising, given the large number of projects undertaken by the North Slope Borough in Wainwright, that nonnative residents and visitors constituted a much larger percentage of all persons in Wainwright than was the case in either Unalak-

Map 6.
Wainwright

leet or Gambell. Nonnatives in Wainwright averaged about 110 persons in the early and mid-1980s. (The differences among the proportions of natives to nonnatives in the three study villages is marked and is accounted for by the real differences among the villages in employment opportunities.)

The Economy and Oil

Wainwright shares in the huge tax revenues collected by the NSB from Prudhoe Bay oil, participates in the federal-and state-sponsored projects that are initiated by the NSB through its successful lobbying efforts, and receives its portion of ANCSA award funds. The NSB's Capital Improvement Projects (CIPs) for Wainwright have provided the greatest sources of funds and construction activity in the village.

Federal construction programs channeled through the regional for-profit corporation, Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC), have also been formidable. Smaller projects undertaken by the village's for-profit corporation have also had real effects on the local economy and infrastructure. The opportunities for native and nonnative construction workers—both skilled and nonskilled—have been considerable but also temporary.

Infrastructure, Utilities, and Services

The large number of CIPs and federal and state construction projects initiated since 1971 have transformed Wainwright's infrastructure. Practically all natives reside in modern, electrified, centrally heated homes. There is a water system, a partial sewage system (not in the homes), a main gravel road, and several short, lighted streets. The village also has buildings for health care delivery, NSB operations, the village corporation, the city council, storage, schools (elementary and high school), and stores. Whereas the old BIA elementary school remains the focal point of community festivals and occasional visiting, the new elementary school boasts an olympic-size swimming pool, and the high school has a gymnasium large enough for all public functions. A "washateria" is available for use by anyone.

Outside of town, a Distant Early Warning (DEW) line installation was constructed in the early 1950s. The U.S. Air Force maintains the installation and employs two local natives at the site.

Education

Until recently, high school students were sent away to Mount Edgecombe, near Sitka. This practice changed when state funds were used to construct a high school in the village. The grade school and the high school are state funded, rather than B IA funded, and both are directed by the North Slope Borough School District.

Governments and Corporations

Wainwright has a for-profit and a nonprofit corporation as well as a chartered city government. As in Gambell and Unalakleet, Wainwright organized an IRA government under provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act nearly fifty years ago. Pursuant to ANCSA, it reconstituted the IRA as the village's nonprofit corporation.

Wainwright and the North Slope region are so dominated by the North Slope Borough, through its funds, projects, and political influence, that the Wainwright IRA joined other nonprofit village corporations in the region to form the Inupiat Communities of the Arctic Slope (ICAS). The ICAS Board of Directors has representatives from each member village; thus, this IRA government is a regional institution with local representatives. Perhaps as a consequence, the ICAS and its local

members exercise much more limited local authority and pursue fewer federal grants, contracts, and awards than either the Gambell or Unalakleet IRAs. The ICAS works closely with the BIA, which still operates within the villages of Wainwright and Barrow (but not in Gambell or Unalakleet), and with the Indian Health Service of the Public Health Service.

Wainwright chartered the Olgoonik Corporation (OC) as its village for-profit corporation. The OC operates a food and dry goods store and several rental houses for temporary employees on various projects. It was also building a hotel and restaurant at the conclusion of our field research. Although the OC main-mined contacts with the ASRC, both the OC and the ASRC were dominated by the funds, activities, and leadership of the NSB.

The OC, for instance, purchased a construction company formerly owned by a nonnative resident. The company soon began to acquire millions of dollars worth of contracts from the NSB for CIPs. The millions of dollars spent by the NSB in the village have not provided a strong multiplier for local or regional industries, but they have provided vast sums to equipment and material suppliers, transporters, and construction firms. Nonnative residents tend to save and to spend their money outside the village.

Wainwright was incorporated as a second-class city in 1972 to avail itself of NSB and state revenues and programs. Its city council is composed of seven members, including a mayor and vice-mayor. By law, the city council has the authority to levy taxes, regulate public safety and morals, regulate vehicular traffic, own and manage public property, issue business permits and licenses, and enforce compliance with state law.

Yet because of the dominance of the NSB and the revenues that it redistributes, the sovereignty of the city government is very limited. Social service and health delivery programs have been appropriated by the NSB and the ICAS. Community improvement projects are NSB programs, as are public safety and fire-fighting, both of which have been ceded by the city to the borough.

The city council, in fact, operates only peripherally as the governing body of a second-class city, even though it establishes its own ordinances (so long as they do not conflict with state

law). Those ordinances are enforced by the NSB. However, the city council provides counsel and guidance, much as its IRA predecessor provided counsel and guidance and much as the predecessor of the IRA provided guidance and counsel to the villagers, that is, through suasion and nominal authority vested in traditional leaders.

Regardless of state law, and even at city council meetings attended by public safety officers who are sworn to uphold state law, recalcitrant persons have been told to leave the city, that is, the village—this without benefit of hearings or trial. Traditional wisdom, not state law, has been followed in the conduct of some village judicial affairs.

In 1982, without benefit of a single, long-term industry or other business capable of sustaining itself in the private market sector, the village of Wainwright had nearly two jobs per household. Natives held two of every three of those jobs.

The average Wainwright native household (4.1 persons) has about 1.5 employed members. Aggregating full-time and parttime employment, the contrast with Unalakleet and Gambell, where 0.6 and 0.5 person per household, respectively, are employed, demonstrates that Wainwright family members are employed at a rate about three times greater than that of either of the other two villages.

Only two Wainwright residents are employed in the off-related industries at Prudhoe Bay, and two are employed at the DEW line station. No Unalakleet or Gambell residents are employed in the oil-related industries and Prudhoe. The bulk of employment for Wainwright natives comes directly or indirectly from NSB projects, and because many of them are in construction, they are also temporary, providing perhaps twenty weeks of annual employment. But the pay rates are high, about $23.00 per hour in 1982.

Nonnatives work on construction projects, and they also comprise the professional staffs that provide consulting and other services in Wainwright through the NSB and ICAS, including health, business, law, science, education, and public safety. The nonnatives are predominantly transient.

The high employment rate in 1982, regardless of underemployment, undoubtedly made the lives of Wainwright's natives

quite comfortable. But not so comfortable that they eschewed their subsistence life-style. For example, Luton (1085) determined that heating fuel and food alone, if purchased wisely and in bulk, would consume about $16,000 per family (four persons) per year in Wainwright. That assumes that all food eaten was purchased in bulk from bush suppliers in Anchorage. Few native families in Wainwright, and fewer still in Unalakleet and Gambell, could afford such expenses in addition to clothing, subsistence technology, and subsistence trip expenses.

When the costs of clothing, technology, and extraction expenses are added to heating costs and food purchases from the local stores, even Wainwright family budgets were severely strained. The twin threats of the depletion of the Prudhoe Bay oil reserves from which NSB revenues derive and the depletion of ANCSA funds have generated persistent concern among natives.

Christianity

The Presbyterian church is the dominant sect in Wainwright. The Assembly of God, a Pentecostal religion, also has a minister and a small congregation in the village. As among the other villages in the study, the natives are devout Christians.

The Environment

The Wainwright environment, from the coast to the foothills of the Brooks Range 100 miles inland, is treeless. It is, thus, tundra, or "barren ground." In the summer, from the vantage point of the air, the expanse appears as a gray-green plain, dotted with ponds and lakes of all sizes and river systems that look like broken spiderwebs.

Precipitation is low, about 15 inches annually. Snow accounts for most of the precipitation. Winter temperatures are extremely cold, averaging about - 16§F in January. The annual mean temperature is a chilly 12§F. Pack ice, anchored to the coast and stretching for miles into the Arctic Ocean, provides the winter hunting territory for Wainwright villagers for six to eight months of each year. The Kuuk River system provides a

Map 7.
Chukchi Sea Region, Arctic Ocean

frozen highway for snowmachine travel to the interior during winter months and a waterway for motorboat travel during summer months.

Much of the tundra for miles around is matted with roots and stems in which low shrubs—particularly bilberry, dwarf huckleberries, and crowberry—are heavily represented. Reindeer moss grows well through this heath. In some areas, but particularly in a region southeast of Wainwright and Peard Bay, sedges and grasses grow in the marshes and near some poorly drained lakes. At climax, the tundra supports large caribou populations.

During the early 1980s, the northwestern caribou herd south of the Brooks Range was growing and expanding its range at a rapid rate, reversing the decline experienced twenty years earlier. Near Wainwright and elsewhere in the immediate vicinity, caribou were available in considerable numbers, marking a resurgence of the species in the region. In recent years, caribou have provided the most frequently eaten naturally occurring resource in villager diets.

But Wainwrighters remain adapted to marine resources as well, hunting several species of marine mammals, including seals, walrus, and whales. As among the St. Lawrence Islanders, the bowhead whale is the centerpiece of lore, symbolism, community festivals, gifting, and camaraderie, and the annual hunt of the animal provides the occasion for the renewal of crucial Eskimo values.

Polar bears frequent the Wainwright region during fall and winter, seabirds and waterfowl nest in the area from late spring to early fall, and migratory fish, including some salmon, char, and herring species, pass by the coast or spawn in the drainages throughout the territory. A few bird species, such as the ptarmigan, and marine invertebrates and fish species, such as whitefish, sculpin, grayling, burbot, rainbow smelt, and saffron cod, are available in the area year-round.

Resource Availability

A wider variety of species of plants and animals is available near Unalakleet, during more months of the year, than at either

Wainwright or Gambell, and more species are available at Wainwright than at Gambell (see Appendix C for details). St. Lawrence Island residents are very much dependent on walrus to sustain them during the hardest winter months. They cannot jump on snowmachines and hunt caribou. Jigging for fish and winter seal hunting, too, are only modestly productive.

3
Historical Background

The arctic and subarctic, sparsely populated and icebound so much of the year, has a modest historical record. Other than Eskimos, Aleuts, and Athapaskans, the first persons to arrive in Alaska north of the Yukon River seldom remained long or wrote much about their experiences. Nevertheless, there are discernible outlines to the history of each of the three villages in this study which separate them from one another. I provide brief sketches.

Whereas all three villages have been influenced by environmental calamities and epidemics in their histories, Gambell has been more influenced by a harsh and less bountiful environment than either Unalakleet or Wainwright, each of whose environments provide more places to flee to and more means to survive. And whereas all three villages have been influenced by the vagaries of the worldwide market economy, the villages of Unalakleet and Wainwright have been more involved on the peripheries of the action than has the village of Gambell.

So clear differences obtain among the three villages. Unalakleet has been influenced by extremely harsh environmental factors from time to time and by catastrophic epidemics, but in addition, it has been influenced by economic factors beyond the control of local residents. Wainwright is the youngest of the three villages (arguments can be made for a pre-1848 origin, but 1848 and, for a more permanent site, 1004 are the prime dates)..Although influenced by environmental catastrophes, it has been less affected by them than either Gambell or Unalakleet. But it has been much more influenced by economic boom and bust cycles than the other two—first whaling, then coal, then trapping, now transfers of revenues from oil.

The differences among the histories of the three-environ-

ment being most important in Gambell and economy most important in Wainwright, with Unalakleet taking a middle position-reflect their current situations. Gambell is the poorest, and Wainwright, momentarily, is the richest.

It appears evident that the multiple resources of the Unalakleet environment have lent themselves to multiple adaptations as exigencies have demanded (see Appendix c). The more limited and specific resources of the Wainwright and Gambell environments have also limited the range of adaptations possible as exigencies occur. But whereas Wainwright residents could flee if they could not subsist near the Kuuk Lagoon, flight has been much more limited for the residents of St. Lawrence Island. In general, over the course of island history, its residents have chosen to stay regardless of the vicissitudes they encounter. Wainwright residents have been compelled to stay in part because they have been engaged on the edges of the market economy for the 140 years of the village's existence.

A common response to famine or to other severe conditions in all three villages has been to share resources and labor. So the three are not dramatically different from other Eskimo and Aleut villages in this respect. Hunters lost on the sea or on land are sought by search parties. The elderly and hungry are fed. Disabled boats are assisted by passersby, even if they are in direct competition, say, in a commercial fishing market with those whose boat is disabled. Sharing is so basic to native life in all three villages that it overrides competition and personal gain if those gains would be registered while someone else suffers and the person who stands to gain must do so by not giving assistance to the person in need. The practice and the ideology of sharing, regardless of specific environmental catastrophes or epidemics that may affect one village but not another, is represented throughout all of the villages. Specific differences over the past century, environment held constant, are attributable to economic and political factors.

Of central importance to the course of history in the three villages is the role played by naturally occurring resources in the lives of villagers. They provide sustenance, define areas of interest and use, are crucial in providing goods to share and by-products for gifting and sale, and provide the focus for na-

tive ideologies and sentiments about place and space. The environment is challenging but can be understood and accommodated by natives. Threats to the environments in which they live are threats to natives which they are well aware of.

Gambell and St. Lawrence Island

St. Lawrence Island has never been an easy place to gain a livelihood. Environmental factors, storms and persistent dense fogs in particular, are key problems with which the island's residents have had to cope. Hunting parties are regularly lost at sea, as was the case in early 1989 when a walrus crew was lost in the fog for three weeks. The other walrus hunters in Gambell and its sister community of Savoonga formed teams to search for the lost hunters. The federal government provided gasoline for the searchers, who eventually located the lost men, but in the meantime, walrus hunting and walrus harvesting declined. As a consequence, the native residents on the island had to cope with a meager food supply and a meager supply of walrus ivory— e staple food and the single most important commodity available to St. Lawrence Island natives.

Great storms, and the famines they sometimes cause, have taken their tolls on St. Lawrence Island over the past centuries. This is not to say that Wainwright and Unalakleet have been free from environmental rigors; they have not. But the consequences of severe weather conditions affecting St. Lawrence Island which lasted for about one year mark a very important event in Gambell's history, and the international influenza epidemic about forty years later coincides with another major event in the island's history. Regardless of environmental challenges, the native population wants to be there and almost no place else, and they have been able to do so almost surely because of the assistance that is provided to those in need by kinspersons and friends.

The ancestors of today's residents of Gambell arrived on St. Lawrence Island from Siberia, it is presumed, probably 2,300 years ago (Burgess 1974: 20, 59). At earliest European contact, the Eskimos of St. Lawrence Island were geographically, culturally, and linguistically closer to their Siberian congeners with

whom they intermarried and visited than they were to Eskimos on mainland Alaska. Modem residents of Gambell speak Central Siberian Yupik one of four mutually unintelligible Yupik languages. Central Yupik and Pacific Yupik are spoken on the Alaskan mainland (as is Inupiaq, another mutually unintelligible Eskimo language). Central Siberian Yupik is spoken on St. Lawrence Island and in Siberia (where Siberian Yupik and Central Siberian Yupik are spoken).

Russians first mentioned observing the islanders in the mid-seventeenth century, and by the early eighteenth century, Russian and Danish maps of the Bering Sea included St. Lawrence Island (Hughes 1960: 7). At the onset of commercial whaling in the Arctic Ocean in the early 1800s, Russian maps noted the locations of thirteen settlements scattered about the island's shores and estimated 1,500 inhabitants (other estimates have placed the number at 2,500) (Burgess 1974: 23, 55; Ackerman 1976: 36). St. Lawrence Island villagers traded baleen, oil, hides, and ivory for food, clothing, and alcohol with the whalers. By the 1860s, they were hiring onto whaling vessels as crewmen.

The first major event in recent St. Lawrence Island history occurred during 1878-79 when famine on the island caused many deaths, perhaps two-thirds of the population including three complete villages, and considerable misery (see Burgess 1974: 56, 64-69). Islanders continue to view it as the most significant event in the island's history. Although the cause of the famine is not fully understood, it is likely that exceedingly harsh weather depleted native food supplies, while making replacement very difficult. Some men appear to have been away from the village working on whaling vessels during the ice-free period when they normally would be filling the family larders with the bag from hunting and fishing. Participating in the labor market, then, complicated the situation.

A federal investigation in 1881 reported that all but a handful of the survivors had convened at Sivuqaq (Gambell) and appeared to have recovered from the physical effects of the famine, without any significant aid from the U.S. government (Burgess 1974: 32, 64-65; Ackerman 1976: 39). At about the turn of the century, the few island residents who had re-

mained in Powooiliak after the famine also relocated to Sivuqaq (Burgess 1974: 31).

A Presbyterian mission and school were built by Sheldon Jackson in 1891. Jackson was both a Presbyterian missionary and the general agent in the territory of Alaska for the (federal) Bureau of Education. The school was not used until the arrival of the missionary, V. C. Gambell, in 1894. Gambell provided instruction in English to these Central Siberian Yupik speakers.

After Gambell's death, Sheldon Jackson (who wore many Presbyterian and federal hats), under the auspices of and funds from the BIA, introduced reindeer to St. Lawrence Island and also at Wainwright, Unalakleet, and many other villages throughout Alaska. The island was declared a reindeer station by Executive Order in 1903, providing reservation status to the island. Gambell's natives were given beneficial ownership (trust status, a form of impaired fide) of the island while the federal government retained fide.

The second major event in recent St. Lawrence Island history occurred about 1918 when the influenza epidemic that was devastating the world was introduced on St. Lawrence Island. At about the same time, or perhaps a little earlier, a herders' camp grew sufficiently large to splinter from Gambell and establish a new village, Savoonga. The new village became the center for reindeer herding activities on the island (Hughes 1960: 14). In addition to the fissioning of Savoonga from Gam-bell, the influenza epidemic caused many other Gambell residents to flee to unoccupied village sites around the coast to isolate themselves from the disease. All, except the reindeer herders of Savoonga, returned.

Because the Savoonga population was drawn from segments of some of Gambell's patricians, St. Lawrence Island patriclans became multilocal (a clan had segments in more than one locale). The distances between the villages and the arduousness of travel prior to the introduction of motorboats and snow-machines reduced contacts between residents of the two communities. And the focus on reindeer herding also reduced the Savoonga population's reliance on the sea.

Within a generation, Savoonga's population grew nearly as large as Gambell, and in 1939, each community chartered gov-

ernments under the provisions of the IRA. Gambell incorporated as a city in 1963, and Savoonga followed suit in 1969. These two forms of government lessened clan authority and influence on the island.

Between the time that IRA governments and the city form of governments were adopted, the residents of St. Lawrence Island got cut off from their Siberian kinspersons on the Chukotsk Peninsula with whom they shared a common language, visited, and intermarried. The U.S. and USSR governments terminated all contacts between these people soon after World War II. The Siberian Yupik people were removed to inland villages.

Some motorized equipment was used on St. Lawrence Island in the 1950s. The equipment was limited by the residents' modest incomes. Motorboats gained wider use in the 1950s and snowmachines in the 1960s, although dog traction remained paramount until 1970. Snowmachines, in particular, made it possible for clansmen in the two villages to share the bag or quarry taken in one village with clansmen in the other village.

The passage of ANCSA forced a very difficult choice on the island's residents. The islanders chose ownership of the island in fee simple, foregoing cash awards to underwrite their for-profit village corporations, which were mandated by ANCSA. Choosing to take the island did not free them from ANCSA's provision that the for-profit village corporation would have to go public in 1991. The for-profit corporations in each village were invested with joint title to the island. All enrolled members became shareholders, and still more of the powers vested in clans were lost, particularly the controls over key strategic resource areas.

The St. Lawrence Islanders have treasured their land much as they treasure their language and their common history with Siberian Eskimos. Although Central Siberian Yupik was not spoken in the schools from 1894 until 1973, virtually everyone on the island continues to speak it. Most islanders, except for a few of the elderly, are bilingual, speaking both English and Central Siberian Yupik. Villagers are proud of the fact that they have maintained their native tongue.

And although intermarriage, trading, ceremonial, and all

other contacts with their Siberian relatives and friends were terminated soon after World War II, in August 1988, the USSR's glasnost policy allowed twenty-one St. Lawrence Island residents to travel by boat to New Chaplino, about 20 miles north of Provideniia at the neck of Provideniia Bay, to spend two weeks with their relatives and friends who had been relocated there.

On Famine and Population Decline

An obvious theme in St. Lawrence Island history is the love of space and place. But the obstacles to maintaining a large population dependent on naturally occurring resources on the island are considerable and loom large.

Except for one year (1920) in which no competent census was taken, the St. Lawrence Island population steadily increased from 1,903 to the present (see fig. 2). These increases have implications for the relation between the native population and the per capita availability of naturally occurring species in the future.

If the population of St. Lawrence was 1,500 in 1878 (one estimate is 2,500), it is likely that prodigious quantities of meat were harvested to feed the people and the working dogs—much more than the amount that is harvested to feed the current island population of slightly over 1,000. Assuming that every five people had a team of eight dogs and that each of those dogs required three pounds of meat daily (on average—more in the winter months and less during the summer), the St. Lawrence Island Eskimos harvested over 1,300 tons of meat annually for the dogs alone in the 1870s. If we are very conservative and assume only four working dogs per five people, those dogs would require 650 tons of meat annually. Continued population growth, or the reinstitution of dog traction, or both, could presage disaster. A protracted famine in the 1870s meant that dogs and persons died, and as dogs died, the St. Lawrence Island Eskimos were less able to cope.

Unalakleet and Norton Sound

Unalakleet, situated at the mouth of the Unalakleet River about fifty miles northeast of the most northeasterly marsh of the

Figure 2.
Gambell and Total St. Lawrence Island Population, l30 Years (1852-1982), at Unequal Intervals^*

mouth of the Yukon, is a natural hub for north-south and coast-interior trade. The river encourages traffic, and the gravel (sand-rock) spits at the mouth allow easy pedestrian travel, unlike the marshes of the mighty Yukon. Moreover, forested hills provide timber for building and firewood and places for a variety of environmental niches. The value of this location has been recognized by several waves of immigrants to the area.

The earliest known habitation in the Norton Sound region occurred at about 2000 B.C. (Dumond 1983). The earliest protracted and direct contacts by Europeans with Eskimos of the Unalakleet area occurred with the construction by Russians of Fort St. Michael (Mikhailovski Redoubt) about fifty-two miles

to the southwest in 1833 (see Ray's 1066 edition of Edmonds). This paved the way for the Russian-American Company to establish a hut for trade in Unalakleet, which it did in 1838, hiring a local native to operate it (Michael 1967; Correll 1974).

The earliest indirect contacts between Unalakleet natives and Europeans occurred much earlier. Trade networks maintained for two or more centuries linked Eskimo traders from the northern Bering Straits region to the Chukchis in Siberia and to the Eskimos along the lower Yukon and the Athapaskans in the interior. The position occupied by Unalakleet villagers was central. They traded oil to the Athapaskans of the interior for caribou skins and then traded caribou skins to the Malemiuts in exchange for peltries. The pelts, in turn, were traded to the Russians who journeyed to Siberia as early as the sixteenth century, well before the czar's sailors and explorers made their ways through the Bering Sea.

Two years before the trade hut was built in Unalakleet, the village experienced an epidemic that reduced the population from perhaps 115 to 13 inhabitants. Between 1836 and 1838, the survivors relocated from the gravel spit on the south side to the gravel spit on the north side of the river's mouth (see Michael 1967: 95-102, for Zagoskin's account of 1842).

The tiny Unalakleet population was composed of Central (mainland) Yupik speakers when the hut was erected. Because there were but thirteen survivors in the village, the Russian-American Company's representative, Zagoskin, beckoned the Malemiut from the Norton Bay region to the north to trade in Unalakleet. Many Malemiut, who spoke Inupiaq rather than Central Yupik, did so. They also stayed and colonized the village along with the remnant Yupik population.

In 1866, immediately prior to the Seward Purchase, Western Union Telegraph designated Unalakleet as its headquarters for one section of its projected transoceanic line (Whymper 1869; Dall 1870). The trading hut was operating when Western Union arrived in 1866. In less than 30 years since the Malemiuts were first beckoned by Zagoskin, the village had become the home to two groups of Inupiaq speakers—Malemiuts and Kaweraks—in addition to the local Yupiks (known as Unalits) (Whymper

1869: 167; Dall 1870: 24). Some Russian-Eskimo admixture had occurred.

Map 8 represents the pre-1836 locations identified by Edward Nelson in 1877 for the Yupik-speaking Unalit, or Unalaqlingmiut, the Malemiut, and the Kawerak (E. Nelson 1899: 24). Caribou, which had been abundant along the Norton Coast in 1840 and were an important attraction for Malemiut and Kawerak hunters and trappers in the 1840s, had disappeared from the area by 1880. This disappearance, not uncommon to caribou, which are especially prone to overpopulation and subsequent famine, occasioned a great reduction of Malemiut settlements in the Unalakleet area by 1880 as they sought meat to feed themselves and their dogs (see Burch 1975 for interpretations of the decline of resources during the period).

Nelson's (1899) massive ethnography of the several Eskimo groups around the Bering Strait focuses principally on the techniques and tools employed by Eskimos to obtain their livelihoods, provide shelter, transport themselves and their belongings, and the like. The resources harvested by Norton Sound Eskimos in the late nineteenth century were for the most part similar to the resources harvested by their forebears during the previous three millennia and to those harvested by the contemporary residents of Unalakleet. The variety of fish, land mammals, sea mammals, birds, and plants was great.

Ivan Petroff counted 100 persons in Unalakleet in 1884. Smaller settlements, such as Iktigalik, were located upriver. The Reverend Axel Karlsen established a mission in Unalakleet for the Swedish Evangelical Mission Church of America in 1887, remaining there until he died and was buried in 1910 (Correll 1974). Karlsen is credited with stifling and eventually eradicating traditional gatherings, especially plays and feasts, traditional entertainments, especially dancing and singing, and discrediting and hence eradicating shamans. He was instrumental in opening a school in 1899 (later to become the Covenant School), a ministry to service the sick and the aged, and a home for children. Karlsen also encouraged the residents of Unalakleet to develop gardens for potatoes, onions, and a wide variety of cool season, green vegetables.

Map 8.
Distribution of Unalit (Yupik), Malemiut (Inupiaq), 
and Kawerak (Inupiaq) About 1836 (from Nelson 1899)

Jackson established a reindeer herd in Unalakleet in 1894 (Stern et al. 1980). The first superintendent of the reindeer station was the Reverend Axel Karlsen. Although purchased with federal funds for natives, the herd was in the private ownership of Karlsen's church, with parts of it belonging to the 150 Lapp reindeer herders who were brought from Norway to maintain the herd and to teach local natives to become pastoralists (see Stern et al. 1980:26-36; Correll 1974: 70-72). In 1902, as many reindeer were owned by missions and other non-Eskimos in Alaska as were owned by Eskimos (Stern et al. 1980: 28).

The reindeer herds declined and were reestablished at least three times between 1894 and 1940, when the reindeer were sold to the federal government. The federal government then redistributed the reindeer to local Eskimos. The Unalakleet herd was gone by 1966. A herd remains at nearby Shaktoolik.

In 1939, the village of Unalakleet ratified a constitution under provisions of the Indian Reorganization Act as it was extended to Alaskan natives in 1988 (52 Stat. 393). A reservation was established two years later. The IRA government, converted to the village's nonprofit corporation in 1971 following ANCSA (which dissolved IRAs but allowed them to return as nonprofit corporations), has remained intact and in operation since 1939.

During World War II, a U.S. Army base was established on a hill about 3.5 miles directly north of town. The base was dismantled following the war. In the mid-1950s, a U.S. Air Force radar station was erected on 8,000 acres on a hill adjacent to the east side of town. With the advent of satellites, the station was decommissioned in a haphazard fashion in 1974 (leaving transmission towers positioned above the Unalakleet River whose cones were filled with PCBs, noxious and volatile chemicals in drums, batteries exposed on ledges, drums of oil and gasoline, and the like).

Although the military bases were self-sustaining, Unalakleet residents recalled that during the occupancies at the bases the military personnel hunted and fished in areas formerly used exclusively by natives and that during the 1950s and 1960s in

particular, they found it more difficult than previously to extract the resources that they required for subsistence. Indeed, it was recalled that the North River area was filled with military personnel and boats during the fishing season and by hunters during fall and spring. According to native informants, they requested the officers at the air base to prohibit military personnel from hunting and fishing in the area, and they complied.

Pressures on local hunting areas were not caused by military personnel alone. After World War II, residents from small villages near Unalakleet began to relocate there, while Unalakleet began to grow through natural increase as well. Between 1880 and 1910, Unalakleet's population grew from 100 to 247 (147 percent). The increase must have been due in large part to in-migration. Between 1910 and 1930, the population increased by only 14 people, to 261. The worldwide flu epidemic during that period killed many natives. Persons from smaller hamlets nearby sought refuge in Unalakleet—the reverse of the response on St. Lawrence Island.

In the period prior to World War II, Unalakleet villagers were almost entirely dependent on natural occurring resources. Shotguns and rifles had been in use locally since the 1920s and some motorized boats since the 1930s. But dog traction was the dominant form of transportation on land and paddles and human energy on water. Dogs had to be fed regularly, so their needs, too, constrained village size.

Following World War II, some Unalakleet men who had served in the military returned with modest amounts of cash and used it to buy boats for family subsistence uses but also for a nascent but intermittent commercial fishing industry.

Trucks were brought to both the army base and the radar station by the military. Subsequently, over the following twenty-five years, outboard motors became commonplace, rather than rare, and during the 1960s, snowmachines became widely used. Since the 1970s, ATCs and even trucks and cars were acquired by institutions, such as churches, schools, and the village corporation (and some persons).

Rifles and shotguns became the dominant means of securing quarry in the 1970s as weirs, traps, and snares became less popular. Traps became restricted primarily for use in acquiring

fur-beating animals. Dog ownership and use decreased, and jobs and programs made available through the village IRA government and through the Covenant Church increased the cash flow in (and out of) the local economy.

By 1950, the village population had increased to 469 from the 261 of two decades earlier. A second great spurt in village population, far outstripping an annual natural increase rate of 2.5 over twenty years, most probably occurred soon after World War II and is attributable to inmigration from the smaller hamlets nearby—Golsovia, Egavik, Klikitarik, and upriver locales.

Climbs and Plunges in the Unalakleet Population

Between 1950 and 1960, Unalakleet's population grew by about 100 people to 574, only to plunge to 434 in 1970. The much slower growth rate between 1950 and 1960 and the plunge between 1960 and 1970 can be attributed in large part to federal policies and programs. The Selective Service draft and the BIA relocation programs were most instrumental. Unalakleet residents were drafted and volunteered for military service during the Korean and Vietnam wars. The Relocation and Employment Assistance programs of the 1950s and 1960s, which were made available to Unalakleet villagers through the local IRA, provided transportation for villagers to Anchorage, Seattle, and other cities and on-the-job training when they arrived. The Employment Assistance Program focused on the relocation of entire families, not just individual trainees. These BIA programs were designed so as to permanently relocate enrolled reservation natives in urban areas where they could sever their ties with their reservation communities and be integrated into the economies of cities (see Jorgensen 1978a : 22-27).

Unalakleet children were encouraged to leave the village for additional schooling, and many did, attending the BIA's Mount Edgecombe School in Sitka (southeastern Alaska) and going on to college at Haskell Institute (Lawrence, Kansas) or the University of Alaska, often with B IA assistance or entitlements through legislation in the Johnson administration's "War on Poverty."

Alaska achieved statehood during this same period (1959),

and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) assumed control of fishing and hunting throughout the state. By 1960, the commercial fisheries division of the ADF&G had determined that a profitable commercial fishery could be established in Norton Sound. That agency established some regulations encouraging natives to take part in it, which some did. Along with commercial trapping, the village had established its second commercial, market-dependent venture. Both of these economic ventures were solely dependent on the harvests of naturally occurring, renewable resources—some of the same resources on which their subsistence depended.

The Lure of a Homeland and Public Sector Benefits

If Unalakleet families and individuals were pulled or pushed from Unalakleet in the late 1950s and 1960s for military service, education, or employment through government programs, so were they drawn back to Unalakleet by the monumental force of ANCSA, work made available along the trans-Alaskan oil pipeline that followed ANCSA, the desire to use Unalakleet as home and a base of operations, and the desire to reengage in a subsistence life-style that now held the promise of some employment. Fully twenty-one years before the ratification of ANCSA, and eight years before the awarding of statehood to Alaska, Frank Degnan, a native resident of Unalakleet, was elected to the Territorial House of Representatives. When statehood was conferred in 1050, Degnan was elected to the Alaska House of Representatives. He represented Unalakleet very well, using his influence to bring state and federal programs to Unalakleet during his tenure in territorial and state government.

In large part from Degnan's work, Unalakleet benefited from new houses, sewers, electricity, and schools. These factors coalesced to make life somewhat simpler and more convenient for residents of Unalakleet, emboldened children to stay in the village beyond their public school years, and encouraged former residents to return. It also made it a prime center for secondary regional development, catching Nome's overflow.

In 1070, just prior to the passage of ANCSA, the village cen-

sus tallied 434 residents, but a decade later, that population had increased to 632, and a scant two years later, in 1982, a census taken by the city of Unalakleet put the total at 790. In our field research, we counted 200 persons who had returned to Unalakleet from locales outside the village between 1071 and 1982. All did not stay and some died, but the return rate was remarkable.

Unalakleet has had a relatively large nonnative population since 1894. These persons almost always leave the village when their employment terminates or when they retire, so some growth and decline is attributable to them. When natives return, they much more frequently stay.

What is unique is the total size of the present population. It is not dear whether the population, so dependent on naturally occurring resources for sustenance and for access to the private sector economy, can be sustained by the environment. For example, in addition to the large population, interest in dog teams has been renewed by the 1,049-mile Iditarod race, which passes through the village. Between the late 1970s and early 1980s, several dog teams were added to the village total annually. These animals require food that is, for the most part, harvested locally.

In 1971, with the passage of ANCSA, changes within the villages accelerated. Those changes of the past decade have been large and obvious in Unalakleet. New technologies have altered the daily and weekly routines and provide marked contrasts with village life of the 1960s. Four-wheel-drive vehicles are driven very short distances (about one or two city blocks), through tunnels of snow, to the grocery store, for instance. Yet the new technologies are preeminently convenient overlays to traditional society rather than the harbingers of an imminent transformation of Unalakleet society away from a subsistence base. As one village leader said, "We take whatever technology works and shape it to our own purposes and uses. . .. Apparently that bothers people who want us to remain pristine, or to admit our contradictions of wanting technology and controlling and preserving the natural resources for our own use. . .. Why not? We've always accepted and reshaped technology that works for our own purposes." This practical

Figure 3.
Unalakleet Population, Over 146 Years (1836-1982), at Unequal Intervals^*

statement addresses the question of contradiction in subsistence and technology as well as it can be addressed.

Wainwright and The North Slope

In 1848, about 900 vessels had been hunting whales south of the Bering Strait, when the Superior , under Captain Thomas Roys, became the first whaling vessel to push through the Bering Strait into the Arctic Ocean. The Superiors success touched off a rush to the Arctic Ocean the next year (Bockstoce 1978). Nonnative whalers engaged in these early activities intermarried with the Inupiat, and today many Wainwright people trace their ancestry to nonnative whalers of this period.

Demand for whale oil and other by-products, such as baleen for corsets, continued for another seventy years. Because outcroppings of coal occur near what is now Wainwright, mines were opened in the late 1880s, and natives located there to mine

the coal, which was used by the steam whalers that plied the arctic seas. The natives also began hunting, selling the meat as a commodity, to supply the whalers with food.

As late as 1881, there were at least five Inupiat settlements within a twenty-five mile radius of the Kuuk Lagoon (Murdoch 1892: 44). The inhabitants of these settlements migrated from the coast to the interior or from the interior to the coast during the seasonal changes. So there were local native populations from which laborers could be drawn to assist whaling operations, and those populations could also be educated and converted to Christianity by Christian missionaries.

Jackson sought to introduce education, Christianity, and economic self-sufficiency to Wainwrighters much as he, or his agents, had to villagers in Gambell and Unalakleet. In 1904, nearly two decades after the first disruptions from nonnative contact, the village of Wainwright became more formalized when Jackson had the federal government build a schoolhouse there (Milan 1964).

Jackson also introduced a reindeer herd into the region in 1904 (Jackson 1904). From the five or so settlements around Wainwright, Jackson enlisted the Kuugmiut people (from the environs of the Kuuk River and the coasts around Wainwright) and the Utuggagmiut (from the area around Icy Cape and the Utukok River, to the east and south of Wainwright) to manage the herd (Ivie and Schneider 1979: 76; Schneider and Libby 1979; Brostad 1975).

In 1918, Arthur James Allen, working as an agent of the H. B. Liebs Corporation, set up a whaling station and trading post at Wainwright, even though the baleen market had crumbled eleven years earlier (Gusey 1983: 75). Apparently, Allen was able to find a market because his crew operated into the 1940s, long after commercial whaling was dead and trading interests had refocused on fur trapping.

As the importance of whaling decreased in the first decade of the twentieth century, the importance of fur trading increased, only to decline during the Great Depression. But for two or three decades, it was common practice for trading posts to be operated as cooperative ventures between whites and Inupiat (Schneider and Libby 1979: 44).

The population of Wainwright rose and fell over the period from 1890 to 1970, enjoying the booms and busts of whaling, coal mining, reindeer herding, trapping, and trading fox pelts. Only Christianity and the education system endured. As figure 4 demonstrates, the population was under 100 through 1920, even though a reindeer station had been established at Wainwright in 1904. But with the expansion of the school in the early 1920s, the population grew from the immigration of families that came from small villages scattered along the Kuuk and Icy Cape regions.

A peak of 392 residents was reached in a census taken by the school in 1940. The population, including three whites, hovered in the 350 to 390 range throughout the 1940s but dropped dramatically in the late 1940s and early 1950s as about one-third of the population moved to Barrow. Recovery from the mid-1950s was slow, and by 1970, the population was still only 80 percent of what it had been in 1940.

The benefits made available to North Slope natives with the passage of ANCSA, the development of the oil pipeline, and the creation of the North Slope Borough's taxing authority occasioned an aggregate population increase of 54 percent over the following thirteen years. These population dynamics are similar to those for Gambell and Unalakleet, as we have seen.

Comparative Population Daynamics

The populations of the three villages have not been static over the past century. The worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918 affected all three village populations by drawing residents from smaller villages to larger ones (Wainwright and Unalakleet) and by temporarily dispersing the Gambell population. The colonizing of Savoonga in 1917 also added to the decline of the Gambell population. The considerable downturns in population in Wainwright (1950) and Unalakleet (1960) were stimulated by federal government programs, as were the marked upturns in all three villages after 1970. The role of public policy has weighed very heavily in the population dynamics of Eskimo villages for eighty years. The sizes of the three communities, large by comparison to most Alaskan Eskimo villages but small

Figure 4.
Wainwright Population, Over 93 Years (1890-1983), at Unequal Intervals^*

Figure 5.
Population Trend Lines, Unalakleet, Gambell, and Wainwright (1880-1982)^*

in comparison to Bethel, Nome, Kotzebue, and Barrow, may be too great to allow for complete, successful reversion to total reliance on naturally occurring resources for subsistence. The growth of Gambell, although clearly accelerated by the events of the early 1970s, maintained a steadier internal rate than the growth of the other two villages between 1930 and 1970.

4
The Availability and Harvesting of Naturally Occurring Resources: Subsistence Economy, Part 1

Introduction

"Economics" will be used here as a generic term that refers to any full system of production, subsuming production, exchange, distribution, and consumption. The term "subsistence economics" refers to a specific mode of production. It comprises the organization of labor that is required to extract, process, and store naturally occurring resources; the organization of distribution required to share, gift, or reciprocate those resources; and the patterns of consumption of those resources that can be observed. The natural resources themselves occur and persist without human planning or manipulation. Human activities can, of course, interrupt the growth, even the existence, of these natural resources, but in the absence of man and his activities, they will continue to exist, even if other natural events periodically limit their growth or distribution.

The economics of subsistence in the Alaskan arctic and sub-arctic has undergone gradual changes over the past 120 years. In the mid-seventeenth century, and probably earlier, native trade networks connected groups from the Alaskan interior to Siberia. The connections were so complex as to comprise a single, unbounded network, a large exchange system in which, for the most part, neighbors bartered goods produced as by-products from naturally occurring resources (e.g., wooden con-miners, wooden ladles, oil rendered from seal blubber, pelts from fur-bearers, caribou hides, carved ivory).

Although the network organized neighbors into barter relationships, often through trade partnerships between persons, some goods produced in the interior of Alaska made their way to European merchants in Russia. Cash was not known, nor was the concept of capital. So cash was not exchanged among Alaskan natives, nor was capital accumulated, but exchanging for desired goods—goods that were shared with kinspersons and friends—was an important stimulus to trade.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the Russians organized the North Alaskan fur trade, which marked the beginning of a series of changes in which Alaskan natives became integrated into the peripheries of the world political economy. The Russians expropriated native land by discovery, then sold that land to the United States, while denying native claims to it. At this very time, natives in the Bering Sea region, including St. Lawrence Island residents, began selling their labor to commercial whalers from Europe and the United States. By the late nineteenth century, the residents of the Wainwright region were selling their labor not only to commercial whaling operators but also to a coal mine operator at Wainwright. And following the collapse of the commercial whaling industry in the Arctic Ocean, Wainwright hunters began journeying several hundred miles south to Unalakleet to trade pelts directly with the Alaska Commercial Company. By the 1930s, a few Unalakleet natives were acquiring motorboats, and soon after World War II, some Unalakleet men were acquiring large commercial set nets, as they entered the commercial fishing industry.

Thus, before the turn of the century, Eskimos from Unalakleet to Wainwright had had their land expropriated, de jure if not de facto, by Czarist Russia—only to have it sold subsequently to the United States. They came into regular trade relations with merchants and middlemen wherein they exchanged by-products from naturally occurring resources for goods, such as knives, axes, and wooden and metal containers. The United States imposed its authority over the Eskimos, established schools, established reindeer herds, and, through a plethora of federal laws, exercised controls over their societies and their lives, while drawing them ever deeper into the public sector of the economy.

The capitalist political economy into which Alaskan Eskimos were being integrated brought them to the edges of the market. Labor, goods, and public sector transfers became the means by which Eskimos gained cash to purchase items that assisted them in their subsistence harvests.

Currently, the technology that can be purchased from public and private sources of income has altered the organization of extraction, while becoming deeply embedded within it. Snow-machines have replaced dog traction; motorboats have replaced the kayak (kayaq ) and, for the most part, the umiak (umiaq ). Rifles and guns have replaced many nets, snares, and traps. Time allocations for harvests have been changed markedly. Even the organization of labor for extraction of many species has changed. Furthermore, the kinds and amounts of resources that are harvested have changed.

On some occasions, and for some purposes, a woman drives her own snowmachine, usually alongside her husband on his. A few women in Wainwright and Unalakleet own rifles, which they use to hunt caribou and even moose and seals in the case of at least one Unalakleet woman. And women serve on a few Gambell walrus crews. These are marked departures from past practices, in which tools of the hunt, men's tools, could not be touched by women; in which tools used to extract animals of the sea could not be used to extract animals of the land; and in which men, exclusively, were the hunters. Women prepared and stored the bag and produced the by-products.

As reported above, Eskimos are well aware of the advantages of new technologies for subsistence, and they seek to acquire whatever equipment will assist them in their subsistence tasks. The influx of cash from several sources and the consequences of institutional programs, which have focused on changing Eskimo housing, education, health, and the like, have also occasioned the change from extended family households to a predominance of nuclear family households, and with it have come changes in some aspects of the organization of extraction.

Whether it has always been so, I certainly do not know, but one overriding feature of subsistence extraction in all three villages for every species extracted—from hooking crabs to shooting doubles on cranes (bagging two birds with one shot)—is the

obvious pleasure derived from the activity. The hunt is a good time, a challenge. Indeed, subsistence activities have many of the features of sport hunting and fishing. For example, in a draft report on harvests at Unalakleet, I wrote (Jorgensen and Maxwell 1984a) that when villagers cleaned their set nets, they usually grabbed their spinning rods and sought to catch a few salmon on hook and line—a most inefficient but decidedly pleasurable task.

The Minerals Management Service personnel who read the report were incredulous. They had never read of or heard about Eskimos engaging in such avowedly pleasurable subsistence activities, and they wondered whether Eskimos in any other villages acted in this fashion. Not only do they pull out spinning tackle in Gambell and Wainwright but they do so in all of the villages. Jigging through the winter ice for fish, hunting walrus, or shooting geese while fooling them with expert calls, to cite a few examples, are delightful and desired, as well as necessary, activities.

The question of "necessity" should not be narrowly interpreted. I simply mean that whereas it is necessary to procure resources for sustenance, pleasure is part of the extraction experience. But it is surely not necessary to extract all types of edible resources in a habitat or to place equal weight and value on all resources. Villagers in all three villages forego some resources that are available in their habitats. So, it is clearly not necessary to harvest anything and everything. Choices are made, and those choices are conditioned by many factors, including knowledge, experience, taste, transportation requirements, hourly work requirements, vagaries of weather, and natural disasters.

In Wainwright, for instance, the residents choose not to harvest lemmings, brown bears, and dozens of locally occurring fish and avian species. In Gambell, the tundra vole is passed by. In Unalakleet, blackfish and several varieties of birds are seldom extracted. Furthermore, as animals become available in areas in which they did not occur previously, or at least did not occur in great numbers, the natives often make only casual efforts to harvest them. Such is the case for walrus for Unalakleet hunters and moose for Wainwright hunters. Yet in both instances, hunt-

ers are increasing their takes of these animals as they gain experience with them.

The point is that the subsistence economies of the 1980s in the three villages are not the same as they were in the 1950s or 1060s and certainly not the same as they were in the 1920s. It is not "necessary" to extract every edible species in each habitat. Preferences change; skills and knowledge change; even requirements for transportation change: the liberation from dog traction and the reliance on motorboats, snowmachines, and ATCs have unmistakably altered native choices about resources as well as the amounts of resources that must be harvested. And subsistence pursuits are not merely fun, or sport, or activities that take an Eskimo's mind off his (or her) wage employment. Eskimos desire to acquire and eat native foods, and they depend on native foods for their sustenance; that is, subsistence pursuits are necessary to natives.

The changes that have occurred to the organization of extraction are consonant with the instrumental way in which natives in all three villages accommodate themselves to their environments and to the equipment that allows them to cope more efficiently in the procurement of many species. And even if the influx of cash and the programs of various institutions—from the federal government to village nonprofit corporations—have altered family household organizations, still the organization of distribution, the patterns of consumption, and the ideology of kinship and friendship obligations with respect to subsistence have changed very little. Eskimo subsistence is not nuclearized or private, nor is it engaged in for personal gain.

The Modern Subsistence Economy

Modern subsistence economies integrate modem technologies and the sources of income required to maintain them. There is no doubt that the modern versions of the subsistence economies of Gambell, Unalakleet, and Wainwright are different from the general arctic and subarctic subsistence economies of twenty-five years ago. Nevertheless, they remain quintessentially subsistence economies in their organizations of production: ownership, control, labor, distribution, consumption.

Let me explain what I mean by a "quintessentially subsistence economy."

Subsistence modes of production, literally of extraction, in the three arctic and subarctic villages in this study can be distinguished from other economic forms by several factors in addition to their direct and intimate links to naturally occurring resources. First, subsistence modes of production lack well-developed market systems. The producer consumes his own product, although he is not the sole consumer of his product. Nevertheless, middlemen are not inserted between the producer and the consumer. Nor are permanent locations or structures set aside for the exclusive purpose of exchanges of goods. Second, while exchanges of processed or unprocessed resources for services do occur, these are relatively rare and do not provide the energizing force of the system. Third, in a subsistence economy, labor is not a commodity that can be bought and sold in the marketplace.

A fourth characteristic is that neither the extracted resources themselves nor the labor required for extracting and processing them are converted to capital. Since capital accumulation does not occur, the savings of renewable resources for future sales is limited as a motivator of human activity. However, resources are preserved and stored to sustain human Fife. Forces such as wind, water, and changes in temperature, as well as biological processes, render difficult any form of long-term storage (periods beyond one or two years). The technological requirements for overcoming these forces and processes are either very expensive or unavailable. Resources are therefore stored and subsequently distributed to maintain life, but they are not stored for future sale and the conversion to capital.

The fifth distinguishing characteristic may be found in the distribution pattern used in subsistence economies. Distribution of resources in subsistence economies is, for the most part, based on family, extended kinspersons, friendship, and village networks. Goods except at community festivals, when they may be pooled—are not distributed to people outside the established personal networks. The absence of specialization within a subsistence economy is a sixth distinguishing feature. An individual's productive activity is built on a broad spectrum of

skills, which are directed toward a wide range of products and species.

A seventh and final factor, one closely related to the previous six, is the fact that productive activities are directly linked to procuring food and shelter for the maintenance of life itself. This final factor elicits an image of an individualistic economic structure. In fact, however, the social fabric in which the subsistence economy is embedded is crucial within and among communities.

Subsistence, the Political Economy, and Cash

A long history of trapping (commodity), whaling (labor), coal mining (labor), fishing (commodity), public sector employment and transfers, and federal and, more recently, state relations and controls has drawn native villages ever deeper into public sector dependencies, as their traditional lands and resources have been expropriated. The interplay among the cash derived from public and private sector economic activities, the technology for subsistence and commercial activities, and the persistence of the subsistence economy will be discussed in part throughout this and the following four chapters, but the theory that accounts for the persistence of native subsistence economies in Alaska will be proposed in chapter 9. With this in mind, let Us explain the cycle of naturally occurring, renewable species that are extracted by residents of the three villages and the organizations that exist for extracting and distributing those resources, including strategies and planning.

Introduction to Culture and Nature at Gambell, Unalakleet, and Wainwright

No one season or month begins the subsistence year at any of the three villages, so the beginning point for our periodization is somewhat arbitrary, fitted as it is to the Gregorian calendar, which cuts the arctic and subarctic winter season in half. This is true, even though the three villages differ among themselves in habitat and in the variety and amounts of naturally occurring resources that are available to them. Wainwright is, after all,

arctic, whereas Gambell and Unalakleet are subarctic. Nevertheless, the winters are long and the summers short at all three villages, and the activities that are conducted at such feverish pace during the summers at all three villages are the necessary prelude to the long and demanding winters.

The residents of Gambell extract resources over about half of the length of the island and 30 miles and more from shore in the northern Bering Sea, sharing their bag, catches, and collections with their kinspersons from Savoonga. The Savoonga residents, who use roughly the other half of the island, share the products of their efforts with their kinspersons in Gambell. In this way, the territorial range of families in each village is increased. The distance between the two villages is 48 miles. This is an important factor for island residents and should not escape our attention.

Although millions of birds nest or pass across the island each year, and although thousands of sea mammals summer in the vicinity of Gambell, St. Lawrence Island's resources are limited in comparison with those of Unalakleet and Wainwright. Furthermore, access to the resources on which island subsistence is based is often constrained by weather conditions even more than is the case for either Wainwright or Unalakleet. Because of the absolute limits on island resources, the long distances to the mainland, and the prohibition against hunting along the Siberian coast, gifting and sharing loom especially large in Gam-bell and Savoonga, especially since residents from either, or both, can come on hard times during long winter periods in which stored foods are depleted and fresh quarry cannot be added to the larder.

In Unalakleet, the native foods that are extracted and enjoyed by the residents become ready at different times of the year, but there is no time when at least some native food that is important to the local diet is not available. Native foods are sought throughout the year, whenever people have the need or "taste" for them and the means, and weather, and travel conditions to go for them. ("Taste" is used in our discussions of all three villages to convey the idea that some food is desired at a certain moment or during a certain season. The amount desired may be small, but whatever the amount is, it is desired.)

The subsistence resources on which people rely are numerous, and several are abundant during the season in which they occur. Most of these resources are available and harvested within a 60-mile radius of town: along the length of the Unalakleet River valley and its tributary river valleys, north and south along the coast, and about 30 to 80 miles west into Norton Sound. Winter caribou hunts, however, frequently are conducted more than 100 miles northeast of the village. Four- and five-day hunting trips engaged in by as many as a dozen men on snowmachines are commonplace.

Wainwright lies on the tundra well above the Arctic Circle. Its environs do not produce the wide spectrum of fauna found near Unalakleet. However, certain species of mammals and fish are seasonally and locally abundant. Normally, caribou are abundant in the late summer and fall and available through most of the year. In the spring, ducks and geese migrate through the area in vast numbers. In 1982, Luton (1985) observed a man and wife net nearly seventy chum salmon in a single day in front of town, while thousands of walrus drifted by on ice floes.

In the early 1980s, several hunting trips for Dall sheep were undertaken from Wainwright. One of these trips took four days by snowmachine into the Brooks Range. Yet even when such extraordinary hunts are excluded, the people of Wainwright continue today—as they did in the past—to extract resources distributed across vast areas of land and sea (see Pederson 1979). In 1982, during the field investigation period of this study, people frequently traveled by snowmachine 150 miles or more inland into the foothills of the Brooks Range to hunt. The cabins of many Wainwrighters are located 50 miles and more up the Kuuk River. People traveled to Atqasuk on the Mead River to fish. Still others hunted around Icy Cape or fished on the Utukok. In 1982, one of the two Wainwright whales was taken off Atanik, 25 miles northeast of town. A boatload of Wainwright walrus hunters was temporarily stranded more than 100 miles to the north, on the ice near Barrow.

Such travels expand the types of environments that are exploited by Wainwrighters, as they do for Unalakleet villagers. Wider environments add to the types of flora and fauna they

encounter and increase the times at which natural resources can be extracted in abundance. But long trips by snowmachine are expensive, and even the most carefully laid plans can founder on the unexpected behavior of a species (e.g., caribou may have migrated in an unpredicted direction), the breakdown of equipment (snowmachines, pack sleds, or the like), or the occurrence of extremely harsh and protracted storms. The need to carry sufficient fuel to reach far distant hunting sites restricts the amounts of quarry that can be returned to the village.

It is the case in all the villages that people look to the land and its rivers, to the sea, and to the skies for their subsistence needs. The resources they harvest for food come from all three. The land and the sea provide certain resources year-round, and others do so seasonally. In the midst of an environment yielding numerous and sometimes abundant resources, people nevertheless must work hard at the harvest, and they must acquire and constantly draw on a considerable store of knowledge about the resources and the natural conditions to be able to meet their subsistence needs each year.

Seasonal Harvests

The three villages do not acquire the bulk of their subsistence resources during identical seasons—a reflection of the different environments in which they are located and to which the residents of each have adapted over past centuries. Gambell natives acquire the majority of their food supply during the spring (walrus and whales), while many fewer resources are available to Gambell residents than to the natives in either of the other two villages during the long winter season. The bulk of the food stored and eaten in Unalakleet is acquired during the summer (fish, in particular), but several different kinds of resources are available to them throughout the year. The bulk of the naturally occurring resources eaten in Wainwright are harvested in the spring (whales) and in the late summer and fall. (Caribou, the staple, is available throughout most of the year.)

None of the villages harvests the majority of resources during the long winter season, which starts a few days to a couple of weeks after the autumnal equinox and begins to abate a short

time after the vernal equinox. Leads begin to appear in the Bering Sea ice near St. Lawrence Island in late March, signaling the onset of the most active and productive sea mammal hunting season—the staple of Gambell villager life. In Unalakleet, the onset of spring activities begins with bearded seal hunting, usually in April, but the most feverish harvesting pace commences with the roe-on-kelp collecting and the salmon runs during early June. The leads appear in the Chukchi Sea ice, accompanied by sea mammals, in late April or early May, about a month later than at Gambell. Although sea mammals contribute to Wainwright villager subsistence, they do not contribute nearly so much to the total local diet as they did twenty years ago (the bowhead and beluga whales remain as large and highly preferred portions of the diet). The main activities of the subsistence cycle at Wainwright, that is, the period in which Wainwright villagers harvest the majority of the resources that carry them through the year, begin in July, with the most intense caribou hunting activities.

Thus, the principal harvesting activities for the three villages all begin during the period of ice breakup, but they begin in earnest for Unalakleet and Wainwright residents considerably later than at Gambell. Furthermore, the three villages focus their attention on different species for their main staples.

Figure 6 provides a gross comparison of the relative abundance of the harvests of naturally occurring resources among the three villages. Although the inhabitants of all three villages were—for several centuries and continuing into the recent past—heavy extractors of sea mammals, in the 1980s, sea mammals provide the bulk of harvested natural resources only in Gambell. For the present, at least, more important contributions to subsistence than those made by sea mammals are made by fish in Unalakleet, while whales and caribou provide approximately equal contributions in Wainwright. Nevertheless, in all three villages, whales are the most desired animals, although not even in Gambell do they make up the single largest contribution to diet or to by-products.

Whether they are participating in the hunt, or in ceremonies sponsored after whale hunts, or in gifting, sharing, and eating the various parts of the whale, Eskimos see this animal as the

Figure 6.
 Yearly Subsistence Cycles, Three Villages, 1981-1982^*

single most important symbol connecting them to their own place, to their histories. Former villagers residing in Anchorage or Seattle, for instance, long for a "taste" of maktak (whale skin with blubber attached) and whale meat. They rejoice when their relatives send them "CARE" (the term used by natives) packages that include either a bit of maktak or some whale meat. To hear Eskimos talk about their desire to taste whale and about the re-vitalization they experience when tasting it after a long period without impresses the observer that such persons feel as if they have had their cultural batteries recharged—shades of a totemic feast.

A second generalization to draw from figure 6 is that, with the exception of caribou and moose, the villagers in all three villages have access to similar kinds of resources. Unalakleet enjoys a more moderate climate and a greater variety of resources year-round than either Gambell or Wainwright. Yet it is probable that the biomass that is available for harvesting is more or less equal among the three villages. The significant differences among the villages tend to be strategic. Access to large quantifies of resources year-round is greater at Unalakleet. Furthermore, the principal resource harvested at Unalakleet—fish—is extracted with more efficient techniques than is possible for the extraction of staples at the other villages—sea mammals at Gam-bell, caribou at Wainwright.

What cannot be seen in figure 6 is the drastic reduction in the numbers of sea mammals harvested in all three villages since 1971, the year that ANCSA was passed and construction of the trans-Alaskan oil pipeline began. Although all three villages continue to harvest large numbers of sea mammals, and although the people of Gambell and its sister village, Savoonga, remain principally dependent on sea mammals for the majority of their diet, several factors have coalesced—some related and some not—to reduce the number of sea mammals taken in all three villages, even though the population of each has grown since 1971.

The principal factor in the decline of sea mammal harvesting is the dog population. Villages that as recently as 1970 had more dogs than people have in recent years had few dogs at all, other than a few pets. Dogs kept by families prior to 1971 were chiefly

mature, working animals. Litters were usually killed unless a family felt that it needed to replace one or more of its working animals. Mature working dogs, we estimate, consumed about 60 percent of the annual harvest—fish, caribou, but especially sea mammals. Several factors, including the number of dogs, coalesced to reduce the take of sea mammals. Other factors are snowmachines, motorboats, and ATCs, which reduced the time required to pursue, locate, and dispatch large land and sea mammals, while at the same time alleviating the need to feed dogs. The factor of employment income became important in purchasing and maintaining snowmachines, outboard motors, skiffs, ATCs, and electronic gear and also in purchasing fuel. By restricting access to some sea mammals, federal laws and international agreements also became significant factors.

Sea Mammals

The explanation for the reduced harvests of sea mammals is that there are no longer large numbers of dogs to be fed in the villages of Wainwright and Gambell. Indeed, there were no dog teams at all in Gambell in 1981-82 and only one dog team in Wainwright. (The team in Wainwright is used for sled racing, not hunting.) Before 1971, dogs and sleds were the major source of transportation in all three villages for six to eight months of each year. The hunting techniques employed by the villagers fired the limitations of their dog teams. Most important, hunting focused on bagging large quantifies of meat to feed the dogs. With the advent of snowmachines, dog traction became obsolete, and petroleum, a nonrenewable energy resource, replaced animal protein, a renewable energy resource. Dogs became too expensive to maintain, so they were either shot or allowed to die.

Various estimates have been offered about the daily meat consumption of working dogs during the winter and of non-working dogs in the summer. The ranges are four to seven pounds daily in the coldest periods and one-half pound daily during the ice-free periods (Bane n.d.; Spencer 1959; Milan 1964; Nelson 1969). Bane, who ran and hunted with a team in Wainwright for three years, conservatively estimated that the

average daily meat consumption of dogs on an annual basis was three pounds. Table 2 estimates the annual meat consumption by dogs for 1965 and 1982 and projects what the annual meat consumption by dogs would have been for 1982, if all households still relied on dog traction.

There are thirty-five dog teams used for sled racing and hunting in Unalakleet. Even with the recent increase in dog teams there, however, the aggregate reduction in tons of meat harvested for all villages dropped from 878 in 1965 to 137 in 1982. If dog traction had been maintained as the dominant mode of transportation, 1,624 tons of meat would have been required to feed the dog teams in the three villages in 1982—about twelve times as much meat as was consumed by dogs that year.

Should the three villages return to dog traction while maintaining their present sizes, the territories that would have to be covered to yield sufficient food for all families would undoubtedly be greater than the spaces from which subsistence resources currently are extracted to sustain the populations. It is conceivable that a return to total or near-total dog traction would necessitate the fissioning into smaller villages located at reasonable distances from one another so as to provide accessible strategic resources for all. Should villages break up and families relocate, concomitant changes in the organization of labor for extraction would undoubtedly occur. Yet it is my impression that the organization of distribution and consumption would change very little. The organization of those sectors of extraction will be developed in chapter 5.

Consequences of Using Snowmachines and Motorboats

The speed, pulling power, and ease of maintenance of snow-machines have had a remarkable impact on life in all three villages in a very short time. Men were enabled to extend their hunting ranges and bag game sufficient for their subsistence needs in less time than was possible when dog traction was employed. And about 60 percent less game had to be bagged, because there were no dogs to feed. Furthermore, men who once

traveled with their families, often in the company of other hunting families, found that it was possible to conduct many harvest pursuits alone, doing in a few hours what formerly took families several days to accomplish.

But snowmachines are not the sole technological items that have significantly altered Eskimo hunting practices: the advent of skiffs and outboard motors was instrumental in changing the composition of task groups for walrus hunting while increasing the potential bag of walrus and seals as well as the catches of

fish. Motorboats also made it possible for Unalakleet residents to engage in commercial fishing in Norton Sound, while simultaneously allowing other members of their families to fish for subsistence at strategic locations along the Unalakleet River.

Thus, for part of the year, the organization of labor for subsistence has been altered by the organization of labor required to harvest fish to be sold as a commodity. Yet harvesting fish for commercial sale has allowed for the purchase of boats, motors, and fuel, so that families can engage more efficiently in the subsistence economy. We can refer to this phenomenon as "feedback," but regardless of the name we attach to it, Unalakleet natives recognized the advantages of commercial fishing. Engaging in the activity necessitated the purchase of equipment that could be used for subsistence and commercial purposes. But once acquired, the equipment had to produce cash so that the speed and efficiency of the same equipment could be used for subsistence.

Walrus hunters at Gambell experienced a complementary phenomenon. Skiffs that could be used to acquire walrus for subsistence also had to be used to acquire ivory for carvings, to make it possible for the hunters to continue to use this fast, efficient equipment for subsistence pursuits. Public transfers of funds stepped into the breach for Wainwright villagers. But they will not do so forever, since the basis for the transfers is tax money from oil, which will not last forever.

Ice-edge hunting for seals and walrus, which was formerly done with dog traction, is much less common now than it was two decades ago in all three villages, as hunters in motorboats pursue their quarry in open leads, at haul-out areas, and on ice floes. Caribou, too, which float down the rivers and along the coast on large floes during spring breakup, are pursued in motorboats by Wainwright hunters. Caribou are also hunted by crews using motorboats during the summer periods to ply the rivers and locate the herds. Early each fall, Unalakleet hunters locate moose in this fashion. After freeze-up, caribou are pursued by Wainwright and Unalakleet hunters on snowmachines.

Large outlays of money for equipment, maintenance, and fuel were required to switch from dogs to motorized transportation. The transition, of course, tightly tied the subsistence

economies of the three villages to wage work and cash transfers of various kinds. That is not to say that subsistence activities and the market economy are inextricably bound. It appears that they could be extricated if necessary. It is to say, however, that subsistence activities at present consume a very large portion of the monies that flow into village households and that the organization of labor has changed with the advent of the uses of cash for subsistence pursuits.

Preferential Harvests As A Consequence of Income

Although the transition from dog traction to motorized traction had a striking impact on the reduction of overall takes of sea mammals by hunters in the three villages, access to tax revenues made possible by oil production at Prudhoe Bay has occasioned other dramatic changes in subsistence pursuits. These changes are restricted to the North Slope villagers. Because of the very unique changes in subsistence practices that occurred in Wainwright in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we break from the format we have pursued thus far and use the practices at Wainwright as the springboard for comparing differences in the practices at Unalakleet and Gambell.

The discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay, as an unintended consequence, stimulated the formation of the native-controlled NSB. The NSB gained some taxing authority over the oil that was pumped from Prudhoe, which resulted in the growth of government and government-related jobs and projects. Cash began to flow into NSB villages over a decade ago, and the subsistence harvests at Wainwright soon began to change.

Alaskan natives have preferences in food, as do other people around the world. And as employment and cash incomes became available to them, Wainwright natives began to reduce the number of species of land mammals, sea mammals, fish, birds, and marine invertebrates that they harvested annually. This does not mean that they reduced significantly the total amount of resources they harvested. Rather, with access to cash to buy the technology that would quicken their subsistence harvests, with less time to devote to subsistence pursuits, and with the

ability to withstand periods of native food shortages by making purchases at local stores, Wainwright natives began to change some of their practices.

By about 1980, most Wainwright residents could find employment at high rates of pay for a few months each year; perhaps two or more persons in the same household could find employment. There became less and less reason to pursue the less desired resources. The relatively large amount of cash available to them provided a flexibility of choice that was unimagined by and unavailable to earlier Wainwrighters, even during the whaling and fur-trading periods. Appendix C provides detailed information about the effects of preference on the harvests of various species.

Hunters in all three villages have discontinued the harvesting of the smallest rodents during the past twenty years, but Wainwright hunters, unlike their counterparts in Gambell and Unalakleet, have limited other harvests almost exclusively to the most desired species. For example, of 15 land mammal species available in the Wainwright region, only 5 are harvested, and 4 of them are harvested for their pelts. At Unalakleet, however, 18 out of 21 land mammal species are harvested.

The Wainwright people harvest only a few favored fish species—salmon, char, whitefish, and some saffron cod and smelt. Two decades ago, fish were used to feed dogs but also to tide families over during bad winter weather. Since then, fish have ceased making the difference for survival in Wainwright, although they still do so in Gambell and Unalakleet. Indeed, Gambell fishermen pursue some of the very fish and birds species that are either eschewed or disregarded at Wainwright, such as sculpin and auklets.

Birds, especially waterfowl, are a pleasure to hunt, and they bring high prestige to the most proficient hunters. Wainwright hunters have restricted their hunting almost exclusively to preferred species: they hunt only 16 percent of the avian species that are available in their environment. Unalakleet hunters seek 44 percent of the species available in their environment, and Gambell hunters seek 80 percent.

A similar state of affairs exists for the extraction of marine invertebrates. Luton (1985), while working in Wainwright dur-

ing 1983, perceived a relationship between the lull in capital improvement projects (CIPs) in the village, which had resulted in a downturn in employment, and the villagers' plans to harvest crabs. Thus, the choice to harvest preferred species appeared to be a function of access to cash and sufficient time to conduct the harvest. When times were bad, people immediately began thinking about alternative resource harvests. Even though subsistence harvests, then, dearly have been altered by a number of factors, the basic subsistence economies are very much intact. They simply reflect a balancing of preferences with the exigencies of the moment.

5
The Organization Of Extraction: Subsistence Economy, Part 2

Planning for Subsistence

Extraction of naturally occurring resources requires planning for the allocation of technology, the organization of labor, the approximate amount that should be extracted and stored, the amount that can be eaten fresh, as well as the distribution of fresh and stored goods, and, of course, the means by which cash can be obtained to pay for the technology and fuel used. In villages such as those we have been describing, people fine-tune their mental calendars each year, figuring for that year as precisely as they can in days or weeks the arrival of the foods, their duration and the best time of harvesting, and the speed at which they will follow each other. People depend largely on their own knowledge of the cycle and habits of the animals and plants, of the influence of weather and ice conditions on their availability, and of the signs they observe in nature that tell them more exactly what the year's calendar will be.^[1]

Just as they keep mental calendars, people also keep mental maps of the area and the locations within the area where each resource is usually located. To reactivate their mental maps each year, people again draw on their personal and family knowledge about animal and plant habits, about the influencing

[1] uch more extensive analyses of the annual resource harvesting cycle by groups of species for the three villages are presented in Jorgensen and Maxwell (1984), Little and Robbins (1984), and Luton (1985). All are available without charge from the SESP Section, Minerals Management Service, Department of Interior, 949 E. 36th Ave., Room 110, Anchorage, AL 99508-4302.

conditions, and about the signs they read in nature to figure out more exactly the location of food resources that particular year. In refining both their calendars and their maps, natives incorporate, as much as is possible, the huge quantity of information on resource availability that all of the local people exchange with each other.

A person's store of knowledge about food resources necessarily includes much more. To be able to satisfy a family's subsistence needs for a year, for example, people must be skilled at obtaining food resources, preparing them for consumption, and preserving them for later use. Residents of all three villages possess this know-how, based both on their elders' teachings and on their own experiences of land and sea hunting, fishing, and resource collecting. Once the resources have been located and extracted, people employ their knowledge of preservation and storage techniques to put away food for both their own and others' needs.

Subsistence needs are never simply individual, except in a short-term or immediate sense. On a yearly basis, people never use their stores of knowledge to obtain food resources solely for themselves. The planning and extracting of foods, and their preparation and preservation, are done with the needs of whole families in mind and, beyond that, with thoughts of the many occasions and reasons for giving to the elders and to relatives, friends, and neighbors. The giving of food and eating in the company of others have inestimable importance to life in all three villages—perhaps as much importance for social reasons of kinship and friendship and personal reasons of pleasure and sense of self-worth as for the economic reasons of subsistence need.

One aspect of subsistence is routine and practical and is rooted in teachings, experience, and daily reality. Subsisting involves acquiring and using a store of knowledge about the animals and plants; techniques for getting those resources under changeable weather, water, and ice conditions; and the techniques needed for preparing, preserving, and storing these resources. It involves the help that people give to one another in the work of pursuing, extracting, and processing the foods. It involves giving food to others who need or will enjoy eating

what they receive. It involves each of the trips taken from town or camp to go after whatever foods are in season. It involves butchering the game, cleaning and cutting the fish, and picking leaves and other debris from berries. It involves repairing and maintaining boats, motors, nets, all-terrain cycles, and snow-machines. It involves locating, cutting, transporting, and chopping wood. In Unalakleet (but almost not at all in Wainwright, and not at all in Gambell), it involves cooking for and feeding the dogs. It comprises a host of preparations and activities involving native foods and other sustaining resources.

A second aspect of subsistence gives meaning to daily practicality and routine. Subsisting also includes the responsibilities that people fulfill in providing for their families and caring for the older people and for other relatives, friends, and neighbors. In Gambell, that regularly means coordinating activities with clanspersons in Savoonga. It includes the pleasure that people derive from subsistence pursuits and from being out in the country. It includes the respect and reverence that people hold toward the land and the animals. It includes the understanding people have of the deeper connections between themselves as a people, the land and the sea, and the resources. The people know that these connections sustain not only their bodies but also their cultural and personal essences, giving them identity and meaning in their lives as persons and as a people. It is to these resources, and their relations to them, that villagers in all three communities assign significant meanings, the symbols of the realities that are their villages.

The Allocation of Cash and the Use of Modern Technologies

In all three villages, the harvesting of resources for the family food supply over a year's period requires many trips onto the ocean, up the rivers, over the tundra, along the shores and cliffs, and, for Unalakleet residents, into the woods. The trips vary in purpose: taking one or several specific resources is usually the object, but they also must be made to assess the readiness of resources for harvesting or to put subsistence equipment in place (e.g., to prepare camp, set nets, place traps and snares,

build blinds). When in quest of any natural resource, villagers are aware of, and look for, other resources that can be harvested besides those that are the primary purpose of the trip.

The length of a trip (in time and distance) and hence the extent of preparations and the investment made in it (fuel, ammunition, food, equipment) are principally determined by the main purpose of the trip. Trips can be as short as three hours, as when fish nets set dose to the villages are checked and cleaned or when eggs are harvested from nesting birds in the near vicinity. Many trips to harvest foods take a full day, such as when the villagers are collecting greens and berries, or jigging for fish through the ice several miles from the villages, or hunting for walrus. And many trips may take from a few days to several weeks. Unalakleet and Wainwright whale hunters and caribou hunters may be away for weeks at a time. Even the harvesting of herring and herring roe-on-kelp requires Unalakleet families to take trips lasting from three days to about a week. Hunts for moose, bearded seal, and the smaller seals may also be conducted during two- or three-week trips.

Residents of all three villages normally move their families to camps some distance from their home villages for a few weeks each year. Elderly persons and some young children are often left at the permanent homes in the village. This, of course, is an age-old practice of Eskimos during the summer period, when extracting activities are most feverish.

Residents of Gambell normally move their families to summer camps at inlets, river mouths, and bays located from about five to forty-five miles distant from Gamber along the shore of the island—especially the south shore—to fish and hunt birds. They also collect birds' eggs and plants of the land and sea at this time, making several return trips over land (ATC) or water (motorboat) to store the goods they extract.

At Unalakleet, spring bird hunting and sealing camps are set up a few miles south of the village along the Norton Sound shore. Women and children stay in the camps for a week or two, but the employed men will commute to the village each morning and return each evening to hunt. Each summer, particularly in July and August, fish camps are established from about six to fifty miles upriver, and permanent cabins are occupied by

most families. These camps may be occupied for as long as a month by most members of the family during the period of seining for silver salmon and char. But men usually stay longer, integrating their fishing activities with moose hunting and bird hunting, then venturing from the summer camps on caribou hunts, following freeze-up. In the fall, just prior to freeze-up, several families set up camps at the mouth of the Egavik River a few miles north of Unalakleet along Norton Sound where they harvest silver salmon and char and hunt seals.

Wainwright residents normally hunt along the coast during the summer, moving to their upriver camps to fish and to hunt caribou as those animals migrate inland during the fall. These encampments—usually made in permanent cabins but sometimes in tents located fifty miles and more from Wainwright—may be shortened by unforeseen circumstances, as is the case for all Eskimo extraction trips. The breakdown of a boat motor or snowmachine, poor travel and weather conditions, or the lack of resources may send persons home. However, especially favorable food harvest conditions or the chance meeting of a moose or several caribou crossing a river may extend trips.

The number of trips made to harvest resources during a season, and throughout the entire year, is always considerable. Each of the forty-one walrus crews in Gambell makes twenty or more trips annually in search of walrus, often in excess of sixty miles from the island. Before repairing to their summer camps, Unalakleet families dean their salmon nets every day over at least half of the salmon season by traveling from their homes in the village. Yet a single seining venture for silver salmon or for char may satisfy a family's need for those species for an entire year. Wainwright's villagers engage in special hunts for caribou in the fall, but during the long winter, men who normally hunt together may make a dozen short trips to hunt caribou.

The usual case in all three villages is that several trips are made for a particular resource or combination of resources. Weather—including temperature, fog, wind, rain, snow and sleet, ice, and travel conditions—can multiply or reduce the number and the length of trips. An extended rainy spell at the wrong time in summer or fall can spoil an entire batch of fish

hung for drying, as can an extended warm spell during the fall when natives are preparing kuaq , a fish or meat that is alternately frozen and thawed over the period of several days and nights. Either event necessitates additional trips, for collecting more of the same kinds of resources that were spoiled or to harvest replacement foods for those that were lost. A bad year for bearded Seals will send hunters out more often and for longer distances in search of them. Time limitations in all three communities, but especially Unalakleet and Wainwright because of the much higher rates of full-time employment there, are another factor that influences the frequency and duration of trips to harvest resources. In those communities, a person's job can shift most subsistence activity to weekends and the after-work hours of long daylight from late spring to early fall.

Among the trips taken are those for scouting out the availability of resources and their readiness for harvesting. While people know the seasons when particular resources become available, they are more acutely attuned to when the resources become prime (i.e., amount of fat, condition of the hides, ripeness) or to when the conditions for harvesting them are right. Seals, for example, approach their prime in the fall and sustain it through the winter. Eskimos say that when they take seals in the fall for their hides, meat, and blubber, the thickness of the seals' layers of fat indicates the type of winter to come, much as a rancher might forecast the severity of the coming winter from the thickness and length of a horse's coat of hair. Whereas the Eskimos believe that a very thick layer forecasts a long, hard winter, it may be that it indicates an abundance of salmon, herring, smelt, cod, and marine invertebrates in the seals' feeding grounds during the summer and fall.

Waterfowl are in their prime in the early fall, before migration, but they are also rested, well fed, eager to respond to the migratory imprinting, and less likely to respond to a hunter's call. As a result, more birds are taken in the spring, at the end of the northward migration and before mating, when they will respond to calling, at least at Unalakleet and Wainwright. On St. Lawrence Island, where it is estimated that over 2.7 million seabirds and waterfowl nest each spring, and on which hundreds of thousands of other birds stop on their annual migra-

tions, bird hunting abates slightly in the summer when the households move to their summer camps and focus on fishing and the collection of plants and eggs. Otherwise, bird hunting is a spring-through-fall activity.

Considerable advance preparation goes into the several-day or longer camp trips made to harvest resources. The same procedures are followed in all of the villages, and as interesting as the process of preparation is for harvesting resources in these imposing environments, the steps that are taken are seldom described in ethnographic accounts. All the necessary equipment for extracting the resources must be readied, the vehicles put in good condition, and the multitude of camp items gathered and packed. Even the planning for day trips is given dose attention, because the success or failure of the endeavor, as well as the safety of the members of the party, can depend on the preparations. The serious attention given to the preparations and the effort devoted to carrying them out are accompanied by a general air of enthusiasm for the trip and optimism about the hunting or fishing to come. Eskimos enjoy their subsistence life-styles—the planning, the trips, the challenge of obstacles to extracting, the camaraderie of the ventures, the beauty of the regions in which the strategic resources are located, the satisfaction of the accomplishment, and the genuine pleasure of sharing the bag.

Physical preparations consist of taking enough food from the family supply to feed or supplement the party's needs. This usually requires a trip to the store for some item, such as coffee or tea. Someone must secure fuel for the boat, ATC), or snow-machines. The equipment needed for the harvest must be assembled (e.g., firearms, ammunition, knives, fishing tackle, net, seine). Sufficient and appropriate clothing must be donned and packed. Accessories (flashlights, lanterns, pots, cookstoves, etc.) must be collected. Tents, sleeping bags, and any other necessity for camping, such as axes, must be packed. Finally, the boat, ATC, snowmachine, sled (attached to snowmachine or ATC), or day pack must be loaded.

Most families store their basic and essential harvesting equipment in their houses or in their storage sheds. This practice speeds up response time when an abundance of some animal

has been spotted, when a last-minute invitation is received to go sealing, or to pursue some other resource.

Each harvesting trip is tailored to the specific purpose, but it became evident that there is variation among the specific practices of some families, partners, or crews. Those practices are often modified on ad hoc bases to accommodate persons who do not normally belong to the team but who are included in the trip. For families (including extended households or segments of patricians), the particular areas in which eggs are collected, or in which fishing is conducted, or where greens are collected or birds are hunted, along with the places where stops are made for picnics and the sites where camps are set up, for example, are all selected according to customary family practices as well as to expectations of the availability of resources. When villages are considered in their entirety, the combined usage that all their residents make of the land, sea, and subsistence resources span immense territories and all seasons. Maps 9, 10, and 11 depict those territories.

Travel over these vast terrains in challenging weather conditions takes a heavy toll on equipment. Heavy demands are therefore placed on ingenuity and skill in making repairs and covering new equipment costs, on purchasing fuel, and on meeting sustenance expenses. It is the case in all three villages that no hunter or group of extractors has to shoulder all of the burden should calamity strike on an extracting trip, since Eskimos take great care to assist persons in distress, providing whatever they can to the disabled party. Persons in each village are informed about where crews and families are headed, and among Wainwright and Gambell crews, it is commonplace to maintain communication among sea mammal hunters through the use of citizen-band radio equipment (CBs).

Extracting expenses are great, regardless of the assistance provided by other hunters and the sharing of skills and resources that characterize life among these villages. Table 3 estimates the expenses incurred on average extraction trips undertaken by villagers in all three villages, distinguishing day trips, two- to four-day trips, and trips lasting up to two weeks.

The significance of the trip expenditures can be better understood from our estimates of the number of trips taken by

Map 9.
Total Resource Extraction Area of Unalakleet Villagers, 1982

Map 10.
Total Resource Extraction Area of Gambell Villagers, 1982

Map 11.
Total Resource Extraction Area of Wainwright Villagers, 1982

persons in a household or from related households. Someone from a household is extracting or seeking to extract some resource during about half of every year. Ventures are about equally divided between trips lasting one day and trips taking more than one day (90-day trips, 20 2-to 4-day trips, 4 extended trips). The total cost incurred is approximately $9,800 annually, exclusive of equipment. Inasmuch as representatives of at least two, but often more than two, households join together on most of the longer trips, sharing expenses in so doing, the expenses incurred by the average household is estimated at $7,600 annually.

Equipment expenses are another matter. Small items of equipment, such as lanterns and stoves, may be broken or perhaps lost. Runners on snowmachines can be damaged. The rugged Bering Sea takes its toll on aluminum boats (the rough pounding taken by the skiffs that are used by walrus hunters shakes the rivets loose, rendering them useless after about three years). A snowmachine might plunge through rotten ice or

might be abandoned during an unexpected thaw. New rifles and guns must be purchased, and the like. Because practically all of the equipment purchased by Eskimos lasts more than one season, table 4 estimates the annual cost based on the life expectancy of each item. Transportation and lighterage costs add about 10 percent to the price of many items purchased in Gambell and Wainwright over those purchased in Unalakleet.

The estimated annual trip and equipment expenses that are incurred by the average family households in the three villages are very high, given the nature of the village economies. Suffice it to say that loans, income transfers, crafts production (ivory carving, skin sewing), trapping, commercial fishing, and some employment, either in the public sector or in positions primarily dependent on public sector funds, provide the means by which subsistence-related purchases are made by Gambell and Unalakleet natives. Wainwright villagers, as we know, benefit from the transfers and employment that are made possible through tax revenues derived from Prudhoe Bay oil.

Most, but not all, Gambell households own either a snow-machine or an ATE. Many have both and a motorboat as well. If a household does not own any of these pieces of equipment, they can usually be borrowed from a dose relative within the clan. In the early 1980s, no Gambell household owned a car or a truck, and there were no roads in the village.

There are perhaps seventy trucks and automobiles and a few miles of road within the village as well as a four-wheel-drive road to the former army and air force bases. With a very few exceptions, those vehicles are owned by the schools, the airlines, the federal and state governments, the native corporation, a couple of entrepreneurs, the Alaska Commercial Company, and the white residents. ATCs and all-terrain vehicles (ATVs), so important to the tundra and island dwellers, have little utility in Unalakleet where practically all subsistence activities from the spring through the fall seasons are conducted from boats. The Unalakleet River is a highway to the hinterland but not one that is used by trucks and cars. The ice on the Unalakleet is subject to warm spots or rotten spots. In early and late winter it is possible to lose snowmachines through the rotten ice. Eskimos know ice, and they are very careful, but they also know that ac-

cidents do happen. The two or three natives who own $25,000 4 × 4 vehicles do not drive them up the frozen Unalakleet River.

Wainwright families often have several members earning more than $20.00 per hour, which accounts for the purchases of pickup trucks and of 4 × 4 specialty vehicles, such as Ford Broncos, Jeep Cherokees, and Chevrolet Blazers. Tax revenues have been used to cut a few roads within the village and to open a road for a couple of miles from town, going eastward. Except to drive a few hundred yards to the store, to drive a mile or two to tow a caribou from the place it was shot, or to tow a trailered boat from home to the water, the usefulness of trucks for subsistence pursuits is limited for about half of the year. But during the long winter, when the Kuuk system is frozen solid, the river becomes a highway to upriver camps for snow-machines, ATCs, and even the Blazers and Broncos and Cherokees. The warmth of the cabs provides a surprisingly different way for hunters and their families to experience their environment.

The comparison below of annual subsistence-related expenditures for families in the three villages is revealing. The residents of Gambell have by far the smallest cash incomes among the three villages, and they invest a greater proportion of their total incomes in subsistence-related items than either the Unalakleet or the Wainwright villagers do. Wainwright residents actually spend the most for subsistence equipment but not the greatest proportion of their incomes. The explanation for this difference is simple: Wainwright residents have much greater discretionary incomes than residents of the other villages.

At Gambell, the heavy use and constant pounding taken by the skiffs and outboards, the safety provided by radar and CBs, and the speed in moving and hauling across the island provided by all-terrain vehicles during summer subsistence pursuits all necessitate greater investment of the residents' total incomes than is necessary for Unalakleet and Wainwright residents.

It is likely that if Unalakleet and Gambell families had access to cash equivalent to that of Wainwright families, they, too, would invest more heavily in subsistence-related items, such as 4 × 4 specialty vehicles and larger and more powerful inboard

and outboard boats equipped with radar and radio-locking devices.

Pickups and autos are a delight to own, can pull large loads, and are warm to ride in. Because such vehicles can accommodate many kinds of subsistence tasks when the Continental Tundra is frozen solid, and because large amounts of cash were available in Wainwright, if only temporarily, their purchase has not diverted income from more useful subsistence items.

The expenses discussed above must be separated from purchases of food made for daily consumption, for energy costs incurred in maintaining homes in the villages, for clothing expenses, and the like. These and other topics will be discussed in chapter 6. The crucial point here is the amount of cash that is plowed directly into subsistence pursuits by natives in all three villages. The thorough integration of cash into the subsistence nexus is one striking indicator of how the subarctic and arctic subsistence economies have changed in the past two and one-half decades. Natives need large amounts of cash to live in large villages and to harvest naturally occurring resources with the assistance of modern, petroleum-dependent technologies.

In addition to the expenses incurred by families in their annual subsistence pursuits, Wainwright and Gambell whaling captains incur especially heavy expenses during each whaling season in which they participate. There are 22 crews and captains in Gambell (an average of 7.5 persons per crew) and 9 crews and captains in Wainwright (averaging about 7 persons per crew). The captain pays for the fuel, for gifts to crew members, and for equipment and all necessary associated costs. Gambell captains, on average, have paid about $4,500 annually to take part in hunts over the past few years. The costs borne by Wainwright captains are equivalent. Great prestige accrues

to successful captains—the reward for generosity in distributing the catch as well as an acknowledgment of proficiency.

The whaling captains and their special relations to their crews and to their villages are exceptions to the general rule. Ordinarily, in view of the modern costs of technology and fuel, considerable cash must be contributed by all persons in a household or in the network of kinspeople who share from the bag, quarry, collection, or catch that results from hunting and fishing trips. And the many kinds and numbers of trips that are taken each year in each village are made possible by two factors: the pooling or sharing of cash and the multiple extraction purposes that are accomplished on a single trip.

The Organization of Labor for Extraction

The harvesting of subsistence resources is commonly carried out in the company of other people in all three Eskimo villages. Hunting by a sole hunter, using the stalking technique, does occur but not frequently. The reasons for forming parties of two or more people are obvious after spending time in and around the villages: safety, companionship, economy, labor assistance, and, very frequently, as occasions to teach youngsters by precept. Hunters sometimes go out by themselves for birds or seals and, in Unalakleet, also for hares. In all of the villages, men will go unaccompanied to check and empty fishnets or to check their trap lines if either or both are set close to town. On occasion, women, alone, will clear the fishnets. But when trips are made over long distances in potentially hazardous conditions to take large and sometimes dangerous game (e.g., walrus or brown bears) or to harvest a resource in quantity (e.g., seining for fish, collecting roe-on-kelp, hunting caribou), the parties vary from two to more than twenty people.

In all three villages, regardless of changes to the economic, educational, social, and religious institutions, kinship-based principles are primary in subsistence pursuits. Most of the task groups that are concerned with subsistence activities are composed of cores of kinspersons. Friends and affines, too, may join the parties on regular or ad hoc bases. Most of the sharing of

skills, equipment, and resources—including catch, bag, quarry, and collection—is conceived as occurring among kinspersons. And the natives in all three villages claim, and exercise, the tight to subsistence extraction of all kinds, not only because of cultural heritage (they desire to do so) and economic necessity (they must do so to survive) but also because of inheritance: their parents, parents' parents, and earlier ancestors all extracted for subsistence.

Kinship and affinal (in-law) relations loom large in the organization of all forms of extraction in all three villages, and kinship principles are very important in the organization of extraction and distribution. Kinship ties are so central to the organization of daily affairs on St. Lawrence Island that even though the villages of Gambell and Savoonga have divided the island between them, and patriclan members in each village usually extract goods with patrician members from the same village, still they share the results with their kinspersons, regardless of the village in which they reside, including Nome.

The Wainwright and Unalakleet villagers organize themselves for hunting, fishing, and gathering tasks in rather similar ways. They observe bilateral descent and use kinship terminologies that are very similar in type to the American kinship system.^[2] When reckoning kinship relations, Eskimos in these villages place equal emphasis on relatives on the mother's side and the father's side. Siblings, cousins, parents, aunts, uncles, children, nephews, nieces, grandparents and in-laws on both sides are treated as kinspersons with whom it is usual to hunt, fish, collect wild plants and birds' eggs, camp, and socialize.

Although whaling is a minor activity in Unalakleet, the whaling crew organizations in these two villages are deeply embedded in their kinship and affinal organizations. In Wainwright, a whaling crew may be made up of a man, his sons, the sons of his wife's siblings or his own siblings and often some in-laws (perhaps his daughters' husbands, his wife's brothers, or the

[2] George Peter Murdock, in his monumental Social Structure (New York: Macmillan, 1949) classified American kinship terminologies as belonging to the "Eskimo" type in which brothers are distinguished from sisters, siblings are distinguished from cousins, and aunts and uncles are distinguished from mother and father.

like). But kinship and affinal relations are complemented by friendships and partnerships as well. In their youth, Unalakleet and Wainwright males often develop deep friendships with peers which last throughout their lives. Boys grow up hunting, fishing, and playing together and continue working together in subsistence tasks, often sharing the fruits of their efforts. They frequently join the same whaling crews, regardless of kinship ties.

The differences in the organization of labor in Gambell, on the one hand, and in Wainwright and Unalakleet, on the other, are apparent. Gambell residents observe principles of patrilineal descent, patrilineal inheritance, and patrilineal succession, whereas Unalakleet and Wainwright are bilaterally organized. Inheritance and succession are much more flexible among the bilateral societies, as are task group organizations.

By "task group" we refer to an organization of three or more people who regularly conduct some subsistence-related task. Neither the core of the group nor the entire group changes m any degree in composition from year to year when engaged in some particular task. Whaling crews, walrus crews, seining groups, and bearded seal hunting groups, among others, form task groups. These groups normally have leaders—persons possessing considerable knowledge about the work to be performed. Task group leaders in all three communities normally are (1) highly regarded because of their skill, (2) generous in sharing the bag, (3) followed out of respect and, often, a desire to learn, and (4) frequently the providers of the major equipment used in the task.

Task groups are often made up of persons engaged in complementary functions, rather than the same function. In fish seining, for example, one person may drive the boat, several may pull the seine taut, some may throw rocks to keep the fish inside the seine, some may butcher and fillet the fish, and some may hang the fillets to dry. Whatever the case may be, the task groups—except in the instances of long and arduous caribou hunts or, perhaps, of hunting expeditions for brown bears—normally have one or more children along, learning by precept and by instruction. They are teaching and learning groups, therefore, as well as extraction groups. The structure and size

of subsistence task groups are also influenced by the resources that are to be extracted, the distance from the villages where the resources will be found, the probable duration of the activity, the technology required by the task, and the time of the year.

The natural and social qualities of men and animals all play a part in the construction of task groups. Wainwright villagers believe that walrus will attack the boat if it contains anyone who came along merely to demonstrate bravery. Since the men in that village do not like to put women in danger, women were formerly restricted from crews. Currently, a few women do hunt with the men, indicating that the villagers have lost sight of the earlier stricture that prohibited women from touching or using mens' tools of the hunt and are also willing to bend their current attitudes about shielding women from the danger of the hunt.

Although other factors are involved, then, kinship principles are usually invoked to recruit the members of the task groups, whereas preferences of families for various resources may also influence what resources will be pursued at various times of the year. Thus, a family's desire for food—a cultural component—influences the tasks and the task group composition. In relation to the latter point, walrus do not constitute a preferred food item in either Unalakleet or Wainwright, and the animals are viewed as dangerous. In these villages, walrus are hunted infrequently, relative to their availability, and usually by crews of men who have hunted together in the past but who do not normally or regularly do so. The crews, or their cores, appear to be composed of "experts at-large." Unalakleet whaling crews also fit this description.

Employment and Subsistence Tasks

At Gambell, walrus is the village's staple as well as a highly preferred food item. Walrus are hunted year-round by crews usually composed of several persons from the same patrician who regularly hunt together. There is much less employment in Gambell than in either Wainwright or Unalakleet, and the organization of the task groups and the frequency with which

crews are on the water—leads in the winter, open in the sum-mer—in pursuit of walrus reflect these several differences.

At Unalakleet, and even more so at Wainwright, people will juggle their jobs with subsistence time. Employed men work to pay for the equipment, supplies, and gasoline that are necessary for the hunt. A walrus crew might, therefore, have a core of hunting partners but be supplemented by one or two available and eager hunters who can spare the time. Often, then, such crews are ad hoc, forming somewhat hastily and leaving the villages after work to hunt walrus only twenty-five or thirty miles from the village. Or they may pursue walrus during weekend hunts, butchering their quarry and returning to town in time to return to their jobs.

Wage work profoundly limits the choices that go into subsistence pursuits. Gambell villagers are least affected by time constraints but most affected by financial constraints among the three villages. Wainwright villagers are most affected by time constraints and least affected by financial constraints. The combination at Gambell encourages the maintenance and interplay of social ties, whereas the combination at Wainwright restricts the interplay of social ties. Wage work exercises less influence on subsistence choices and social ties in Unalakleet than in Wainwright, although there, too, employed persons are limited in their time allocation. In Wainwright and Unalakleet, those who are constrained by job obligations are able to contribute more to the subsistence expenses of the family members who are less constrained.

Hunting Groups

The Lone Hunter

During the winter, lone hunters in the three villages may push sleds onto the rotten ice and pursue seals at their breathing holes and along leads in the ice. Yet even in winter seal hunting, it is common for two men to travel together to the hunting area and to return home together. Caribou often seek winter forage very close to Wainwright, and as a consequence, a lone hunter may pursue them. Here, too, partners often hunt together.

Partners and Small Groups

At Gambell, small hunting groups normally have about four members and are almost always composed of male siblings, a father and his sons, brothers and their sons, or a paternal uncle and his nephews. The size of the Gambell groups reflects, in large part, the nature of the resources that are available to the islanders. Except for polar bears (a marine mammal) and reindeer (a tame land mammal), there are few opportunities to hunt in pairs. Polar bears are a very limited resource, whereas reindeer, a limited and managed resource, must be paid for, much as a hunter from California purchases a deer tag to bag a deer in Utah. And because the reindeer are herded, several men make a joint trip to the herd—managed by their Savoonga clansmen—to hunt the animals.

Hunting partners are characteristic of Unalakleet and Wainwright. Partners are usually closely related men (brothers, cousins, uncle and nephew, father and son). It is also common for hunting partners to be close friends or brothers-in-law. Partners hunt together but also form the cores of slightly larger hunting groups, which may increase to as many as four people for some pursuits.

Flexibility of Partnerships

It is commonplace in both Unalakleet and Wainwright for a man to have two or three hunting partners with whom he hunts for different species or at different times. In these villages, too, partnerships are often established with persons—kinsmen or friends—from other villages. One partner may join the other to hunt as a guest in his territory, or they may make gifts to one another of subsistence foods, or they may be especially hospitable to one another at community festivities.

At Unalakleet and Wainwright, the collective hunting skills known throughout the villages are not shared equally in every family, so that young men sometimes go hunting with experienced elder men, from whom they want to learn more about the animals hunted, the ice and weather conditions, the behavior and sensitivities of various animals, and so forth.

Large Hunting Groups and Crews

Groups larger than partnerships form in Gambell for the great majority of subsistence extraction pursuits including the hunting of walrus, bearded seals, and birds and the collection of birds' eggs and plants of various kinds. These resources constitute a wide variety of differences as to size, amount, access, location, means to harvest, difficulty of transport, and so forth. They are similar in that each type of resource requires rather large crews, and those crews harvest very large quantities of each resource type. Extraction of every one of these resources requires considerable coordination of labor to harvest, butcher (except for eggs), clean, transport, store, and distribute the resources during the short time in which they are available.

The seabird and egg collecting crews have no counterparts in Unalakleet or Wainwright, but walrus, small whale (e.g., beluga), and bearded seal crews are formed in all of the villages.^[3] The crews are similar in size and in some other features. Each is usually composed of a captain (who owns the boat and capitalizes the venture), a navigator, a person to keep the lines from being tangled and to release the floats after the animal has been harpooned, and a harpooner. All crewmen beach the prey, pulling it onto an ice floe or onto a beach. The captain directs the butchering and distributes the catch.

The differences are marked. Crews, sometimes consisting of as few as three persons, are quite rigidly structured at Gambell, being drawn from as many as six or seven people, almost always from the same patrician. Indeed, three or four persons from the same nuclear family household, or extended family, compose most of the forty-one crews in Gambell. At Unalakleet and Wainwright, the walrus, bearded seal, and beluga crews have

[3] A lone, skillful hunter can successfully hunt and beach beluga whales, as I learned in 1981 on the Mackenzie River delta. An Eskimo man working full-time for ESSO in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, had successfully bagged a three-ton beluga after his normal workday in a solo venture on the river a couple of days before I interviewed him. Another Eskimo man who worked full-time delivering water to houses in Tuktoyotuk on the delta had successfully bagged a large beluga on the weekend prior to the time I interviewed him.

relatively stable cores, but the other members vary with specific circumstances as discussed above.

At Unalakleet, the largest parties generally form for caribou hunts, which are conducted many miles distant—perhaps two days' travel by snowmachine—from the village. The groups are often ad hoc in nature, having been formed by one particularly good hunter. Although the party separates into pairs when the herd is sighted, the men provide security and protection for each other.

Figure 7 represents the composition of typical walrus, beluga and bearded seal hunting crews in the three villages.

Whaling Crews

At Gambell and Wainwright, the largest hunting groups are the whaling crews, which normally are composed of seven to nine men, under the direction of a captain. At Gambell, the whaling captains are either heads of their patriclans, from which their crews are drawn, heads of the local segments of the patriclan, or heads of prominent extended families within the patriclan. Kinship as well as hunting prowess and the ability to capitalize the ventures are all important factors in Gambell. Kinship factors are less important in Wainwright. Figure 8 represents typical whaling crew compositions in Gambell and Wainwright in the early 1980s.

Families as Extractors

Except in Gambell where barrels of seabird eggs are collected by coordinated crews of young men who climb around the slick and precipitous cliffs on which auklets, murres, puffins, terns, gulls, and other species nest, the harvesting of eggs and plants—including plants of the sea—as well as set net fishing are undertakings of families. Some families are extended and reside in two or more households, and some comprise more distantly related families. Frequently, these activities occur during early and late summer camping trips, but they can occur whenever the resources are available during the warm months, often very close to the village.

Figure 7.
Typical Walrus (Beluga, Bearded Seal) Crews at Gambell, Wainwright, and Unalakleet, 1982

Members of one or more families in all of the villages team up for the daily net cleaning of fishnets placed close to town and to gather shellfish, eggs, kelp, other saltwater plants, roe-on-kelp, berries, and "greens" (edible green plants of many kinds). Larger family groups organize to seine for salmon and char at Unalakleet. Figures 9 and 10 depict typical egg-collecting crews at Gambell and river seining techniques at Unalakleet.

Opportunity

Opportunities to harvest more than one type of resource at a time are normally seized whenever they occur. Salmon seining crews are on the lookout for moose and waterfowl; hare (snowshoe, arctic) hunting crews are on the lookout for sage grouse, ptarmigan, snowy owls, and other birds; beluga and walrus crews will also look for ducks and geese and for caribou seen along the shore. With the exception of bowhead, minke, and gray whale hunting, several resources are sought on each expedition. One resource is usually the focus of the trip, but

Figure 8.
Typical Whaling Crew Composition, in Wainwright and Gambell, 1982

Figure 9.
Representative Young Bird and Egg Collecting Crews, Gambell, 1982

Figure 10.
Subsistence Seine Techniques, Unalakleet, 1982

others are taken as opportunities arise. A "double-double" would be shooting two geese or ducks with a single shot (a common Eskimo practice) and bagging a beluga on the same trip.

Food Processing

The people who go on a day trip together or who camp together also work together in processing and harvesting the foods. Co-hunters share the labor of butchering large animals (bearded seal, walrus, whale, and sometimes caribou and moose). Occasionally, someone else will happen by and help with the butchering of large game. If so, he or she is given a share of the kill. The female members of a household or camp clean, cut, dry, and smoke the fish taken from subsistence set nets. Women outside the immediate household or camp unit, if they join in a seining venture, may clean and cut the fish that were hauled in.

At home in the village, a household unit generally takes on the processing and preserving of the foods that are brought in by its members. The women and girls of a household pluck birds; cut and clean fish; turn and move fish on drying racks and in the smokehouse, if one is available; salt fish (herring roe-on-kelp as well, at Unalakleet); cut, salt, and dry seal and walrus meat; render seal oil; wrap and bag foods for freezing; and store greens in containers of seal oil. When visiting friends or relatives, women will often help with the processing of the food harvested by their hosts. And relatives and good friends may also share the use of fish racks and space in food storage units (ice cellars at Wainwright, caches, store houses, freezers, and sheds).

Men and boys usually complete the butchering of game brought to the house by a hunter; gather driftwood for smoking fish and building fish racks or racks for all other kinds of smoking and drying (seal, walrus, whale meat, moose); construct or renovate the racks, smokehouses, storage buildings, and ice cellars; and maintain and repair the motorized vehicles, boats, and equipment (nets, guns, rifles, rods and reels) that are used in harvesting subsistence foods. When close male relatives visit a household, they will help with these undertakings.

Organization of Distribution: Sharing

The practice of sharing is central to the subsistence economies of all three villages. Sharing is institutionalized in such a way that raw resources are given, labor is contributed, and equipment is borrowed and loaned to kinspersons and friends. In Unalakleet and Wainwright, the manifold connections are through networks of bilateral kinspersons, affines, and friends. In Gambell, the connections are among patriclansmen and friends. Except for the patricentered principles that take precedence in Wainwright and the bilateral-affinal principles that take precedence in the other villages, there are few differences among the three villages in their practice of sharing.

The concept of helping persons is so deeply held that there are no second thoughts about economic choices when an able person contacts a person in distress, nor is it expected that thanks will be expressed or reciprocation explicitly offered. The able person acts to help the disabled person, to repair his equipment, to give him fuel, or the like. We assume that this practice and its accompanying ideology have accommodated Eskimos to their arctic and subarctic habitats and have caused natives not to behave as "economic men" in the Western market tradition (see Knight 1921 and Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson 1957, for lucid analyses of the assumption of economic man and choice in economies).

The practices of sharing, giving, and helping are so wide spread and so persistent in the arctic and subarctic that their collective significance is often overlooked and is apparently accepted as given by many arctic researchers. For example, Nelson (1969: 378-380) points out that sharing, helping, and giving were so ubiquitous in Wainwright that no one ever even thought of thanking someone for assistance. Either Ellana (1980:108-116) was paying no attention to resource distributions in her study of subsistence harvests in the Norton Sound area or, more likely, she considered knowledge of it so common that it did not require comment, because she does not mention sharing at all.

The Concept of Sharing

Among arctic and subarctic Eskimos, the concept of sharing subsumes gifting and helping. Sharing is not only conceptually different from the concepts of market exchange for standard values and higgle-haggle in bartering but is also conceptually different from the concept of reciprocity, which recognizes that the donor of a service or an object will receive a service or an object from the original recipient at some future date. Some Eskimos give much more than they receive, but the recipients are conceived of as the community, not as individuals. The donor does not expect specific reciprocity. He accepts the cultural institution of giving. He helps and is helped. Nevertheless, esteem accrues to the big giver, that is, the successful extractor who shares his catch. Whaling captains, walrus captains, trapper-hunters, and expert seal hunters are invariably big givers. We assume that sharing, helping, and giving among arctic and sub-arctic peoples are, then, conceptually different from market exchange practices and also from concepts of reciprocity and redistribution, as applied to nonmarket exchange systems (see Polanyi, Arensberg, and Pearson 1957; Sahlins 1965).

In all three villages, most of the sharing involves relatively small quantities of food. On an ordinary day in Gambell, for instance, one family might give to another family enough walrus meat for one family meal. At Unalakleet, it might be a snowshoe hare or perhaps a couple of fresh silver salmon, enough for an elder's meal or for a family's meal. At Wainwright, it-might be enough caribou meat to feed a family for a couple of days.

The staggering thing is the frequency with which sharing occurs—every day in virtually scores of families in every village. Baked salmon, ducks, geese, soup, seal oil and greens, frozen grayling, and dozens of other foodstuffs are given by donors to recipients; invitations for meals are extended; tools are borrowed; labor is contributed. People who receive gifts, especially the elders in the villages, often receive more food, particularly fresh food, than they can possibly consume. So those persons often become involved in secondary gifting, sending part of what they get to someone else.

Most sharing, with the exception of that with the village elders, occurs within fairly narrow confines. In Gambell, sharing most often occurs among members of the same patriclan, but there, too, the village is perceived as a cohesive, communitarian unit. So gifting does not stop at patrician boundaries. Gambell residents take pride in their community and in the generosity and acceptance displayed by fellow villagers toward others. When I first asked a group of Gambell adults how they asked a relative or friend for food, a woman said that she knocked on the prospective donor's door and gestured by holding her hands in a cupped fashion. The gesture meant that walrus or some other food sufficient for one meal was required. It was always given without question. A prominent Gambell hunter told Robbins that a person "gives until it hurts," and then he gives some more (Little and Robbins 1984: 111).

In Unalakleet and in Wainwright, food is given to parents, to children, to siblings, and to collateral relatives—aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces, and cousins. Sharing is also frequent between dose friends, particularly hunting partners.

Large amounts, too, are distributed. These distributions frequently occur when some families have been unsuccessful in harvesting some crucial resource, such as walrus at Gambell, moose and some salmon species at Unalakleet, or caribou at Wainwright. Failures can stem from a large number of causes, such as bad weather conditions, equipment problems, a family's inability to adequately capitalize the extracting trip, or the "bad luck," as natives frequently put it, of not encountering the resource that was sought. Large amounts are also distributed at major community festivals (discussed in chap. 10).

A Gambell household in which staples are limited might receive large portions of walrus, seal, or whale. The predicaments of all families are known to fellow clansmen. But if clansmen are few in the village, a person's or household's predicament is still well known. An unfortunate family in Unalakleet might receive quarters of caribou or moose, several packs of smoked king salmon, and large quantities of dried salmon (pink, silver, dog). A Wainwright family in need of staples might receive an entire caribou or a forty-pound bag of grayling and whitefish. In no village are gifts restricted to these items. Almost anything

might be given, including cash or foods and other items that have been purchased, such as coffee, tea, sugar, flour, stove fuel, salt, clothes, fishing tackle, reload equipment, rifles, guns, and shells.

No matter how conscientiously a family works to meet its food needs or how carefully it plans, circumstances such as illness or failure in hunting may cause it to fall considerably short of filling its needs. All of the adult natives in the village know what big game has been taken and which family may be short. In such a case, friends and relatives look after the family by bringing food, or a family can simply seek food.

On the Rationale for Sharing

Whereas elders more often receive than give, a generation earlier, they more often gave than received. And whereas some families receive more than they give during one season, unless the hunters in the family are injured or are unable to harvest resources for some other reason, they will usually give generously in subsequent seasons.

If, however, a family suffers shortages when able family members reside in the village but do not harvest subsistence resources, there can be some grousing about the lazy persons by those who contribute to the larders of the resource-embarrassed families. Natives in all three villages place a high value on seeking to provide for their families, and they place a negative value on not seeking to do so. They understand attempting but failing. Failures occur periodically to all who seek. But an extra burden is put on successful extractors when persons in their families, or in wider networks of kinspersons, or in their villages, do not seek at all.

Sharing Networks

Robbins closely analyzed a single Gambell household's sharing network to determine its limits and the amounts of goods that flowed through it. As was true for all three villages, it was impossible to ascertain quantities because small gifts (e.g., food for a meal) are so commonplace that they are soon forgotten. Never-

theless, Robbins connected the Gambell household to 29 households within Gambell, 23 within Savoonga, and 7 within Nome. Farther afield, the household had connections in California (6), Oregon (2), Fairbanks (2), and Sitka (1). The majority of gifts in the network went to members of the same patriclan. The 70 households represented 315 people who shared in the subsistence products harvested in Gambell (Little and Robbins 1984: 112-119).

When natural calamities strike, such as the ice conditions that severely limited the number of walrus taken by Savoonga hunters in 1982, the Savoonga people journeyed to Gambell as often as necessary to claim their share of walrus, whale, and other resources harvested by their patriclansmen. All of the usable parts of many animals were taken on many occasions, including tusks to be used by ivory carvers. Moreover, many Gambell hunters, unprompted, ran boats or snowmachines laden with walrus products to clansmen in Savoonga.

When, in 1982, late breakup and very high water destroyed the salmon fishing for Yukon River villages, Unalakleet families connected to families along the Yukon River through marriage packed and shipped huge quantities of fish, caribou, and moose to their affines. And when, in 1982, the whaling crews in Barrow were unsuccessful in landing any of the whales that they struck, a very large contingent of Barrow residents arrived in Wainwright to collect shares of the meat and maktak that were provided at the annual whale thanksgiving festival.

In all three villages, the large sea mammals (bearded seal, walrus, and whales) are divided among the members of the hunting party. Bowhead whale distributions at Gambell and Wainwright follow a special ritual overseen by. the successful whaling captains. When the hunters return to the village, they share their portions with relatives, elders, friends, and neighbors. At Unalakleet, the catch taken in seining for fish or a coordinated drive for hares is also divided among participating members, who, in turn, give some away to other individuals and families.

Most other foods are harvested by teams composed of members of the same family household or closely related family households. For these foods, a person or a household gets all

that is caught or gathered, regardless of how many persons go out together and whether the entire group is composed of relatives. This is true for birds, eggs, greens, shellfish, berries, seal, caribou, and moose. The person, or the household, puts the food in the household larder and almost always gives some of it away.

Distribution in the three villages is sharing, a natural part of living. According to more than one Unalakleet hunter, and we take the liberty of paraphrasing for them all, giving "is just something that's always done."

Organization of Consumption

Distribution and consumption are so intimately connected as to be isomorphic. Those who harvest and those who receive consume. It is clear that all that is harvested is not consumed by the extractor, nor is all that is received consumed by the recipient. With the exception of about a quarter of the households in Wainwright, the households in the three villages rely on the subsistence food that its members harvest during the year.

Some elderly persons living alone, female-headed households, and even some male-headed households where one or more persons are employed full-time require gifts of native foods from relatives and friends if they are to consume them. A survey conducted in the late 1970s reports that one-third of the native households in Wainwright received as gifts all of the native foods that they consumed (Kruse, Kleinfeld, and Travis 1982).

Except for the households such as those described above, which are more frequent in Wainwright than in the other two villages, a household also feeds persons other than household members. These recipients include relatives and friends who drop in to visit, people from out of town who stay overnight, or people who come to help with building or work. Generally, anyone who stops in is offered tea, coffee, a snack, or a full meal.

Sitting down to eat almost any meal in any of the villages usually means having a grandparent, sibling, cousin, or some visitor, perhaps a child, join the household at the table. This holds

in the villages and at camps that are established spring, summer, and fall. The Inupiaq term, yokoq , means to participate in a specially recognized form of sharing by consuming native food together. When household members in Unalakleet and Wainwright invite visitors to an after-supper snack of tea, berries, strips of dried meat, and crackers, they recognize it as yokoq. Such occasions are enjoyed by all. Larger units of consumption accompany family and community events, such as holidays, weddings, anniversaries, church festivities, and, in Wainwright and Gambell, the whale festivals (chap. 10).

Patterns of Consumption

If they all could be amassed in one place at one time, the total results of a family's yearly subsistence efforts might surprise even the family itself. During years when the weather has been favorable, ice cellars, caches, storehouses, and freezers brim with food at the beginning of winter. The natives anticipate tasting summer foods in the depths of winter. Yet the stored supplies are only a part of all the subsistence foods taken and consumed throughout the year.

Families in the three villages typically eat three to four meals a day, one or two of which may be meal-sized snacks. Smaller snacks are also eaten. In Gambell and Unalakleet, of all the meals eaten during a week, by far the majority feature subsistence foods as the main dish. The estimates from our investigations in the three villages vary markedly about the contribution of naturally occurring resources to the diets but not about the central role that subsistence foods play.

At Gambell, the natives estimate that 80 percent of the foods they consume annually are naturally occurring resources. At Unalakleet, natives estimate 70 to 80 percent, and at Wainwright, the researchers estimate slightly less than 50 percent of the local diets. The differences among the villages are apparent functions of the cash incomes available to residents in the three villages (see chap. 6). Nevertheless, in all three villages, purchased foods, such as vegetables, fruit, or starches (e.g., bread, pasta), are almost always side dishes. Native foods, especially meat and seal oil, comprise the main courses. Candy, pop, and

other sweets contribute to the caloric intake in all three villages but not heavily to the overall food intake.

Breakfasts, when taken, are the only meal in which store-bought foods (coffee, tea, and cereal in all three villages, plus perhaps eggs and bacon in Unalakleet and Wainwright) might predominate. But even at these meals, subsistence foods can figure prominently, as when caribou, moose, or walrus steaks are fried, or leftovers from the previous night's supper are eaten. Breakfasts are meals in which jams, jellies, and syrups made from berries gathered in late summer are eaten.

Lunch and supper, as well as meal-sized snacks, most often are prepared with native foods. The main course in any of the three villages can be seal, maktak, fish, or birds. In Gambell, walrus or birds' eggs are eaten frequently. In Unalakleet, roe-on-kelp, moose, and hares are eaten frequently. And in Wainwright, caribou is eaten frequently. Each of these food items can be prepared in a variety of ways, and each is served with seal oil, indispensable to most native meals. Wild greens (even cultivated plants from family gardens in Unalakleet) supplement the meals.

Dried fish, seal, and caribou are handy snacks. In Gambell and Unalakleet, meals of store-bought foods chiefly provide variety and are bought at considerable expense. The native foods, out of desire and not just necessity, provide the overwhelming majority of the nutritional needs of most families. Meals of some Wainwright families are predominantly processed foods purchased at the local stores.

Close to a third of native meals are made from fresh subsistence foods. As should be obvious, the proportion of fresh to preserved foods increases in the late spring and remains fairly high during the summer and fall during the height of the annual harvests. Fresh foods are also obtained during the winter, as we made clear above, but these fresh foods are returned to the household "flash frozen," because it takes but a moment to freeze smelt, whitefish, and even small seals when depositing them on the ice.

Fresh foods cannot be overlooked in any assessment of the amount of subsistence resources that a family harvests and uses over a year's period. Sea mammals, marine invertebrates, and

hares are eaten fresh. During the summer period, fresh fish caught with rod and reel are roasted and eaten as fishnet cleaning, hook-and-line fishing, and "greens" harvesting continues. During the spring, ducks, geese, and a wide variety of other birds and birds' eggs are cooked and consumed between meals as well as at the principal meals of the day. Again in the late summer-early fall, birds will be harvested, roasted, and eaten fresh, often at the sites at which they are bagged. During the butchering of whales, slices of maktak are consumed raw on the spot.

It is possible to compare, albeit grossly, the annual consumption of naturally occurring resources by Gambell and Unalakleet households. These foods are either harvested, received as gifts, or consumed at community festivals—or all three. We do not have sufficient data to make even gross estimates for Wainwright households, although caribou consumption is higher there than in the other two villages. Table 5 is intended to highlight similarities and differences but is compiled from scores of tallies and estimates drawn from many households in the two villages. Every household was not asked identical questions on many of the resources (e.g., precise tallies of "buckets of greens," "barrels of berries," "pounds of whale meat and maktak"), so composites are drawn.

The preponderance of fish yet wide variety of resources consumed by Unalakleet residents and the more limited variety yet heavy use of sea mammals, birds, and birds' eggs consumed by Gambell residents are clear differences. These gross comparisons also suggest that Gambell residents consume more naturally occurring resources than do Unalakleet residents but not many more. The Unalakleet climate and soil are also conducive to raising cool weather vegetables (turnips, cabbages, carrots) and potatoes. A majority of Unalakleet families raise and harvest about 75 pounds of vegetables and 250 to 300 pounds of potatoes annually, which they eat as side dishes with native meats when they are not eating greens or pasta.

6
An Explanation of Dependency and Subsistence: Village Economics, Part 1

Introduction

We define village economics as a full system of production. We have demonstrated how deeply the subsistence economy is embedded in the larger system of production: cash is required for myriad technological items—from CB radios to 18-foot outboard skiffs—to assist subsistence harvesting. We have also demonstrated how Eskimo goods, as commodities, and Eskimo labor, as a commodity, became integrated into the peripheries of the world market. Here we explain the village economic systems themselves—modes of production that subsume subsistence economies into dependency relations. In chapter 7, we explicate the details of the contemporary modes of production in the three villages—infrastructure, ownership and control, employment and income, and the Eskimo as "economic man."

Before the seventeenth century, the residents of what are now Unalakleet, Gambell, and the North Slope villages were engaged in complex trade networks that connected the Athapaskans in the interior to the Chukchi in Siberia. In the seventeenth century, the Chukchi and Siberian Eskimos extended the network to include Russian traders at Anadyr and at other places along the Kolyma River and its tributaries. The Russian merchants, then, intercepted the existing network. In so doing, they began to transform some native goods into commodities, while encouraging the natives to trade those items that were commodities on the European market. I define commodities as being anything, from mineral rights to a human's productive capacities, that is sold in the marketplace.

I call the Eskimo economy of the Russian period both pre-capitalist (i.e., subsistence) and semimercantile (i.e., some goods were sold for gain to foreign merchants, but there were no native Eskimo merchants whose sole support was earned as merchants). Thus, in the seventeenth century, Eskimos began to become integrated into a hierarchical, worldwide economic system. But their base was still subsistence.

By 1833, the czarist-state-owned Russian-American Company had established trading posts in Norton Sound. It sought to dominate the trade in which Alaskan goods of considerable value were exchanged for European-produced commodities of considerably lesser value. The Russian-American Company was never successful in controlling all of the trade. Natives continued to pass many of their goods through existing networks all the way to the Kolyma region.

The resources extracted by Eskimos and Athapaskans were naturally occurring, renewable items of traditional use—pelts and hides for clothing, drums, bedding, and the like. The European merchants reaped the benefits of commodity circulation throughout Europe and the world, while delegating the risks of production to the natives (the extractor-producers). Thus, without help or credit against projected returns from the merchants, natives set, baited, checked, and cleared their trap lines during the winter months and skinned, prepared, and transported their pelts to trade partners or directly to trading posts.

The first point is that in the seventeenth century, Russian merchants plugged themselves into a flourishing native trade network, while plugging natives into a growing world market. The second point is that the risk bearers, that is, the natives, received considerably less for their goods than did the Russian merchants for those same goods. And a third point, albeit speculative, is that the Russian trade market influenced natives to shift their harvest schedules so as to focus more of their time and energy on the trapping of fur-beating animals. In so doing, they may have increased the actual risks of the subsistence life. That is, normal extraction pursuits may have been slighted in favor of the pursuit of peltries during the winter—hunters moving inland in pursuit of foxes, for instance, rather than to the sea in pursuit of seals.

The following discussion is not directly related to Alaska. It is introduced as an analogy, because only analogies sustain the argument that I wish to make about increased subsistence risks and activities in the fur trade. Increased subsistence risks were surely the lot of many of the Algonkian, Siouan, and Iroquoian speakers who became engaged in the fur trade in the subarctic and Great Lakes regions. Hickerson (1965) demonstrates that One of the effects of the trapping and trading engaged in by the Siouan and Algonkian Indians of the Upper Mississippi Valley was the sharing of a large territory that these erstwhile enemies had formerly treated as a buffer zone, or "no-man's-land." When neither group let the other use the zone safely for extraction, game remained plentiful and was extracted with caution. When Siouans and Algonkians forsook their old enmities and shifted their extraction practices so as to reside, hunt, and trap in a common region, not only were the fur-bearers depleted from the zone but the Virginia deer, too, were depleted, causing hunger among both groups alike.

Although Eskimo trapper-traders had maintained indirect contacts with Russian traders for about two centuries and direct contacts for two or more decades, it was not until the mid-nineteenth century, when Eskimos came in contact with the whaling industry, that marked changes occurred to their organization of labor. Before 1848, the productive capacities of the natives, that is, their labor, were not sold as commodities. Natives extracted resources, prepared foods and by-products, and either consumed, shared (gifted), or, for some items, traded the goods that were produced. Native labor was subsumed in a kinship-friendship nexus. It was a part of life itself and not separable from it, as are other commodities for which careful accounting is made. Efforts to acquire food, dress skins, build shelters, harness dogs, and the like, were not separated from obligations to kinspeople or from supernatural beliefs.

A scant nine years after the Russian-American Company established its trading posts in Norton Sound, nearly nine-hundred whaling vessels were plying the Bering Sea in pursuit of bowhead whales, whose oil brought high prices on the world market (Scammon 1968). Six years later, in 1848, the first whaling vessel passed the Bering Strait and entered the Arctic

Ocean. Bowheads were taken as they migrated to and from their summer feeding grounds, and this triggered a rush to the Arctic Ocean in 1849 (Bockstoce 1978).

The residents of St. Lawrence Island began selling whale oil and baleen to commercial whalers by the 1850s, if not earlier, and they were being hired onto whaling ships as guides and hunters by the early 1860s (Foote 1964). As hunters, the natives provided food for the whaling crews. Compensation took many forms, including barter of goods for labor, credit advances to natives for shares of the catch, and monetary compensation.

This transition is important, because the natives began selling their labor, as a commodity, to assist in the harvesting of whales, a naturally occurring resource on which the natives themselves depended for subsistence, also to be sold as a commodity. The ownership of the resource and the profit from the sale, of course, belonged to the firm that owned the ship and provisioned the crew. By this point in the Industrial Revolution, capitalism was experiencing rapid growth, and the residents of the three villages in this study were being incorporated into it both for the goods they produced and for their labor (providing expertise and service as guides, providing food for crews, etc.).

Thus, the indigenous subsistence economies that were basically precapitalist now also became semicapitalist—with labor and some goods being sold for gain to the capitalists who had organized the venture. The Eskimos became integrated into the periphery of the economy. Subsistence remained their base. Sharing with kinspersons and friends and trading with partners remained the major elements of the organization of distribution.

Soon after the United States purchased Alaska from Czarist Russia, the Alaska Commercial Company replaced the Russian-American Company as the firm that sought, with federal blessing, to become the monopsonist in trade to the natives. And soon after that, in the early 1870s, the whale oil industry went into decline with the growth of the petroleum industry, putting native laborers out of seasonal work and providing them with no market for the whale oil that they had rendered from their own harvests. It is the nature of the capitalist use of peripheries,

of course, to purchase goods and labor only when it is deemed profitable to do so.

In the late 1870s, the whaling industry experienced a resurgence, when the fashion industry began using baleen for corset stays, skirt hoops, and some other items. Commercial whaling survived, even grew, for another three decades. In 1887, for instance, there were at least thirty-two whaling vessels plying the Arctic Ocean. These vessels carried more than one-half million pounds of baleen to San Francisco alone (Van Stone 1962: 23-24). Shore-based stations were created along the Arctic Coast, fifteen between Point Hope and Point Barrow, thereby reducing transportation costs. Hughes (1984: 263) thinks it likely that a shore-based station was established on St. Lawrence Island as well.

Eskimos residing in the vicinity of what is now Wainwright sold their labor on the whaling crews, but with the advent of shore-based stations, they increased their hunting to provide for the ships' crews and began to mine the outcroppings of coal near Wainwright for use by the commercial whaling vessels. Whaling vessels had been steam powered since the 1880s. So at Wainwright, as at Gambell, natives sold their labor at the price commercial whalers were willing to pay, and only when there was a market for it, much as they sold the subsistence goods and by-products for which there were commodity markets. St. Lawrence Island Eskimos also sold carved ivory to the commercial whalers, but this was only supplementary to the sale of their labor and baleen.

A few Unalakleet natives began selling their labor to the local missionary, Axel Karlsen, at the turn of the century. Karlsen had several small businesses in the village, including ownership of the reindeer herd. Natives worked as herders, and some joined a few of Karlsen's employees to move the herd to Nome during the gold rush. Others served as guides, translators, and even prospectors (Correll 1974). Some Unalakleet natives stayed in Nome for several years to sell their labor in whatever ways they could.

The bottom had fallen out of the baleen market by 1908, when only five vessels worked the Arctic waters (VanStone

1962: 24). BY the same time, the gold rush had subsided. A lean period followed, although many natives traded pelts with men whom they had formerly known as whalers but who had shifted their commercial interests from whaling to fur trading. During this very same lean period for the sale of goods or labor, the three villages experienced more contact with federal agents and representatives of various kinds. Schools were built, teachers came to the villages, and representatives of the Bureau of Indian Affairs began providing some services, while offering some very limited employment to natives.

At the conclusion of World War I, the worldwide fur trade rallied, and again natives were drawn into the market. They sold fox pelts to the Alaska Commercial Company but also to traders who resisted the Alaska Commercial Company's federally approved monopsony. Many of the traders who worked the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort seas were large operators who had converted their steam whaling ships to trading and transport vessels for the fur trade. The trappers received about $60.00 for a fox pelt at the peak of this trade (Hughes 1960). Some of the most successful hunters could earn several thousand dollars a year at those prices (Spencer 1959:361; Hughes 1984; 264-265).

By the 1920s, natives used the rather large sums that could be garnered from running trap lines to capitalize their subsistence pursuits. Motor launches, shotguns, rifles, and binoculars were purchased and used to harvest and transport some sea mammals and to take birds and land mammals. Many portable camping goods, from teapots and thermos bottles to stoves and fuels, soon came to be used. St. Lawrence Island carvers continued to sell ivory artifacts, but those sales were dwarfed by the sale of fox pelts.

The stock market crash and the Great Depression caused the price of a fox pelt to plummet to about $5.00. Retrenchment in Gambell, Unalakleet, and Wainwright followed the collapse of the fur market. The subsistence economy and its precapitalist form of organization—including cooperation, sharing of catches, the use of blubber and rendered oil for cooking and lighting, the collecting of driftwood and coal (at Wainwright) for heating, and even a renewed sense of community solidar-

ity—characterized all three villages (see Spencer 1959: 361-362; Hughes 1960).

The BIA and the federal schools that had been built in all three villages during the early 1900s brought some menial public sector employment to the natives. But it was World War II, postwar defense policies, and the federal actions taken to develop the infrastructure of Alaska to accommodate energy resource extraction that drew the native villagers most deeply into public sector dependencies. Men were conscripted, served in the territorial guards, or volunteered. Small bases were built near Unalakleet and near Gambell during World War II, and soon after the war, a DEW line base was built near Wainwright. The few jobs that were available to natives were completely dependent on public sector funds (defense, education, law and order, etc.).

In the past five decades, contacts with church, government, and, on a more limited scale, private sector businesses have drawn residents of the three villages ever more tightly into the nation's political economy. Their aboriginal lands have been expropriated for military bases, then returned to them, in recognition of the fact that any claims they might make to still greater amounts of lands, water, or other resources have been extinguished. Their rights to harvest naturally occurring resources, on which their subsistence lives are based, as they have been for millennia, have also been extinguished. Control over and regulation of those resources have been appropriated by federal and state governments.

In recognition of the extinguishing of claims to land, the villages of Wainwright and Unalakleet and the respective regions to which they belong—the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation and the Bering Straits Regional Corporation—have received public monies from ANCSA to conduct their affairs. Gambell and Savoonga, because they claimed the entire St. Lawrence Island, have not. Regardless of Gambell's choice, the control of the naturally occurring resources on and around St. Lawrence Island is vested in the federal and state governments. The public sector has come to play an increasingly important role in the economies of the three villages since 1971.

The structures of the dependencies of the three villages vary.

The village with the most meager access to public sector funds, Gambell, has the lowest per capita income. The village most dependent on public sector funds, Wainwright, has by far the highest per capita income. Although Unalakleet villagers generate greater private sector income than residents of either of the other two villages, they, too, are overwhelmingly dependent on public sector funds for their maintenance.

Welfare payments and government transfers of funds and services, too, are of crucial importance in all three villages as supplements to resources procured from the environment and to job and sales income. It is likely, however, that if the three villages were required to develop self-sustaining economies, devoid of major public sector involvement, either primary or secondary, then Wainwright would have the lowest per capita income. And eventually, when the income derived from oil is exhausted, the technology employed in the Wainwright subsistence economy will not be petroleum dependent, because of the high costs involved. Relatively large social dislocations, probably including migrations, will occur.

The Native Niche in the Political Economy

The natives of the Alaskan arctic and subarctic have few avenues to the market. The naturally occurring, renewable resources and the by-products from them that are available to Eskimos to sell on the market are regulated by state and federal governments. The naturally occurring, nonrenewable resources in the vicinity of Eskimo villages that can be or are sold on the market—specifically, oil, gas, and coal—are owned either by the state or federal governments or by regional corporations. In the former case, natives are restricted in their access to the resources that provide the basis for their existence. In the latter, multinational corporations are encouraged to extract the resources that benefit the growth of those corporations and, presumably, the growth of the national, state, and regional economies but not the economic and social well-being of the natives. This presumption is part of the "trickle-down" theory, which holds that capital accumulation by a corporation will also entail the demands for more services and goods for that corpo-

ration, which, in turn, will create openings for persons and companies to supply those goods, and so forth.

Ivory carving and the sale of excavated, mineralized ivory, some of which is not carved and some of which consists of pre-nineteenth-century carvings ("ancient ivory"), are the principal means by which St. Lawrence Island Eskimos penetrate the private sector in production. Commerical salmon and herring fishing, herring roe collecting, and trapping are the principal means by which Unalakleet natives do so. Trapping is the principal means for Wainwright natives.

Whereas more than 50 Unalakleet men, 46 Gambell men, and a few Wainwright men run trap lines on a fairly regular basis, little income is generated from this pursuit. The most successful trappers in Unalakleet (15 in 1982) and Gambell were single men who camped away from the villages during most of the winter and checked their lines. The value of pelts has remained low for several decades. This endeavor offers little prospect for growth.

Ivory carving and the sale of ancient ivory that has been excavated from former village sites on St. Lawrence Island engage at least one person in almost every Gambell household, yet the per capita income from ivory sales of all kinds is estimated at $500 annually. Although this ivory income is a tiny sum, it is a necessary addition to the other funds that make their way into family coffers—that is, from employment, welfare, and trap-ping—for the purchase of technology to assist in subsistence pursuits. In an even less remunerative craft, many Gambell women and men are skin sewers and produce native garments. Most of the garments are worn locally, but some garments are for sale. Few sales are registered, and there is no cooperative or agent to find markets for them.

Commercial fishing, conducted on a haphazard basis by some of the persons who owned outboard motorboats at Unalakleet after World War II, was revived in 1961, when the Alaska Department of Fish and Game stimulated it and after fish buyers agreed to purchase and process catches in Norton Sound. For twenty years, with one or two exceptions, a single buyer controlled the catches at Unalakleet and eastern Norton Sound, much as a single oil distributor, Standard Oil, located at St.

Michael, controlled and continues to control all oil distributed in the eastern Norton Sound area. The coastal regions of the north have been divided among the major oil distributors. Monopsonies of trade, in which a single firm monopolizes all exchange in some commodity market, have been as common in the arctic after statehood as before. The prices at which people can sell, as well as the prices that they must pay for basic commodities, are set by the monopsonist. The state and federal governments guaranteed the new order by providing support for the capitalist enterprises.

The Role of the State

The state (federal and state governments) plays several important economic roles in Alaska that affect natives, including their subsistence economies. It provides public support for their enterprises, it provides services to individuals, and it controls their resources.

Support for local enterprises has come in several ways but principally through actions that benefit capital without demanding excessive outlays from it. Central among them are the development of the infrastructure (transportation systems, utilities, communication systems), services (fire and police protection, research), laws (such as those that inhibit foreign competition or that create and protect private property and private accumulation), and assistance and subsidies to get nascent industries moving.

For example, the federal government not only paid for the infrastructure that has made drilling and pumping of Alaskan oil possible but also extinguished the Alaskan natives' claims to land. And when native corporations were formed, as required by law, an old monopsonist (under new ownership in Seattle), the Alaska Commercial Company, appealed to the federal government against the "unfair practice" of allowing native corporation stores to receive start-up money from ANCSA. To rectify the problem, the federal government has provided subsidies m the Alaska Commercial Company.

In modern Alaska, the public sector of the economy looms very large, paving the way for capitalist investment and capi-

talist extraction of the naturally occurring, nonrenewable resources (oil, gas, minerals) and of the renewable resources (chiefly fish, shellfish, furs, and timber). Native corporations have been established to extinguish land and water claims, on the one hand, and to encourage participation in capital investment and accumulation, on the other. The public sector economy, providing infrastructural development, services, subsidies, and assistance, is also evinced in the transfer payments and services that are provided to the people who have suffered most or who are least able to operate successfully in the private sector or in that part of the public sector that provides earned income for employment (local, state, or federal employment, IRA employment, employment derived from state or federal block grants, borough taxing authority, contracts, and the like).

Villages in modern Alaska, and the three villages in this study are not exceptions, have become dependent on public funds to maintain and expand their municipal and IRA functions. At Wainwright, the North Slope Borough, with its taxing authority over Prudhoe Bay oil revenues, is the dominant conduit of public funds. Public funds are used in all three villages to provide cash to families in the employ of local, borough (Wainwright), state, and federal institutions or in the agencies and programs that have been funded by those institutions. Since all such funds are ultimately dependent on legislation at the federal, state, and borough levels, they can grow, shrink, or disappear, depending on legislative decisions and the ideological predilections of presidents and governors. Moreover, because oil sales are the principal source of state and borough revenues—hence the principal source of state transfers to native villages—employment, construction, and the availability of cash in villages are also especially sensitive to the price of oil, the demands for it, and, eventually, its depletion.

This is not to say that there are no private sectors in the three villages. But except for trapping in Wainwright and Unalakleet, commercial fishing in Unalakleet, and ivory carving and sales in Gambell, supplemented by a little skin sewing, all other private enterprises are directly dependent on public sector expenditures for their very existence. Even commercial fishing requires federal assistance in some forms, if natives are to engage

in it. Furthermore, fishing and trapping must comply with state regulations, whereas walrus hunting requires a federal variance to the Marine Mammals Protection Act in order for Eskimos to harvest walrus and their ivory.

Constant public expenditures are required to maintain small trucking firms, air service, small inns, private grocery-dry goods-garage operations, taxi services, videotape rentals, and all other enterprises in each village's economic superstructure. The distribution of public funds—earned and unearned—is the arctic/subarctic multiplier.

It is again noteworthy that commercial fishing, trapping, and ivory sales are based on the harvests of naturally occurring, renewable resources. Walrus have provided a staple in the Gam-bell diet, as fish have done in the Unalakleet diet, for over two millennia. Fur-bearing animals have provided, until recently, the bulk of native clothing and bedding for the same period. Furs have also provided exchange values with Eskimo, European, and American traders for hundreds of years. So the key items of subsistence are also the key items of commerce in Gam-bell and Unalakleet. At one time, of course, naturally occurring resources were the key items of commerce in Wainwright—first, whales and caribou, and later, furs. But federal laws and international restrictions preclude trafficking in whale and whale by-products, whereas federal and state laws prevent both the large-scale extraction and the sale of caribou.

Wainwright is the exception. Its principal item of commerce—furs—is insignificant in the economy of the early 1980s. Subsistence resources are used for subsistence and not substantially for sales. The massive role played by the public sector in the local economy—including state restrictions on the harvests and/or by-products from whales, polar bears, and caribou—and the high per capita income it provides are undoubtedly the reasons Wainwright villagers have not sought to sell naturally occurring, renewable resources, or by-products from them, on a larger scale. And it is undoubtedly the major factor that allows Wainwrighters to be especially discriminating in the species that they choose to harvest for subsistence.

Unalakleet and Wainwright Eskimos have been propelled into regional corporate ventures by virtue of the ratification of

ANCSA's provisions. All three villages have been required by ANCSA to establish village corporations. But in so doing, none of the villages was transformed into a corporate capitalist entity, bent on accumulating capital, saving, delaying gratification, economizing scarce resources so as to maximize their financial benefits, and withdrawing support from others as they compete in the marketplace. Rather, Eskimos in all three villages, prior to and subsequent to ANCSA, hold values about the land, the air, the water, and the animals and plants. These values differ in some important ways from commodity valuations of naturally occurring, renewable and nonrenewable resources. Eskimos in the three villages certainly sell labor and such commodities as pelts, fish, and carved ivory, but they also give and share those same items and their labor; and they engage in cooperative and helpful associations and gestures in extraction and transportation of those items when otherwise competitive behavior would be expected.

The three villages are incorporated into the nation's political economy, a political economy that is controlled by the capitalist mode of production. For at least three decades, it has been argued that Native Americans have been emerging from underdeveloped tribal cultures and that modem technologies and organizations ("modernization") and universalist achievement orientations would eventually bring about the economic development of those tribal societies. Economists have generated a large number of variations on this theme. "Dualism," "stages of economic growth," "diffusion," and, for want of a better term, "psychological inadequacy" are some of the themes that have been proposed to account for why tribal economies are under-developed and how they will become more fully developed. In general, all of these arguments contend that if infrastructure is developed, modem theories of organization put into operation, and tribal people taught universalist achievement orientations (i.e., to save, delay gratification, economize scarce resources so as to maximize future benefits, compete for personal and family gain, dissociate from restrictive entanglements with wider networks of kinspeople, friends, and tribal mates), then such tribes will experience economic development.

A second body of political economic literature has critiqued

such themes of economic development and found them wanting. It is not our purpose to review either of these large literatures. The forces of the political economy have expropriated native land, appropriated control of the resources thereon, dominated native governments, and salved some of the wounds with earned income from the public sector and with the dole that these compelling forces have themselves inflicted. So, I seek to show how the three villages have become drawn into the complex hierarchical system that is controlled by the capitalist mode of production and how the villages combine the capitalist mode with other modes.

Whereas the capitalist mode of production is dominant in Alaska and in the rest of the United States, it is an articulated system that does not transform all persons and communities within its embrace into industrial producers of surplus value. To the contrary, for its own growth, the system encompasses semicapitalist and precapitalist forms of production. In the United States, the public sector has provided the means and the economic transfers to integrate semicapitalist (some sales for gain, as in trapping and carving) and precapitalist (subsistence) modes within the larger political economy. Many forms of dependency result from this integration.

Capitalism is a disciplined pursuit of profit, forever renewed, but it is much more than that. The development economists are surely correct when they point out that technologies and the techniques of their use—labor-time, universalist orientations, need-achievement, and wealth—are prerequisite to capitalist development. But they are surely wrong in thinking that if these factors are in place, ipso facto, tribal economies will transform into capitalist economies. Ownership and control of a resource base on which production, in turn, can be based are crucial. The state has denied native claims to ownership and control of most naturally occurring resources—renewable or not—in Alaska. This factor more than any other limits capital accumulation by natives in the arctic. But powerlessness and dependence on dole, in addition to limited access to resources, jointly restrict the development of viable market economies and capital accumulation by Alaska's natives.

Ideological factors, too, are crucial. Neither human propensity for profit nor greed are universal, and the residents of the

three villages in this study, in their economic behavior, provide dear evidence that they are not. Furthermore, the complex hierarchy that is capitalism has integrated the three villages, while expropriating most of the natural resources within their former domains, providing the rules and regulations by which their public and private sectors will operate and providing the funds and the dole through which public sector dependencies are maintained.

Capitalism in arctic and subarctic Alaska is capital intensive rather than labor intensive, and the capital is invested in the extraction and production of nonrenewable resources. Indeed, arctic capital is the capital of multinationals. Representatives of the oil, gas, and mineral industries made several public presentations in each of the three villages during the early 1980s, informing the residents not to expect jobs in those industries when those resources are extracted from below the waters of Norton Sound, the Navarin Basin (of the Bering Sea), and the Chukchi Sea. But the residents have also been told to become familiar with people in the industries because Unalakleet and Wainwright—being situated as they are and in view of the infrastructure that each village has—will be seeing them on a regular basis. Many advances have been made to Gambell to establish staging areas, communication centers, and the like, for the oil industry. But they have all been rebuffed.

If economic development is to spin off in Unalakleet, for instance, as a multiplier from the extraction and transportation of raw materials by multinational corporations, the spin-off will be to the major and minor air carriers and to a local entrepreneur and the village corporation, as they respond to new demands for limited goods and services. And should Wainwright become a secondary staging area for Chukchi Sea oil operations, perhaps providing a pumping station to connect Chukchi Sea oil to the trans-Alaskan pipeline, the spin-off will be likewise limited to the provision of more goods and services.

On Competition: The Oil Age Eskimo in the Private Sector

I have asserted above that whereas competition between and among persons and firms is expected in the private sector of

the economy as a part of democratic capitalism, it is not apparent in the villages in this study. I can add here that the public sector that accompanies, services, and absorbs many of the infrastructural costs of the private sector is also suffused with competition. This is attested by the meritocracy system, through which persons gain influence and power in the public sector and its departments, offices, agencies, and bureaus. Again, the Eskimo villages in this study provide exceptions.

The exceptional behavior of Eskimos in both the private and the public sectors is not caused by any backwardness or by any psychological inadequacy. They understand how the market works. They understand costs. And they understand that benefits accrue from larger incomes. The interesting thing is how natives perceive such benefits.

In early 1982, when writing up the results of a multivariate and rather complex analysis of social indicators of community well-being in eight Alaskan villages, four in the Aleutian-Pribilof Island Association and four in the North Alaskan Native Association regions, I was struck by the importance of two factors: the amounts that native Alaskans invested in their subsistence pursuits and the amount and kinds of things that they shared within and between households, among wider networks of kinspeople, and among friends. Sharing extended from one's home village to associates in distant villages. And an interesting fact that should not go unnoticed was that the more people earned, whether in public sector jobs or as successful private sector fishermen, the more widely they shared. I referred to this widespread phenomenon, the "cement that holds the structure of Eskimo villages together," the persistence of traditional subsistence pursuits and the organization of labor and distribution, especially sharing, as "the tie that binds" (Jorgensen, McCleary, and McNabb 1985).

During the field research for this study, and after I had written about Aleutian and Northern Alaskan sharing, I asked a knowledgeable Unalakleet hunter-fisher whether there was a single native person or a single native family in the village who did not participate in subsistence pursuits. The question had been asked of other residents, and all had been puzzled by its obtuseness. It had never occurred to anyone that some family

among them would not be so engaged. This hunter, however, was asked whether, if a person or a family seldom hunts or is incapable of engaging in a variety of subsistence activities, subsistence products would be distributed among them. Not with exasperation but with a desire to inform, the hunter said, "Sharing is the tie that binds, the aspect of our life that is Eskimo, that makes us, that maintains us." The native's summary phrase was identical to the metaphor I had selected for the same phenomenon in different villages.

Little and Robbins (1984) and Luton (1985) did not hear the same words in Gambell and Wainwright, but the sentiments that natives expressed there about sharing were similar. In Gambell, natives said, "You give until it hurts, then you give some more." In Wainwright, sharing was described as the opposite of the market's assumption of scarcity, to wit, "The more you give, the more you get."

It is the concept and the activity of sharing that blunt the tooth-and-claw competition that characterizes so much of the entrepreneurial and capitalist activity. Indeed, Protestant ethic individualism—in which the individual is besought to save, delay gratification, develop worldly talents, and accumulate worldly possessions—has not fully caught on, even after over eighty years of evangelical activities in each of the three villages. And even in Wainwright, where large incomes were earned and money flowed quite freely in the early 1980s, prayers were not offered for one's personal success but for those who gave to the community (Luton pers. comm.).

Natives share and maintain wide-ranging ties with kinspeople and friends, and the persistence of native views of their obligations to one another in the subarctic and arctic homelands makes it difficult to shun those obligations and to supplant them with closer, personal ends. People who hunt whales, walrus, caribou, or hares together, or who share warm homes or their skills and labor to repair a damaged snowmachine, do not make good competitors against one another in the commercial fishing or trapping arenas. The people who convene to rejoice in a successful whale hunt, or walrus festival, or Fourth of July feast of native foods are all friends and relatives, and they honor together the resources on which their personal and communal

lives depend. The Alaskan arctic and subarctic region remains a demanding and challenging place, where several millennia of adaptations, highlighted by sharing and helping, have been the mode.

Some examples of competition in the Unalakleet commercial fisheries will make the point even more dearly. Commercial fishing, per se, in Unalakleet is more fully discussed in chapter 7. In discussions about what technology is considered appropriate for Unalakleet herring and salmon fishing, commercial fishermen regularly reported that a fisherman needed a boat about 24 feet to 26 feet in length and a single outboard motor in the 100- to 115-hp range. I often commented that twin 50-hp motors, although costing more, would last longer, run at about one-half throttle, be more fuel efficient, and be much safer when on the sound. Visions of rough seas during late May, when, at night, fishermen are trying to find or trying to clear their herring nets while watching for moving ice, can make for anxious moments, the kind of moments when a non-Eskimo would feel safer with two motors rather than one. Eskimo responses were instructive. I was told by the fishermen that 100-to 115-hp motors were best, because they provided full power when that power was needed. But more important, the fishermen replied that a fisherman with one motor, in the words of one man, "is never out on the water alone." He meant, of course, that another Eskimo will always help a person in distress.

There were discussions among Eskimo fishermen of thoroughly un-Eskimo behavior, such as native commercial fishermen checking their nets only to find that they had been stripped. No one for a moment thought that an Eskimo had stripped a fellow fisherman's net. On hearing this, the trappers among the fishermen were asked (and practically all fishermen engage in at least some trapping during the winter months) whether their traps were ever cleaned of their quarry by another native. That, too, was unheard of, and furthermore, no trapper will exhaust a riverbed or creek of all its fur-bearing animals, no matter what the pelts are fetching on the market, because "no one wants to think that he has destroyed the life of a place." The environment is shared with those animals.

The native view of competition cannot be divorced from the native view of helping and sharing. This view of competition proved absolutely perplexing to a nonnative representative of a large, Seattle-based firm that was buying fish in the Unalakleet fishery in 1982. The firm, which had formerly been the monopsonist in the Unalakleet fish trade, was locked in competition with a buyer from Minnesota who had entered the Unalakleet fishery (see chap. 7). The Seattle firm had contracted with a local native to act as their agent in procuring fish from Unalakleet fishermen. The firm sent the nonnative along to keep in touch with them and to look after the firm's interests.

The nonnative agent was working long hours, thoroughly engrossed in the competition between his firm and the Minnesota buyer's firm for the catch of each fishing period. (The ADF&G divides the commercial salmon fishing season into several sessions, usually about twenty-five.) He would press on for nearly an entire forty-eight-hour period, icing fish, putting them into containers, and shipping them to Anchorage by aircraft at a rate of three 28,000-pound shipments during each two-day period. His firm was beating the Minnesota buyer but could not quite knock him out, even though his own firm's salmon prices to the fishermen were higher than the worldwide market could bear.

The knock-out opportunity came during one July fishing period, presumed to be a pink salmon session, When an unexpected and very large run of chum (dog) salmon materialized. The native concept and practice of sharing and helping, of never leaving someone alone on the water, deflected the punch. Around midnight during the last day of a session, two of the Seattle firm's tenders loaded with chum and some pink salmon headed from Shaktoolik to Unalakleet. A tender belonging to the Minnesota buyer headed back at about the same time. The biggest of the three tenders was owned by the Seattle firm and piloted by a native. En route, the Seattle firm's big tender lost one engine, and its little tender broke down completely. The Minnesota firm's tender, laden with 6,000 pounds of salmon, also broke down.

Rather than hurting the competition and helping himself, helping the native buyer, and helping the Seattle-based firm for which he worked and to whom most natives were selling their

fish, the native piloting the big tender heard the distress call from his companion boat and slowly worked his way back to pull it in to Unalakleet. When he got to his sister ship, he saw the disabled boat of the competitor. So, on one engine, he pulled both of the boats back to Unalakleet, thereby threatening all of the fish in all three tenders, because they surely would rot before he got them back to the village. One of the Seattle firm's boat loads was iced, the others were not.

Soon after the two tenders were pulled to Unalakleet behind the larger but partially disabled big tender, the slough smelled of rotting fish. All but the iced fish were rotten, so both firms suffered. The Eskimo pilot refused to leave the other tenders on the water without help. Eskimo values, not market values, prevailed.

In another example, the representatives of the Seattle firm installed an ice machine in Shaktoolik for the sole use of fishermen selling to their firm. The idea was that with this ice, fishermen would lose fewer fish before moving them to Unalakleet and that the Seattle firm would be able to buy all of their fish, thus denying them to the Minnesota buyer. A village official was left in charge of the ice machine. In that capacity, he sold ice to all who wanted to buy—those who sold to the Minnesota man as well as those who sold to the Seattle firm. The Eskimos simply continued to share, while for the first time enjoying the benefits that competition among white-owned firms brought to them.

There is a subplot to all of this. The native fishermen belong to the Norton Sound Fishermen's Cooperative, or Co-op. They share joint liability with the Co-op, and, by and large, most are in debt to it for loans and monetary assistance. The Co-op, which is predominantly a native organization, had contracted with the Minnesota buyer to use the Co-op's modest fish processing plant and to have exclusive right to Co-op fish.

When it was clear that half or more of the Co-op members were selling their fish to the local native, who himself was serving as agent for the Seattle firm, the Co-op's leadership was not miffed. They felt that competition among nonnative buyers was especially healthy, even if local fishermen were not paying back their outstanding obligations to the Norton Sound Fishermen's Cooperative during the 1982 fishing season. They pointed out

that in past years, the fishermen had to accept the price offered by the monopsonist who controlled the local market. For many Unalakleet residents, commercial fishing is the major, if not the sole, source of revenue, so they sought the best price available. In fact, many fishermen immediately switched to the Minnesota buyer during the first thirty-six hours of a period when the local native could no longer afford to buy pink salmon on his own (without the backing of the Seattle firm).

I ask, perhaps rhetorically, whether there is a competitive side to Unalakleet Eskimos in their commercial fishing. That side may be expressed in each fisherman's unwillingness to share precise information with other fishermen on the whereabouts of especially productive net placements. In another vein, however, Unalakleet fishermen take great pride in their skills—including knowing where to place their nets, knowing how to negotiate stormy seas in tiny skiffs, and bringing in the largest catches. The Co-op posts the names of the fishermen who are on the water for the longest periods or who have the greatest catches per period, per species, and per season. Awards are given for such accomplishments, and the awarded fishermen as well as their less successful fellows take pride in the personal competence of the winners. Personal monetary gain is not the issue. Most of the village community was buzzing with respectful comments when a lone fisherman brought in a 1,600-pound catch of chum salmon in his 16-foot Lund skiff, powered by a 35-hp engine.

7
The Contemporary Mode of Production: Village Economics, Part 2

Village Infrastructures

The oil and gas that are extracted from beneath the North Slope, together with the ANCSA legislation that made such extraction possible, have affected the three villages in very different ways. All three have received buildings, jobs, and the delivery of services from tax revenues collected by the state and shared, in a variety of ways, with the villages. But Gam-bell's infrastructural development has been severely restricted in comparison with that of Wainwright, for which North Slope Borough membership brought remarkable changes, and Unalakleet, in which the flow of public and derived public funds stimulated considerable changes.

Table 6 shows the infrastructure for each village in 1982. Because the NSB had very ambitious capital improvement project plans, which commence and cease with the availability of revenues to the NSB, Wainwright's infrastructure grew through the early 1980s at a much faster rate than that of the other two villages. The plunge in oil market prices, however, has brought an almost complete halt to CIP projects, which were scheduled to be phased out completely by April 1987 (Luton pers. comm.).

Transportation

As of December 1982, Gambell did not have a road, nor were there any trucks in the village. The twice-weekly scheduled flights from Nome did not regularly arrive, and the cargo ship docked offshore about twice each summer. Unalakleet had

(Table continued on next page )

thrice-weekly, nonstop commercial jet service to Anchorage, regular cargo plane service from Anchorage, and many more cargo ship visits than the other two villages. Wainwright had thrice-weekly flights from Barrow, but a common practice among Wainwright residents and temporarily employed persons was to charter unscheduled flights from Barrow if the scheduled flights did not fit into their plans. Because dog traction has been replaced by snowmachines and motorboats, practically every family in every village owns one or more of each. Many Gambell and most Wainwright households also owned ATCs—a reasonable mode of transportation for the Arctic and Bering Sea tundra year-round.

Housing

The vast majority of houses in all three villages were constructed during and after the 1960s. Many were built under BIA-HUD programs in the 1960s. In the 1970s, houses for all three were built under the Alaska State Housing Authority and for Gambell and Unalakleet, by the Bering Straits Regional Housing Authority. In Wainwright, more than half of all the homes that were occupied in 1982-83 had been built since 1971. Moreover, since 1980 alone, 73 houses have been built there—37 as Federal Aid Housing and 36 as nonfederal housing under NSB authority. Including apartments, the NSB owned 50 units in Wainwright. The NSB's oil-related revenues have correlated with the building of larger and larger

houses, so that the most recent group in Wainwright includes three- and four-bedroom homes. Wainwright has separate housing for every 3.4 persons in the village, as opposed to every 4.4 persons in Gambell and every 4.6 persons in Unalakleet. In 1982, there were eight vacant houses in Wainwright, but all habitable houses in Gambell and Unalakleet were occupied. The ratio of persons per household and the number of vacant but habitable houses are simple measures of a local surfeit and a phenomenon of oil transfers and federal programs.

Communications

Satellite-relay telephone service to the three villages is good and can be expanded, although most of the homes in all of the villages are already outfitted with telephones. Radios and television sets, whose pictures are transmitted by satellite, are also in almost all homes. Communication systems are greatly desired by Alaskan natives. Gambell hunters want to be able to lock onto the Gambell radio tower's signal when they are caught in dense fog. When on the sea, practically all hunters use CB radios to maintain contact. Unalakleet has more current and more regular newspaper service from Anchorage and Nome than either of the other villages. The Alaska television satellite system was being installed in Wainwright during our field period, so residents in the village were a bit slower than residents of the other two villages in outfitting their homes with television sets. Tele-video diagnostic health services were also introduced to Wainwright in 1982 (but not to Gambell and Unalakleet).

Utilities

All of the villages are electrified. Street lights are located near most of the public buildings, and in Unalakleet and Wainwright, they are strung along the road. Houses are wired, and most homes are completely heated with oil. Most Unalakleet houses also have Wood-burning stoves, and many Wainwright houses also have coal-burning stoves.

Gambell draws water from Troutman Lake with a pumping system and from a spring at the base of Sevoukok Mountain,

but it does not have a filtration system with home hookups or a sewer system. It does have a solid waste dump. Unalakleet is the only village that has a water system that pumps, filters, and delivers water to houses and other structures in the village; a sewer system that draws sewage from those same structures, treats it and deposits it in a lagoon and also a solid waste dump. Wainwright must cope with permafrost. Utilidors—warmed and insulated pipes that move water and wastes in some Canadian arctic communities—have not been installed in Wainwright. That village has a pump from a freshwater lake to a treatment plant and tank. A truck is used to distribute water to homes. A truck is also used to pump sewage from homes and to deliver it to a liquid waste treatment dump.

Public and Private Structures

The populations of Gambell and Wainwright are about the same size; both are less than two-thirds the size of Unalakleet's population. This must be kept in mind when assessing public and private structures in the villages. In addition, Unalakleet has been a hub or secondary hub in Norton Sound for at least 150 years, whereas Gambell and Wainwright have never been hubs.

Gambell's weak development is striking in contrast to the public and private structures in Unalakleet and Wainwright. Unalakleet has about three-and-one-half times more public and private structures than Gambell. If we exclude the housing owned by the NSB, Wainwright has over one-and-one-half times more public and private structures than does Gambell.

Although Wainwright has fewer public and private structures than Unalakleet, its structures are huge in comparison to those in the other two villages, and they are more completely outfitted as well. Wainwright has by far the largest amount of commodious space for public purposes among the three villages.

North Slope Borough Capital Improvement Projects for Wainwright

The large size and number of public structures in Wainwright are clear indicators of the awesome importance of NSB ac-

tivities, especially the development of public infrastructure in North Slope villages as a function of oil tax revenues. Luton (1985: 120-129) counted seventy-five CIPs completed, in progress, or planned for Wainwright between 1979 and 1985. (This is not a total list of CIPs in Wainwright, and most of these have now been completed.)

The amount of money allocated for the clips is remarkable considering the fact that Wainwright has about 500 residents and no long-term economic base other than subsistence extraction. Such clips have invested $20.6 million in two schools, one of which houses the olympic-size swimming pool mentioned above. Houses for six teachers, costing $1.8 million, are to be turned over to the NSB when a $$06,000 renovation converts an old school to apartments for the teaching staff. Maintenance and warehouse buildings for NSB, the schools, and the local utility cost $30.9 million. Roads, snow fences, drainage, and erosion control cost $10.8 million. (The single road through town and the roads that criss-cross the residential areas are graded, graveled, and elevated five feet above the permafrost.)

A gravel acquisition dredging site cost $1.5 million. The water and sewage system, complete with trucks, treatment plants, and pipes, cost $14.6 million. Electric utilities, including street lights, have cost $7.4 million. Health facilities and a televideo system cost $5 million. Fire and public safety buildings and equipment cost $8.2 million. Upgrading and repositioning of the airport runway and facilities to accommodate jets and large transport planes cost $14.3 million. Seventy-three houses average about $300,000 each, while upgraded heating systems for Wainwright houses cost $1 million. Recent planning has included $100,000 for a study of local transit needs, a bridge, and a harbor.

At least $138.4 million have been spent since 1980 in developing Wainwright's infrastructure through clips. Federal, state, and NSB funds have been used to develop this infrastructure. Except for one scenario, in which Wainwright is destined to serve as the off-loading harbor for oil pumped from the Chukchi Sea and also the site for the projected hookup with the trans-Alaskan oil pipeline to carry that oil south to Valdez, there are neither resources nor plans to develop a self-sustaining niche in the market economy for Wainwright. Access to

gravel and a reasonable off-loading facility will accommodate the multinational oil companies, should they discover huge oil reserves below the Chukchi Sea.

The $138 million spent on CIPs for Wainwright is a small part of the NSB debt. Many of the bills incurred in CIPs at Wainwright have already been paid by state and federal sources. Others have been paid by the NSB. Yet some have not been paid, and some projects on the drawing board had not even started by late 1985. (I will return to this crucial issue in the epilogue.) To pay for old projects and start new ones, the NSB must regularly stretch its taxing ability. In the past, it has done so by selling bonds for capital projects and then taxing Prudhoe Bay property to retire the bonded indebtedness. In 1983, the North Slope Borough's indebtedness was about $1 billion. The subsequent plunge in the worldwide price of oil has severely affected the NSB's ability to sell bonds on the national and international markets. And because the plunging price of oil has softened the oil bond market, especially North Alaskan oil bonds, the NSB can neither sell its bonds nor tax Prudhoe Bay property to retire the bonds that it cannot sell.

The NSB, a native controlled government, has moved fully into the worldwide political economy. Its credit rating has slipped, and Alaska legislators have worried about the consequences of NSB indebtedness for all of Alaska (Luton 1985: 131). In 1985, CIPs in Wainwright provided about one-fourth the employment they provided in 1982—the highwater mark in the public expenditure of funds in that village.

Alaska State Grants and Improvement Projects at Gambell

As we have seen, the infrastructure at Gambell, whose population is about the same as that of Wainwright, is spare. A brief contrast between projects for Gambell and Wainwright will help us understand the differences, which are enormous. State grants are the principal source of infrastructural development in Gambell. In 1981 and 1982, per capita benefits amounted to about $100 and $190, respectively. In 1983, Gambell received new fire-fighting equipment, a multipurpose community build-

ing (for city offices, recreation, a learning center, and a library), and a $250,000 grant for the establishment of an ivory cooperative. The total investment over three years is less than $1 million. Gambell villagers, nevertheless, have consistently rebuffed, politely but firmly, all overtures and offers from oil companies to use the Northwest Cape region for radio transmitters, staging areas, safe harbors, and the like.

Ownership and Control of the Means of Production

As is abundantly clear, few goods are produced in any of the three villages for sale at a profit. Their economies are fueled by funds from the public sector. By and large, many of those funds flow through, or in and out of, the villages, without being recirculated within them. Table 7 lists the businesses by type and relative size (approximate receipts) in the three villages. It also specifies the sources of funds that created and now sustain the businesses and the locale of each business's ownership—within the village or elsewhere. The source of funds indicates whether the business is subject to the whims of legislation, the caprice of the market, or both. The locale of ownership of the business is important because it indicates whether profits arc drained from the village to be invested elsewhere or whether profits are controlled locally.

A quick perusal of table 7 will confirm that there is a connection between access to public goods, infrastructural development, businesses, and, as I will show, jobs and household income. These points, though impressionistic, should be obvious by now. Not unexpectedly, Gambell is by far the least developed among the three villages in numbers and kinds of businesses. Unalakleet, as secondary administrative and transportation hub, has the most extensive development of private businesses. Wainwright, whose growth is solely a function of policies designed to develop public infrastructure to serve the community but not to produce goods or penetrate the private market, stands between Unalakleet and Gambell in private business development.

This demonstrates that the sources of funds for most of the

largest businesses are public; yet for all businesses, the sources of funds are predominantly public, either directly or through an intermediary. For examples, the person who offers videotapes for rent in Unalakleet is employed as a custodian at the state-funded elementary school; at Wainwright, it may be an Anglo teacher who rents the tapes; whereas the person who flies into Wainwright and rents a room in the hotel is a consultant on contract with the NSB.

The private sector, for the most part, services the public sector, providing transportation, hauling, lodging, meals, groceries, dry goods, and repairs. It also serves the public sector by building some of the village's infrastructure (although some contracts are awarded to companies based outside the villages and regions).

Residents of native villages, then, are essentially consumers, and most of their purchases are related to the acquisition of subsistence resources. In response, a retail distribution market has developed within the villages. Natives exercise only partial control of the retail distribution sector. Each village has at least two retail stores that sell food, dry goods, fuel, and equipment such as snowmachines, motorboats, and ATVs. These stores also provide equipment repair services. In Wainwright and Unalakleet, the private/federally subsidized Alaska Commercial Company competes with the stores that are maintained by the village cooperatives (two tiny stores in Wainwright are privately held). The village cooperatives receive their funding from ANCSA and, of course, from the sales and proceeds from any other ventures in which they engage, such as contract construction of federally assisted housing within the village. In Gambell, a small store owned and operated by a native family competes with the village corporation's Alaska Native Industries Cooperative (ANICA) store. Because of capitalization problems in Gambell, the village corporation's store is capitalized by ANICA.

ACC and ANICA are private firms. Each is based in Seattle, and each receives federal subsidization. The profits earned by these firms flow to Seattle, where management invests them. Yet all of the monies earned in the village do not flow from them. Both ACC and ANICA hire local natives to run the operations. Thus, some of the money spent at the stores is paid as salaries

and wages to local employees. And those employees spend their incomes on purchases at those very same stores as well as elsewhere in the village.

Because costs of food and goods of all kinds are very high in the Alaskan bush, white residents of the native villages, from school employees to city managers, and nonnative institutions, such as the Covenant Church and School, make bulk purchases of food from Anchorage. Nonnatives purchase equipment in Lower 48 state cities or Anchorage. And nonnatives, and some natives, also purchase goods through catalogs. Price, then, is an important factor, and persons who can gain lines of credit or whose earnings are sufficiently great to allow for bulk and equipment purchases, including shipping charges, recirculate within the village only meager amounts of the salaries that they earn there.

Profits earned by the village corporation stores and the family-owned store are invested in the villages, while the natives in their employ recirculate most of their earnings locally. But the banks from which those stores borrow and the vendors from which they buy are located in Anchorage, Seattle, and elsewhere; thus, the major portion of every dollar from every sale leaves the village.

The videotape rental and gift shop businesses in Unalakleet are tiny, part-time, one-person-owner establishments. The gift shop, for example, is operated by a member of the native family that owns Ryan Air Service. The shop is located in the air service's small office building-terminal and is opened when flights bring visitors, such as school district consultants, to the village. A teacher in Wainwright rents videotapes out of the NSB-owned home in which he lives, which, in turn, is provided by the school district. Of the two small, privately held stores in Wainwright, one is operated out of a private home and one is located in a small building. One of them specializes in hunting supplies and snowmachine replacement parts. It is interesting to note that the smallest of the privately held businesses in Gain-bell is a reload supply store (shells, powder, shot, etc.) operated by one man out of his home. Subsistence needs—his own and those of his village mates—have given him a tiny opening for sales.

With the exception of the village corporation retail stores, the retail sector provides no multiplier to the local economy. The public sector, together with the air transportation sector, provides a small multiplier, as the gift shop demonstrates.

Transportation facilities are crucial to get people and goods in and out of the villages. Unalakleet has several to service itself and its neighbors. Wainwright required transportation facilities on a rather large scale—to make possible its own energetic building program but not to service other communities.

Wien Air Alaska hires a few persons in each of the three villages, but the bulk of every fare and every bill of lading to each of the villages returns to the Anchorage offices of the firm. Cape Smythe Air, a local Barrow firm, has held a contract from Wien to fly from Barrow to Wainwright and other North Slope villages. Ryan Air Service, which holds the Wien contract to service Gambell and several Norton Sound villages, is a very successful native-owned private business, based in Unalakleet in 1982. It hires some pilots from outside Unalakleet, but most of the employees are natives, many from the Ryan family.

Members of the Ryan firm invest locally some of the dollars that are spent with them. They planned the construction of a terminal and restaurant to accommodate increased intraregional and interregional travelers, many of whom are doing business with, working or consulting for, or attending meetings at the Bering Straits School District. Overnight travel was projected to increase with relocation of the Norton Sound Health Authority to Unalakleet. Yet Ryan Air Service must purchase its aircraft, aircraft parts, fuel, and electronic technology outside the village and region, where it must also seek financing. The very small transportation firms—one-person taxi services and family hauling services in Wainwright and Unalakleet—are on call.

In Unalakleet, the Covenant Church and School own their own trucks, as do the ACC, the village corporation, the city, and the Norton Sound Fishermen's Cooperative. The hauling services get the overflow from freight at the lighterage docks and the airport, most of which is to family homes or to the state schools. They also lease their equipment and services to contractors who enter the village on short-term projects. The barge and

lighterage firms that service the villages are owned by firms based outside the villages.

The service sectors of the villages are consonant with other public and private sector developments. The Sivuqaq Native Corporation in Gambell owns a house, which it rents to persons who stay over for a day or two. One enterprising Gambell man often finds accommodations in local houses for bird-watchers who wish to visit Gambell in the spring. Unalakleet and Wainwright, by contrast, have lodging and restaurant accommodations. The small lodge/restaurant (nine rooms) in Unalakleet is owned by members of a native family. From time to time, they lease the rooms and the kitchen to construction companies from outside Unalakleet. In that way, firms that hold contracts requiting two or three months' work in the village can house and feed their employees. The skilled employees are imported from more distant cities. The Wainwright hotel and restaurant is owned by the village corporation and hires locally. During 1982 and 1983, the hotel was used as a construction camp (a residence and kitchen for construction workers) but also as a local restaurant. The skilled employees on Wainwright jobs are also hired from distant cities.

Self-employment is the major source of income for many native families in Gambell and Unalakleet. As I have pointed out, commercial fishing, trapping, ivory carving, skin sewing, and sales of ancient ivory are the avenues to the private sector market for natives. The resources that are sold, hence consumed, are renewable. These economic activities also provide small multipliers to local suppliers of technology and fuel, to a boat builder in Unalakleet, to three net hangers in Unalakleet, and to stores and persons who repair equipment. Most Eskimos make their own equipment repairs, but during the commercial fishing season, when they are pressed for time, the repair services and net hangers do a brisk business.

Every Gambell family, with only one or two exceptions, has at least one ivory carver and at least one person who collects ancient ivory (for sale or for carving and sale). The 111 carvers are complemented by 90 persons—mostly women, with, again, almost one in every household—engaged in skin sewing. The former activity generates much more income (aggregate of

about $250,000 in 1982) than the latter, but both are integral to the purchases that are necessary to maintain Gambell's subsistence life-style.

Sixty-five Unalakleet natives hold limited-entry fishing permits, seventeen for fisheries other than Norton Sound. Another fifty persons assist the permit holders or fish for herring and collect herring roe-on-kelp (for which entry permits are not required). There are also about fifteen men in Unalakleet who run commercial trap lines in the winter and fish commercially in the summer.

The commercial fishermen and trappers in Unalakleet and the trappers, carvers, and skin sewers in Gambell own their own equipment. To purchase equipment, the commercial fisherman usually requires loans from the NSFC, which, in turn, requires loans and assistance from the village corporation, the regional nonprofit corporation, and the Alaska Native Foundation to maintain itself and to provide assistance to native fishermen. Commercial fishing is of sufficient importance to warrant separate attention, below. As for ivory sales, the Gambell village carvers received a grant of $250,000 from the state of Alaska to establish an ivory cooperative that was comparable to the total sales of all ivory in 1982.

Native self-employment in Wainwright has not been stimulated by oil transfers. Three or four men carve ivory or make baleen handicrafts on a very limited basis; two families operated their personal automobiles as taxis on a catch-as-catch-can basis in late 1982; and two families operated small stores to generate some income. One man built wooden boats. Two families sold smelt to consumers in Barrow. A few men trapped and sold the pelts.

Whereas ivory carving and commercial fish extraction are most assuredly production for profitable sales, both are cottage industries, carried on by many private producers. These producers buy their own equipment, take most of the risks, and, consequently, absorb most of the losses. Most Unalakleet fishermen choose to belong to the Norton Sound Fishermen's Cooperative, because it provides benefits to them. The NSFC is owned jointly by the fishermen, with 100 percent of the nonvoting preferred stock being held by the village corporation and

by the regional nonprofit corporation. The NSFC, which owns the fish-processing plant, a dock, and a truck, will be discussed in conjunction with the subject of commercial fishermen.

The native village corporations in each village engage in some production. Normally, this occurs when the village has been awarded a federal, state, or borough (Wainwright) grant to build something in the village. The Sivuqaq Native Corporation has access to fewer contracts and fewer funds than its counterparts in Unalakleet and Wainwright. The Olgoonik Corporation recently bought the white-owned firm that had done the majority of the construction business in the village and began bidding on contracts to be awarded locally, often on a partnership basis with outside construction firms. The Unalakleet Native Corporation created its own construction company. Whereas most contracts—all large building contracts—have been awarded to nonlocal firms (through 1983), the village corporations controlled most of the small building contracts in their villages during the 1982-83 period. In Wainwright, the OC often gained pieces of the large contracts through joint ventures with outside firms. Usually, Olgoonik supplied some of the labor for the projects.

Employment and Income in the Villages

The overwhelming majority of the permanent and temporary jobs that are available to residents of Gambell, Unalakleet, and Wainwright are in the public sector. In addition, the majority of employment in private sector jobs is dependent primarily on grants and contracts from public agencies or on purchases and travel engaged in by people on public sector payrolls, grants, contracts, and related sources of funds. These villages represent classic public sector dependencies: their resource bases have been expropriated; ownership or control, or both, of productive local resources are vested in nonlocal governments and corporations; the resources relied on for subsistence are controlled by nonlocal governments; access to the loci of power is limited; income from public sources and dole provides services, goods, structures for shelter, and cash to underwrite the subsistence economies; and there are virtually no sustainable private

sector businesses, owned and controlled locally, to provide a floor for the local economy.

Table 8 tallies the full-time employment for the three villages in 1982. It is difficult to pinpoint the precise number of full-time equivalents (FTEs), because jobs that appear to be permanent come and go with contracts and grants in all three villages (CIPs for Wainwright). Yet, if we treat the jobs listed here as permanent and full-time, our estimate will not be too highly inflated for the 1981-1983 period.

Table 9 lists the numbers of persons employed in the very small, private, family-held businesses in the three villages. Only one of these businesses, the retail store in Gambell, provides the sole source of income for the owner. Only two of the businesses—the lodge and the white-owned boat-building outfit in Unalakleet—provide major sources of income for the owners or their employees. These entrepreneurial enterprises are fitted into the families' quests to provide a little extra for purchases of all kinds.

Gambell

Gambell is cash poor, has few jobs, and has few prospects for economic growth in either public or private sectors. Controlling for population sizes, in 1982, Wainwright had almost three times and Unalakleet had over one-and-one-half times more FTE jobs than Gambell. The dependency of Gambell residents on the public sector for almost every single full-time job in the community is a striking fact. So is the tiny number of jobs that are available. There is little doubt but that the choice of land over participation in the distribution of ANCSA settlement funds has deprived Gambell of many public sector jobs.

Gambell's location makes it unsuitable as a transportation or administration hub. There is some likelihood that Gambell may be located dose to large quantifies of outer continental shelf oil and very close to the main transportation lanes for oil movement by ship. But the several village governments—IRA, city council, and village corporation—will not participate in the proceeds from any oil-related activities that occur near the island, except as transfers are made available by the federal govern-

ment. It is more likely that they will reap the disbenefits from noise, traffic, and spills.

Nonnatives occupy the high-salary positions in education (3 percent of the population holds 14 percent of the jobs), leaving the village in May and returning in September each year. In spite of their high salaries, the turnover rate of teachers is high. More than half of the households have no wage earners, part-time or full-time. The 58 full-time jobs occupied by natives are supplemented by occasional work. There were 28 jobs of brief duration in 1982, 8 of them for the construction of a multipurpose building that took six weeks to complete. Another 20 jobs were made available in the building of an evacuation road to protect against flooding. Those lasted for three weeks.

Although the Territorial Guard/National Guard has had a history of villager participation since the early 1940s (see Hughes 1984: 265), the thirty-six men and one woman who are currently active in the Gambell National Guard are not motivated solely by patriotism or history. The government-issued equipment, from "moon boots" to parkas, and the pay for monthly meetings and annual encampments are welcomed.

The latter provides about $1,000, on average, to every Guard member each year.

As we know, the principal source of income for almost all Gambell families is sales of carved and ancient ivory. Skin sewing contributes small amounts as well. The aggregate earnings from sewing, carving, and ancient ivory sales was $500 per capita in 1982.

Welfare and transfers-in-kind are important in Gambell, although they do not provide the sole means of support for any recipient or recipient family. But these resources are used within segments of clans to purchase food, equipment, and fuel, and benefits extend to clanspersons beyond the recipients. The resources, then, are pooled with those of more fortunate relatives, who provide assistance and kindness as a matter of course. Elders, as in Unalakleet, especially if they have few clanspersons, receive assistance of various kinds from many village residents, regardless of clan membership.

In 1981, nearly one-half of the households received food stamps, one-third received energy assistance, 12 percent received Aid for Dependent Children, 15 percent received Old Age Assistance, and 3 percent received Aid to the Permanently Disabled. The total value of the transfers was $1,078 per capita.

Robbins (John Muir Institute 1984: 121-122; Little and Robbins 1984) calculates the Gambell average household income from all sources at $13,200 and per capita income at $3,220. That is one-third less than the Unalakleet per capita and two-thirds less than that of Wainwright for 1982.

The importance of welfare transfers is undeniable. They account for one-third of the per capita income, an amount more than double that which is earned from the few but vital forms of production in the village—ivory carving, including the carving of ancient ivory, and skin sewing. And the dominant role of subsistence from naturally occurring resources is also obvious. The meager family incomes are plowed into subsistence pursuits, including the pursuit of walrus tusks.

Unalakleet

In Unalakleet, there were 184 full-time jobs for a total population of 790 in 1982. Natives, comprising 88 percent of the

population, held 60 percent of the jobs (110), and nonnatives, comprising 12 percent, held 40 percent of the jobs (74). Wages in Unalakleet, except for persons employed in professional capacities as educators, administrators, and pilots, range between $5.00 and $15.00 per hour. A few white households are disproportionately represented in full-time, public sector employment, principally as educators and administrators. Among 31 couples or families, 55 white persons are employed full-time, meaning that 30 percent of all full-time employment in the village is held by these few households.

It is doubtful whether nonnatives would reside in Unalakleet if there were no employment for them. The jobs that they occupy are predominantly in the public sector, and should they continue to work in the village until their retirement, according to past practices, they would then relocate. The village is an out-post—the locale of their employment but not their home. Even the pastors and teachers at the Swedish Covenant Church and School relocate on retirement.

The majority of the nonnatives are employed in school district, education, health care, and city administration and as pilots and mechanics for Ryan Air. The services they provide, then, require special educations and particular skills, and they are paid either directly or indirectly from the public coffers. This occupational structure is consonant with underdeveloped economies that are dependent on the public sector. Educators and administrators earn from $40,000 to $100,000 annually (the latter for a school district superintendent). Clerks and custodians working full-time earn $9,600 to $13,000 annually. Even these figures are misleading until we analyze costs and expenditures in the arctic and subarctic.

Construction jobs in Unalakleet are not plentiful. In some years, there are four or five small projects going on during the summer months, such as the construction of apartments for school district personnel or a school district building. But some summers go by with only small repair jobs in town. In the 1981-1983 period, approximately thirty-five short-term construction jobs were available annually. A little more than half of those jobs were held by itinerant nonnatives.

Large construction projects in Unalakleet are few, although two new state schools and a school district building were com-

pleted between 1979 and 1982. Jobs on the larger projects go predominantly to nonnatives, because Unalakleet does not have a native hiring preference clause and because most public developments are contracted by firms that are not located in Unalakleet. A strong building trades union in Alaska assures that workers will be hired off the bench in Fairbanks or Anchorage for jobs in Unalakleet. Smaller jobs, such as apartments constructed by the village corporation, go predominantly to natives. Perhaps twenty natives can get ten weeks of work each year from local, small-scale construction projects.

The Norton Sound Fishermen's Cooperative fish-processing plant might employ as few as 25 or as many as 35 persons in their various crews throughout the season. (In 1982, 14 nonnative workers were brought in by a nonnative from Minnesota who had contracted to operate the plant. Local natives and a few local nonnatives composed the rest of the work crews.) Crews work through each fishing session. The salmon season lasts from about mid-June to early September and is divided into 25 sessions, ranging from 12 to 48 hours. A rest period follows each fishing session. Plant crew members average about 50 shifts of 8 hours each during the season. Pay averages about $4.00 per hour. A person working every session would gross about $1,600.

A National Guard unit provides modest incomes to the fifteen members who attend the monthly meetings and encampments. Men can pick up work on fire-fighting crews from time to time. And efforts are made each summer through city, IRA, regional corporations, and the state to provide some employment for local youths. Service on various advisory committees—fish and game, coastal zone management, school board, Bering Straits Regional Corporation—also pay travel, per diem expenses, and, on occasion, modest fees. These small bits of cash are not trivial to native families. They can pay for fuel to drive motorboats and snowmachines, for ammunition, for repairs to equipment, or for specially desired foods from the local store.

The primary source of income for about 115 natives, entry-permit holders and assistants, in Unalakleet is commercial fishing. Assistants receive one-third of the proceeds from the catch. They are usually brothers or sons of the permit holders,

although cousins or even good friends sometime form these two-man crews. The natives (and their assistants) who fish in the Unalakleet subdistrict of Norton Sound are joined by 18 nonnative permit holders, some of whom reside in Unalakleet and work at the various schools or in other capacities that allow them fishing time during the summer fishing season.

In 1981, the 50 native and 18 nonnative permit holders for the Unalakleet subdistrict received $341,000 for their salmon catch, and in 1982, the total was $489,000. The earnings were not evenly distributed, ranging from $2,000 to $50,000, with nonnative earnings on top. But the average in 1982 was about $7,200. The average share for assistants in 1982 was $2,400. It is a well-established fact that fishermen's earnings increase with the amount of time they spend fishing. Costs must be deducted from the earnings, of course, and those include equipment of all kinds, maintenance, and fuel. Suffice it to say that for persons who fish all or most of the twenty-five or so fishing periods each year, costs (over $6,300) exceed the average earnings of the native entry-permit holder (gross earnings of $7,200, minus assistant's share of $2,400, equals $4,200 for the permit holder). Some fishermen fish less, earn less, and have fewer costs. Some fish more and earn more. Up to a point, expenses increase relative to the amount of time a fisherman spends on the water, but no fisherman has to invest much more than $6,300 annually, plus interest ranging from $900 to $1,200, in his operation.

Native fishermen have also entered the nascent herring fishing industry that recently opened in Unalakleet. No entry permits are required, but start-up costs are extremely high for profitable fishing. Many Unalakleet natives entered with their commercial salmon fishing equipment (which also provides some of the subsistence fishing equipment for most of them). About one-hundred native fishermen earned $330,000 in 1982, exclusive of costs. The fifteen Unalakleet residents who hold permits in the Yukon and Bristol Bay fisheries earned another $350,000.

Nuclear families in Unalakleet could not get by if their sole source of support was from the fish processing plant (average income $1,600), commercial fishing ($7,000 or $3,500, with high fuel and equipment costs), National Guard income (aver-

age of $1,000), native and ACC stores and state schools (as clerks, custodians, and kitchen helpers, at from $5.00 to $9.00 per hour), trapping (whereby 15 men average about $3,500 annually, with high fuel and equipment costs), occasional construction or fire-fighting employment, or piecework from knitting and weaving musk ox hair garments. Indeed, nuclear families are seldom independent. Rather, households often consist of more persons than a nuclear family, and "families" usually comprise more than one household. Income, equipment, and the naturally occurring resources that have been extracted are all shared within the family. For example, the trapper is provided money for operating costs by an employed parent or brother. The trapper, then, shares the proceeds from trapping as well as the products from the hunt with his relatives. The person who is employed occasionally as a fire fighter uses some of those funds to purchase fishing equipment, reload equipment, or fuel, and so forth. The native employed full-time at the village corporation or at any other job pools and shares his or her resources with all other members of the larger family. A person's labor, too, is freely given within families and wider networks of kinspersons and among friends. Thus, a person's productive capacities are treated much as goods, equipment, and income: they are shared without fee, not sold as a commodity or used solely for personal gain.

Welfare and Transfers of In-Kind Services: The Unearned Side of The Public Economy

Unalakleet is not only dependent on public sources of money for most of its infrastructure and its earned income but is also dependent on public sources for all of its unearned income. In the early 1980s, Unalakleet families, much more so than Wainwright families, required welfare assistance in the form of cash and food stamps. In 1981, for instance, a monthly average of 59 families and 12 elderly persons received welfare assistance through the Food Stamp program, Aid for Dependent Children, Old Age Assistance, and Aid to the Permanently Disabled. Those benefits, which totaled $232,000 for the year, were paid

to families representing 226 people, that is, at a rate of a little more than $1,000 per capita. The 226 persons represent nearly one-third of the total native population.

Field observations made it dear that no recipient of transfer payments subsists solely on those payments. In every instance, some member of the recipient family engaged in subsistence activities. And in all instances, the recipient families shared resources, equipment, and labor with closely related kinspersons who resided in other households. Even the recipients of Old Age Assistance prepared and preserved foods, which they shared with others. More often than not, the elders had received the unprepared foods from relatives and friends as gifts. Elders, persons known to be impoverished, and families in various stages of transition (e.g., woman-headed households), are treated with concern and kindness. Any other treatment would be unthinkable in Unalakleet.

The recipients of special kindnesses from Kinspersons and friends express their own kindnesses in many ways. They may baby-sit, help to process foods, assist with repairs, or merely provide warm words of gratitude. They are not obligated to reciprocate. By custom and convention, they give and they share.

Unearned assistance also is provided to natives through services and goods. We did not collect dollar equivalents, but unemployment insurance, energy assistance, weatherization (home insulation), counseling, and health services are delivered to natives. At least one-third of the households receive energy assistance, which defrays about one-fourth of the household's energy costs. We estimate the average annual income per native household in Unalakleet from all sources, earned and unearned, at $20,000.^[1]

[1] Income from full-time employment is estimated at $1.54 million: from fishing (salmon and herring) in Norton Sound and elsewhere at $1 million; from private businesses at $350,000; from trapping at $52,000; from part-time employment , fees, and piecework at $80,000; and from welfare and energy assistance at $268,000. Unalakleet native households (164) average 4.3 persons, so that the 1982 per capita income was $4,700 (rounded)—less than half of the estimated per capita income in Wainwright.

Wainwright

Full-time employment is unusually high in Wainwright, where, in late 1982, there were 139 FTE jobs for a population of 506 persons. The actual number of jobs available throughout the year (which, when aggregated, yielded 139 FTE) was about 190 (many construction jobs lasted for only a few months). Virtually any native adult male could find work. The NSB policy of avoiding union contracts and hiring natives first gave a distinct advantage to natives seeking work, an advantage not shared by Unalakleet natives in their own village. When CIPs come on line, the OC frequently has the contract, and natives are employed. Even then, the native population, which comprises 78 percent of the village, held only 63 percent of the jobs (97), whereas nonnatives, comprising 22 percent of the village, held the other 37 percent (42). For the most part, nonnatives were transient. They resided in barracks, the hotel, and other temporary housing when construction projects were under way and left on completion.

According to Luton (pers. comm.), natives were hired for jobs that were based on cost-plus contracts, but when contracts had a fixed price and completion time was crucial, nonnatives were hired. Nonnatives held most of the skilled jobs—super-visor, chief mechanic, and so forth.

The NSB created 120 of the public sector jobs. This figure, alone, conveys an impression of the importance of the borough to village economic affairs. Most of the employment, either full-time or during the construction season, is with CIPs, and the rates of pay for the least skilled general construction jobs in 1982 and 1983 were extremely high, averaging about $23.00 per hour. The hourly pay range was from $6.00 to $30.00. We estimate the average for all pay in Wainwright (for natives) at $20.00 per hour. The average pay for whites on CIPs was about $35.00 per hour in 1982.

Although some construction projects continue for eight or nine months, until the period of darkness and the most bitter winter cold, Luton (1985) estimated that the average native worked no more than four months each year on construction jobs. A large amount of money relative to needs could be made

in that period of time, and subsistence interests could be pursued as well. Men often lay off work to hunt or fish. Liberal NSB policies accommodate the subsistence interests of the laborer-hunter.

Remuneration is often great in the skilled service positions—health care, teaching, some government administrative jobs—and in a very large number of the skilled construction jobs. One white couple, each an educator, earned $200,000 annually, while receiving free housing, utilities, and a travel allowance. All of the teachers are married couples. They receive housing, most utility costs, and joint salaries of about $90,000 annually. The top native earner drew $60,000 annually. Native employees of the schools work in kitchen, custodial, and teacher's aide positions—most of them part-time—for from $9.00 to about $14.00 per hour.

In addition to their full-time and part-time employment, about twenty Wainwright men attended National Guard meetings, for which they were compensated, and Wainwright residents received financial benefits from HUD (federal) housing subsidies, Indian Health Service health and welfare benefits, and NSB per diem payments for attendance at various meetings. Some households also received fuel subsidies from the state. The years 1982 and 1983 were especially active ones for CIPs in Wainwright. They represent the apogee for the CIP income that flowed through the village. Projects slowed by nearly 75 percent between 1983 and 1985. Luton (1985: 117) estimates that the average native household income was $40,000 in 1982.

The per capita income for 1982, estimated at $10,000, allows Wainwright residents to purchase the technology and the fuel they require to extract naturally occurring resources and also to be selective in the resources they extract. Prices on all goods purchased in Wainwright are high. Prices and expenditures will be assessed below.

Wainwright's impressive public sector growth and the even more impressive growth of the NSB are based on oil-related revenues. Neither the NSB, the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, the Olgoonik Corporation, nor Eskimo entrepreneurs control the extraction, processing, or distribution of oil. As a matter of fact, only two Wainwright natives are employed in the

oil industry, working a week on and a week off as laborers for Pingo, a firm servicing the oil industry at Prudhoe Bay. The "skilled" labor position and the engineering and production management positions are occupied almost entirely by nonnatives from the southwestern region of the United States.

Some Marked Contrasts in Earnings From Employment

Gambell earnings are so tiny and the sources so constricted that · comparisons with Unalakleet and Wainwright are stark. But even if we look closely at the differences between earnings in Unalakleet and Wainwright we see a marked contrast. Luton (1985) estimated that the average native laborer in Wainwright worked about four months annually (or about 600 hours), at $23.00 per hour. The average Wainwright laborer would earn about $14,700 annually, while shouldering no costs or risks. The average Unalakleet entry-permit holder would earn about $4,200 for about 600 hours work in the salmon fishery and $2,200 (assuming that each had a helper) for 216 hours of work in the herring fishery, while shouldering all of the costs and risks. The $7.85-per-hour earnings evaporate when expenses are tallied. I will assess Unalakleet fishery economics below and explain why fishermen continue to fish even when costs appear to exceed benefits.

The differences between Wainwright and Unalakleet are dramatic, and they are especially interesting when we note that Unalakleet fishermen are operating in the private sector market and that Wainwright laborers are receiving public sector funds for public sector projects. The question for oil age Eskimos is, what will the economic base be in the near future?

The Household Balance Sheet: Relations Between Income and Expenses

In 1982, Gambell residents were struggling to get by. Unalakleet residents were getting by, but few natives were able to capitalize themselves so as to participate more successfully in the commercial fishing industry. Wainwright residents were riding the crest of a wave. With per capita income estimated at

$10,000, these residents of the North Slope Borough benefited from taxes on North Slope oil. They made a lot, spent a lot for necessities, and had some discretionary income to dispose of as they pleased.

A balance sheet, admittedly "back of the envelope" because of the mixture of averages and informed estimates, will assist the analysis. Table 10 gives the average income and average costs per household for 1982, standardized on Unalakleet's average household size (4.3). The average household sizes for Gambell and Wainwright are 4.1 and 4.0, respectively. No costs are estimated for income tax obligations.

The figures in parentheses are the standardized total incomes, total expenses, subsistence equipment and trip expenses, and food and dry goods expenses. It is unnecessary to standardize the rent-mortgage and utilities-heating expenses inasmuch as they do not vary with the sizes of the average household. Standardization narrows the differences between Unalakleet and Gambell and widens the differences between Unalakleet and Wainwright. The differences for income and expenses between Gambell and Wainwright would also increase somewhat if standardized on Gambell's average household size of 4.1 persons.

As has been shown, Gambell villagers invest much more of their total income—and local credit—in subsistence-related expenditures than do residents of the other two villages. Residents of Wainwright, however, put much more money into purchases of food, dry goods, utilities, heat, and discretionary uses than do residents of Unalakleet or Gambell. I call food, dry goods, rents and mortgages, utilities, and heat "house-maintaining" expenses to distinguish them from "subsistence-related" expenses.

Wainwright and 'Gambell lighterage expenses are higher than those at Unalakleet, adding about 10 percent to the costs of large equipment, oil, and many foods, especially canned goods and produce. Oil, for example, sold for $150 per barrel in Unalakleet, $162 per barrel in Gambell, and $168 per barrel in Wainwright. These costs show up in the "utilities and heating fuel" category. But the sizes of houses and the village climates also influence heating costs.

Gambell, which is very cold and windswept during the win-

ters and cool, wet, and fog enshrouded for much of the summer, has relatively small houses—mostly with two bedrooms. Gambell residents maintain their homes and their public buildings at below 60 degrees Fahrenheit. Room air temperatures impressed me as being in the low 50s. Unalakleet houses are heated more cheaply than Gambell houses,, even though they are kept considerably warmer—in the low to mid-60s—because practically all houses have wood-burning heaters, which, given the abundance of wood nearby, are used regularly. Oil furnaces, too, are used. Unalakleet enjoys much warmer summers than either Wainwright or Gambell, and houses there are seldom heated from mid-June to mid-September. The most recently constructed seventy-three homes in Wainwright are three- and four-bedroom units. Given the long, extremely cold

winters and the very cool summers in Wainwright, it is common for the largest houses to burn four barrels of fuel oil per month for most of the year, dropping to two barrels from mid-June to mid-September.

The discrepancy in rents and mortgages between Gambell and Unalakleet, on the one hand, and both with Wainwright, on the other, is also obvious. The housing stock in Gambell and Unalakleet is somewhat older than Wainwright's, and the newer houses in both villages are funded under low-cost HUD-BIA programs. At least half of the Wainwright houses are new, large, and relatively expensive. The most recent thirty-seven houses were funded by NSB-CIP projects, not by low-cost HUD projects. As a consequence, rents and mortgages for these houses are about $250 per month, a modest sum by standards in the lower United States but four times as much as the average Gambell and Unalakleet residents pay.

Naturally occurring resources harvested by Gambell and Unalakleet residents comprise about 80 and 75 percent of the local diets, respectively. Similar resources constitute slightly less than 50 percent of Wainwright villagers' diets. So Wainwright villagers choose to purchase more foods and dry goods from local stores than do residents of the other villages, much as they choose to hunt preferred waterfowl, caribou, and sea mammals and to pursue preferred fish. In 1982, they could afford to do SO.

Food is very expensive in village stores, particularly produce, which is greatly desired in all villages. It is often asserted that food prices in the villages are about double those for similar goods in such dries as Seattle and Los Angeles. Both the research team members' personal purchases and our frequent observations suggest that village prices are more than double the prices that any of us pay in our home communities.

Table 11 lists a few basic items in Unalakleet stores and the comparable prices for those items in Newport Beach, California. It also lists a few basic items and some less basic items in the Wainwright stores, with comparable prices in Newport Beach. These prices are for mid-1982. If they are representative of all items in the village and Newport Beach stores, Unalakleet residents pay over twice as much (2.29) and Wainwright

residents pay three times as much (3.01) as Newport Beach shoppers for comparable foods. Robbins (pets. comm.) reports that fifteen basic food items cost two and one-half times more in Gambell than in Bellingham, Washington.

Dry goods are also expensive in the villages. For example, in mid-1982, an Aid for Dependent Children recipient purchased one pair of blue jeans, a polyester shirt, one pair of children's shoes, and one carton of cigarettes. The total bill was $108. Comparable prices in Newport Beach for the same items at the same time totaled $57.00. The high cost of processed foods is one reason that they are little used in Gambell and Unalakleet. Preference for native foods, particularly for animal protein, is another reason that they do not dominate the table fare. Nevertheless, processed foods, from frozen fried chicken to soda

pop, would probably contribute many more calories to the diets of the residents of both villages if large sources of family income were available.

On The Discrepancy Between Income And Expenses In Gambell

Two issues have been left dangling: the discrepancy between income and expenses in Gambell and the ratio of earnings to costs of fishing commercially in Unalakleet. Here I address the Gambell discrepancy noted in table 10.

It appears that Gambell households, on average, are spending more than they receive in income. Although many households incur debts at the local stores, every household in the village does not accumulate equally large ones (110 households × $3,950 = $434,500). Rather, subsistence equipment and trip expenses per household are inflated; hence, I overestimate the costs for each household's expenses.

The most closely related families within clans share equipment and expenses. (Walrus-hunting, seal-hunting, egg-collecting, bird-collecting, and greens-collecting crews normally consist of members from three or more households within the same clan.) The costs for each family's subsistence equipment and trip expenses are, therefore, probably $3,000 less than the estimate in table 10, although there still remains an aggregate debt for all families in the village of about $100,000 at any one time. This debt is secured with "green" ivory, that is, ivory from recently killed walrus. Hunters take green ivory to the stores during the hunting season, then buy it back during the winter, often on credit. The natives carve year-round but principally through the least productive season for hunting—winter. Proceeds from ivory sales or from green ivory serve to dear their debts. Cash is in such limited supply in Gambell that barter is the major method by which market transactions within the village take place.

The Village Corporations

ANCSA required every native village to form a profit corporation of native shareholders (see chap. 1). The corporations in the three villages have quite different histories.

Gambell, because it joined with Savoonga to choose a fee simple land settlement, received three and one-haft times as much land as it would have received otherwise. In gaining the land, Gambell was denied many other ANCSA benefits. The village for-profit corporation (Sivuqaq Native Corporation) received start-up costs of $100,000 from a special provision enacted subsequent to ANCSA (see PL 94-204, 94th Congress, S. 1469, Sec. 14[b], January 2, 1976).

The SNC started cash poor and has remained cash poor, although it manages the island's resources in conjunction with the Savoonga Native Corporation. The Gambell city government has taxing authority and access to state grants. The IRA government has access to federal funds and programs, especially those that have been made available to them from contracts (most former BIA and IHS programs). The IRA government is as cash poor as the SNC and the city government.

Certainly one of the most burning issues in Gambell during and subsequent to our field research has been the future of island governance, particularly in view of threats to the villages from the requirement in force up until 1988 that all village profit corporations go public in 1991 but also in view of the threats from oil exploration and extraction in the Bering Sea. The two are related. Inasmuch as the three forms of government now operating side by side are artifacts of the state and federal legislation that divides and diffuses authority, they do not instill confidence. The natives of Gambell want to be the sole owners of their own land and to be able to guide their own future.

Prior to ANCSA, the IRA government served as the administrative, legislative, and judicial branches of government, and it also controlled the village's corporate economy. Although the BIA served as trustee, and the secretary of the interior exercised veto authority over IRA decisions, native land was held in trust, and there were no threats of takeovers, leveraged buy-outs, or the like. The three village governments worked closely together, while taking care to separate their spheres of authority. Since late 1981, they have been seeking advice about the consequences of dissolving the village corporation and city gov-

ernment and reconstituting the IRA as the administrative, legislative, judicial, and corporate government for the community.

Unalakleet enrolled 839 shareholders in its Unalakleet Native Corporation in 1971. This is a startling number, considering the fact that the 1970 census tallied only 434 residents in the village. ANCSA, the prospects of improvement to the local economy, including the commercial fishing industry and employment on the pipeline or the North Slope oil industry, and the desire to return to the village to protect family camping spots along the river drew 200 persons, mostly in families, back to Unalakleet.

The Alaska Native Fund provided $1.03 million to the UNC by 1976, another $357,000 by 1977, and it has or will have provided another $3.78 million by 1991. The total of $5.167 million distributed over twenty years is $308 per capita per year. All start-up, administrative, and capitalization costs were and are to be derived from these funds. This is clearly not sufficient capital to create a viable local economy.

A president and a board of directors elected by the shareholders have authority over the UNC. They hire a manager, who is responsible for the operations at the UNC's retail store, its garage, and a small construction company (formed in 1982). The manager is also responsible for securing loans, contracts, and grants to enable expansion of UNC businesses. A local native currently manages the UNC, whose managers have resigned or have been replaced with some regularity. During the period of our fieldwork, 1982-83, a nonlocal native managed the corporation.

There is lively competition between the UNC and the ACC stores, and in 1982, the UNC manager advertised in regional papers, attempting to stimulate visits to Unalakleet via Ryan Air for purchases. The manager reasoned that natives are accustomed to paying high prices for transportation but that they also enjoy traveling—even short distances—to see relatives and to make purchases at good prices. He claimed that price, not loyalty to one's own village corporation, determined sales. Why else, he argued, would Unalakleet residents make purchases at the local ACC? The UNC's retail store improved its gross sales during his tenure. His advertising campaign even drew some

visitor-shoppers from Norton Sound villages serviced by Ryan Air, much as he had predicted.

The UNC accommodated the increased sales with the positions on hand, so there was no gain in employment or household incomes from improved sales at the store. But the UNC received a building development grant (for its own buildings), contracted for the construction of four apartments (which it owns), and landed a city contract to build a small apartment house. Thereby, it employed a few local men for from two to six months. The jobs were completed either early or on time. The 1982-83 fiscal year produced the UNC's first annual profit—a very small one.

The UNC had no apparent prospects for economic growth in the private sector other than, perhaps, pushing the ACC—its federally subsidized competitor—out of town. The importance of the UNC lies elsewhere. It serves the interests of the local natives in the manner in which they wish to be served. That manner is steeped in native cultural values. It also is important in exercising some control over the money that makes its way to the village through various sources. In particular, the UNC seeks to gain maximum returns on investments (bank notes, treasury notes, etc.) and to keep check on vendors and banks. Let Us take the second issue first.

In the late 1970s, the Bering Straits Regional Corporation (BSRC) was treated scandalously by an Anchorage bank in a celebrated case in which it was "deprived" of over $2 million, which it never recovered. The UNC, itself, was treated scandalously soon thereafter, although it did not sue. In 1981, about $2 million from the UNC's portion of the Alaska Native Fund had been invested with an investment management firm in Anchorage. A year later, that money had not generated one cent in interest. At that time, a $2 million investment in the money market would have yielded $400,000 for one year. On learning about the status of the UNC's investment, the manager quickly retrieved it by courier.

Vendors have not distinguished themselves in their dealings with the UNC, either. Until 1982, all UNC purchases of food, equipment, and dry goods were paid for before delivery and without benefit of a discount. Regardless of the purchasing

power it possessed for its store, the UNC had to pressure vendors with the threat of buying elsewhere to get the 2 percent discount normally available to businesses that pay their invoices within a week following delivery.

The UNC also must deal with monopsonists, who do not yield to pressure or suasion. For example, the UNC purchases fuel oil for villagers and for its own needs, buying about four barge loads per year from Standard Oil in St. Michael. There are no competitors, by design. To secure oil for the 1982—85 season, the UNC had to pay $500,000, several months prior to delivery, to Standard Oil. Standard Oil refused to quote a price per barrel or for any other unit of measure. The UNC had to negotiate a loan to make the payment, then pay interest on the loan. Resale to villagers was at the same price paid by the UNC. This action served the monopsonist, the bank, and the villagers but not the UNC's growth.

This is only one way in which the UNC serves the public good. It also sells for a profit, but it has lowered prices on the goods that are available at the local store. Its shareholders and its Board of Directors discuss the public good in their business deliberations, for example, selling fuel oil for the price at which UNC buys it. At one point, the deliberations of the shareholders and board caused them to turn down, without equivocation, a business that provided some potential—a liquor store. It is illegal to sell liquor in Unalakleet.

The UNC also successfully badgered the U.S. Air Force to return to Unalakleet and to decommission its former base and White Alice radar station, removing PCBs from the cones in the towers as well as other dangerous chemicals, acids, oils, and gasoline. The action was prompted by a desire to protect the Unalakleet River system and the wildlife and flora around it as well as to protect the villagers and avert the possibility of having to evacuate the village. The UNC has also been a source of funds, through loans, to the Norton Sound Fishermen's Cooperative and to UNC shareholders who belong to the NSFC and share its liability.

It is clear that the operations of the UNC would not be considered wise or businesslike in the boardrooms of most of the world's profitable corporations. The UNC has sought to serve

the interests of its shareholders, and those interests include the preservation of the Unalakleet environment—the space in which natives gain their livelihoods and the space that natives are willing to defend and to which they assign the significant meanings that encompass the interests of past and future generations.

Wainwright enrolled 371 stockholders and created the Olgoonik Corporation as its for-profit village corporation. The OC received over $455,000 in start-up funds from the Alaska Native Fund (established by ANCSA) between 1972 and 1976, while the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation received about $10 million. After 1976, the OC received about $158,000 from one provision of ANCSA, and it will have received about $1.67 million from another provision by 1991. (See Arnold 1978 for a thorough assessment of ANCSA.) Over twenty years, then, Wainwright has received or is expected to receive about $2.28 million. As in Unalakleet, this sum is equivalent to an annual per capita over the twenty years of $308 (the identical formula was used for all villages except those that took land).

Neither the OC nor the ASRC has dominated economic development at Wainwright. That honor goes to the native-controlled NSB, which has been directly or indirectly responsible for most public developments on the North Slope and which has funneled many of them through the regional and village corporations. Economic and political power is centralized in Barrow, the seat of NSB government.

The OC has ventured into several local businesses, including a store that employs eight clerks and managers and competes with the ACC store. In 1981, the OC bought out Blackstock Construction Company's Wainwright operation. Blackstock stayed on as "facilitator," hiring and providing accommodations for nonnative construction workers and assisting with contract proposal writing. The OC took over some Blackstock contracts and garnered some new ones. The financing was done through the profits from the contracts that Blackstock sold to the OC and from the new contracts. In 1982, about seventy-five persons were hired on construction contracts held and managed by the OC—all directly dependent on NSB actions. By 1985, there were no new contracts, and construction on old contracts had

almost stopped. There were no immediate prospects for an up-swing in NSB funds; hence, no immediate prospects for OC construction activities. By 1985, OC's major sources of income were its retail store, the selling Of fuel oil, and a few remaining labor contracts.

The Norton Sound Fishermen's Cooperative

Fish, the single most important staple in the diet of Unalakleet natives, is also the single most important commodity with which they can penetrate the market and gain earned income. There is no other foreseeable industry for this subarctic village. Since 1973, however, village fishermen have watched nonnatives venture into the local fishery. Few natives can muster the ten to twelve thousand dollars required to purchase a permit from any of the 196 limited-entry permit holders in the Norton Sound area (stretching from Unalakleet to Nome; Unalakleet is one subdistrict of the area). A brieflook at the past will be helpful.

Commercial fishing was rekindled in Unalakleet by Alaska Department of Fish and Game personnel in 1961 from its tenuous beginnings in the late 1940s. In 1964, the Small Business Administration (SBA) financed some Anchorage businessmen to build a modest fish-processing plant at Unalakleet. It was essentially a dock and a structure in which fish could be cut (head and tails) and gutted. The SBA foreclosed, following a series of abuses, and leased it out but not to Unalakleet natives.

In 1973, the state's Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission was established, as was the Norton Sound Fishermen's Cooperative. The latter was a small organization of local native fishermen. Establishment of the commission began to lure nonlocal fishermen, who were capable of purchasing entry permits while being assured that the competition for the fish would be limited. Up to that time, natives gained entry permits on the basis of the number of years they had fished at Unalakleet. If they had fished regularly and acquired sufficient points, they gained permits at no cost. Since 1973, permits have been purchased and their value has climbed, pricing natives out of the market. Once a person had a permit, capital was required for the equipment to make commercial fishing profitable.

Those who could acquire capital, or who could generate sufficient annual revenues from fish sales, qualified for loans through the state's Alaska Fisherman's Mortgage and Note Program. Only half a dozen native Unalakleet fishermen have qualified for this program or for conventional loans. In 1980, for example, the average NSFC fisherman earned $5,000 for the season, exclusive of costs. The range that year was from $2,000 to $38,000. Nonlocal and nonnative fishermen have qualified for loans and for the state's program.

Currently, the NSFC membership includes 100 local natives (50 permit holders) and 24 local nonnatives (school district employees, teachers, and other nonnatives employed in the village). Four nonresident nonnatives also fish near Unalakleet. The nonnatives, to a man, possess larger and more powerful boats (32 ft. is possible; natives normally own 18-ft. to 22-ft. skiffs). Larger fuel tanks allow the larger boats to stay on the water longer, to make quick trips to clean nets, and to carry larger loads. Native complaints about arriving at their nets to find them cleaned of fish increased between 1981 and 1983.

The NSFC members have joint liability for previous debts (unsuccessful marketing during one year or excessive spoilage over two years) and for NSFC property. They have invested their personal funds, sold shares to the UNC and to Kawerak (the regional nonprofit corporation), and secured loans from the Community Economic Development Corporation, the UNC, and the Alaska Native Foundation. Some members obtain assistance in purchasing equipment and fuel from the NSFC (which borrows from the UNC), and a few have qualified for assistance from the Alaska Native Foundation, which assisted 500 rural native fishermen throughout Alaska in 1982.

Salmon Fishery Economics

Let us now turn to the costs and to income. The value of the salmon catch to Unalakleet fishermen has increased dramatically since 1977, when the United States extended its territorial waters limit to 200 miles from shore. That act, which denied foreign fishermen access to waters close to spawning areas, in-

creased local fish stocks and local fish availability. However, the procedures established by the Commercial Fisheries Entry Commission in 1973 have worked to deny many local native fishermen commercial access to the abundances that have been made available since 1978. The two acts together have stimulated nonnative fishermen to buy permits and to enter the Unalakleet fishery. The dramatic changes in the fishery arc summarized in table 12.

The increase in fish and dollars (unadjusted for inflation) derives from the relation between legislation and the growth of the fishery. Nearly five times as many salmon were caught annually, and their value was over ten times greater after 1977 and the extension of the territorial water limit than it was before 1973 and the establishment of the entry commission. The fishery's potential has not yet been achieved, however. In 1982, 252,700 salmon were caught commercially near Unalakleet. Many thousands more were caught in the natives' subsistence nets along the river. Yet the Alaska Department of Fish and Game counted over 6 million salmon upriver beyond the majority of the subsistence nets that could intercept them before they spawned.

The Unalakleet fish marketing area had been controlled for most of the past two decades by a single marketing monopsonist, which was based in Seattle with facilities in Anchorage. The monopsonist had paid lower prices than the NSFC thought were reasonable. That is why, in 1982, the NSFC entered into an exclusive contract with a buyer from Minnesota. The Minnesota buyer was connected to the village through his membership and active participation in some missionary activities of the Swedish Evangelical church (Covenant church). The buyer brought his own management and the principal crew to staff the processing plant. He installed a blast freezer and a cooler capable of handling a million pounds of fish and gave it to the NSFC as a contract obligation.

The erstwhile monopsonist did not want to be pushed from the fishery, so it struck a separate deal with a local native fisherman. It made him an agent, with the power to buy fish for them. They set up an icing machine and other equipment, making it

possible to move fish to Anchorage by air for processing. They had no clock but used a makeshift operation, including a frontend loader, to move the fish from the slough.

The competition was unusually healthy for the local fisher-men—so much so that about half of the NSFC fishermen sold to the native buyer. The stakes were high. The Seattle firm wanted to buy local goodwill and get reestablished in the Unalakleet market. It authorized the local buyer to pay from $0.02 to $0.05 per pound more for the various species of salmon than the Minnesota buyer was paying. Such differences add up for a quarter of a million pounds of fish, and the firm was looking at the potential of several million pounds in the future. The Seattle firm was not making a profit at those prices, and the extra weight in unprocessed, iced fish that they were flying from Unalakleet pushed them farther into the red.

Furthermore, in its quest to regain the market, the Seattle firm also provided start-up money to many fishermen through the local native buyer. That made it possible for fishermen—all of whom belonged to the NSFC and had debt obligations

there—who were short on cash to purchase motors, or nets, perhaps even new skiffs, or whatever else they needed to get started. They could pay back their loans with their catches.

So, for the first time in the history of the commercial fishery in Unalakleet, a little competition crept in, and for the first time in the natives' experience, they benefited, albeit minimally, from that competition. The fish marketing business, however, is complex and fickle. The Seattle firm was unable to move a floating fish processor from Bristol Bay, the world's richest sockeye (red) salmon fishery, to Unalakleet, because of a strike in Bristol Bay. When the pink salmon runs began in mid-July, the firm refused to buy, because pinks are a small salmon, expensive to process, and unpreferred in the major markets. The Seattle people thought that the natives would then have to sell their catches to the Minnesota buyer, who, they reasoned, could neither process nor pay for the fish.

Things did not work out as desired by the Seattle firm. Moreover, their local native buyer refused to leave his relatives and neighbors in the lurch. He continued to buy pink salmon, at a reduced rate, with his own money. But as luck would have it, there was a very strong run of chum (dog) salmon, which are worth three times the price of pinks. The local native purchased the chums at $0.05 more than the Minnesota buyer was paying, sold them to the Seattle buyer, and stayed in business. The two buyers stayed on to compete throughout the entire season.

The views held by the NSFC leadership and the native fishermen toward the Seattle-Minnesota struggle are interesting. They enjoyed the competition waged between the two nonlocal firms, and they reaped the benefits. There was no rancor, no opposing sides, and no struggle. To obtain start-up money, the Unalakleet fishermen had to sell where they could get the best price. If they could not pay their share of their obligations and liabilities to the NSFC during the summer, they could at least pay some of them, and there would be another year.

The effects of the competition were salutary. And the increased prices obtained by the fishermen for their fish far outstripped inflation for the period between 1981 and 1982, as table 13 demonstrates.

Costs In Commercial Fishing

The $489,000 earned by about 68 fishermen, natives and non-natives, during the 1982 salmon season was not evenly distributed. As has been pointed out, the average for all limited-entry permit holders was $7,200 (exclusive of shares to assistants). The persons who fish every period, especially the well-capitalized nonnatives, earn considerably more than the average. The distribution is definitely bimodal. A majority of native fishermen are undercapitalized, fish half or less of the sessions (reducing wear and tear on their equipment, of course), and have earnings in the $4,000 to $5,000 range. A majority of the non-native fishermen and several native fishermen fish all of the sessions, invest heavily in equipment and maintenance, and have earnings in the $15,000 to $25,000 range.

A Unalakleet native fisherman will usually buy a boat that can double as his family's subsistence fishing boat. If he obtains two boats and motors over a five- or six-year period, a smaller boat (16 ft.) will be used by his family for subsistence fishing, whereas the newer and larger boat (18 ft. to 24 ft.) will be used to move the family to spring camp, to collect roe-on-kelp, to make journeys to nearby villages (St. Michael or Shaktoolik), and to move to and from fall camp. Table 14 gives the start-up costs for a

fisherman who possesses the minimal equipment required to fish commercially.

An aluminum skiff could last as few as five or as many as thirty years: the longevity varies with the quality of the skiff and the conditions of use, but it is too early to tell how long the average Lund 18-foot skiff, for example, will last. An outboard motor, any size, lasts about four years if properly maintained and only three if the use is extremely heavy for five months each year. Commercial nets last about four years, until the mesh must be replaced and the net rehung. Rain gear lasts about three years. Propellers can last for perhaps twenty years, unless rocks are hit or they are otherwise damaged. Fuel costs in 1982 averaged $175 per forty-eight-hour fishing session, assuming seven to eight trips between the dock and the nets per session. When crankshafts wear under heavy use, repair costs approach replacement costs, so new motors are purchased. Table 15 estimates the annual maintenance and fuel costs for Unalakleet fishermen, assuming twenty forty-eight-hour fishing periods and four-year lives for motors and nets.

About every fifth year, a new motor must be purchased, at $3,200 for a 50-hp outboard, and the mesh must be replaced and the nets rehung at $1,000 (mesh at $200 per net, hanging at $50 per net). So after the completion of each four-year cycle, another $4,200 outlay (in 1982 prices) is required.

It is evident that a person must fish long and often if, over four years, the start-up, maintenance, and operating expenses total $25,380, or $6,345 annually, exclusive of interest payments. And it is not a lot less expensive if after the four-year start-up period, a new motor must be purchased and the nets must receive new mesh and be rehung, although the annual costs thereafter would be $4,925, exclusive of interest payments (all figures assume 1982 dollars). At $4,925 costs, and a one-third share going to a helper, the fisherman making $7,200 annually would be losing $125. At $6,345 annually, he would be losing $1,645.

Why Unalakleet Natives Fish Commercially

So why is commercial fishing a viable option for native fishermen, especially considering the few sources of income that are available to native families in Unalakleet? The answer varies with each fisherman. A very few have high costs, fish often, and generate high incomes. Some fish seldom, work alone, and focus on subsistence fishing. All but the very largest boats, which are owned by very few Unalakleet natives, double for subsistence pursuits. And almost every native fisherman is in debt to the NSFC, the UNC, the Alaska Native Foundation, or to all three. The benefits for subsistence uses of equipment purchased for commercial fishing are very important, and the availability of loans, the extension of payback dates, and the support of the village and regional corporations make commer-

cial fishing possible. Subsistence pursuits are benefited by the availability of loans for commercial fishing, even if a fisherman spends more than he makes.

The Nascent Herring Fishery: Copsts And Income

A commercial herring fishery, in which a $45.00 fee but no limited-entry permit, was required to enter, was opened in Norton Sound in 1979. The herring season occurs in early June and is heavily influenced by weather and ice conditions, which can seriously inhibit access to spawning herring. In 1982, the season was very short (five days), yet 3,625 metric tons of herring were harvested. The total value was about $980,000, of which Unalakleet fishermen—native and nonnative—earned about $330,000. So, in a few days of frantic work, fishermen can exceed the total income that they earn throughout the entire salmon season. This is even true for nonnatives who command better equipment and spend more time on the water during salmon sessions than do most natives.

Because permits are not required, natives have an opportunity to enter the fishery. But this fishery requires rather more complex equipment than the salmon fishery. With sufficient earnings, it should be possible for natives to purchase permits to enter the salmon fishery as well. The costs of capitalizing a herring operation are high, however, and their limited access to capital is a major restraint on natives. The successful herring fishermen have, for the most part, been whites from distant-areas, using the best available equipment (such as a 32-ft. welded aluminum boat with twin inboard-outboard Volvo 280 motors, twin 50-gal. fuel tanks, a winch on the bow, and rollers on each gunwale, one of which serves as a large batter that knocks the fish from the net as it is drawn across the boat [upside-down] by the other roller and returns the net to the water). The cost for such an outfit in 1982 was about $50,000. The disadvantages of using l6-foot skiffs, without hoists or rollers, are obvious. No native fisherman that I talked to could imagine how he could purchase a 32-foot boat equipped similarly to those that were operated by whites and had been

financed by a firm in Seattle. A few sought to acquire 24-foot boats and the less expensive equipment that required more labor and less capital.

The costs for herring fishing, except for boats, motors, and rollers, are much the same as for salmon fishing, and a few items can be used for both. Indeed, most natives use their salmon fishing equipment for herring fishing. And if they acquire new, larger equipment for herring fishing, they will also be better equipped for increased earnings during the salmon season. At present, or until such time as the Norton Sound fishery is overwhelmed with nonnative fishermen, the earnings can be enormous for natives—relatively, that is. In two days of herring fishing in 1982, some native fishermen made up to $6,000 each. A ten-day season, with a biomass of 22,000 metric tons, could put them in the black, and they know it.

Furthermore, herring roe-on-kelp, another favorite subsistence food for which there is a strong international market, can be very profitable. Spawn-on-kelp can be collected with the same equipment that is used to harvest herring. During the short commercial roe-on-kelp season in 1982, one native family, using two tenders and several skiffs, collected 40 tons of roe-on-kelp at a value of $0.70 a pound, or $56,000. No other family collected nearly so much, but many could collect and sell more than they do were it not for their meager household incomes and lack of access to capital. These factors seriously constrain native prospects for success in a fishery that had been theirs from time immemorial.

Table 16 tallies the start-up costs for herring fishing. If the weather is good, a fisherman in possession of the equipment (favored by undercapitalized natives) that is listed in table 16 can fish for five forty-eight-hour periods per year for each of several herring seasons, collect spawn-on-kelp soon after each of those seasons, pay off the notes on his equipment, maintain and replace the equipment as necessary, purchase a salmon permit, and earn points toward a limited-entry permit, assuming that the herring fishery, too, will require them soon.

Maintenance costs for herring fishing equipment are higher than for smaller equipment. Motors are larger, burn more fuel, and are worked harder, because fishermen stay on the water

longer—clearing their nets at least nine times during each forty-eight-hour period. The biggest, fastest boats make even more trips.

During a season in which five forty-eight-hour herring periods are fished, fuel costs are about $1,000. Every fifth year, the motor must be replaced and the nets rehung ($5,750 in 1982 dollars). About $150 per year is required for maintenance.

On the Future of Natives in the Commercial Fishing Industry

Whereas commercial fishing in Unalakleet appears to be the sole means by which natives can penetrate the international private sector, build a limited but self-sustaining sector of the local economy, and provide a multiplier to the local economy, neither the salmon nor the herring runs are so strong as to provide optimism for great growth. Furthermore, the cash poor, indebted native fishermen have no strong lines of credit and no easy access to capital. They survive on tiny increments of cash through loans from local public lenders (the UNC, the Alaska Native Foundation, and the NSFC).

If appropriate technology could be purchased and maintained by fishermen and the NSFC and if sufficient air transportation were available, the fishery will become the economic foundation for a continued subsistence life in the subarctic. As

things are now, however, it appears that nonnatives, both local and nonlocal, will benefit most from the fishery. It is ironic that the naturally occurring, renewable, harvestable resources of the sea are beginning to provide Unalakleet Eskimos with their entrée into worldwide markets—perhaps as producers and controllers of exchange rather than merely as high-risk-taking producers. Yet at the same time, limited access to capital may thwart natives, while assisting nonnatives, and multinational corporations and the federal government may jeopardize the harvests of fish or the values of the harvests through their own programs to drill and pump oil and gas from the Bering Sea, including Norton Sound. Not only is commercial fishing threatened but so are all the subsistence activities that are focused on the animals and plants of the sea, from waterfowl to kelp.

8
Kinship and Social Organization, Part 1

Introdugtion

The discussion of subsistence, production, and dependency makes it clear that kinship and other aspects of social organization are central to the organization of extraction, distribution, and consumption. I also demonstrate that except for commercial fishing and ivory carving, there is almost no production and that even these focus on the persistence of family and community, not on capital accumulation or business growth. Third, I show that contemporary dependency relations in the Alaskan arctic and subarctic have influenced many aspects of the subsistence and economic organizations in the three villages.

Paradoxically, the village most affected has been Wainwright, which has experienced great changes from the benefits of transfers from oil revenues while exercising no control over oil and only the most ephemeral influence over the transfers that come to the village. And the residents of the two villages that do have semblances of productive sectors—which could foreseeably provide them with small niches in international markets, allowing for some local growth—perceive that oil extraction and transportation threaten their endeavors, that well-capitalized non-natives will squeeze them from their enterprises, or both.

I have focused on certain topics for analytical purposes, but it is clear that these various kinds of organizations are embedded in and interdependent with one another. The manner in which Eskimos articulate with their environments for food and shelter is expressed, in part, through their social organizations. The environment with which traditional Eskimos coped, or which they put to their own uses, and with which their economic

and social organizations were so obviously and so closely intertwined caused early nineteenth- and twentieth-century observers to accept as a given that Eskimo social and economic organizations were fine-tuned to the environments in which they survived.

It frequently has been suggested that drawing Eskimos into the market economy, particularly through the provisions of ANCSA, would change all of that. Our investigations among oil age Eskimos, conducted a dozen years after ANCSA's commencement, confirms that some changes, many of them notable, have occurred but that the basic relations among environment, subsistence, and social organizations remain intact.

Here I will analyze social and kinship organization in the three villages, emphasizing at the outset that subsistence and economic organizations remain tightly bound to social organization. The social organizations of the three villages encompass kinship relations, including families, closely related households, and wider networks of kinspeople, and also networks of friends. The manner in which persons are aligned by kinship is not the same in all villages, as is evident from the discussions of St. Lawrence Island patricians and the roles that those clans play in the organization of extraction. There are also some differences between the residential-bilateral organizations of Wainwright and Unalakleet which I will sort out below.

A Brief Look at Traditional Social Organizations

The importance of kinship relations to pre-Contact and early Contact Eskimo societies is unchallenged. Robert Spencer (1959), in his estimable analysis of Inupiaq-speaking North Alaskan Eskimo society, generalized that the settlements from Point Hope to Point Barrow tended to form endogamous communities. In other words, persons found their spouses in their home settlements. In a more recent survey, Ernest Burch (1975), focusing on Inupiaq-speaking Northwest Alaskan Eskimos, affirms for that area the generalization that communities comprised kinship units.

The Bilateral Demes of Wainwright and Unalakleet

The units that were formed seem best characterized as demes (see Jorgensen 1980: 179-180), groups of people demonstrating descent from a common ancestor, regardless of the sex of the connecting ascendants (bilateral), which are united by some additional criterion, such as unilocal postnuptial residence or collective ownership. De facto, some of the recognized descendants of a given ancestor are potential members (who moved out on marriage, perhaps), and others are actual members. Demes often have stewards.

Among Alaska mainland Inupiaq and Yupik speakers, traditional demes appear to have observed the sort of marriage principles that maintained the nexus of the group (e.g., endogamy, whereby first-cousin marriage may be disapproved and second-cousin marriage preferred). They practiced post-nuptial residence principles, which also lent themselves to maintaining the loose boundaries of the group (patrilocal preferred in most areas, but the couple could reside where opportunities were best). And many groups also possessed some corporate features, such as rituals that they alone performed or prerogatives that they alone enjoyed. Among mainland Inupiaq and Yupik speakers, men's semisubterranean chambers (kashim for the Inupiaq, and karigi for the Yupik), where they resided during much of the periods in which they were in the village and in which ceremonials were performed, and unique rituals may well have represented the corporate character of the demes.

Yet demes, by dint of their bilateral descent organizations, were somewhat flexible and open. A couple could choose to live in the wife's section of the village or even in the wife's village if it was different from the husband's and if endogamy was not observed. A person traced descent equally on the mother's side and the father's side and could look to either or both sides for support. It is possible, in fact, likely, that demes came to be non-localized so that bilateral kinspersons were distributed in several villages over a continuous geographic area and that kinship bonds among them facilitated sharing and cooperation.

It is also possible that flexibility of kinship group membership, which itself facilitated sharing and cooperation, was

further enhanced by the widespread mainland Eskimo practices of adoption, wife exchange, and partnership. These features of traditional Eskimo social organization allowed for the expansion of the circle of kinspersons, the replacement of deceased members, and predictable, formalized relations, which were treated as kin relations (see Spencer 1959; Burch 1975).

As has been emphasized earlier, kinship principles do not stand alone. People who hunt, prepare, and share together—that is, rely on one another's skills and generosity—are the people among whom kinship obligations are most pertinent. In the past, extended families were the basic kinship organizations through which subsistence was achieved, although nuclear families or polygynous families might separate from larger extended families during some seasons of the year.

Kinship provided the nexus for community life. Spencer (1959: 65-71), himself considerably struck by the relations among naturally occurring resources, subsistence adaptations, trade, and such abiological factors as wind, temperature, ice, and sunlight, saw kinship and blood feud as the factors that provided collective responsibility and the basis for law and order. Burch (1975) concluded that kinship was relevant in all social contexts for traditional Northwest Alaskan Inupiaq speakers.

As we have learned, the Unalakleet area, originally settled by Yupik speakers who were decimated by an epidemic in the 1830s, came to be occupied by Malemiut (Inupiaq) and by a few speakers of the Kawerak dialect of Inupiaq who trailed in behind the Malemiut. Only a very few Yupik speakers remained, and the revitalized community reflected the endogamous bilateral kinship-based communities of Northwest Alaska.

The Patrilineal Clans of Gambell

St. Lawrence Island Eskimos, Central Siberian Yupik speakers, are more closely related linguistically to the Asiatic Eskimo languages than to the mainland Yupik languages (Woodbury 1984). The St. Lawrence Island dialectal and language differences from Inupiaq, as well as from mainland Yupik, suggest that early Yupik speakers separated from Inupiaq speakers

many centuries ago, perhaps as many as twenty, and that mainland Yupik separated from the Asiatic branch more recently.

Traditional Asiatic Eskimos differed markedly both from Inupiaq and from mainland Yupik (see Hughes 1084: 243-246). Whereas Inupiaq and mainland Yupik had institutionalized the men's communal houses—kashim and karigi—and observed bilateral descent, the Asiatic Yupik had no men's communal houses, and they observed patrilineal descent. The origin of patrilineal descent reckoning among Asiatic Yupik is unknown, and, to my knowledge, no person has sought to reconstruct the proto-Eskimo kinship system to shed light on whether the patrilineal kinship terms preceded or followed bilateral kinship terms among them.

Whatever the urform (the hypothetical original Eskimo kinship system) may have been, the Asiatic Yupik became organized into unilineal descent groups, which traced descent through the paternal line. An interesting feature of the descent groups that were formed along patrilineal principles was that on marriage, the bride moved near her husband's father's home and became a member of his patrilineal descent group. At this time, the bride gave up membership in her natal descent group. Such groups are referred to by Murdock (1949), Driver (1956), and Jorgensen (1980) as "compromise" descent groups, inasmuch as unilineal descent principles are compromised by marriage. In patrilineal clan societies, wives (but not other affines) become members of the descent group.

It is possible that these compromise patrilineal descent groups were localized (residing in one place) at one time and that each member could trace his or her relation to every other member through a known, apical ancestor. Perhaps each resided in one of the thirteen villages that appear on the nineteenth-century Russian and Danish maps. Such patrilineal descent groups are usually referred to as patrilineages (see Jorgensen 1980: 180-190). When two or more patrilineal descent groups recognize bonds of common descent but the relations among them are stipulated to some mythical being, or presumed ancestor, rather than being traced and demonstrated, those groups are usually called patrisibs. When patrisibs

gain members from in-marrying spouses, these "compromise" kinship groups are referred to as patricians.

Lineages, sibs, or clans can be either localized or non-localized. For example, all members of a clan can reside in the same village, or members can reside in different segments of the clan in different villages. St. Lawrence Island Eskimos are organized into eleven nonlocalized patricians. All but one of those patricians currently have segments (usually more than one) in each of the island's two villages.

Traditionally, membership in an Asiatic Eskimo patrician was corporate; that is, its members were jointly liable for the actions of any member of the clan, and they observed special customs and owned special property, privileges, and prerogatives. Clans were exogamous, in that men sought their wives from outside their own clan. Boat crews were composed of clan members. A section of the village was recognized as the property of a clan. Members of a clan were buffed in particular locales that were reserved only for clan members. Clans performed hunting and other rituals that were unique to themselves and that they alone were privileged to perform. And patriclans possessed unique tales about themselves, their relations to others, and their cosmogony (see Hughes 1984: 24-277). In the mid-1950s, Hughes (1060) noted that even kickball games were played between children of two different clans.

Kinship terminologies employed by Asiatic Eskimos distinguished cross-cousins from siblings, as do mainland terminologies. On the mainland, terms for cross-cousins and parallel cousins were the same. Among Asiatic Eskimos, however, a distinctive term was used for patrilineal parallel cousins (father's brother's children) and another for matrilineal parallel cousins (mother's sister's children). This separation of parallel patrilineal cousins marks patriclan relations.

It should be apparent that traditional patricians and demes shared many features in common, although the organizing principles of clans allowed for less flexibility of membership than did those of demes. It is likely that there were more formalized requirements of the clan members as well, particularly in the clan steward's role in overseeing the distribution of the results of extraction.

The Past in the Present: Contemporary Organization

In the 1980s, many features of endogamous bilateral kinship groups are central to the villages of Unalakleet and Wainwright, whereas patricians are basic to the social organization of St. Lawrence Island. The kinship organizations are not the same as they were in the early Contact period, but they are not very different either. The hunting subsistence bases of the three villages have undoubtedly reinforced traditional social organizations, much as those organizations have provided the nexus for extraction, preparation, distribution, support, and positive affect—the basis for community in the arctic.

Many forces have influenced native social organizations in the past century, but they seem trivial when compared with the forces that have influenced them during the past twenty years. Recent and obvious changes have occurred to household sizes, which have decreased. Nuclear family households have come to dominate village settlements: such arrangements account for about 43 percent of village households. Single persons—often aged but often middle-aged hunters—sometimes live alone. A few women-headed households are present in each village.

During the 1960s, the Johnson administration's "War on Poverty" began to quicken the pace of changes to native so-defies. In addition, the Bureau of Indian Affairs expanded its programs of sending Eskimo children away for school and then sending them to dries, such as Seattle and San Francisco, for employment. Social scientists have linked social organization to economic organization in the arctic for so long that it was reasonable to forecast deep and lasting changes to all of Eskimo society if the hunting economy should wane and die. After all, Eskimos were moving into the twentieth century.

Changes have occurred but not quite as anticipated: the family-kinship basis of the hunting way of life has persisted. Children are now educated in their natal villages, marry, and rear their own families there. They may leave for further education, but they very frequently return. Whether or not they have full-time employment, they are engaged in subsistence activities.

On the surface, then, the changes that have come about in Eskimo social organization are dramatic and suggest that native social organizations and their kinship nexuses are not at all what they once were. A deeper look goes beyond the obvious changes that pertain to infrastructure (houses, buildings, airfields, snow-machines) and focuses on the persons that reside within the houses. It is the organization of skills, labor, distribution, and consumption that connects the villagers of the present with the villagers of the past.

Contemporary village society cannot be assessed by tallying housing starts. Nevertheless, among the many factors that have influenced changes in Eskimo social organizations over the recent past, one of the most influential has been the government program (several actually) that has made available an aggregate of over 400 individual family houses in the three villages. Nuclearization of family households has been brought about by the sheer availability of houses even more than the availability of jobs or cash. Nuclearization both precedes and outstrips the other two factors by any reasonable measure in every village but Wainwright. Yet even in Wainwright, the move to nuclear from extended family households began with federal programs in the late 1960s, thus preceding, if not outstripping, both jobs and cash there as well.

Housing and Changes to Household Organization

Households are usually defined as coresiding persons; that is, people who reside under the same roof. Households can comprise families (kinship-related) of various kinds: families plus several affines, families plus more distant lineal or collateral kinspersons, friends, single persons living alone, and so forth. In most of the world's subsistence societies, households comprise various combinations of kinspersons organized into families—nuclear, extended, composite, stem, and the like. Moreover, it is common, but certainly not necessary, for households to constitute the basic social units through which property is owned or controlled, subsistence is achieved, children are reared, shelter is provided, positive affect is cultivated, and children are educated.

Since the conclusion of World War II, massive population shifts from rural to urban areas have occurred throughout much of Latin America, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Indonesia, Oceania, and parts of Africa. These population shifts have been accompanied by shifts to smaller households and, it is often alleged, narrower obligations and responsibilities among kinspersons (Goode 1963, Cough 1975). Often these obligations have been restricted to persons in one's own household. The mobile, independent nuclear family, unencumbered by extensive kinship, community, or tribal ties, is considered to be a rather normal outcome of capitalist economies, in which labor is a commodity to be sold on the marketplace and in which formal institutions assume many of the functions once fulfilled by family households and larger aggregates of kinspersons.

We do not have to look to modern sociologists to find theories that link economic changes to changes in family-household compositions and functions. In the mid-eighteenth century, Montesquieu developed his argument that as the division of labor became more complex, k caused greater social differentiation, while also causing families to be less than independent (Considerations on the Causes of Greatness of the Romans and of their Decadence [1734] and The Spirit of the Laws; or of the Relation that Laws Ought to Have with the Constitution of Each Government, Manners, Climate, Religion, Commerce, etc . [1748]). This theme, shed of its reference to the role of climate, was picked up and developed further by Emile Durkheim in his masterful treatise, Division of Labor (1893).

Are the foregoing, then, predictable consequences to family-household organizations from the economic development that occurred among Native Alaskan villages? The evidence from the three villages in this study, at least at this point in their histories, suggests that they are not. Responsibilities extend beyond households, and even beyond villages, to encompass a much wider network of kinspersons, affines, friends, and elderly acquaintances.

Household and Family Trends in the United States

In the United States for the forty years between 1930 and 1970, especially among the nonnative, nonminority population,

households gradually but consistently decreased in size and were less and less likely to comprise members who did not belong to the nuclear family (of two parents and their children). The average size of households dropped from 4.11 to 3.14 (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1971).

Since 1970, the trend among nonminority, nonnative households in the United States has been toward an increasing number of single persons living alone (unmarried, widows, or widowers), couples (married or not, same or opposite sex), and single parents with children. The average size of households had dropped from 3.14 to 2.72 by 1982. The nuclear family remains the dominant household form in the United States, but it is losing ground at a rapid rate. In 1970, 82 percent of households were nuclear families; in 1982, 73 percent were so constituted. Furthermore, in 1982, over 12 percent of the population was made up of persons living alone, same-sex roommates, or unmarried pairs; and about 15 percent lived in single-parent-headed households, some with no children (U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1983).

American Indian Household and Family Trends

There is little question but that nuclear family households are getting smaller as the birth rate dwindles and that there are fewer of them as divorce rates increase, as persons marry later in life, and as more persons forego marriage altogether. And there is also little doubt that the fostering of the nuclear family ideal by a host of legislative acts for Indians as well as the federal policies that have sought to sever ties between Indians, their larger kinship groups, and their tribes have been recurring themes since the nineteenth century (see Jorgensen 1978a for assessments of the General Allotment Act [1887], the Indian Citizenship Act [1024], the Indian Reorganization Act [1934], several Termination Acts [1954], and similar legislation).

The nuclear family residing under one roof, if not the dear majority, is nevertheless the single most frequently occurring (modal) household type on all Indian reservations. But those households are seldom economically independent or indepen-

dent in many other ways. Child-rearing assistance is provided to any family with children by grandparents or collateral kin in other households, food and resources are shared, for some purposes, incomes are pooled, labor is contributed, and so on (see Jorgensen 1964, 1971, 1972; Knack 1980; Maxwell 1974; Nordstrom et al. 1977; Robbins 1968). Household "functions," then, extend beyond persons residing under a single roof to encompass a wider network of kinspeople.

During good times, when cash income is available to heat and maintain separate homes (usually homes provided, at least in part, by some federal program), nuclear family households on reservations increase, and the average size of households decreases. Reservation Indians can then enjoy the privacy that single-family homes provide.

But in lean times—when federal programs are terminated or when unearned income from leases and royalties wither—household sizes increase and their compositions change as kinspersons coalesce to share resources and cut costs (see the sources cited above). Indian household sizes grow and shrink in rather direct responses to the economic conditions that obtain within their communities.

But the underlying ethics and the obligations and responsibilities among kinspersons and friends do not change. Practices that may have been intermittent become more regular, and practices that may have been dormant are revived. Food is shared, warm homes are shared, skills are used for many in need, and so forth. Whereas it is evident that reservation Indian households change their composition as economic exigencies occur, the changes that occur among them are not simple functions of economic forces (Jorgensen 1964, 1971; Aberle 1967; Robbins 1968; Knack 1980).

Research among the Umatilla (de la Isla 1969), Blackfeet (Robbins 1968, 1971), Southern Paiute (Knack 1980), Colville and Spokane (Maxwell 1974), Navajo (Callaway, Levy, and Henderson 1976), Northern Ute (Jorgensen 1964, 1972), Upper Skagit (Robbins 1980), Northern Cheyenne (Nordstrom et al. 1977), and many other reservation groups has demonstrated that households with the least predictable incomes have the

most members and the greatest variety of types of kinship relations, affines, and nonkinspersons living within them. They pool and share.

Yet family households more complex than nuclear families are commonplace and predictable on the basis of relative age as well as income. Family household cycles very different from those in non-Indian communities prevail. And these cycles, although interrupted by divorces, deaths, and migrations back and forth between cities and reservations, are similar on all the reservations cited above and are clear indicators of the importance of kinship obligations in the context of the aging of family members.

For instance, young marrieds usually move in with the parents of one of the spouses until they have children, the husband-father gains some predictable income, and the young family can establish a household of its own. And as those young families splinter from the larger household, it is only a matter of fifteen years or so before one of the parents—or some other elderly relative of one of the spouses—becomes a widow or widower, or becomes an invalid, and moves into their home. Assistance to elderly kinspersons, even quite distant collateral relatives, is a responsibility of kinsmen, not institutions.

On every American Indian reservation there are many variations on the developmental cycle, including grandparent-grandchild households or two female-headed families jointly occupying the same house (two sisters and their unmarried children, for example). The point is that persons turn to their kinsmen for assistance as they age and their spouses die, as they marry and require help to get started, or as other factors affect their own well-being or that of their families. It is also the case on every American Indian reservation that persons drift in and out of the houses of kinspeople and friends. American Indian households are flexible in accommodating people in this way.

Similarities in Indian and Eskimo Households and Families

In the societies we have been discussing, resources are not withheld from relatives or friends in need. Saving and delaying

gratification so as to assist one's nuclear family to the exclusion of others would cut against the grain of native life—both Indian and Eskimo. To understand Eskimo household organization is to understand that persons within households interact with dose relatives in other households to provide subsistence, child rearing, support, protection, comfort, and positive affect.

Understanding Eskimo Household Organization

In table 17, it is evident that average household sizes in the three villages changed markedly after federal housing programs, ANCSA-related programs, and oil revenue transfers became available in the 1970s. There is little evidence that Unalakleet household sizes varied much between 1907 (6.3) and 1968 (6.3), even as the population fluctuated over that sixty-year period. Gambell household sizes increased a bit between 1955 and 1972 (5.2 to 5.4). And Wainwright households appear to have changed little between the mid- 1950s and about 1971.

Prior to about 1972, households in the three villages averaged over 5-½ members, and they had done so for several decades, certainly since the mid-1950s. The average household in the United States was only about 60 percent as large as

native households in the mid-1950s and 66 percent as large in 1982 (using aggregated unweighted averages for the three villages). So, unlike the United States as a whole, household sizes have been decreasing only since 1972 for the villages, and even then, native households, per se, are much larger than average U.S. households.

If the future is like the past, we can expect native households to increase in size as public funds transfers, including oil tax revenues, are curtailed. It is the cultural practices, particularly the obligations and responsibilities shared by kinspersons and friends, regardless of the roofs under which they reside, that are crucial.

Toward Understanding Modern "Families" and Clans

Contemporary Village Household Organizations

If the three villages are considered from the perspective of households—that is, those people who live together under a single roof—we note residential compositions of several types, almost all of which are kin based. Moreover, the residents in each household form consumption units, and all adults and older children assist in rearing the younger children. Yet the compositions of households change—adding and losing members—and households are never independent. They always participate in larger kinship units for extraction, distribution, consumption, nurturing, and support. I call such units "families." They also participate in still larger units—clans or demes and villages.

Table 18 classifies all village and U.S. households into nine types (and one "unknown") and lists them by frequency (in percentages). The classification of single-person households in the United States varies from the classification of single-person households in the villages. The differences are explained below.

I do not wish to make comparisons with the general U.S. population here, but it is evident that by far the most common household type in the villages as well as in the United States at large is the nuclear household—husband, wife, and children. Whereas nuclear households predominate in the gen-

eral population, in the villages, they are less than a majority, although they are the most frequently occurring households. This is similar to the general situation among American Indian reservations.

Nuclear households in the three villages range in age from young families, with the husband and wife in their twenties and having two or three small children, to older families, with the husband and wife in their sixties and having adult but unmarried sons and daughters living at home. Some of these house-

holds include grandchildren or nieces or nephews who are being raised by their relatives while those children's parents are away at school or at training sessions or are engaged in some job. Many of these nuclear households change composition during the summer months, when relatives return, even if for a short period. The returnees, if adults, often have put their children in the care of close relatives in the village, which they consider their true home, their residence. The cities are way stations and domiciles.

After the nuclear household, the next most frequent type is the single-person household. The percentage is high for · the general U.S. population, too, but because the Bureau of the Census included same-sex pairs and unmarried cross-sex pairs in its category, useful comparisons with the villages are not possible.

Although we do not tally American Indian household types in table 18, single-person households are extremely rare among them. Yet in Eskimo villages, such living arrangements are very common, comprising about 17 percent of all village households. The key to explaining the large proportion of this type of household is the importance of subsistence extraction activities, coupled with the availability of housing. Single-person households are predominantly made up of unmarried men over the age of thirty. Men are less likely to migrate from the villages than are women. And if they stay in their natal villages, they always maintain close ties to their families, for whom they hunt and fish and from whom they receive support, meals, cash, and help in kind to defray expenses.

In all three villages, these men tend to be extremely competent hunters and usually trappers. They invariably receive assistance, but they give to their families, as well as to other persons in the villages, much more than they receive.

In every village, too, it is currently possible for some elders to live alone while receiving assistance in the form of house maintenance (energy, weatherizing, etc.) and welfare from government sources and subsistence resources from relatives and other concerned village residents. It is doubtful that single-person households, of hunters or elders, will persist if unearned

income and transfers are further reduced. Such households will most likely collapse as those persons move in with aging parents, children, siblings, or more distant collateral kinspersons.

The paucity of single-person households among reservation American Indians, even when housing is available and unused, is attributable to the lack of an extractive subsistence base, on the one hand, and the meager employment and transfers available, on the other. When the economy can sustain the fissioning of large households into smaller ones, Indian households, too, fission as people seek some privacy (see Jorgensen 1971, but also see Jorgensen 1964; Munsell 1968; Robbins 1968; Knack 1980; Nordstrom et al. 1977). The ethic and practice of cooperation and sharing among networks of kinspersons larger than households do not cease. Furthermore, at the onset of harder economic conditions, disparate households coalesce into larger units—often composite but also extended in composition.

It is not a coincidence that extended households and composite households, taken jointly, equal the proportion of single-person households in the villages. Nor is it a coincidence that they have no counterparts in the U.S. population in general. The twentieth-century history of democratic capitalism has been to fraction households into smaller units, not to create larger ones. Even welfare legislation has facilitated small household units (elderly people living alone, nuclear families in which one spouse is absent, institutional care for disabled persons, and the like).

The general U.S. population, however, does not suffer a dependency relation to the government, nor does it suffer unemployment/underemployment in the 60 to 90 percent range of all employables. American Indians suffer such a relation and such conditions, while also exercising little control over their local economies. And, we have seen, Eskimos are increasingly being pushed and drawn into a niche similar to that of U.S. Indians.

Indians coalesce in large households and pool and share their skills, general labor, and resources. Eskimos pool and share as they have for millennia, but currently they are breaking into smaller household units at a faster rate than the smaller units

are fusing into larger households. We anticipate that this phenomenon will reverse itself as the incomes available to villagers wither.

Extended households encompass three generations. The compositions vary, but typically they include a couple, their unmarried children, their married (or divorced) children, and their grandchildren (the offspring of the married children). They might also include various nephews and nieces (in Unalakleet and Wainwright), adoptive kin, and even a sibling of the apical couple. Extended families occur least frequently at Unalakleet and most frequently at Gambell. The unilineal descent system at Gambell selects extended families over composite families, drawing lineal kinspersons from three or more generations together into single households.

The bilateral communities, Unalakleet and Wainwright, also have several composite households. These households usually embrace persons of three or more generations, but, as the name implies, they comprise various types of kinspersons—lineal, collateral, with perhaps an affine or even a nonkinsperson. Native households are open, and people move in and out to share resources and to gain support as is necessary for the moment. In the bilateral villages, either extended or composite households form (or splinter); whereas in the patrilineal village, extended households—following unilineal principles—form (or splinter).

Single-parent households (or denuded nuclear households), in which children reside with one parent, which were unusual twenty years ago, are not uncommon in the villages today. In part, the availability of housing and of Aid for Families with Dependent Children explains the phenomenon, much as it does for the United States in general. But, unlike the situation in the general population, it is doubtful that such households could survive in any village other than Wainwright if family members in other households did not assist the single parent. In 1985, as sources of income withered and family incomes plummeted in Wainwright, single-parent households could not cope unassisted in that community (Luton pers. comm.).

Assistance is provided in the way of native food, labor, and services. The parent is assisted by relatives in child-rearing tasks. Most such households are headed by women. In Gambell,

the widowed single parent receives regular assistance from the men and women of the clan into which she has married. Her children are children of the clan. But the denuded nuclear families that are headed by either divorcees or unmarried mothers look to their natal households for support. They also receive assistance from, and give assistance to, other women in the village (through the distribution of subsistence products). Robbins (pers. comm.) reports that the male children of divorcees and unwed mothers in Gambell, regardless of which family assists in rearing them, begin making their significant associations—joining bird and birds' eggs collecting crews—with their fathers' clans when they reach early adolescence.

The percentages of single-parent households for the United States are not comparable with village percentages, inasmuch as the Bureau of the Census included single parents without children as well as single parents with children in the category. The remaining types of households that occur in the three villages are so rare in the general U.S. population as not to be tallied, but they are common in American Indian and Eskimo communities.

Conjugal pairs are subsumed under the Bureau of the Census's "nuclear" type, so it is not possible to make informed comparisons with the general population. Yet conjugal pairs (childless married couples) in the general population surely exceed 7 percent of all households. For natives, some are young couples who do not yet have children. At the other end of the age spectrum, some are older native couples whose children have moved into their own homes. It is likely that the older couples will eventually move in with their children. In all cases of conjugal pair households, native couples are linked to larger family units for subsistence, recreation, affect, and the like. The single instance of a conjugal pair living alone in Gambell is a couple residing near the bride's father while the husband completes his bride service. Normally, such couples reside in the bride's extended household until a child is born to them.

A grandparent/grandchild household is composed of one or both grandparents with one or more grandchild. In all of the villages, it is not infrequent that grandchildren are cared for by grandparents. And it is common for grandchildren to reside

with grandparents—as much to help out as to be helped. Some grandparents have reared grandchildren since the latter were very young. Indeed, a practice in Gambell is for grandparents to select the firstborn male child of one or more of their children. In Wainwright and Unalakleet, grandparents often have their grandchildren for the school year, if the children's parents reside in some urban area and want the children to be educated and enculturated in the village.

Joint households are composed of siblings, with or without their spouses, and any children that the siblings may have. These households are often formed by siblings who wish to share expenses. One may have recently relocated from employment or schooling elsewhere, or one sibling may have returned to the village following a divorce.

Avuncular households, peculiar to Gambell and consonant with that village's patrilineal system, are composed of an uncle and his married nephews. Robbins (pers. comm.) reports that in each instance, the males who brought their wives to reside in their father's brother's house had many male siblings. This type of household does not occur in the bilateral villages, but uncle are often drawn into composite households in Unalakleet and Wainwright.

Basic Differences Between Native and Nonnative Households

The household cycles in the three villages, with the exception of the Gambell practice of temporary initial postnuptial residence with the bride's family, are identical. Moreover, they are identical with the household cycles of American Indians. A young couple resides with the family of one of the partners, swelling that household's membership. When the husband gains employment, becomes a fully competent (and able-bodied) hunter, or both, then separate housing and greater independence are possible. The birth of a child also often precedes the establishment of the nuclear family household. After fifteen or twenty years, elderly relatives of the husband

(Gambell) or of either partner (Unalakleet and Wainwright) join that nuclear household. The cycle is from extended (or composite) to nuclear and back to extended.

Again, as among American Indians, economic and political-economic factors often intervene to interrupt the cycle. These factors include welfare transfers and policies, new housing, and energy assistance. Grandparents, for instance, because they have a house of their own, can continue to maintain separate households, so long as they can receive some support from grandchildren while caring for and rearing those children. Divorces and deaths can alter nuclear households, but the availability of housing in conjunction with welfare and/or social security assistance can allow one-parent households to continue under such an arrangement.

Denuded nuclear families can persist for a while or can combine with others in composite households or joint households. Conjugal pairs can reside separately, as can single persons. But as economic exigencies dictate, composite and extended households fuse and fission. No matter what the household composition, most households are not independent but are connected to others through kinship and through sharing, cooperating, and assisting.

The nonnative residents of all three villages are located in villages because they are employed in those places. The teachers at the schools are nonnative couples, so both husbands and wives are employed. The construction workers on Wainwright CIPs are males, who either reside in dormitories or share rented houses. If they are married, their families do not accompany them to the village.

Unalakleet has the greatest number of "permanent" non-native households, although Wainwright has the greatest proportion of nonnative residents among the three villages. In Unalakleet, there are thirty-one resident white couples (11 conjugal pairs and 20 families). They represent 15 percent of all of the households in the village. The thirty-one couples occupy fifty-three full-time jobs, and children in two of the families also occupy full-time jobs.

In all three villages, the nonnative persons leave on corn-

pletion of their jobs and contracts or, in a few cases, on retirement. Furthermore, nonnative persons and families within the villages are not interdependent but fit the more typical nuclear household model, practicing Protestant ethic values.

In the three villages, all but one nonnative household fit the nuclear, single-person (one person or several coresiding single persons), or conjugal-pair types—the dominant types of households in advanced capitalist countries. They represent mobility, selling of labor-time, and willingness to relocate in order to do so. The lone exception is an elderly Lapp man and woman who formerly herded reindeer near the village. These people are neither married nor related but keep house together.

Families and Clans: Past and Present Bases of Village Social Organization

The natives residing in any of the three villages in this study would not limit the use of the word "family" either to the persons coresiding with them under a single roof or to a small circle of kinspersons living in town. The definition of family, for the bilateral-descent villages of Wainwright and Unalakleet in particular, must await the analysis of kindreds in chapter 9. The word "family" will remain ill-defined, then, until we can convey its loosely bounded nature. It is important to stress, however, that a family can, and usually does, occupy several houses. Thus, families most frequently comprise several households.

For the moment, I point out that in all three villages, regardless of household composition, a family encompasses a person's most immediate relatives: father, mother, brothers, sisters (unmarried in Gambell), sons, daughters, grandparents (paternal in Gambell), and grandchildren (paternal in Gambell). It also embraces the near kinspeople with whom a person invariably has a very close relationship (aunts, uncles, first cousins, nephews, nieces, and great-grandparents). "Family" often refers to great-uncles and great-aunts, grandnieces and grandnephews, second cousins, and other more distant collateral (Unalakleet and Wainwright) and lineal (Gambell) kinspersons.

Some Structural Differences in 'Families' Based on Descent Principles

The major difference in family reckoning between Gambell and Unalakleet/Wainwright is that Gambell residents emphasize membership among patrilineal kinspersons, whereas residents of the other villages reckon family members on either the mother's or the father's side, or both. It is also the case that Gambell families arc less flexible in membership recruitment than are the families in the other villages. The patrilineal customs by which Gambell kinship units are organized are restrictive in the number and types of relations that are maintained with one's mother's natal family, one's sister's family of procreation, or one's daughter's family of procreation. So Gambell families, too, will require special treatment later.

In Gambell, "family" will always be characterized by interactions among persons from the closer segments of the father's patriclan within the village. Frequently, then, that is the father's father and mother, the father's brothers, the father's brothers' wives, the children of the father's brothers, one's own children, and one's brothers' children. Gambell villagers rely on patrilineal descent reckoning to classify their relations to residents within the village, to residents of Savoonga, and to residents of Nome and elsewhere.

In practice, families in Unalakleet and Wainwright are formed on the basis of propinquity. If the relatives of a person's father reside in the village but the mother's relatives do not, the interactions that characterize the family will be among the father's close bilateral relatives. Although Unalakleet and Wainwright villagers rely on bilateral descent reckoning to classify their kinsmen and the nature of their relations to them, "family" also can include people in adoptive and step-relations.

Most members of a person's "family," in both the near, or household, sense and in the more distant sense of "these are my dose kinspersons with whom I share, to whom I lend support, with whom I cannot marry, and so forth," live in the village. But often some of them live elsewhere. In Unalakleet, for example, almost everyone has family members living in

other villages of Norton Sound, and many have family members residing in the Yukon-Kuskokwim area nearby. Wainwright residents have family members in other North Slope villages, much as members of Gambell "families" might reside in Savoonga or in Nome. There is considerable contact among family members, even though several may be separated by considerable geographic distance. Periodic visits, returns for whale hunts, summer season residence, exchanges of letters and telephone calls, exchange of subsistence foods, and other gifts made throughout the year all serve to maintain the strength of ties.

Families are the basis of Unalakleet and Wainwright social organizations, and the bonds among "family" members, in metaphorical terms, are fight and secure. Protracted observations in both villages allowed the researchers to recognize the strong bonds within families, including connections to members who have established separate households. Members of one or of several closely related family households come swiftly to each other's aid in sickness or trouble, bear hardships together, consider many of their most memorable and happy times to be those they have spent together, assist one another in child rearing, provide comfort and solace in times of grief, and pool their knowledge, skills, labor, resources, and even cash.

Intense feelings and devotion characterize the interaction between and across generations. In Wainwright and in Unalakleet, these same feelings also characterize interactions between lineal and collateral relatives. In Gambell, these feelings certainly characterize clanspersons, but they extend to the mother's natal clan in a noticeable way. Clanspersons interact in ways that appear identical to the bilateral "families" of Wainwright and Unalakleet: grandparent-grandchild ties are firm, indulgent, and loving. Parent-child relations are as loving preceptor to proud student but are not solely structured in a student-teacher fashion. Kinship, love, and friendship pervade the relationship. Nieces and nephews gain succor and friendship, even lifelong hunting, fishing, and food preparation partnerships, from uncles and aunts.

There are structural differences among the villages, of course. In Gambell, a patribias distinguishes the relations of

uncles and aunts to their nephews and nieces: uncles focus more attention on their brothers' children and aunts on their husband's brothers' children than is the case in Wainwright and Unalakleet. In Wainwright and Unalakleet, sisters' children and brothers' children, potentially at least, receive equal attention. Attention and the closeness of the relationship depend principally on proximity of residence.

Such differences are structural, not behavioral. For example, in Gambell and Wainwright, sea mammal hunting crews most frequently consist of some men who stand as nephew to uncle, others who stand as siblings, and still others who stand as father to son. The difference between the two villages is that uncle-nephew relations in Wainwright crews are often between mother's brother and sister's son as well as between father's brother and brother's son.

As in other dimensions of social practice, there is more flexibility in Wainwright and Unalakleet for forming lifelong friendship-kinship-partnership bonds. Siblings and bilateral first cousins of the same sex and same age-set usually form these bonds that pervade most of the public, subsistence, and recreational activities in which villagers engage. They discuss their problems and also their confidential activities.

In the arctic literature, it is common to focus on partnerships of males. I am not restricting the discussion of dose friendships to males. It is obvious to any observer that closeness is generated between and among women from shared activities and common experiences but particularly from sustained activities. Men are bound to men and women to other women. The ties emerge when children accompany their parents on visits, at spring, summer, and fall hunting camps, when several families join to share meals and tell stories, when children attend school, and so forth.

Intense feelings, coupled with very close ties, can also exist between more distant kinspeople of the same sex and age set who have been reared in each village. The constant contacts in such intimate places, places in which cooperation in the sharing of knowledge and activities is so crucial to the maintenance of life itself, generate close ties with more distant kinspeople.

In Gambell, there is less flexibility but a wide range of persons

among whom lifelong friendships can be made. Usually, closest friends and confidantes are patrilateral first cousins (children of the father's brothers) residing in the same village. Close friendships also emerge between clanspersons in Gambell and the distant villages of Savoonga and Nome. The obligations of clan membership, including joint liability, constrict choices while also providing contacts with clanmates in other villages.

In Gambell, again, the bonds between women and their natal clans are, for the most part, severed on marriage. Women marrying into a clan therefore create new bonds within the clan they have joined through marriage. Because subsistence and subsistence-related activities occupy the core of daily life in Gambell, the in-marrying women perforce cooperate and share in daily, weekly, seasonal, and annual tasks. The connections they nourished in their natal clans begin to wane at marriage, but they are surely not forgotten. These relations, too, are reactivated in times of need but also in times of celebration. In all of the villages, these special attachments are born and nourished in camping trips, school experiences, Fourth of July celebrations, fishing and hunting ventures, whale festivals, holiday celebrations (Thanksgiving, Christmas, the New Year), basketball trips, trips to the Eskimo Olympics, and the like. They can span a lifetime, and they often do.

The Central Importance of Subsistence in "Family" Life

In family life, as in village life as a whole, subsistence pursuits assume central importance. Men hunt, fish, repair equipment, create shelters, and build storage facilities; women fish, gather, collect materials for fuel and construction, and prepare and store the products of extraction. These activities, the organization of extraction by sex and age within the "family," are undertaken and completed not by rote but by planning that considers every member of the family and others who may be partially dependent on the family.

There is consideration, too, for those who are not partially dependent on the family but who need or would appreciate portions of food or assistance from time to time. Extraction of resources is sometimes carried out alone, but even for hunt-

ing, fishing, and gathering tasks that can be conducted by one person, such activities are more often conducted in concert with family members, other kinspeople, and friends. In part, these activities allow for speedier, more efficient, and more secure ventures, but they also generate pleasure and emphasize interdependence.

When the harvested resources are eaten, the basic act of consumption, villagers seek the company of others—family, hunting partners, visitors, friends—usually lingering after the meal's completion to exchange stories or to talk over plans for an upcoming venture, such as a trip to camp. There is little evidence of perfunctory meals fitted in between work, with the latter measured as "labor-time?' The pace of village life stops for meals. Consumption is a joy.

9
Kinship and Social Organization, Part 2

The Role of Kinship in the Life Cycle

The enactment of ANCSA in 1971 had the effect of creating regional and village corporations and enrolling former village residents as stockholders. With the prospects of funds and jobs, families once located in distant places—from Fairbanks to Cleveland—returned home and replanted their roots. Contacts had been maintained through letters, telephone calls, and return visits but also through remittances of cash from city dwellers and shipments of "native foods" from the persons who remained at home. In the early 1980s, people were still returning to their natal villages, six persons in the three villages known to me in the 1982-83 period alone. Two had retired from life careers in the Department of Defense.

Before and after 1971, Gambell villagers who had been sent away from home to be educated at BIA or private shools (usually sponsored by a Christian mission) or to serve tours of duty with some branch of the U.S. military usually returned to the village and resumed a subsistence life-style. Gambell residents, it is quite clear, were somewhat more conservative than the residents of Unalakleet and Wainwright. The rich subsistence resources around the Northwest Cape and the obligations to patriclansmen to assist one another in harvesting those resources and maintaining the clan undoubtedly influenced Gam-bell youths to return to their natal villages on completion of their education or military tours. But some Gambell families, too, were residing in Nome, Anchorage, and other places. Most of them returned. Returning families joined their kinspeople and friends who had never left.

Since 1971, children and young adults in the three villages have experienced life cycles similar to those of the Inupiaq, Yupik, and Siberian Yupik residents who preceded them in their natal villages over the past century. The differences in those cycles are few and can be pinned to the differences between patrilineal and bilateral descent organizations. I will separate them for convenience, but the similarities far outweigh the differences.

The Gambell Cycle Through Marriage

A child in Gambell enters a family, a clan segment, and a clan whose relations have been maintained by parents and lineal relatives. From their earliest experiences, children can turn for affection, protection, comfort, instruction, and sustenance not only to their parents and older siblings but also to paternal uncles, aunts in the patrician, paternal grandparents, and their patrilateral cousins.

Husbands and wives in Gambell in the majority of cases were reared in Gambell. The wife becomes a member of her husband's clan, so the significant connections for her children will be with her acquired patrician, and it would be odd to maintain strong connections between her children and her natal clan. In at least one clan, a woman who gained membership through marriage is the clan's steward, or leader. Children are not restricted to life in their natal village, however. They are welcome at the homes of friends or at their mother's natal household within the village; and throughout their lives, they are welcome among, and network in many ways with, clansmen in Savoonga and Nome.

The Unalakleet-Wainwright Cycle Through Marriage

Children in Wainwright and Unalakleet are born into wide networks of bilateral kinspeople, which have been established in earlier generations and maintained by their parents, older siblings, and older collateral relatives. Often husbands and wives, more so in Unalakleet than Wainwright, were reared in the

same village. In some instances, of course, one of the spouses, usually the wife, moved into the village. Postnuptial residence in the husband's village is common in all three villages.

In Unalakleet and Wainwright, cases of village exogamy reduce the number of contacts that children will have with families of the in-marrying spouse, but an effort is made to keep the connections as strong as possible. Children may spend summers with grandparents, or with uncles and aunts, in their mother's home village; holiday visits are memorable as well. Sometimes, a Unalakleet or Wainwright family will live for a period in the mother's home village, and children have memories of the time spent there.

Major Similarities in the Cycles

As they grow older, children in the three villages develop their own special friendships with certain kinspeople (cousins, favorite uncles, or, in Unalakleet and Wainwright, also favorite older persons). Youths form birds'-egg collecting crews at Gambell, hare-hunting teams in Unalakleet, and groups of associates who practice for subsistence hunting by shooting at lemmings, small birds, and the like, in Wainwright. Inasmuch as grade schools and high schools have been built in all of the villages since 1971, the children also make friends among schoolmates, play on basketball teams together, and wrestle in good-spirited fun at the drop of a hat.

As young adults, they assume increasing responsibilities within their families and within the village; more and more, they are expected to hunt and provide, to help older people, and to become involved in village affairs. The circles of kinspeople are enlarged for Unalakleet and Wainwright people on marriage, and new responsibilities are assumed by married persons in all three villages. After marriage, their focus begins to center on their own growing families and those of their siblings (brothers in Gambell, brothers and sisters in the other villages). They also focus on the needs of their aging parents, aging relatives, and elderly pensions in general.

When they, too, have become elders, they receive the love of their children and grandchildren and the respect of the com-

munity. Their well-being is the concern not only of their near kin but also of more distant kin (clansmen in Gambell), neighbors, and young adults, who bring them portions of their subsistence harvests, give them rides, cut wood for them, and dean house for them.

Marriage and Residence

In some particulars, marriage customs being one of them, the patrician system in Gambell is sufficiently different from the bilateral systems in the other villages to require separate treatment.

Gambell

Marriages in Gambell are arranged by the families of the betrothed, much as they were when observed by Hughes (1960) in the mid-1950s. Strict clan exogamy is no longer observed, however. Indeed, even the prohibition about marrying a first cousin carries only a weak sanction, although that is the sole relationship—other than that of sibling-sibling—that is prohibited. Whereas a couple might suggest to their respective parents that they wish to marry, the approval and arrangements are determined by the parents in consultation with their respective clan stewards and, perhaps, clan elders. Gifts are exchanged between the sets of parents-in-law: the groom's family delivers gifts before the wedding,' the bride's family after the ceremony. Ceremonies are either civil or religious (Christian). Reciprocal gifting does not take place if marriages are contracted with persons from villages other than Gambell or Savoonga.

A woman loses her social identity in her natal clan, yet retains her personal name, which belongs to her natal clan. Robbins (Little and Robbins 1984: 86) reports that when he asked a man whether he had visited his daughter and newly born grandson, the man replied, "No! She belongs to them [his son-in-law's clan] now." With the loss of the old social identity is associated a new social identity. And specific, lifelong economic obligations and responsibilities accompany that new social identity.

The woman reduces interactions with her natal clan, yet

throughout her life she will probably assist the dependent elders of her father's patrician. She will also assist other dependent villagers, such as young widows and divorcees, but her acquired patriclan. She will receive most of her assistance.

The groom must perform bride service for his father-in-law for about one year before the couple can establish a residence with the groom's patrician. The newlyweds either take up residence in the bride's natal household or they occupy a house adjacent to her father's house. Thereupon, the groom provides labor to his wife's father's clan and to her family. He hunts, hauls water, hauls garbage, distributes subsistence goods, and obeys the requests of the father-in-law and the elders of his wife's natal patrician.

The period of service normally ends when the groom has proved himself worthy or when the couple has a child. The two are not necessarily unrelated. The period can extend beyond one year if a house near the husband's family cannot be located. On return to his patrician, the couple pays deference to the elders of the patrician. The groom resumes his membership in various harvesting crews, and the wife begins to integrate into the routine work conducted by women of the clan.

Unalakleet and Wainwright

Marriages between first cousins are not approved (the children of either the father's siblings or the mother's siblings). Marriages between first cousins have occurred on rare occasions, but they are discouraged before they are consummated and frowned on thereafter. The parents do not arrange marriage, and the groom does not serve the bride's father's family.

Both villages are large enough to accommodate a considerable amount of village endogamy (marriage of partners from within the village). Our marriage data for Wainwright are not as complete as the Unalakleet data, but according to Luton (1985, pers. comm.), at least one of the partners in most Wainwright couples was reared in the village, and their marriages are heavily endogamous.

Restricting our discussion to Unalakleet, there were 119 native couples in the village in 1982 in which either one or both

spouses were born and reared in Unalakleet: 56 percent of the marriages were between Unalakleet residents (endogamous), and 44 percent were between a person from Unalakleet and a person from outside the village (exogamous). An informal tally of outmigration yielded the names of 88 women and 33 men. (We asked knowledgeable people to tell us who had left the village and not returned, except to visit, during the past two decades.) Women moved to cities (72) rather than to villages (16). Men did, too, but at the much lower rate of 2:1 (22 to 11), not 4.5:1.

In the event of exogamous marriages, men bring their spouses to reside in Unalakleet more often than Unalakleet women bring their spouses to the village (the ratio is 3:2 in-marrying women to in-marrying men). Unalakleet and Wainwright fit the patrilocal-virilocal mode, in which most couples reside in the village of the husband or the husband's male kinsmen. This is surely analogous to, although more flexible than, the Gambell custom. Given a subsistence life-style in which men hunt, fish, and rely on one another for help and support in a vast terrain that, itself, requires knowledge and experience to comprehend, choosing patrilocality-virilocality is a simple derision. When men move away from Unalakleet or Wainwright, it is usually after they have secured full-time jobs and have given up, at least temporarily, much of the subsistence life-style. Yet if the Wainwrighter moves to Barrow, he will continue to harvest resources in that region, while returning home to harvest others.

Nevertheless, when men move from their home villages, especially when they take up residence in a city, they become dependent on "CARE" packages of native foods from home, or they engage in subsistence activities during vacations. If they live in Bethel, Kotzebue, or Nome, as some do, they engage in more limited subsistence activities in those large villages.

Intervillage marriages are especially revealing, in Unalakleet at least. Here we see very clearly the relation between sex and place: native men marry natives (3:1 over nonnatives) and bring them to Unalakleet. Native women who bring their husbands from another village or place to reside in Unalakleet, or who have married men in Unalakleet who were born and reared in

some place other than Unalakleet, more often marry nonnatives than natives (4:3 over natives). With one exception, when Unalakleet women marry native men from elsewhere and establish residence in Unalakleet, those men are from nearby villages in Norton Sound. There are good reasons for this postnuptial residence practice. It is not a simple indicator of patrilocal-virilocal practices on the wane.

Indeed, for those couples residing in Unalakleet in which a local woman was married to a native from some other village, all but one of the marriages were with persons from Norton Sound villages, principally the neighboring communities of Shaktoolik and St. Michael. Residents of these villages have shared some extraction areas with Unalakleet residents for several generations. The in-marrying men bring considerable knowledge of the terrain with them and move easily into the subsistence region, only part of which is new to them.

The couples residing in Unalakleet in which local women married nonnative men in all but one instance met in Unalakleet, where the nonnative was gainfuly employed. Those men were originally drawn to Unalakleet because employment was available. During the period of our inquiry, those men were either full-time employed or serf-employed. They were on the peripheries of a subsistence life-style.

Marriages between natives—of either sex—and nonnatives are rare in all three villages. Similar circumstances experienced by some natives in each of the three villages make such marriages possible. Native men, for example, frequently have met their spouses while serving in the armed forces or while working or studying in some place outside the area. They bring them back to Unalakleet. Unalakleet women-also have met their non-native spouses in schools or while working in urban areas. Yet some women met their nonnative husbands from among the U.S. Air Force personnel once stationed near the village. And some, of course, met their nonnative husbands when the latter were gainfully employed in Unalakleet. In practically all instances, Unalakleet women moved from Unalakleet and took up residence at a location chosen by their husbands. Only those Unalakleet women who met their nonnative husbands during the period in which those men were working in Unalakleet, and

who still happened to be employed there when we conducted our study, reside in the village. In all likelihood, they will leave when the men's jobs are terminated or when they get better jobs elsewhere.

The patrilocal-virilocal bias is apparent, as are the reasons for it: subsistence pursuits are crucial; they are conducted in large part by men, especially during winter; and coordination and cooperation among extractors—the kind that grow throughout a lifetime—are central to family and village life. The in-marrying native men from nearby villages know some of the terrain, know the customs of extraction, and share parts of a common heritage with the residents of Unalakleet.

There were only four native couples in Unalakleet in which neither spouse was born or reared in the village. All four are from adjacent villages in Norton Sound, and all are closely related to a woman who married a Unalakleet man and took up residence in Unalakleet. She provided the family connection that made it possible for these couples to gain acceptance, hunting partners, and familiarity with the terrain.

Marriage and postnuptial residence practices are important in family organization and in the relations among kinspeople and affines beyond the nuclear family. Even, as in Wainwright, when families appear to be becoming less dependent on naturally occurring resources, more particular in the resources they extract, and less dependent on wider networks of kinspersons, affinal and kinship relations within the village are activated in most social interactions. As conditions become more difficult, those same relations are activated for subsistence activities, sharing, and providing support. And the relations with affines and kinspersons in other villages that may have lain dormant are also activated as may be prompted by exigencies and more protracted conditions.

Demes and Clans

It is clear that households arc not independent in any real sense. They are always connected to larger "families," whether bilateral or patrilineal. Although the families to which we refer remain only vaguely defined and await discussion of kindreds and

clan segments for definitions, it should be clear that families extend over geographic space to include kinspeople living even in distant places and over genealogical space to include kinspeople of sometimes distant relationship. This is one point on which the kinship organizations of Unalakleet and Wainwright differ from that of Gambell. Another point on which they differ is the relative firmness of the kinship structures beyond the nuclear family. I will explain this below.

From Family to Kindred to Deme in Unalakleet and Wainwright

The bilaterally organized villages of Unalakleet and Wainwright are homes to families whose members reside in those villages and in more distant places as well. Their loose structures, which encompass all living relatives and memories of deceased ones, appear akin to large, nuclear, family-centered kindreds, yet those in which affines as well as kinsmen are recognized as members.

The natives in Unalakleet and Wainwright employ kinship terminologies that kinship analysts fittingly call "Eskimo" (Murdock 1949; Driver 1956). They are so similar to Anglo-American kinship terminologies that they require little definition. A person uses one term for a male sibling and another for a female sibling. The children of mother's brother, mother's sister, father's brother, and father's sister are all addressed and referred to as "cousin" (English gloss). Parents are distinguished from uncles and aunts, but uncles and aunts are not further distinguished as to whether they are on the mother's side (matrilateral) or father's side (patrilateral). Helpful, close relations obtain among cousins, much as they obtain among siblings, and between uncles and aunts and their nephews and nieces, much as they obtain between parent and child. Parental and sibling bonds, by proximity and duration, are usually, but not always, stronger than uncle/aunt bonds with nephews/ nieces.

Because bilateral descent, in conjunction with marriages, converts relations that are affinal (in-laws) in one generation to kinship (blood) in the next, a child's family kindred includes

both relatives (mother's kinspeople) who are his father's affines and relatives (father's kinspeople) who arc his mother's affines. So family flexibility, rather than rigidity of the ordering principles of membership, is the rule. Indeed, when a person marries, his or her affines become family to his or her children, as does his or her personal family of orientation.

Affines—that is, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, parents-in-law, and sons-in-law/daughters-in-law—develop and maintain strong bonds through joint activities, whether they reside in the same or in different villages. If they reside in the same village, on occasions, some male affines hunt and fish together; some female affines prepare meals together; and all affines attend community celebrations together, often establish camps dose to one another, and maintain close relations with the children of their sisters or brothers (their nieces and nephews). It is the kinship bond of uncle and aunt to niece and nephew that makes more secure the bonds between siblings-in-law and the kinship bond between grandparent and grandchild that makes more secure the bonds between parent-in-law and son-in-law/daughter-in-law.

If affines reside in different communities, bonds are maintained through visits, the sharing of foods, particularly those that are abundant in one place but scarce in the other, and resource extraction excursions, again often for resources locally abundant in one place but scarce in the other (such as roe-on-kelp, caribou, or berries).

Kindreds: Their Relations to Households and "Families"

Figure 11 is an idealized, schematic representation for Wainwright and Unalakleet of siblings' family kindred of orientation (the one into which brothers and sisters are born and reared) and a male's (ego's)^[1] family kindred of procreation, a kindred that is added to his personal kindred of orientation. A woman ego adds her husband's family kindred to her new kindred of procreation.

[1] Ego refers to the person through whom relatives are reckoned (demonstrated or stipulated).

Figure 11.
Schematic Representation of Kindreds, Unalakleet and Wainwright, 1982

These kindred organizations are flexible, allowing for adoptions and for movements of persons from one household to another within the kindreds, as exigencies and interests dictate. The members are quick to specify the nature of their kinship relations to other members, if asked, or to volunteer such information to the fieldworkers ("he's my cousin, my mother's sister's boy"), if a family member's name is mentioned. We were always informed about relations if a person's name came up in reference, say, to a basketball game, a long-distance hunting trip, or participation on the village's dance team. That is to say, family members are proud of their relatedness, share many experiences, and want the uninformed person who mentioned the name, no matter what the context, to know how they are related.

In Unalakleet and Wainwright, family kindred is not mere descent reckoning: kinship relations entail a vast array of joint activities, and descent reckoning is in large part a memory of those activities. During the late 1970s and up through 1983 in Wainwright, some of the activities associated with subsistence, which provide the context for interactions with kinspeople and friends, were engaged in with less frequency than during the previous decades. But as Luton (1985: 141) cautioned, kin ties of great importance still existed within the community and should not be underestimated. They are always asserted in relation to marriage, social events, and task group formation. As conditions worsened in 1984 and 1985, kinship ties were invoked for subsistence pursuits, assistance, and mutual support. Relatives are proud to be relatives, and they enjoy sharing mutual responsibilities and obligations.

Family kindreds in Unalakleet and Wainwright, then, are more or less unbounded, because kindreds of orientation overlap with kindreds of procreation. At marriage, the spouses have more kinspeople, more obligations, and more persons to turn to for assistance than they had before. The side on which most emphasis is placed, husband's or wife's, is determined in largest part by residence. That is, the kindred located in the village in which the couple resides will provide the most daily connections of all kinds. If the marriage is endogamous, both husband's and wife's kindreds are emphasized, but the male hunting-fishing

activities will usually swing the weight to the husband's kindred of orientation. Children, however, receive succor, support, and attention from both sides and serve to increase the activities that are shared between them.

The "Family" In Unalakleet and Wainwright

It is here that we can solve the puzzle posed by the ill-defined, unbounded "family" discussed in chapter 8. Family kindreds can, and usually do, occupy several houses and thus comprise several households. An elderly person may have a house and choose to live alone; a young nuclear family may have a separate residence; and a third family, comprising mother, father, unmarried children, a divorced son or daughter, and a couple of grandchildren, may occupy a third house. Yet the three households may well be the core of a family, that is, the set of people who most frequently interact in hunting and fishing activities, food preparation, baby-sitting, meals, and the like.

But residence flexibility is such that some people come and go from one house to another (married couples, students, or divorced men or women may coreside with their parents or grandparents, or with an uncle and aunt, then move onto another house or return to school). Nevertheless, the kinship, nurturance, support, subsistence organization (extraction, distribution, consumption) bonds remain. A family, then, in Unalakleet and Wainwright is not a house or a household. It is an unbounded organization of bilateral kinspersons that expands at marriage. Each child sees his or her family as an ever-widening circle of relations.

Functions of the Family in Unalakleet and Wainwright

Each circle of family, in the wider sense, has its own history, traditions about its place of origin and its ancestors, and stories about memorable events. Wainwright is, however, a more recent village than Unalakleet, so that many of the family histories for persons in that community extend only three or four generations.

Native populations near what is now Wainwright, as we

know, had been in contact with, and in the service of, nonnative business operations for about 140 years. Some of the consequences of those contacts were disruptive to the small native communities between Point Hope and Point Barrow. The small villages in about a twenty-five-mile radius of the Kuuk Lagoon were not immune to these disruptions and dislocations. Families splintered away from small villages to serve or to join those operations. Diseases afflicted them, and an unusually high mortality rate reduced their numbers (see Luton 1986).

By the 1890s, several Inupiat communities, comprising mixtures of coastal and inland peoples, had coalesced—intermarrying, extracting resources of land and sea, and serving the nonnative enterprises that operated near Wainwright. In 1904, the Bureau of Education school and a reindeer herd were established there. Wainwright was born, as families in the region relocated there. The settlers came from several communities during the whaling and postwhaling periods. Families continued to immigrate to the village throughout the 1940s. The early settlement was, then, complex, as it was in Unalakleet following the epidemic during the early nineteenth century. The recent history of native emigration and immigration has seen more activity in Wainwright than in Unalakleet.

These historical-demographic caveats aside, each family has land that its members have customarily used as campsites—at least for three generations but usually for considerably longer periods than that—for harvesting native foods. Each family has names that reflect its continuity. Families of today continue the history bequeathed to them. They retell the smiles and traditions and pass on their store of knowledge to younger members. Every year they have set up camp on land recognized as theirs, either through allotment (a special act for Alaska natives, now rescinded by ANCSA) or through traditional practice or subsistence use. Some of those parcels have been claimed by families through ANCSA's provisions for conveyance. When Eskimo children are born, they receive Eskimo names in remembrance of past members of the family; sometimes the English names (first and/or middle) given to a baby also recall the memory of family members who have died.

Within an immediate family, nuclear or extended (the small-

est circle of kinspeople), each member holds responsibilities toward the others. Parents want the best for their children and work hard to provide for them. In Unalakleet, parents put food on the table largely by subsistence harvesting of the native resources. In Wainwright in 1982, parents put about half the food on the table from subsistence pursuits. In Unalakleet, most families obtain at least a portion, and in about one-third of the families most, of the cash needed to house, clothe, and otherwise provide for their children (e.g., to meet school-related expenses) by commercially harvesting the natural resources (fishing and trapping). As we know, Wainwright families in 1982 gained most of the cash they needed from earned and unearned income ultimately made available by the oil operations at Prudhoe Bay.

Yet in both Wainwright and Unalakleet, children are reared very similarly. Part of the instruction given to children and the knowledge handed down to them are the techniques of harvesting and processing native foods. When out in the country, upriver, or on the ocean, and involved in subsistence pursuits together, parents feel that they are giving their sons and daughters the same memorable childhood experiences that they fondly look back on.

Sons and daughters, as they grow older, take on increasing responsibilities within the family. As they become more adept at hunting, setting and checking nets, cutting fish, piloting boats on the river or ocean, and other aspects of subsistence, they take on more of the work and contribute more to the family's food supply. Their contribution increases in other areas of daily family life, too—taking care of younger sisters and brothers, cleaning the house and yard, making repairs, feeding the dogs (Unalakleet), and taking part-time or seasonal jobs. They care about their parents' approval, and they feel distress if they let them down in some way.

Brothers and sisters look after one another when they are children, giving protection and comfort. When older, they continue to watch after one another's welfare and will personally sacrifice to help in a pinch. They often provide each other with native foods and meals; but especially when one is having a hard

time and without a hunter, or unable to go into the country, they make it a point to bring food.

Brothers and sisters are among each other's best friends. Brothers pal around together when young; when older, they hunt together, and they talk over troubles and plans. Sisters are the same; they pick berries and cut fish and meat together; they care for each other's children; they talk over their hopes and cares, and in other ways, they give each other emotional comfort and support.

When brothers and sisters have families of their own, these families join in activities together. They visit and have meals together; they harvest subsistence foods together; they give each other, and their younger siblings, a place to stay. They often form joint families when one is divorced or becomes a widow or widower. Together, they sometimes join their parents to harvest foods, and they go to their parents' house to help with repairs and construction.

When siblings grow older and become grandparents, they are looked after by their children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, grandnieces, and grandnephews. As spouses die, or as couples age, more distant relatives and friends in the village join in looking after these people. Yet even with advancing age, most of the older people maintain considerable physical activity and continue to give from their end. They hunt, fish, and pick berries and greens. They give part of what they harvest and part of what has been brought to them to their children and grandchildren as well as to relatives and friends their own age. They also help to give their adult children and grandchildren a start in life and help to ease any difficulties they may be experiencing. Their houses are always open, they have their adult children and grandchildren stay with them, they take their young grandchildren to raise, and they give financial help when they can manage.

Collateral kinspersons are very frequently as close as lineal kinspersons. Indeed, a special enduring closeness almost always develops between cousins and often between second cousins. This same degree of closeness links uncles and aunts with their nephews and nieces. These kin come to one another's aid and

generally look after one another. They hunt, fish, and cut fish together; they explore and travel the country together. The older teach the younger about subsistence techniques and a host of other subjects. If they are fairly close in age, these relatives are close friends who spend a lot of time in each other's company, who joke, who share good times and troubles, who know they can count on one another, who give each other gifts and in a multitude of ways express their friendship. They usually form same-sex bonds, that is, male collaterals with male collaterals, females with females.

The Demelike Organizations of Unalakleet and Wainwright

As we have observed, the Inupiat settlements of the North Slope historically were kinship-based units. In both Unalakleet and Wainwright today, kinspersons, no matter how distant, feel a measure of responsibility to each other. In fact, the common, local observation in Unalakleet is that practically everyone in the village is related in some way, either by blood or by marriage or by both. An agamous bilateral, localized descent group of this nature is called a deme, and the village of Unalakleet more or less fits such a description. Its core members surely comprise a deme. The fact that only four native couples are from villages other than Unalakleet is strong evidence for Unalakleet being a demelike organization.

The evidence for Wainwright is less conclusive. Given its brief history and its population fluctuations over the past half-century, it may not comprise a large, localized descent group. Kinship ties, however, are everywhere important in the community, and Luton (1985) argues that those ties are accompanied by ideological and emotional features that make the community distinct.

The recognition of kinship, combined with a sense of belonging through the generations, is one of the unifying forces among people in the village. This recognition translates into people putting differences aside and joining together in common action when circumstances require. It also translates into a general concern for one another and an immediate will-

ingness to help when circumstances, either small (such as running out of gas on the river or being on foot and needing to get to the other end of the village) or large (such as death, an accident, or a fire), render someone or a whole family in need of assistance.

Clan Segments and Clans in Gambell

Each of the eleven St. Lawrence Island patricians has members in both Gambell and Savoonga, and many have segments in Nome as well. Clan segments are extended families, although they should not be confused with the "extended households" discussed in chapter 8. Clan segments almost always occupy several houses. Robbins (pers. comm.) reports that both Gambell and Savoonga clan segments normally consist of three to six nuclear families or some mix of nuclear, denuded nuclear, and single-men family households. The segments of a clan may or may not share the same surname, but surnames are irrelevant to demonstrating genealogical relationships among segments of a clan or to stipulating such relations when actual demonstration of biological kinsmen cannot be specified.

The emphasis on patrikinsmen in the social organization of St. Lawrence Island is evident in marriage, residence, kinship terminologies, extraction crews, distribution networks, and dance teams. The clans sit at the center of these customs. Hughes (1950, 1984) analyzes the kinship terminologies that are employed on St. Lawrence Island as a type commonly associated with unilineal descent systems and called an "Iroquoian" variant (Murdock 1949; Driver 1956; Jorgensen 1980). In this system, the cross-cousins (mother's brother's children and father's sister's children) are addressed by the same term. Mild joking relations obtain between cross-cousins. None of the helpful relations that obtain among siblings and cousins in Unalakleet and Wainwright obtain between cross-cousins in Gambell.

Distinctive terms are used for each set of parallel cousins (one term for father's brother's children and another term for mother's sister's children). Both of these relations are helpful, similar to the relations among siblings and cousins (cross- and/

or parallel) in Unalakleet and Wainwright. But one of the parallel relations is important over all others—the connection between a male and his father's brother's children. It is on this relationship, in conjunction with sibling bonds, that walrus crews, sealing crews, whaling crews, egg-collecting crews, young-bird-collecting crews, and other crucial subsistence activities are built. As Hughes (1984: 268) says, this relationship "is the cornerstone of the patrilineal descent group." Collective terms for an entire group of patrilateral parallel cousins are employed, which gloss to "those that have the same flesh" (Hughes 1984: 268). And when patrilateral parallel cousins address or refer to one another, they often use sibling terms rather than cousin terms.

Separate terms are used for each of the following: mother's brother, father's brother, mother's sister, and father's sister. Separate terms are also used for brother's children and sister's children. Terminologies of this type are classified as "bifurcate collateral" and correlate strongly and positively with unilineal descent systems (Murdock 1949; Driver 1956; Jorgensen 1980). Persons who stand in patrilineal relationships are marked by more terms with which more explicit behaviors are associated than is true, say, for maternal relatives. The latter enter a person's life less regularly than do paternal relatives.

Although Gambell families, clan segments, and clans are patrilineal, there are obvious similarities to Unalakleet and Wainwright kindreds and larger social groupings. For any Gambell person, there are wider and wider circles of social groupings—the household (domestic family), the extended family or clan segment (several cooperating households of brothers, their wives and unmarried children, and their married sons with their wives and children), and the patrician. The clan is a definite social group, whose members stipulate their descent to a common apical ancestor. Whether clansmen reside in Gambell, Savoonga, or Nome—or anywhere else, for that matter—they are part of a corporate, unilineal descent group. In addition, each person has a kindred of dose relatives on the father's side as well as on the mother's side. These relatives vary for everyone but siblings, and they demand neither joint liability nor strict allegiance.

When families repair to camp, brothers, patrilateral parallel cousins, or both, establish themselves near to one another to provide assistance or simply to enjoy the company of persons whom they can rely on. The larger kinship network that can be drawn on in the clan can provide money, equipment, labor, subsistence items, and other goods, especially during the camp season but throughout the year as well.

ClanOrganization

Patriclans have definite memberships, definite membership criteria (a person belongs to his or her father's clan; at marriage, a woman joins her husband's clan), definite forms of leadership, and definite criteria for leadership (the eldest male member of a clan is the steward, although the oldest male's widow may serve if she is the oldest member of the clan). Perhaps the criteria for leadership, more dearly than any other factor, show how completely a woman is integrated into her husband's clan. If she survives her steward-husband and if she is the oldest member of the clan, then she becomes the new steward.

Clan Stewardship

Hunting prowess is crucial on St. Lawrence Island, and it is an attribute that all hunters seek to develop, but the fact that a steward is a great hunter is not the reason that he is steward. Clan leadership succeeds to the oldest male. Thus, the point is simply made, age (the eldest) and sex (male first, female second) are the significant criteria for stewardship. A woman is the steward only under the conditions specified above.

It is commonly understood among the villagers that wisdom and experience accumulate with age and that men have more experiences and more responsibility than women. Authority and decision-making powers remain with elderly men. Those factors are seldom challenged, according to Little and Robbins (1984: 90).

Clan stewards are perceived, and talked about, as persons with great integrity as well as great wisdom. They have internalized the values of the group, and they represent those values

in a laudatory way, a way that gives pride to the clanspersons. They teach patience in subsistence pursuits by precept and by verbal instruction. They also teach respect for the environment—animals, humans, plants, and the sea. They exhibit and teach courage. And while teaching subsistence skills, they convey respect for the quarry as well. "They are, in fact, stewards of the clan's material wealth and social welfare" (Little and Robbins 1984: 90).

Clan stewards pull together the resources, the capital and equipment, that are required to hunt whales, walrus, seals, and the like. They advise the captains in their clans about the most propitious time to undertake a hunting venture and when to replace equipment. And when conditions are extreme, and families within the clan are low on food or resources, the steward will seek resources from the clan segments that have surpluses. It is possible—and it has happened in the very recent past—for a clan steward in Nome to send members of the clan from Savoonga who had been unsuccessful in the walrus hunt to Gambell to collect food, ivory, and all else of importance from members of the clan in that community.

In the past fifteen years, stewards have lost some of their authority to manage hostility within and between clans, as federal and state jurisdictions have been established over them. Yet in matters of subsistence, marriage, family disputes within the clan, names for newborn children, and the like, stewards exercise final authority. Stewards behave like board chairmen, presiding over their clan segments and over entire clans with authority but usually taking advice from respected elders if such is deemed necessary (ibid., 91).

Patriclan Functions

In Gambell, the eleven clans are represented by thirty-three clan segments (there are 24 segments in Savoonga). The clan segments are not evenly divided among the clans, nor are the 110 households evenly divided among the thirty-three segments. Some segments have as many as six households, some as few as two. The patricians supply cohesion among the clan segments. Each clan segment has a leader, and he organizes

the households. The patrician steward must coordinate the segments in the several villages. Clan networks encompass residents of both communities, so intercommunity activities frequently follow clan protocols (ibid., 92).

Robbins (ibid., 93-99) used the patriclan diagrammed in figure 12 as an example of a multilocal St. Lawrence Island clan that had fifty-eight living members in 1982. These fifty-eight people were organized into fourteen nuclear or denuded nuclear families, occupying twelve households. The clan segment in Gambell included eighteen people in four households.

The clan's steward resides in Savoonga. He is linked to the Gambell segment through the wife of his deceased brother. The Gambell widow is the second-oldest member of the clan, and she will assume the stewardship should she outlive her brother-in-law. In 1981, when a crew from the Gambell segment of the clan landed a bowhead whale, the clan's steward journeyed from Savoonga to claim half of the whale for the people of Savoonga (equal sharing of the whales between the villages is the norm, but the clan that bags the animal receives the accolades and shares in the pride). In 1982, when walrus hunts in Savoonga were poor, Gambell members of the same patrician "rushed to the aid of their Savoonga kinsmen with supplies of meat, tusks, and hides" (ibid., 96).

Patricians provide the pool of cooperating men and women, organized on the basis of tradition as well as on the specific requests of clansmen, for help, sundry tasks, and mutual aid. The clan is a formalized, unilineal descent group, which functions in all of the ways that families in Unalakleet and Wainwright function. But the added dimension of corporate liability and corporate responsibility, accompanied by a steward and segment leaders, enables clans to respond to problems and bring a wider network of persons to bear on the solutions to those problems with considerable speed, if necessary. Certainly, clans can respond with greater speed and a more specific commitment from distantly located kinsmen than can the bilaterally organized and inherently more diffuse families.

Within the clan, children are cared for, supplies and equipment are shared, household labor is contributed, equipment is repaired, and assistance is provided in constructing rooms,

Figure 12.
 A St. Lawrence Island Patrician with Clan Segments in Gambell and Savoonga, 1982

sheds, and buildings. In addition, commodities and cash are transferred, and clansmen cooperate to celebrate holidays, rejoice in the whale and walrus harvests, and sponsor dance teams.

The patriclans are pegged to the extraction, distribution, and consumption of the naturally occurring resources on and around St. Lawrence Island. These organizations—pregnant with symbols as well as numerous everyday acts as mundane as greeting a cousin with the term for brother—mobilize in times of need, counsel about issues facing the island, and select the most competent and wisest among them to run for positions in the local governments, so as to lend their voices in the critical decisions that affect the island as a whole.

Because so many of the critical situations that face them pertain to their island and to the resources that they cherish and on which they rely, the clan members encourage their most proficient members to take the lead in Alaskawide and regional organizations, including the Eskimo Walrus Commission, the Eskimo Whaling Commission, and Kawerak (the Bering Strait regional nonprofit corporation). St. Lawrence Island residents from both villages have ascended to the top of all of those organizations.

Networks

A network of interacting people may be connected by any one of several different kinds of ties. They may be kinspeople (by blood or marriage), friends, co-workers, members of the same organization or group, or schoolmates. While we are concerned with networks of kinspeople, other kinds of networks also exist in the three villages. People who form a network of kinspersons usually will, at the same time, stand in other relationships to one another. They may work together; they probably attend the same church (Presbyterian, Covenant, Adventist); very likely, they attended the same high school (for the middle-aged generation in all of the villages, Mount Edgecombe; also Covenant, in Unalakleet); and they may belong to one or two of the same social organizations or sodalities (Search and Rescue, Sewing Circle, Covenant's Young Marrieds Group, Wainwright Dancers, Gambell Dancers, etc.).

A network can be described as a constellation of interactive people who pass information, goods, and services among themselves. The people within a kin network visit one another, work on tasks with and for each other, and give or lend items to each other. While they do not relate exclusively to others, they may spend considerable time together, repeatedly joining to accomplish certain tasks and to enjoy each other's company. They think of each other when they have something to give, and, of course, one gives to the other(s) at those times.

In Gambell, a woman's family is often connected to her clan of marriage through giving and sharing on minor occasions. And networks also link friends beyond the more durable, formalized structures of clans. In Wainwright and Unalakleet, kinship networks generally consist of one or more core groups of closely related people: parents, children, and children's families; siblings (brothers and sisters) and their families; first cousins and their families; or a mix of these and other more distant kin.

The spread of a kin network usually reaches far past the boundaries of either Unalakleet or Wainwright. It includes kin-persons who are next-door neighbors and kinspersons who live in distant villages and cities. Information and goods flow to the

farthest reaches of a network. Information includes family news and word on subsistence resource availability, and goods include native foods and other gifts. Joint activities (such as resource harvesting and processing) generally take place among kinspersons who are resident within the village. Depending on the season, however, visiting relatives will be available to take part and are included in the endeavors. Sometimes, kinspeople living elsewhere are invited to visit for the specific purpose of hunting birds, fishing, or picking berries. Invitations like these may serve to incorporate kin into an activity network for the first time or else strengthen preexisting network ties.

Affinal networks, or in-law relationships, can serve to expand networks far beyond Unalakleet, Wainwright, or Gambell. One partner of a union is frequently from another village or even from an urban area. In Unalakleet, for example, one of the native spouses in thirty-three marriages is from outside the village. In another twenty couples, one of the spouses is a nonnative from Anchorage or another city in the United States. Of the thirty-three native-native marriages, most of the spouses are either from Norton Sound or from Yukon-Kuskokwim villages, and a few are from St. Lawrence Island, the North Slope, or the Aleutians.

Subsistence foods usually flow directly between a couple and the kinspeople of the in-marrying spouse. Women who have married into Unalakleet from the North Slope, for example, send their families dried and smoked salmon, dried or frozen moose, and berries. Women who have married into Unalakleet from Yukon villages send their parents caribou, moose, seal, seal oil, saffron cod, smelt, and berries. In neither instance do the women in Unalakleet expect anything in return, although they may receive subsistence foods that are harder to obtain or foods that are considered genuine treats around Unalak-leet. North Slope families send caribou, maktak, and geese, while Yukon families send pike, shellfish, blackfish, cisco, and whitefish.

In Wainwright, Unalakleet, and Gambell, the flow of subsistence foods throughout affinal networks is on a regular basis, but sometimes it also operates on an emergency basis. A poor harvest of berries, a disastrous flood, or violent winds pushing

shore ice onto a village will all necessitate that subsistence foods be given to help meet particular needs.

In all the villages as well, the flow of subsistence foods between villages may pass through several affinal links in a network and even result in the formation of food-trading friendships. I and my research associates and several employees of Wien and Ryan Air were all enlisted at one time or another during 1982 to carry packages of maktak, smoked king salmon strips, jars of jelly, baleen, or some other treasured native food or animal by-product to someone in Village A from someone in Village B. One Unalakleet man struck up a friendship with a Gambell man while visiting St. Lawrence Island, looking to buy some ancient ivory. They now exchange gifts of locally favored food. Another person, the mother of a Unalakleet man whose wife is from a Yukon village, struck up a friendship with another elderly person related to her daughter-in-law and now receives berries from her friend, to whom she sends gifts of local food delights.

Affinal networks also link family networks within villages. The networking of gifts often expands, joining people in many common activities. In the bilateral-descent villages, affines may join a hunting or seining task group that has formed around a core of kinsmen. Certainly, men or women who have married into a village take part in the activity networks of their wives or husbands.

The flow of goods through kin networks points to the ramifying nature of these networks. Many more villages are connected by interacting kinspeople than may be supposed at first glance. Focusing attention on only those exchanges between spouses and their immediate families in affinal networks, for instance, underestimates the extent to which goods, once put into a network through giving, find their way through acts of further giving to people far beyond the initial recipient.

For example, a couple in Unalakleet, the wife of whom is from a Yukon village, regularly sends gifts of food—large amounts, in emergencies—to the wife's parents on the Yukon. A network of her parents' kinspeople will often distribute among themselves the goods she may send to her parents. The Unalakleet woman may send by plane a box of frozen caribou

and moose meat to her home village. Her parents, in turn, will give some of this meat to their children living there. Perhaps one of their daughters, the original giver's sister, is visiting from another Yukon village, into which she has married. She will be given some of the meat, which she will take home; and people in her husband's village will partake in a meal of moose or caribou from Unalakleet.

The same phenomenon occurs when parents in Wainwright send "CARE packages" of maktak, seal oil, and berries by jet to their married children in Anchorage. The receipt of native food is eagerly anticipated by all Eskimo people living in the urban areas of Alaska and elsewhere. The children who receive their parents' gifts will give some of it away, in portions or in meals, to cousins or other friends and relatives who also live in the city and would delight in a taste of native food.

Earlier, I cited the example of one Gambell household that was engaged in sharing with seventy other households representing about 315 people in 1982, the period during which the network was measured. Figure 13 is a graphic representation of the sharing network (all sharing links are not shown).

The woman in ego's household ensures that persons in the six households to which she is related through her father's patrician receive a steady supply of food. All are headed by elderly women or by widowers. Some contain grandchildren or spouseless daughters with their children. These dependent households, some in Nome and some in Gambell, are indigent and require food and emotional support, which they are given. Food (walrus, seal, maktak, fish, and fowl) is sent to Nome by air. The six dependent families in the woman's father's patriclan make up only a small portion of her larger network, which is predominantly through her patrician by marriage. Yet the woman maintains other connections to her former patrikinsmen (paternal aunt, brother). Neither males nor their spouses hesitate to help the indigent, whether related to them or not (Little and Robbins 1984: 117).

Robbins and Little (following Hughes 1960) think that twenty-five years ago sharing patterns existed almost exclusively within patricians. It is likely that the changes following ANCSA—especially various government transfers, the increase

Figure 13.
A Kinship Sharing Network, Gambell, 1982

in women-headed households, and the modest reduction in the contribution made by naturally occurring resources to native diets (80%)—have stimulated sharing across old patrician social and economic boundaries. The sharing network in which the family depicted in figure 9 is engaged—and this network is common rather than exceptional—demonstrates the wide geographic distribution of participating households and the continuing strength of kinship and affinal links that join the St. Lawrence Islanders, even those residing in Nome, into a single community.

10
Ideology

Conversion to Christianity

One century ago, the Eskimo residents of Gambell, Wainwright, and Unalakleet held beliefs very different from those they hold today about sickness, death, and proper relations with living things. Survival and the subsistence economy stood in the center of these beliefs, and the ritual practices that accompanied them sought to avert or to rectify problems in relation to survival and subsistence. As in social organization, religious beliefs and practices were unavoidably instrumental, inescapably pinned to the environment and the uses to which it was put.

The essential beliefs were animistic—a world suffused with discrete spirits. Some spirits, such as the souls of animals, were kinspersons to be propitiated. It was believed that their behavior and their emotions were similar to those of humans. But more important, perhaps, the souls of animals were extremely sensitive to protocol, to treatment with real respect and dignity. They could peer into persons' hearts—into their deepest thoughts—and perceive the manner in which they were regarded.

Spirits were not restricted to living beings. They also were attributed to the abiological entities of land, water, and sky, and those spirits, too, whether in rocks or ice, required respectful treatment. And still other spirits—some called to personal use by specially qualified persons (shamans)—could be helpful or harmful, depending on their use. A final class of spirits was always malevolent.

The Eskimos of a hundred years ago observed several ritual practices, so that problems could be averted or so that they could be corrected. Seals, walrus, and whales were treated with

great respect and were addressed with kinship terms. Tools used to hunt animals of the sea were not used to hunt animals of the land, and vice versa. Offerings were made to the animals that natives hunted, and offerings were made to their spirits after they were bagged. Men observed some taboos, women others. Even the butchering and distribution of sea mammals and land mammals followed ritual procedures. In the North Slope and Norton Sound villages, karigi, the men's semisubterranean houses, were used by hunters to prepare for the hunt, ritually and profanely, and they were sometimes used to purge entire communities, so as to reestablish proper respectful relations with the spirits of the animals on which they relied.

In all of the villages, medical-religious practitioners, who were considered to possess supernatural powers acquired through lonely quests, called on those powers, essentially spirit beings, to solve problems. The shamans' techniques included trances, talking in sentient languages, ventriloquism, and legerdemain. Because the powers that they possessed could be used to help as well as to harm, the shamans could be highly respected and, in some instances, feared.

It was believed that a shaman's spirit could find and return spirits that had left the bodies of villagers, either through theft by an evil spirit (perhaps one sent by a shaman), fright, or wandering during dreams. And it was also believed that a shaman's amulets, coupled with certain proscriptions on behavior, could heal the sick. The shaman, thus, was a most important person in village life.

In a very brief period around the turn of the century, the villages of Unalakleet and Gambell were converted more or less wholesale to Christianity. Wainwright's genesis as a permanent community, as we know, was brought about by Sheldon Jackson, a formidable person, it appears, who established the government school, the Presbyterian mission, and the reindeer herd. The three institutions of economy, education, and religion were as one, inasmuch as the teacher was also the mis-sionary-pastor and the controller of the herd.

The combination of church, education, and economy was effected by the federal government. Indeed, the missionaries in Gambell, Unalakleet, and Wainwright also represented the

federal government in those places. This was no fortuity. Rather, this larger arrangement for much of native Alaska was worked out by the Reverend Jackson, who was a Presbyterian missionary at Fort Wrangell in 1877. The federal government first commissioned Jackson to oversee education in Alaska. He soon purchased reindeer herds from Norway and Siberia, and by 1894, he was hiring Lapps to control the herds and teach the pastoral-husbandry skills to natives.

This particular combination of powers had occurred in Unalakleet about a decade earlier. In 1887, Axel Karlsen of the Swedish Covenant church established a mission and school without great initial success. But in 1894, he received a reindeer herd from the federal government through Jackson for the villagers. Karlsen was given control of the herd, and his mission soon became more successful.

Gambell received its first missionary in 1804—Verne C. Gam-bell, a Presbyterian. As at Wainwright and Unalakleet, Gambell was also the local teacher and the representative of the federal government. There is no evidence of early success at proselytizing to Christianity, but in 1900, a medical missionary, E. O. Campbell, took over the Presbyterian mission (Gambell had been killed at sea two years earlier). He also received a federally owned reindeer herd, complete with Lapp herders, to assist the natives of Gambell in their annual subsistence needs. A near-total conversion to Christianity soon followed.

Conversion did not necessarily occur overnight in every village that received a missionary, a school, and a reindeer herd. Nor was it akin to an unstoppable wave. Yet many conversions occurred rapidly in most villages. In most cases, missionaries were not resident in those villages but merely visited them regularly from some more permanent station.

One frequently related story, which has many variants, concerns a life-threatening, yet spiritual struggle between a missionary and the village's shaman. In most versions, the shaman threatens to kill the missionary for intervening in the affairs of the village and for preaching a message that beseeches natives to reject their pagan ways. The victor in the battle is inevitably the missionary. Thereafter, the shaman either converts or his power declines and he loses his clientele.

Correll (1974: 68) reports how Karlsen, the Covenant missionary to Unalakleet, preached in the neighboring village of Shaktoolik. Unknown to Karlsen, an angry shaman, gripping his amulets, attempted to get Karlsen to stop in midsermon. Oblivious to the shaman, Karlsen preached on, and the natives feared that the shaman would kill him. Eventually, the shaman sat down and cried. Karlsen later told the shaman to throw away his "devils." The shaman then threw his amulets into the fire. His power was broken in this view.

Campbell reportedly engaged in more than one battle with shamans over converts, and by 1910, the battle, for the most part, was won in favor of Christianity. By the 1940s, the Seventh Day Adventists had gained converts in Gambell, so that a second Christian denomination then complemented the Presbyterian church.

Christian missionaries equated shamanism and the tools of the trade with the devil. Devil worship was defeated, in the missionary view, when shamanism was defeated. Yet shamanism was in full force through the 1890s and continued to be practiced with fewer adherents into the 1930s. Hughes (1984) mentions that one elderly Gambell resident continued to practice traditional beliefs until the mid-1950s.

Luton (1986) argues that in some respects there is little difference between the shaman's prayer that a steam whaling vessel near Barrow be crushed by ice in 1882 and a Christian native praying that an atomic vessel near Barrow be thwarted by Mother Nature in 1981. In the 1880s, the shaman prayed that the vessel would be crushed so that its parts and contents could be salvaged by the Eskimos. It was, and they were. In 1981, the atomic vessel sought to determine the feasibility of year-round shipping lanes (for oil) in the Arctic Ocean. The atomic vessel was struck by moving ice and nearly capsized, became locked to the ice, and helplessly drifted out to sea with the ice pack as it receded in the spring. The atomic ship eventually broke loose. In this example, the native explanation of nature is fulfilled. Nature is directed by forces much greater than man's technology, and technology, per se, is not understanding, nor is it wisdom. Nature is to be respected, to be lived with. It cannot be conquered.

There are obvious differences between shamanism and Christian beliefs. Shamans controlled power, bullyragged spirits, caused events to happen. The shamans' craft was not supplicative. Luton's assessment of the shaman's action as a humble request (prayer) may be wide of the mark. It is more likely that he was calling on his spirit powers to act. The native Christian who prays for God to exercise His dominion over power is certainly different from the shaman who called on powers presumed to be in his personal control to cause untoward natural acts to happen. But regardless of the interpretation of the shaman's act, there are obvious similarities in the two attempts to enlist supernatural assistance to solve profane problems.

Perhaps the most interesting similarity is not so obvious. That is the way in which natives in the past respected the environment and attempted to live within the limits set by it and the way in which natives today respect the environment and seek to live within its limits. There is little doubt that Eskimos in all three villages possess values about the flora, fauna, and abiological features of their homelands which are much different from the values held by members of the dominant society, in general, about similar phenomena. "Values" are, essentially, significant symbols attached to things, that is, ideas. Both ANCSA, which extinguished native claims to control over the wildlife from which they gained their livelihoods, and oil-related developments, which were made possible by the passage of ANCSA, have caused responses by natives that demonstrate the tenacity of their ideologies. These responses also show how those ideologies differ from the beliefs about the environment and the role of humans within it that dominate in the larger society of the United States. These aspects of native ideology will be analyzed below.

There are some ambiguous areas in which Christian and traditional native beliefs have not been satisfactorily separated. In our fieldwork, for example, we sought to learn whether natives attributed spirits to animals and plants of the land and sea and to the physical forms and forces in their habitats. We found no evidence that versions of the Sedna or Sila myths (spirits of animals that required explicit propitiation) were told

or believed, or that ill consequences followed the violations of traditional interdictions about the treatment of animals on slaying them. Famines, bad health, community sorrow, and such, were not attributed to angered spirits. Quite to the contrary, I repeatedly heard unsuccessful Unalakleet native hunters and fishers say that they were "in a slump" or that they had experienced a string of "bad luck." It is doubtful that any but the most absolutely iconoclastic Eskimo would have said such a thing a century ago, and only a few would have said such a thing even a few decades into the mission period.

It appeared, then, that Christian doctrines had fundamentally altered traditional Eskimo beliefs and practices in relation to the environment, but especially in how the environment and man's role within it was explained. Animism had been replaced by Christian beliefs.

Appearances, however, may not be reality in the Eskimo case. We noticed that people in all of the villages had not lost their profound respect for animal life, especially marine animal life. In each village, whales (bowhead, killer, and beluga) and seals are addressed and referred to as "my brother the ———," and respect is shown in pursuing, dispatching, butchering, and distributing them. The spirit sympathy of men for these animals is obvious and verbalized. The whale festival in Gambell, the Nalukatak in Wainwright, and the distribution of beluga in Unalakleet suggest that something more than respect is attributed to the animals that provide the underpinnings of their traditions and their lives. These practices suggest that natives may not believe that man and God, alone, are moral beings blessed with eternal lives.

Christianity in the Villages

Each of the three villages has a dominant Christian denomination as well as one or more Christian sects with fewer adherents. Initially, however, the residents in each of the villages in our inquiry were confronted by only one sect. This may have mitigated any problems that might have been encountered had several sects been competing for the favors of the natives. There

was no evidence of hostility, rancor, or competition between the sects or criticisms of the beliefs and practices of different sects within any of the villages.

If the generations of villagers around the turn of the century found the dislocation of their shamans somewhat disturbing, some aspects of the transition to Christianity for them must have been comfortable. In particular, the Old Testament, with its emphasis on patriarchal communities and families and its respect for elders and tradition, is especially consonant with traditional social and economic organization at Gambell. Except for the emphasis on patriarchal lineal organization, the three villages are similar in their compatibility with key Old Testament values.

And all of the villages must have been receptive to many New Testament teachings as well, particularly the recurrent messages of communitarianism, brotherly love, forgiveness, generosity, and a willingness to surmount life's obstacles. Whereas these prominent teachings from the New Testament were not commonly practiced beyond the extended family and the village prior to the turn of the century, they clearly have been accepted and put to practice in the much larger villages that have developed in the past eighty years. The researchers agree in their impressions that the villagers observe these New Testament ethics as parts of everyday thoughts and acts.

Just how these practices became established in the several communities is not dear, given a somewhat fractious past. That is, each of the villages was made up of families from several small villages, which, for various reasons, had coalesced into the larger villages near the turn of the century. Perhaps they resulted from the Christian movement, in which preachers broadcast their new ideas through sermons to growing communities of people whose previous contacts varied from many and frequent to none at all. A new ideology, coupled with new practices, was acquired, whatever the reasons may have been.

It is very likely that the New Testament promises of redemption in the here and now—which entailed a complete change to the person if the Christian precepts were accepted—followed by eternal life in a heavenly hereafter were very attractive to the Eskimos in the three villages. As Robbins has reported,

"These beliefs have proved a great value to a people [in this instance, the people of Gambell] whose lives are filled with peril" (Little and Robbins 1984: 74).

Christianity is practiced by Eskimos of all ages, but in all three villages, the most conservative elders—those who best remember and relate Eskimo traditions about hunting, singing, dancing, language, and the family and whose experience and wisdom is sought—are, without any exceptions known to the researchers, devout Christians. Every villager to whom we spoke, or about whom we acquired information, considers himself or herself to be a Christian. Church attendance was highest in Gambell (regular attendance was 50%); nevertheless, churches are the foci of all of the communities, religious pictures are found in all of the homes that we entered, and most families have members who regularly engage in some activities sponsored by the churches. The more active members are given special responsibilities as teachers. In Gambell, it is not uncommon for men and women to deliver sermons. And for the residents of Gambell and Unalakleet, the airwaves, too, are pregnant with Christian messages: Nome's two radio stations are owned by Christian denominations. During the long winter months, the Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts involve entire communities, but they are carried out under the aegis of the dominant local churches.

In Unalakleet, the Covenant church (the Swedish Evangelical Mission Church of America) has been central to village affairs since Karlsen established his mission school there in 1887. The church owns land in the village and upriver at the original reindeer station. It owns many buildings situated in the social center of the village, including the church, schools, a recreation hall, dormitories, storage houses, a garage, and houses. In a real sense, the activities associated with the Covenant church are central in the community nexus. The resident pastors, administrators, and faculty have almost invariably been Anglos.

A Catholic church was established in Unalakleet in the 1920s. From time to time, a nonnative priest has been resident in Unalakleet, as was the case in 1982. But for the largest part of the past sixty years, a priest stationed in St. Michael has journeyed to Unalakleet to conduct services and to attend to the

Catholic congregation there. The Catholic congregation in the village appears to be maintained through marriages of Unalakleet residents to persons from Catholic-dominated villages along the Yukon River and at St. Michael.

Unalakleet natives, whether Protestant or Catholic, in their conversations and behavior appear to be devout in their espousal and practice of Christian ethics. Over half of all members of the Covenant church regularly attend services, whereas practically all members of the community engage in some Covenant church activities at some times during the year, whether or not they are members.

Correll (1974: 69) asserted that many Unalakleet natives as recently as 1968, during his stay there, were bitter about the way in which Covenant church missionaries left the village at the turn of the century, reindeer herd in tow, and sought to strike it rich selling meat to miners during the Nome gold rush. Furthermore, many of them, not content with becoming rich solely by selling reindeer meat, dropped the calling of the church in favor of the pursuit of mining claims and gold ore. Correll (ibid.) claims that many Unalakleet villagers did not practice Christianity as recently as the late 1960s because of the repugnant gold rush episode. Our research team could not confirm this. Indeed, Unalakleet villagers appear to be very similar to the villagers of Wainwright and Gambell in their practice of Christianity.

Most Gambell residents are Presbyterians, although Seventh Day Adventists constitute about 20 percent of all Christians in the village. The Gambell villagers are especially willing to talk about their treasured way of life and to defend it as well. When they speak of this life, which encompasses hunting, sharing, and the beauty of the environment, they are also speaking about the Christian organization of their daily lives. Gambell villagers accept their church responsibilities with pride. Women teach gospel lessons and offer sermons, and the older men and women often provide Christian counsel to their younger clansmen and village mates.

In Wainwright, two churches were operating in 1982. As in Gambell, the Presbyterian church is the older, more firmly established religion. All adults born in Wainwright and living

there now have been baptized into the church. The Assembly of God is the newer denomination. A native served as the Presbyterian minister, whereas a nonnative was the pastor at the Assembly of God Church.

Nonnatives in all of the villages frequently adhere to faiths other than those with established flocks in the Villages. Some Catholic and Mormon families in Wainwright, a Baptist family in Gambell, and sundry other Protestants in Unalakleet either practice their religions without the assistance of ministers or are inactive. Yet if these people participate in any village affairs at all, some of them are surely the extracurricular activities sponsored by the churches.

In all of the villages, the established Christian churches conduct baptisms for the newborn infants, marriage ceremonies for most couples who are married within the villages, funerals for the deceased, and extracurricular activities and counseling sessions for various groups, such as the young married couples. In each of the three villages as well, the Christian churches are totally opposed to the use of alcohol. Moreover, each of the villages has prohibitions against its sale. Hence, the alcohol consumed in the villages is brought in by air carrier, either by those who intend to consume it or by those who intend to resell it illegally. None of the villages has established bootleggers, although the availability of alcohol increased in Wainwright with the presence of white construction workers, who themselves are transitory.

The price of alcohol varies in each village. In extreme instances, alcohol is flown to some villages in special flights by noncharter firms. In such cases, the purchaser pays for the round-trip flying time from the place of origin, and the price can be huge relative to the price of a bottle of whiskey (e.g., $S00 flying time from Nome to Unalakleet). Price, alone, operates against frequent heavy drinking within the villages, except during holiday periods, when several people might cooperate to make a large purchase and fly it in by chartered commercial carrier.

The village elders usually see drinking as dangerous to the drinker, to his or her family, and to the entire community. Moreover, middle-aged parents in all of the communities usu-

ally concur with this view. Yet, regardless of Christian admonitions against the use of alcohol, and even though elders and middle-aged parents recognize the dangers of its uses, drinking bouts and drunkenness occur among younger males, less so among females. During 1982, at least, it is our impression that they occurred more frequently within the village of Wainwright than within the other two villages. The availability of cash made the difference, we presume. These bouts are not restricted to younger persons. Against their better judgment, older persons, including some husbands and wives, too, will overindulge. Such is often the case during festive occasions, such as the Fourth of July, and from time to time during the long winters.

Although we did not probe into the question of drinking and how it affects family life, it was evident from our observations that many villagers restricted their drinking to those times when they might be in Nome, Fairbanks, or Anchorage— either to visit sick relatives or for some native-related activity. It was also evident that natives believed that individuals are responsible for their personal choices, so that it is improper to intervene, particularly to admonish the drinker. The opposition of Christians to imbibing, then, did not translate into taking actions against drinkers. Alcohol could be possessed. Only purchase of alcohol in the villages was disallowed.

Luton (1985: 82-83) reports for Wainwright that public sentiment against alcohol abuse in the village grew throughout the first half of 1982. Some, but by no means all, of the support for an initiative against the possession of alcohol came from the Christian churches. The villagers connected the increasing use of alcohol in Wainwright to the increasing personal incomes for natives from oil-related revenues and to the itinerant construction workers who were acting as bootleggers. At that time, a quart of whiskey or a case of beer cost $100.

Although no specific group formed to outlaw the possession of alcohol in Wainwright, a ban on its possession was passed at the village's annual public meeting in April. In July 1982, the city held a referendum on the measure, and the ban was adopted. The threat posed by alcohol abuse to the community was perceived as real. The vote was an extreme measure, given

native reluctance to intervene in the personal affairs of other persons in their own families and villages.

Ideology About Space and Place

Space is where the natives in each of the three villages live. The !and, water, and air that constitute the space of each village encompass a range in which native residents acquire their livelihoods, which they understand through frequent excursions and stories and which they are willing to defend. Places are locations within the larger range, in which homes, camps, and even burning picnic logs and other objects created by villagers— or given definitions and meanings by them—are situated. Storage caches, upriver camps, unoccupied karigi that once belonged to the "old people," and spots on the rivers, sound, or lagoons where unusual and important events occurred are places within the native space of the three villages.

The native concepts of space and place impressed the field researchers in every village with their differences from the concepts of space and place that exist in the dominant U.S. society, its economy, and its laws. And the native ideology about space and place is different from Christian ideas and practices as well. We were impressed that native ideologies were far more similar to traditional native beliefs and to the beliefs of American Indians in regard to their !and than to those of the nation's dominant ideology. We did not consider these differences to be trivial. Indeed, the actions by Eskimos in defense of their space against federal and state regulations and the activities of corporations are practical results of these differences, as we shall see below.

As John Bennett (1979) has pointed out, the ways in which societies define their spaces and places, the ways in which they are used, the manners in which rights to them are transferred, and the ways in which sentiments are attached to them vary widely. It is not clear how many generations it has taken for the Eskimos in the three villages to develop cultural definitions of their space, that is, their environment. Wainwright, after all, was created only eighty years ago. But the original residents

moved in from smaller settlements in that general area and undoubtedly brought cultural baggage with them, including knowledge of the terrain, how it had been used, and how to adjust to new uses of it. The symbols that residents attach to their environment have long, long histories, no matter how they are expressed.

It is the significant symbols attached to the environment and the actions that are provoked by those meanings that provide some focus for us here in delineating native ideologies. Unalakleet's space, for example, is defined by places, such as the Unalakleet River, the Whale-back Mountains, the Egavik River, and Golsovia; by abiological phenomena, such as the characteristics of shore ice; by activities of natural competition, such as the behavior of brown bears; by memories of cultural competitions, such as a history of intermittent warfare and subsequent trading with Athapaskans; and by memories of the use of areas to which sentiments are attached, such as the pleasure and anticipation of spring camp and the delight at the speed maintained by caribou when being pursued by hunters astride snowmachines.

Unalakleet's space includes places where ancient and recent ancestors have been buried, where an unwanted radar station reminds people of how much better the environment would be if it were removed, and where their own range ends in joint use regions with Shaktoolik residents to the north and residents of St. Michael to the southwest. To go beyond those joint-use regions, good form requires an invitation to have been extended, at some time, to Unalakleet residents from the customary users of the area. Affinal and kinship connections provide the basis for most of the invitations.

With but minor variations, the places of Gambell and Wainwright residents are defined almost identically to those of Unalakleet. Their spaces, too, are defined similarly. Gambell residents use the entire island if they wish, and they jointly own, share, and protect it with their relatives in their sister village of Savoonga. Yet Gambell space, for the villagers' purposes, is defined by the Northwest Gape, Boxer Bay, on the west; by Taphook Point on the east; and by Oomeyaluk Bay on the southeast. The Bering Sea waters around the island from

Taphook Point to Oomeyaluk Bay and to eighty or ninety miles out are used by Gambell residents.

Wainwright residents define their space from the foothills of Brooks Range to the south to thirty miles north into the Chukchi Sea and from the Utuqqaq River to the southwest to Point Franklin and Peard Bay in the northeast. In between, the Kuuk River system, including the Kuuk Lagoon, provides the major focus of Wainwright space.

For the native inhabitants of the three villages, neither space nor place is defined solely by ownership rights to corporeal and incorporeal property. Over the long course of history, the Inupiaq- and Yupik-speaking residents of the three regions have defined their space and place—assigned significant symbols to them—while obtaining their livelihoods within them. Significant symbols also have been assigned to space and place as unusual, perhaps harrowing, events have occurred and stories have commemorated those happenings; as kinspeople and friends have been entertained; and as decisions have been made that would enable future generations to live on the same land. Eskimos in all of the traditional villages recognized the earth, sky, water, plants, and animals as natural as well as supernatural—making themselves available at some times but not at others. So, space and place for natives are also products of longevity, of many generations of persons occupying a region and acting as stewards, seeking to maintain proper relations with it. The residents of the three villages, most likely in the past, undoubtedly now, respect their dependency on, and their relations with, the phenomena of their environments—their space, its places, its things.

What are Significant Meanings?

An understanding of how natives assign symbols to their space and its places cannot be gained by administering questionnaires or by following interview schedules. Texts must be collected, discussions must be overheard, comments in context and in place must be heard, so that one may, first, get some idea about what is important (i.e., to what values significant symbols have been assigned), and second, evaluate whether these symbols are

shared rather than subjective and particular to the person whose comments or opinions the researcher has heard.

A dozen trips up the Unalakleet River to clear and untangle fishing nets with different villagers, several egg-collecting trips and trips to fishing camps with Gambell crews and families, and several bird-hunting trips with Wainwright hunters as well as several days of assisting with the butchering of bowhead whales should serve to impress the observers of the three villages with the similarities within villages. In Unalakleet, for example, the many families with whom we worked and visited discussed salmon harvesting subsistence tasks in much the same way, and they talked about the Unalakleet River in much the same way. This similarity is true, as well, when Gambell youths talk about whale hunting or walrus hunting. They talk in much the same way as their parents and grandparents speak about these activities. And Wainwright bird hunters—regardless of families— or participants in various aspects of the bowhead whale hunting-butchering-distribution-consumption chain speak about these activities, and about their importance, in much the same way.

Observers in all of the villages can hear conversations about native respect for the ice, their knowledge of the ice, and the good times they experience in hunting seals, jigging for fish, or watching for the first birds each spring. The villagers speak of the significance of the environment as an integral part of life, indeed, as indistinguishable from life itself, much as sharing is an act of life that is embedded in all subsistence activities—from planning to consumption.

An example from Unalakleet should be instructive. I was impressed during my first net-clearing trip up the Unalakleet River with how the two Eskimo men I accompanied gained pleasure from their subsistence activities. Both men called attention to eagles that flew from their perches as the boat approached them, and both men, separately, and on two occasions each, mentioned the beauty of the river and its riches. These men knew the river's intricacies and the terrain for at least 2,500 square miles. One commented that the defunct but incompletely decommissioned White Alice radar site on a hill above the river was the only eyesore on the river. There was

no rhetoric, just a statement of fact about an unwelcome presence. On other occasions, other natives spoke of the river, the environs, and the White Alice site in the same way.

In my discussions while on the river, but also in several conversations with village leaders, commercial fishermen, and other villagers, it was made dear that the river was not regarded as marketable. And if it was not marketable, it was most emphatically not regarded as an elite province for environmentalists and conservationists. In 1982, residents were much concerned about the recent "wild rivers" designation that the federal government had bestowed on the river's upper course, because they feared that it would be clogged with kayaks and campers from cities near and far (the designation was established as part of ANILCA PL 94-487). This fear was added to the apprehensions that had been building over the preceding five years about potential oil and gas activities in Norton Sound.

Significant Meanings and the Oil Factor at Unalakleet

The meaning of the river to the residents of Unalakleet cannot be validated simply from heating a few similar comments and observing similar behavior among different people. Other kinds of comments made in different contexts can help to validate or invalidate the impressions obtained from conversations during net-clearing trips. For example, one shy, inarticulate man about thirty years of age, who had never considered speaking at a public meeting or acting as a spokesman for the village, sought out a competent and admired uncle to express his concerns about developments that might affect the river—from oil and gas exploration to commercial fishing by outsiders and from commercialized sportfishing to kayaking, again by outsiders. The man was emboldened to talk by a few drinks of alcohol, but he was lucid.

To this man, the river meant the comfort of place and space. It provided nourishment—real and spiritual—and represented freedom to conduct an Eskimo way of life. He recognized that the river was threatened, as were the freedoms that the river represented, and he said that he would rather take lives, or have his own life taken, than see the river overrun or destroyed.

The elder counseled the younger man that violence would not be the solution but would only generate more problems. But he, too, recognized the vulnerable and powerless position of local natives, and though he did not counsel violence, he felt that force, alone, might be the only way in which the river could be kept intact as Unalakleet space.

The chance hearing of this discussion caused the research team to inquire of or to inquire about all the other men in the village who fell into the twenty-five to forty years of age category to learn how they felt about the river. The vocal, articulate leaders were not queried, only those who were neither vocal nor leaders were polled. Without exception, forty men expressed or were heard to express sentiments similar to those articulated by the concerned younger man to his wise uncle. This is not a commodity view of nature, where a village and its resources are salable at the fight price. It is a native view of space and place; it is a home, a place in which livelihoods are obtained and that they are willing to defend.

At a public hearing in Unalakleet in October 1981 prior to an oil and gas lease sale for Norton Sound run by the Minerals Management Service's OCS office, at subsequent hearings conducted by the state for onshore oil leases, and at public relations meetings conducted by representatives of oil companies, the Unalakleet residents expressed their strong opposition to oil and gas leasing. Person after person explained the importance to them of the resources that might be affected by oil-related operations. Moreover, they raised cogent questions about consequences to oil rigs from the movements of ice.

But they felt that they were completely disregarded, perhaps rebuffed with contempt (see Appendix B). The utter frustration that they demonstrated when speaking about these meetings left indelible impressions on us. Their worries about their environment and the clarity with which they stated their concerns cannot be understood as sham or as political positioning by people seeking to enhance their financial positions. And although village leaders requested training for jobs and the allocation of jobs to village residents in oil-related tasks, they did so after arguing eloquently against developments that may threaten their livelihoods and damage their space. Contra-

dictory statements have, therefore, been placed on the public record, but with some interpretation of the texts, the contradictions can be resolved.

One step in the reasoning was omitted from the texts. This missing step was supplied by the elder who counseled his nephew that violence would only make the situation worse, while suspecting that nothing short of violence will stop developments from occurring. It is the sense of the inevitable that causes the articulate leaders to protect what they can. As one man who opposes large-scale industrial developments said, "What chance does a $2 million fishing operation have against a $2 billion oil operation, especially when the guys who make the decisions have all the bucks—oil bucks?" He said this during a discussion of an impending state oil lease sale, since canceled, which had so frightened Unalakleet residents that it dominated much of the public discussions which were focused on different topics, such as commercial fishing.

Significant Meanings and the Oil Factor at Gambell

The residents of Gambell and Savoonga anticipated the loss of their island and their way of life when, prior to the passage of ANCSA, they were informed that the island would lose its reservation status—hence, the trust status of the land. As we know, the islanders chose to take ownership of the island. They have regularly and consistently rejected proposals from oil companies to use the island for various purposes, have created an Eskimo Walrus Commission to help Eskimos influence federal policies on walrus takes, and have gained control over the Eskimo Whaling Commission to influence federal policies on whales as they affect Eskimos.

They have done all of these things to preserve their subsistence way of life, so it is not surprising, after the fact, that we were regarded as people whose research project could hurt them and their island. The first response of the islanders to us was to offer no help in our task. Our first field researcher left Gambell in dismay after completing one month there, even though he had already crewed on one walrus hunt.

Ronald Little and Jean Maxwell flew to Gambell in an attempt

to sort out the issues and answer the questions that bothered the villagers. I flew over from Unalakleet a couple of days later for a command performance before the city, the IRA, and the village corporation leaders. That first meeting was memorable. The villagers questioned our purpose, the uses to which our reports about them would be put, and the consequences to them from oil developments. They wanted to know what would happen to the walrus and whale herds, to the seals, and to the seabirds. It was not as if they were ignorant or naive. Among them was the president of the Eskimo Walrus Commission, soon to become president of the Eskimo Whaling Commission as well, and several persons who were expert and active in native Alaskan affairs. They had considerable knowledge and a great desire to accumulate more.

I thought at the time that these careful, inquisitive, planning people must have gone through similar discussions as they evaluated the probable consequences of ANCSA about twelve years earlier. As our meeting progressed, the natives asked me about how best they could preserve and protect their homeland from oil development, corporate takeover (a possibility because of ANCSA's provision for corporations to go public in 1991), and uninformed federal and state controls of their resources. They even asked whether they could abolish their city form of government and their village corporation and vest all government and economic powers in their IRA government (as had been the case prior to ANCSA). The intention was to revert the island to federal trust status and allow them to manage the resources so that they could preserve their hunting way of life for time immemorial.

After a discussion of what environmental impact statements (EISs) were supposed to be (i.e., "state-of-the-art" analyses of the probable consequences of a planned activity that might affect an environment) and their legal remedies should such EISs be inadequate, the village leaders met and decided to assist our research. From that point on, we received complete assistance. The villagers were eager to tell us how they used the environment. The way in which they valued their space and the places within it became dear through their actions and their words. Pressed for cash, they refused several offers from firms in-

volved in oil operations to use parts of the island for their various purposes. They objected in public hearings to oil leasing in the Bering Sea and Navarin Basin, and they have brought several suits in federal courts under various motions to stop oil leasing and drilling because of the threats that drilling poses to the environment from which their subsistence is drawn (see the epilogue).

The Gambell clans have several famous dancing teams that perform at local festivities and also travel at the invitation of the Smithsonian Institution and other august bodies. In addition to being immensely entertaining and charmingly professional, these dancers are also maintaining and transmitting traditional art, coupled with deeply held beliefs. The dances, replete with "rubber-faced" contortions, mimic the looks and behaviors of animals, of hunters, of women's work, and of other aspects of the relations of Eskimos to their environment. Respect, humor, grace, and good fun are synthesized in this celebration of Gambell life. Although stylized, the dances allow for individual virtuosity, and although traditional topics are the focus, new topics consonant with local experiences can be added to the repertoire. Those topics either focus on traditional life or make good fun of nontraditional experiences.

Gambell art is not separated from the experiences of everyday life, much as labor is not defined as a commodity. Labor, art, sharing, and respect for the nonhuman creatures and things of the environment are bound together in ways quite foreign to the experiences of persons in the dominant U.S. society.

Significant Meanings and the Oil Factor at Wainwright

Prior to the time that Luton arrived in Wainwright in February 1982, the villagers had been experiencing for about seven years the accumulating benefits, as well as the disbenefits, from revenues generated from oil extraction at Prudhoe Bay. Employment, construction projects, an influx of whites, and the loss of a goodly amount of local control to the North Slope Borough administration in Barrow had accompanied the growth of oil-related revenues.

Although real financial benefits had been registered, the rapid changes had brought high social costs. As Luton and Charles Cortese observed, a combination of confusion and anger was one result. As in Unalakleet and Gambell, the Wainwright researchers were met with suspicion and some resistance. Villagers were anxious about possible offshore oil developments, even though they were benefiting from onshore developments at Prudhoe Bay. The focus of our inquiry fed their suspicions and their insecurity. We sought to do another tanik (the Inupiaq term for outsider) study on the issues about which they were most insecure and anxious—subsistence harvests of naturally occurring resources and their relation to local culture.

Natives were bitter about regulation of the resources on which their subsistence was based, including spring duck hunting, caribou quotas, and bowhead whale quotas. Some arrests had been made of duck hunters near Barrow, and the other quotas were monitored within Wainwright. Research on these topics, in the native view, threatened their subsistence activities, hence their way of life. We posed yet another threat to Wainwright space.

As it happened, Wainwright natives actually procured less of their daily subsistence requirements from naturally occurring resources than did the residents of Unalakleet or Gambell. The large amounts of cash that had been available in the village for several years had allowed natives to make discretionary purchases of processed foods. But a concomitant change in their expectations for their environment and for their freedom to extract from it had not taken place.

The Wainwright Eskimos stressed the practice of giving to elders, relatives, friends, partners, and the community at large. The Nalukatak ceremony thanked the whale for allowing itself to be caught. The Christmas celebrations highlighted the cultural ideals of living successfully, and generously, with animals, plants, and other humans in Wainwright space. As Luton (1985: 244) writes, "Expectations are high; meaning runs deep."

Wainwright dancers and singers have engaged in a renaissance of their dances and songs, which depict a score of topics, from the behavior of animals to the behavior of persons. Walrus

are imitated with humor and with respect, as are hunters, skin dressers, and so forth. The meanings are not trivial, as the dances and songs explicitly contributed to social solidarity (everyone was encouraged to join in some of the dances after watching the expert performers) and reaffirmed the value of the animals with which the environment was shared.

On the Value of Regulating Nature

In each of the three villages, it took some time and several conversations to understand villager responses to our persistent questions, "How many?" "How often?" "How much?" For example, when a Unalakleet villager described some event, such as the preceding evening's hare hunt, several images were prompted by the description. Although the men were riding snowmachines, they formed a gentle fan shape that kept many animals inside the lines that they formed. The technique is at least as old as the paleolithic, and it still works well, whether on foot or astride snowmachines. But the differences are that snowmachines, petroleum-based fuel, and rifles are used. Eskimos can travel faster and farther to get the same amount of game that their fathers bagged over a longer period and in a slower fashion. When I persisted in asking how many were bagged, after a puzzled look, the answer came: "At least 100; we had enough for every family [native] in the village [170 families at the time]. Everybody received one for rabbit stew last night."

Then, without prompting, the villager pointed out that you kill only some of the hares that you startle into the drive. [Natives, by the way, always call hares "rabbits," much as they call char "trouts."] "You leave many. You sure don't take them all. You'll be back, and so will they." The lesson is straightforward, matter-of-fact. Nevertheless, the situation is repeated several times before the message finally takes hold. There is conscious conservation of hares. You learn that they do not hunt hares every winter day but vary the subsistence activities with ice fishing, ptarmigan hunting, caribou hunting, and so forth. The fur-bearing animals are not depleted from an area, and no one wants to be responsible for reducing populations of game

beyond the point at which the normal recovery rates that are known for an area can be sustained.

Similar responses were received for river-seining ventures at Unalakleet, walrus and seal hunting at all of the villages, and caribou hunting at Wainwright. When Gambell and Unalakleet villagers were asked about their harvests of wild eggs, they responded that they picked the nests clean. Yet they also informed us which species would lay a second batch of eggs and which would lay a third. They did not disturb the nests after the last batch was laid.

It is my impression that the message was slow to take hold in part because of my own and my research associates' expectations that the natives would be careful scorekeepers. They are proud of their harvesting skills; we may have expected them to be boastful as well. Yet "100," for some reason unclear to me, is frequently used to mark large numbers of fish caught from jigging through the ice in a single session, large numbers of hares taken in a drive, or large numbers of ducks or geese shot by a family during a successful day. It eventually became obvious that "100" was used to meet our expectations; it was not necessarily their actual bag. The crucial information was that resources were conserved, understood, and used respectfully and that either a lot was taken—and often much of whatever it was would be shared—or that the hunters had experienced "bad luck," "were in a slump," or even "got shut out."

We learned, then, that the villagers care that animals are in the habitats in which they belong, that those animals can be harvested in the future, and that they, the hunters, played no role in severely depleting them. In the cases of sea mammals, in particular, no conversation about extracting them was devoid of a discussion of their intelligence, their behavior, and their keen senses of sound and often of smell. They were referred to, and addressed, with respect.

Underlying this behavior is a simple meaning: nature is not abused. It is used with pleasure, and fully, but it is not abused. Moreover, there is both an explicit and an implicit assumption that natives know their terrain and the animal populations on them. The persistent question, then, of how many or how much was usually answered, "100, but sometimes two people will get

150," or "three, but the winter lasted a long time and by the time we could get to the seals the herring were running [Unalakleet] or the bowheads were entering the leads [Gambell]." We learned that the answers that were appropriate were "we got enough" or "we didn't get enough, so we'll have to go again, or replace [that resource] with [another resource], or get some from our relatives. . . ." "Enough" means enough for that family's current needs, or that family's needs for some period, as well as for some of their kinspeople and friends. To deplete an area of fish or game is always too much.

Regulation, then, is linked to needs, use, and the animal populations in the area in question. It is as if natives, by experience and knowledge, were undocumented ecologists. They may as well be talking about biomass, optimum population sizes, and carrying capacities of areas. They themselves do not talk in such terms. Nevertheless, if queried about researchers or representatives of agencies who do talk in such terms, and who establish the regulations that govern the resources of their region, the resources on which natives have lived for a long time, their responses are often low-keyed but appropriately pointed.

In each village, we learned that natives felt that there was little fit between the regulated resources and the availability of those resources. This was especially true for the bowhead whale, so crucial to the subsistence needs and the cultural expectations of both Gambell and Wainwright villagers and to the cultural expectations of their affines, relatives, and friends. The state regulations imposed on harvests of moose, caribou, and fish (commercial) at Unalakleet and of caribou at Wainwright are especially sore points.

As a consequence, for many resources, they follow their own knowledge, their own understanding of the land, river, skies, and sea. State regulations, except for the commercial fishery at Unalakleet, actually have little relevance for the resources and regions where they are intended to apply: by practice, they are not restrictive for villagers, because the Alaska Department of Fish and Game wardens seldom choose to enforce them beyond the confines of the villages. About themselves, Eskimos aver, and believe, that they do not abuse nature. Because they know their own space—whereas state and federal employees do not

know it and would be lost and, perhaps, helpless within it—Eskimos believe that they treat it as it should be treated. They value their space highly.

If the discussions turn to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game or to federal regulatory agencies, the bodies that came to exercise complete control over the resources on which Eskimos depend after ANCSA extinguished their claims to those resources, the residents seem unmoved by those institutions and their regulations. But when specific regulations are referred to, it is also clear that natives feel that they do not fit the animal populations that they are intended to regulate.

They suggest that the regulations are misapplied and inappropriate in largest part because the regulators make faulty observations, mismanage their domains, and base their regulations either on faulty data or on misinterpreted data. For example, in 1082, during the late and very short commercial herring season in Unalakleet, three fishermen who were dismayed by ADF&G action to close the fishery fished out of season. They were caught, taken to the judge, and fined. Soon after the waters were closed, the state reopened them on an emergency basis. To the Eskimos, the reopening of the herring waters was tacit admission of the experts' fallibility.

Eskimos have decried other regulations, particularly those placed on caribou and bowhead whales. For several years, the ADF&G had placed a limit of five caribou annually for each hunter. Natives from St. Michael to Wainwright found this regulation extremely restrictive. When it was discovered in summer 1082 that the great northwestern caribou herd was much larger than the ADF&G had previously stated and that caribou were present in such large numbers in the Kobuk Valley that they were pressuring the commercial reindeer herds, the ADF&G lifted the five-caribou limit for subsistence, and local opinions were confirmed: the state never should have established the limit in the first place. The view is firmly held that only the natives understand natural resources and are capable of managing them.

Whereas natives are bothered by state and federal regulations, these do not seem to represent strict rules that must be obeyed. When an Eskimo ventures into his hunting space, par-

ticularly in the interior, he is not observed by regulators. It is not the space of regulators. They have no places there. It is not their domain. They do not know how to cope. Eskimos do know how to cope. They tell stories of the places they have been or are going. They know where to look for game and fur-bearing animals, what to expect when caribou begin to run, how to stalk polar bears, and how to go about trying to save themselves if, alone, they fall through a river's ice. They know the techniques that were used to adjust to such fortuities in the past, and they know stories about people who innovated those techniques.

So when the researcher presses on the question of regulators and their regulations, the responses usually are, "They don't follow us into the country." It is as if the regulators—except for their controls on bowhead whales (a 60-ton animal whose kill is celebrated is not easily hidden from view, nor would natives show disrespect by trying to do so)—live in a world of paper and ink and theories and rules. As for the rules, it is doubtful that they would be observed even if the regulators followed the hunters into the hinterland or onto the beaches. Eskimos are calm and reserved about most rules. Although bothered by them, they do not seem to pay much heed to them.

Even bowhead quota rules have been violated by Shaktoolik hunters, and in 1982, after a disastrous bowhead hunt, one Barrow whaling captain announced to President Ronald Reagan and the entire world community (represented by the United Nations and all participants in the International Whaling Commission) that he was going to continue to pursue bowheads until his crew was successful and the nutritional needs of his people were satisfied. He informed Reagan that he had three days to evacuate the citizens of the United States if he did not comply. The other Barrow whaling captains discussed the issue and concluded that they could best protect their way of life if they ordered that captain off the ice.

The Eskimos in the three villages are wont to say that they know their resources. They appreciate and would not damage them because they are sustained by those resources. They always point out to the interloper, the neophyte, that there are many kinds of resources and that there is no fear of depleting any single resource.

Community Festivals—Sea Mammals, Sharing, and Ideology

Central to the lives of village natives and their relatives in far-flung places are sea mammals. The bowhead whale is the animal to which greatest respect is shown and to which the most significant symbols are attached. This is true among the residents of Gambell and Wainwright, who hunt bowheads, and among the residents of Unalakleet, who do not. In all of the villages, whales are treated with special care in hunting, butchering, and distributing. In Gambell and Wainwright, ceremonies on a grand scale accompany the successful taking of a bowhead. Analysis of these modern villages and their relation to animals of the sea would be severely wanting if these ceremonies were not addressed here.

During each year in which there are successful bowhead whale hunts, the residents of Wainwright sponsor a ceremony known as Nalukatak , and the residents of Gambell sponsor the Whale Carnival. The two are very similar, although whereas the Gambell ceremony always occurs the day before or after the Fourth of July ("everybody's celebration"), the Wainwright ceremony occurs perhaps a week earlier and is clearly distinguished from the Independence Day celebration. The captains of the successful whaling crews have stored and frozen whale meat and maktak specifically for the occasion, and under the aegis of the captains, families contribute native foods, including maktak from their own larders, for the feasts that are the focus of the events. Ducks, geese, cranes, fish, walrus, seal, oiled greens, berries, and all manner of fresh and stored native foods are consumed. Relatives and friends from distant villages and dries arrive and are hosted in the homes of local residents.

The Whale Carnival and the Nalukatak revolve around dances, games, hospitality, and the sharing of food. The Nalukatak is older and grander than the Whale Carnival, although both involve a variety of activities. "Nalukatak" means "blanket toss," the means by which Inupiaq formerly tossed agile hunters into the air so that they could sight whales entering the leads in the ice. Similar to the Whale Carnival, it is performed over about a twenty-four-hour period; but, unlike the

Whale Carnival, there are as many Nalukatak festivals each year as there are whales killed. So if Wainwright captains beach two whales, there are two Nalukatak ceremonies, spaced about three days apart.

Visiting begins early at both types of ceremonies, as persons move from house to house. Gossip is exchanged; perhaps business is discussed. Each family provides food for its guests—with native foods providing the focus for the fraternizing. In Wainwright, discussions might turn toward persons in the village who do not pull their share of their families' loads in subsistence pursuits. Inasmuch as the holiday explicitly celebrates the deeply held cultural ideals of subsistence—extraction, distribution, and consumption—criticism of persons who do not fulfill cultural expectations appears to be a means to focus on the very ideals that natives espouse and hold dear.

The centerpiece of the affairs is the communal feast and the distribution of maktak, mikiqaq (fermented whale meat and blubber), and walrus. These items are piled high (mikiqaq, in tubs) and distributed in equal portions to every family in such a way that a family of six receives six portions, a family of eight receives eight, and so forth. At Gambell, the Association of Whaling Captains directs the distribution; at Wainwright, the successful whaling crew distributes the portions.

The Whale Carnival at Gambell is accompanied by a harpoon-throwing contest, a high-kick contest (in which contestants seek to see who can kick their legs highest to touch with one foot an object placed above their heads), a drawing for prizes, a search for prizes while blindfolded, and a beauty pageant, in which young women wear traditional attire.

The Nalukatak is accompanied by a blanket toss, in which a dozen or more persons hold a flat, circular "blanket" made from the skins of bearded seals. One at a time, many persons are thrown into the air by those persons who hold the blanket. The people holding the blanket change as fatigue overtakes the tossers. The jumpers vie to gain the highest altitude. The successful whaling captain is the first jumper, followed by the members of his crew, then the women related to the crew. Often, the jumpers throw candy into the air as gifts to the children standing near the blanket.

The Nalukatak and the Whale Carnival are thanksgiving rituals offered to the whales for making themselves available and vulnerable to native hunters. During the evening, at both ceremonies, native dancing and singing conclude the festivities. These activities are more crowded than the food give-aways, the feasts, or the games. Polished native dancers, expertly performing traditional native dances, are accompanied by drummers. During the dances, persons imitate walrus, whales, and other animals with dance gestures and exquisite contortions of their faces. Solo performances, small group performances, and large group dances take place. Most frequently, the small groups are composed of members of a single family, perhaps brothers, siblings and cousins, or even persons representing four generations from a single extended family household. Guests dance, as do persons from the host village. The final dance sets are usually performed by the most expert dancers in the host village, normally those who have worked together for several years and who have coordinated their dance styles through choreography and song. For Gambell residents, the dance teams are constituted from within clans. Although each village has its own dance style, variations by families or clans within villages are also noticeable.

Oil, IWC Regulations, and the Bowhead

Strong political and legal reactions to the regulation of the bow-head hunt and to oil exploration and drilling, which threaten the bowhead population, have been mounted by villagers in Gambell and Wainwright. They have taken the lead among the North Slope Borough, the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope, and Kawerak in attempting to control their subsistence destinies. These governing bodies have agreed that by accepting the IWC quota system and by regulating whaling themselves through the Alaskan Eskimo Whaling Commission, they will be able to establish the principle of self-regulation for the future. The North Slope Borough has conducted studies of whale population dynamics, which may ultimately show that Eskimo whaling does not constitute a threat to the existence of the bowhead. The intention is to free Eskimos from IWC interference.

Epilogue

In mid-1989, as I write the final few pages about coastal Alaska's oil age Eskimos, I peer through an opaque lens at the consequences to villagers from oil-related developments since 1982. For all of the reasons discussed above, I foresaw economic failure for the thirteen regional and more than 100 village for-profit corporations. They were, for the most part, undercapitalized. Their populations were undertrained and undereducated. They were located long distances from markets and were dependent on naturally occurring resources for access to markets. They had poorly developed infrastructures and meager political influence. The foundering of native for-profit corporations, then, was anticipated. Indeed, they have foundered.

Their problems were exacerbated by the plunge in the price of oil and also by the diminution of public transfers. But the political economic forces that constrained them appear to be insurmountable. These are cumulative effects to regional and village for-profit corporations from ANGSA's requirements.

The majority of native for-profit corporations are insolvent, or nearly so, and this is regardless of the price of oil. Between 1974 and 1984, the thirteen native regional corporations showed a cumulative negative return of 4 percent on the return of owner's equity (Robinson, Pretes, and Wuttunee 1988). Bering Straits Regional Corporation, which embraces Unalakleet (Gambell opted not to belong when it took fee simple ownership of St. Lawrence Island), has filed for bankruptcy. Seven other regional corporations are insolvent and struggling. In 1984, eleven of the regional corporations financed one-third of their asset book values by debt capital while relying on local business investment (ibid., 10). This linked the regional corporations to Alaska's economy, which is based on the extraction of naturally occurring resources, some renewable and oil, which is, of course, nonrenewable. Alaska's economic history has been defined by booms and busts in the extraction and selling of

nonrenewable resources. As Robinson et al. say, this "is a questionable venue for a [regional corporation] investment strategy" (ibid.).

The village corporations in Unalakleet and Gambell are barely solvent. Yet they are doing better than the scores of village corporations throughout the state which have dissolved. Wainwright's village corporation continues to receive cash through NSB contracts (see below).

Although many native corporations have filed for bankruptcy and most are struggling dose to the red line, some have received a breath of life from, and many have been given a second life by, a provision of the 1986 Tax Reform Act. The act was not passed with native corporations in mind, but it certainly was passed with the nation's largest and most profitable corporations in mind. However, a provision of the act has served to benefit a host of native for-profit corporations, at least temporarily. The act allows more than ninety of them to sell their tax losses to otherwise profitable companies.

As of March 1988, more than 90 loss-sales were concluded between native corporations, primarily regional, and such corporations and companies as Marriott, Hilton Hotels, Quaker Oats, and Walt Disney. The losses claimed by native corporations at that time exceeded $950 million, or about the total in constant dollars of the ANCSA judgment award ($963 million). Native corporations are getting between 25 and 30 cents for each dollar loss that they sell. Each dollar loss purchased by a profitable corporation is worth about 40 cents in reduced tax liability. The Tax Reform Act, then, serves as a public transfer agent to benefit large profitable corporations and has also proved beneficial to some struggling native corporations.

The Alaska Permanent Fund is a trust based on revenues from the state's nonrenewable resources, primarily oil but also coal, gold, and other minerals. The fund is a trust that is invested in bonds, stocks, and real estate for properties and business ventures outside Alaska. The managers of the fund have eschewed local businesses. A portion of the earnings are distributed annually to Alaska's residents, and these distributions have become an important factor in most household incomes

since they were first issued in late 1982. The dividend, which was $1,000 in its first year, has fluctuated between $300 and $400 each year subsequently, until 1988, when the dividend jumped to $800—a large allocation in recognition of very hard times for the state's residents. The Alaska Permanent Fund is an important source of cash in almost every native household.

Alaska's prospects for sustained economic growth are not good, dependent as it is on oil, fish, and timber. Alaskan oil is expensive to find, pump, and transport. The Japanese and Taiwanese have developed ways to circumvent federal fishing laws and even to fish within the 200-mile territorial boundary established by the United States while gaining control of the fish market. And Alaskan timber, predominantly Sitka spruce, has been ravaged by clear cutting and huge business losses. Within this context, I will assess three significant events, perhaps four, that have occurred since 1982 to dramatically influence all three villages. The first was the Reagan administration's policies on forms of federal welfare and transfers in kind. The second was the international plunge of oil prices. The negative interaction between problems one and two have had serious consequences for natives. The third was the amendments to ANCSA which were passed into law in 1988 (PL 100-241 [Feb. 3, 1988]). The fourth, although too early to assess, was the foundering of Exxon Valdez in March 1989. It will be interesting to begin with the Reagan administration policies because their interactions with plummeting oil prices have intensified problems in the Alaskan villages.

Public Sector Transfers—Federal and State

The Reagan administration began making large cuts in health and welfare budget items as early as 198 I. Aid for Families with Dependent Children was cut deeply in 1983 at a time when Alaska's Natives gained relatively little from the programs. Yet even these cuts reduced the amount of AFDC payments in the three villages between 1982 and 1983. Contradictorily, as the funding for federal-related welfare programs of all kinds has been further squeezed in 1985, 1986, and 1987, natives in all

three villages have become more dependent on welfare transfers—Aid to Families with Dependent Children, Food Stamps, and Adult Public Assistance—than at any time since 1971.

Worldwide Oil Prices

The consequences of the plunge in oil prices to one-third their 1982 value in 1984 and 1985, followed by a slow increase to about two-thirds their 1982 value in 1989 (adjusted dollars), have been most severe, whereas the changes to ANCSA have provided the greatest hope. Exxon Valdez is only the tip of the iceberg and confirms the fears expressed by residents of all three villages during our initial field research and subsequently in our social indicators research.

The village of Wainwright was tiding the crest of the oil-revenues wave a mere seven years ago. It was awash in construction projects, construction jobs, and income transfers of many kinds. By 1985, it began struggling with unemployment and discontinued capital improvement projects. A huge amount of money was poured into village projects from the late 1970s through 1985 (over $134 million). Those projects brought employment and cash to native households unparalleled in village history. When, after 1985, those projects were completed and others either were discontinued or began to taper off, the drop in employment and cash circulating in the village was considerable. And this was so even though CIP projects continued to bring jobs and cash to the village from 1986 to the present. The entire $134 million for CIP projects did not go to native salaries, of course; only a small fraction was so distributed. But Wainwright per capita income was $10,000 in 1982, only $52.00 of which was attributable to welfare transfers. Per capita income had dropped over 20 percent by 1987, and welfare transfers had climbed to $181 per capita.

In the village of Gambell, however, where few public projects were on-line in 1982 and cash was exceedingly scarce, a tiny boomlet caused by capital improvement projects occurred between 1983 and 1985, bringing jobs and cash, albeit briefly, to the natives there. The Gambell residents had so far to climb that the funds that made their way to the village (about $2.3

million in projects, perhaps $800,000 of which was distributed in wages) were seen as an economic blessing. Those funds were minuscule in comparison with CIP funds that circulated in Wainwright during the same period.

The relative deprivation experienced by the residents in the two villages, which happen to be almost identical in size, appear to be somewhat similar but for different reasons: Wainwrighters had the greatest distance to fall because they had access to so much. They suffer from losing so much of what they once had and to which they feel entitled. Nevertheless, Wainwrighters, when down, have much more than Gambellites, when up. Gambell residents could make the greatest gains on the least because they had so small a base. They suffer, then, from having had so little and having their incomes and expectations raised, only to return to their penurious condition. Residents of both villages desire more wage work and more opportunities to enrich their lives within their villages.

The changes that have come about in village populations, employment, welfare, and costs of purchasing processed foods will provide us with some interesting comparisons. But issues unique to each of the villages will also inform us of the bumpy courses being followed in the past seven years.

Changes to Ancsa

Natives' fears about the problems that may befall them and their communities in 1991 from provisions of ANCSA built from 1982 through 1987. Specific anxieties and apprehensions were expressed in public forums, in letters to state and federal congressmen, in lawsuits brought against conveyance procedures, in the hearings of the Alaska Native Review Commission, and in interviews and open discussions with our research team.

In response to the growing fears and to the demonstration of obvious and serious problems in ANCSA's provisions as enacted in 1971, Congress amended ANCSA in February 1988 (ANCSA Amendment of 1987 ; PL 100-241). Those amendments have alleviated some of the worst fears that natives harbored about the probable consequences to their communities in 1991, to their land bases, to future generations of natives, to their re-

lations with the state of Alaska, and to the rights of dissenters among shareholders in the village and regional corporations.

On the basis of the hearings pursuant to PL 100-241, Congress enacted legislation that is intended to avert the litigation engaged in by village corporations against their regional corporations and by persons and agencies within villages against their village corporations over the conveyance of land. Congress also sought to alleviate native corporations of many requirements that threatened the continuation of native cultural values, claiming that native corporations were not well adjusted to the "reality of Native life."

Some Protections to the Land Bases

ANCSA originally required that corporations become public on December 18, 1991. Many natives feared that hostile takeovers, bankruptcy proceedings, or offers to shareholders too good to refuse would deprive natives of their land base. Congress provided some protections against some of these fears.

Native corporations can convey lands, but not subsurface rights, to a "settlement trust" that cannot be enjoined, purchased, subject to liens, possessed adversely, claimed by estoppel, claimed by delinquent taxes, claimed because of insolvency judgments, or otherwise transferred from native control. A huge problem remains in subsurface rights. The regional corporations hold all such rights, but even if those corporations establish a trust, the subsurface rights (oil, minerals, hot water, etc.) are not protected against adverse possession.

Furthermore, for natives, the land cannot be dissociated from the water that surrounds it and drains it, or from the plants and animals that inhabit the land and water. No changes were made to state control of fish and game or federal control of sea mammals and endangered species—the resources on which the "reality of Native life" is based.

Some Provisions for Amending Corporate Charters

As in the dreadful General Allotment Act before it (also known as the Dawes Severalty Act of 1887), ANCSA made no provi-

;

sions for persons born after 1971 to acquire shares in the native corporations. In the amended version of ANCSA, native corporations can amend the stock provisions in their articles of incorporation to give shares to persons born after 1971 as well as to persons born before 1971 who were eligible but not enrolled at that time. These new enrollees have all rights and restrictions including inheritance.

Native corporations can also amend their articles of incorporation to restrict alienation of stock for an indefinite amount of time or amend so as to terminate alienability restrictions (two sides of the same coin). And native corporations can amend their articles of incorporation to implement recapitalization plans. Thus, corporations can protect themselves by disallowing alienation of stock by shareholders for an indefinite period.

Some Individual Rights

The provisions for stock and inheritance for eligible persons who are not shareholders is enhanced by other rights that focus on individuals. Dissenters from corporate decisions can call for votes via petitions, can bring motions before the boards and the shareholders, can demand votes, and can demand that their position be heard by shareholders on any issue.

Gambell

From 1982 through 1987, the residents of Gambell pressed on with their desire to dissolve their village corporation (and Savoonga's corporation as well) and reestablish federal trust status to St. Lawrence Island. As the residents' fears about losing their island to taxes or hostile takeovers mounted, they opened battles on other fronts to preserve their island home. In 1983, the Gambell village leaders rallied around their IRA government and brought suit in Federal District Court against the secretary of the interior to invalidate Oil Lease Sale 57, affecting Norton Sound, in Village of Gambell v. Clark , 746 F.2d 527, 573 (9th Cir. 1984). The court refers to this case as "Gambell I."

The village, through Alaska Legal Services counsel James

Bamberger et al., argued that the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) applied to Outer Continental Lease Sale 57. ANILCA requires that if a project is forecasted to significantly restrict subsistence uses and if the human environment is synonymous with the natural resource base, as is the case for Gambell, then the project must cause the least adverse impact possible on rural residents who depend on subsistence.

The Gambell residents feared that oil exploration and drilling would jeopardize the resources on which their subsistence was based and significantly alter their hunting way of life. Their case was filed after Lease Sale 57, so they sought injunctive relief from exploratory drilling in the leased tracts until the secretary of the interior had compiled with ANILCA's provisions. The village lost in the Federal District Court in Anchorage but won a reversal in the 9th Circuit Court. Nevertheless, a preliminary injunction was not issued on remand to the Federal District Court in Anchorage. In 1985, the oil companies drilled ten wells in the Bering Sea, at an alleged cost of more than $70 million (Wall Street Journal , Oct. 26, 1985).

The Village of Gambell appealed the district court's decision not to issue an injunction (Gambell v. Hodel [9th Cir. No. 85-3877]). In reply, the secretary of the interior, with a host of oil companies as intervenors (Exxon, Arco, Shell, Unocal), argued that drilling for oil would not cause any "large" or "substantial" impact to native subsistence harvests or impose "significant restrictions" on them, either. "Large" and "substantial impact" were not defined, nor was "significant restriction." As to native fears about significant changes to their way of life (protected by ANILCA), the agreement stated that should large or substantial impacts occur, such consequences shall not include claims for psychological, cultural, religious, emotional, or similar losses. The "hold harmless" agreement provided the following mitigation for large or substantial impacts to the native subsistence economy from oil operations: the secretary of the interior shall provide beef to natives. It also held harmless the Department of the Interior and the oil companies for any and all consequences.

The second appeal, including the secretary of the interior's "hold harmless" agreement, became known to the court as "Gambell II." On October 25, 1985, the court decided in favor of the People of the Village of Gambell et al. In the court's opinion (with Carolyn R. Dimmick, U.S. District Judge, sitting by designation, dissenting), the environmental risks from exploration and drilling posed "unusual circumstances" that had to be addressed. Congress, they found, chose to protect subsistence life over oil exploration in ANILCA. The court concluded that the district court had abused its discretion in denying a preliminary injunction, because it "failed to give proper weight to Congress' expressly stated policy of protecting the subsistence needs and culture of Native Alaskans against the harm which may result from the lease of public lands in the outer continental shelf."

The circuit court could not issue a permanent injunction, because a full trial record had not been developed. In the interim, all drilling was halted in two huge swaths of the Bering Sea. The Federal District Court in Anchorage was charged with determining whether drilling was harming or was likely to harm the subsistence needs and culture of Native Alaskans.

The circuit court decision was appealed to the Supreme Court, which overturned the injunction by a 7-2 vote, saying that a request for a court order to stop an environmental risk should not get special treatment because it involves "unusual circumstances." By a unanimous vote, the Supreme Court also held that ANILCA applies to federal lands, not federal waters on the outer continental shelf. Thus, the residents of Gambell, almost all of whom gain almost all of their daily sustenance from the resources of the sea—sea mammals, seabirds, fish, plants, and marine invertebrates—and who gain a large portion of their cash from ivory by-products, found no protection in ANILCA.

ANILCA, which accompanies ANCSA, was not revised when ANCSA was amended, but the changes to ANCSA alleviated many fears that Gambell residents had about the loss of their island and their way of life. Because the land cannot be taken for delinquent taxes or bad debts, and because stock cannot be

alienated by shareholders if the Gambell and Savoonga corporations amend their articles of incorporation, Gambell has some time to plan its next move in protecting the island.

Toward this end, members of the boards of the village corporation, the IRA, and the city council work long hours without remuneration. In 1989, village leaders told Robbins (pers. comm.) that the older leaders were overworked with their community obligations and their household and clan obligations and that "somebody should find a way to fund chairpersons of the IRA government and the Sivuqaq Native Corporation." Even for these important jobs, village leaders asked for little—something for the chairs but not for other board members who also work unstintingly.

The economic base of Gambell life has not changed significantly since 1982: it comprises a mix of subsistence extraction, wages (predominantly from public sources), transfer payments, public subsidies of several kinds, services, and sales of carved ivory figures. One increased source of income has been mineralized ivory, especially the carved "ancient ivory." Whereas Gambell residents were excavating fossil ivory, carved and uncarved, from ancient habitation sites around the island in 1982, families have been putting more time and effort into such excavations in the past six years. In 1988 and 1989, an assiduous searcher might excavate ivory worth $7,000 to $8,000. Several families engaged in the practice of excavating these absolutely limited items. In 1989, some Gambell residents said that it is conceivable that should a family spend June through September digging for ivory, it could earn $60,000 or $70,000, but no family could afford to do so for long because the ivory must be excavated at the very same time that each clansman's labor is most required for subsistence and walrus harvests. Gambell residents prefer to hunt and to maintain their clans and clan obligations.

One indication that economic conditions have worsened, in spite of the construction boomlet from 1983 to 1985, is the increase of the size of the average household from 4.1 in 1982 to 4.6 in 1988. A rapid increase in household size in a society dependent on the public sector frequently indicates worsening economic conditions in which some households, once independent, coalesce with other households to share resources and

labor while cutting some expenses. Expansions and contractions of households among dependent populations respond as an accordion to expansions and contractions of income.

A welcome addition to Gambell households since 1982 has been the dividends from the Alaska Permanent Fund. It has become a common practice over the past seven years for members of a household to pool their Permanent Fund distributions each year to purchase equipment that is necessary for subsistence pursuits. The $3,680 that the "average" household received in 1988, more than double the amount received from 1983 through 1987, assisted in the purchase of a crucial item, such as a 55-hp outboard motor or a 16-foot aluminum skiff.

According to Robbins (1988: pers. comm.), receipts at the Gambell Native Store accounted for 72 percent of total personal income in the village of Gambell in 1087. About half went to food and half went to fuel, hardware, and subsistence (extraction) technology. This is a high rate of local spending but consonant with people who do not have charge accounts, charge cards, or credit lines; do not vacation in distant places; and focus on daily and seasonal requirements. Taxes, mail order purchases, and freight and postal charges to send animal by-products to friends and kinspersons account for almost all of the remaining income that circulates in Gambell.

As in the past, very little of the money that flows into the Gambell Native Store stays there. It flows back to the ANICA headquarters to pay for goods and services provided by ANICA to its thirty-seven stores throughout Alaska and also to return a profit to ANICA which ANICA is supposed to use to improve services and the quality of goods. The Gambell Native Store lost money every year from 1985 through 1987, registering a small profit in 1988.

Wainwright

Wainwrighters who chose to spend large portions of their discretionary incomes on food purchases at local stores have reverted to pouring more and more of their resources and their efforts into subsistence harvests. In summer 1985, when it became evident that conditions would not improve in the near fu-

ture, community residents took the precaution of collecting coal from natural outcroppings near the village, so as to be able to supplement oil heat during the winter months, and they also began harvesting marine invertebrates and varieties of birds that they had shunned for several years.

The international plunge of oil prices has decreased the demand for Alaskan oil as well as lowered the price it fetches. Even the price of heating oil delivered to the villages has dropped, providing a minor benefit from an otherwise disastrous consequence to the oil market. Correlatively, state oil tax revenues and the ratings of North Slope Borough bonds have plummeted. As the bond ratings dropped from AAA to BBB (lower medium quality), it was increasingly difficult to generate funds to retire debts, to pay for CIPs that were in progress, or to initiate new projects. The dependency of North Slope Borough villages on unearned income derived from oil tax revenues through CIPs, employment, and transfers of various kinds is almost complete.

Thus, as the vagaries of the market cause oil prices to drop, Wainwright residents suffer, but so do residents of other villages whether close or distant from the North Slope Borough. Indeed, the entire state economy has suffered, and in a village such as Gambell, it means that there are fewer carved ivory sales in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and Juneau. In a village such as Unalakleet, it means that fewer persons from oil-related industries are frequenting the town.

As the state's economy plunged and the CIP spigot was being tightened, a few Wainwright families began out-migrating, but in 1987, a man-made calamity appears to have slowed the exodus and brought emergency work to the community. Five boys playing with matches started a fire that burned down the new high school, the olympic swimming pool, and the power plant—three attached buildings. A fourth attached building, the grade school, was saved when a person jumped on a bulldozer and knocked down the walkway connecting it to the burning structures (Luton pers. comm.) There was some consternation voiced locally over the person's action to save the remaining building.

The damage was $12 million. In characteristic Eskimo fashion, the NSB provided emergency relief in the way of contracts to rebuild. To do so, the borough undoubtedly pulled resources from other projects under way or projected for the North Slope. The flow of cash in Wainwright began again—for a while. Nonnatives moved back into the community to ply their construction skills, and natives, too, were hired onto the projects.

Eskimo villages, including Wainwright, were not solely dependent on oil revenues in 1982, nor are they now. They are also dependent on federal transfers of sundry kinds. For nearly twenty years, grants, contracts, and entitlements had provided programs and jobs for village residents. The federal monies, contracts, grants, and services that were available to Indians and Eskimos through the 1970s, especially in health and welfare programs, started withering with the advent of the Reagan administration. Yet oil revenues that were redistributed by the state of Alaska made up the slack, at least until the price of oil plummeted in 1984, and the Alaskan economy began foundering soon thereafter.

o The importance of direct transfers in the public sector are very noticeable in Wainwright, where the dollar value of welfare transfers received by residents after dropping by 65 percent between 1981 and 1983 increased by 355 percent between 1983 and 1986.

Unalakleet

Growth from the relocation of administrative headquarters—the Bering Strait School District and the Norton Sound Health Services—and from the use of Unalakleet as a secondary transportation hub by oil companies exploring in the Bering Sea has pressured Unalakleet villagers, even though it has also brought some government and government-related (e.g., transportation) employment to the village. The pressures that were felt from the rapid growth of the village in the early 1980s were evident to any observer. The growth of Unalakleet as a secondary hub required more public services and, consequently,

more public jobs. As people flowed in to take the jobs, and even as local citizens acquired work, there was unrest. Threats to subsistence resources and the native way of life were eloquently and passionately discussed at city government and IRA meetings, regularly attended by 150 or more villagers.

Reagan administration policies also exercised remarkable primary and secondary effects on the village of Unalakleet between 1982 and 1988. A primary effect is direct; a secondary effect is a consequence, perhaps unintended, of something that was directly affected by a policy or action. As an example of a direct effect, welfare transfers to Unalakleet residents were initially reduced by federal policies that made it more difficult to obtain them through more rigorous qualification requirements. This was surely felt directly in Unalakleet households.

The plunge of oil prices had some secondary and unintended consequences for Unalakleet. They were felt through a reduction of state revenues that severely impaired the Alaskan economy and dislocated tens of thousands of Alaskan residents. The plunge of oil prices was fortuitously combined with the Reagan administration's deregulation of the airlines industry in the following way. The reduction in passenger miles caused some Alaska-based carriers to be merged and pushed some others out of business. Ryan Air Service, the native-owned family enterprise in unalakleet, stepped into the gaping hole left by bankruptcies and termination of services and grew dramatically to become the largest bush service in Alaska. Although it grew at an incredible rate, a string of accidents and FAA violations caused the termination of flight privileges in 1988. That action triggered layoffs of the bulk of Ryan's employees.

In 1984, the vice president of the Unalakleet IRA government was also the vice president of the organization of Alaskan Native Villages. During the roundtable hearings on ANCSA held in Anchorage in February 1984 by the Alaska Native Review Commission, this man spoke for the village. The review commission sought to learn about ANCSA's consequences and how villagers viewed their current conditions and future prospects under its provisions. The Unalakleet man reported that his relatives and friends feared for the loss of their land and their way of life from two things: ANCSA's stipulation that all

for-profit village and regional corporations must go public in 1991 and deleterious consequences to the village and to the region from oil operations in the Bering Sea-Norton Sound region. Villagers resent the way they have become dependent on income and service transfers from federal and state governments as well as the domination that such transfers entail.

This person went on to discuss the threats to village sovereignty posed by Congress, saying, "Even if Congress decides to enact that there will be no more Indian Reorganization Act governments, there will still be tribal governments because that is the will of the people." The native village of Unalakleet, in his view, possessed an inherent sovereignty that would withstand domination. A woman from the same village testified that Unalakleet had, and will retain, its tribal identity through the very fact that its power to act comes from the power it possesses from "being a tribe." So she, too, viewed sovereignty as inherent in the organization of the village, regardless of federal and state domination.

Since 1961 when the state of Alaska encouraged the development of a nascent commercial fishing enterprise in Unalakleet, commercial fishing has provided Unalakleet natives with a regular, although seasonal, access to a worldwide market. We pointed out that following the extension of the U.S. territorial boundary to 200 miles offshore in 1977, the amount of salmon and the value of salmon harvested by commercial fishermen in Unalakleet increased. Such was the case through the 1982 fishing season. The catches during the 1983, 1984, and 1985, although more valuable per pound of salmon, produced each year about 25 percent less income than in 1982 (if we do not standardize the value of the dollar over those four years). New means to intercept salmon on the high seas (drift nets more than 30 miles long) were developed and employed by Japanese and Taiwanese fishermen in the mid-1980s, and only now, in 1989, are they being challenged by the U.S. government.

During our initial fieldwork, natives told us that one cannot assess their environment or the way in which it is used by observing for a month, for half a year, or even for a whole year. Seasons vary between years just as they do within years, and bountiful resources today may be scarce tomorrow. This is very

apparent in commercial fish catches, just as it was to the Malemiut who moved to Unalakleet in the 1840s when caribou were plentiful, only to witness the reduction and out-migration of the herd a few years later.

The reductions of the commercial fish catches in the mid-1980s were felt immediately throughout the village because they affected the ability of fishermen to retire loans and to pay for their annual fishing expenses. As prices for fishing equipment increased and gross income from fish harvests decreased, native fishermen, in general, could not afford to spend as much time on the water as nonnative fishermen. The consequence was a cycle that further reduced native catches and income.

In 1982, Unalakleet fishermen caught 252,700 salmon valued at $489,000 (average $1.94 per pound). In 1985, they caught 131,000 salmon valued at $366,000 (average $2.79 per pound). Adjusting the 1985 dollar to the value of the 1982 dollar, Unalakleet fishermen were paid $327,500 ($2.50 per pound on average) for the salmon that they caught, all species, in 1985. The combination, then, of a downturn in the fishing economy, a tightening and initial reduction of federal welfare transfers nationwide, and the worldwide plunge of oil prices significantly affected Unalakleet residents during the first three years following my initial study.

Some Recent Comparisons

Population is a sensitive indicator of economic impacts in Native villages. Whereas all three villages grew dramatically between 1971 and 1982, with ANCSA's enactment, growth virtually stopped in Unalakleet and Wainwright and slowed somewhat in Gambell. The reason for the curtailment of village population is most surely a consequence of the plunge in oil prices, the depletion of ANCSA award funds, and the increasing niggardliness of the Reagan administration budget for all items related to the United States' native populations (health, education, welfare, business development, etc.). In Unalakleet, the sustained rollback of the commercial fish harvest contributed its own impact on the economic pressures on local households.

Public and private sector growth in all three villages ceased at roughly comparable times, while welfare transfers and services became more difficult to access.

The cessation of population growth in Unalakleet and Wainwright is not because birthrates abruptly decreased. Nor are the changes due to dramatic increases in death rates. Natural increase continued at the rates established in the 1970s. Unalakleet and Wainwright populations have been severely influenced by the fluctuations in their economies. Both villages have experienced out-migration—natives as well as nonnatives—during the past three years as natives have been forced to seek work outside the village. For natives, at least, this is a dramatic reversal of the trend since 1971. The numbers of nonnatives in each village have increased and decreased with employment. In all three villages, residents complain about crowding, essentially with regard to pressures on naturally occurring resources within reasonable range of the villages and on employment opportunities as well.

Table 19 demonstrates that Unalakleet actually lost three persons between 1982 and 1987, even though there were 65 more births than deaths during the period. Wainwright gained one person, even though there were 58 more births than deaths. Gambell gained 55 persons, 7 more than we would expect from the birth/death values. The explanation is that 27 nonnative persons currently reside in Gambell, an increase of about 15 over the nonnative population in 1982. Almost all of the 27 are employed in education-related jobs and reside in Gambell for nine months only.

Public and private employment in the three villages, after a few years of growth (not always steady), took different courses in each of the three villages after 1982 (see table 20). Gambell full-time equivalent employment rose with CIPs from 1983 through 1985, yet dropped below the figure for 1982 in 1987. Sales of ancient and recently carved ivory, which topped $300,000 annually in 1983 and 1984, had dropped to $225,000 in 1986 and lower (by unofficial reports from artisans) in 1987. Inflation between 1983 and 1986 reduced the value of 1986 sales to about $215,000 in 1983 dollars. The stresses are ex-

pressed in more bickering between and among the villages' elected bodies—village corporation, city government, and IRA government—than was the case in 1982.

Wainwright, which had greater per capita employment and was more dependent on public transfers for that employment than either Gambell or Unalakleet, lost about 10 percent of its full-time equivalent jobs after 1985. Nevertheless, part-time jobs, especially full-time employment of very short duration,

waxed and waned in Wainwright, picking up recently following the burning of the high school, swimming pool, and power plant.

Unalakleet continued its development as a secondary hub, growing with public income sources to the school district offices, the health center offices, and the expansion of the FAA facility to accommodate the expansion of Ryan Air Service. Much of the increase in Unalakleet full-time equivalent employment for 1987 is directly attributable to Ryan Air Service. The large niche into which Ryan Air expanded when major and minor operators were pushed or fell from the Alaska air transportation market in the mid-1980s proved to be difficult to maintain. A string of accidents and FAA violations caused the termination of flight privileges in 1988 and a plummeting of employment of Ryan personnel based outside Unalakleet and some in Unalakleet.

Welfare transfers have come to make much more important contributions to Gambell and Unalakleet households in 1987 than they did in either 1982 or 1984. Since 1982, it has been more difficult to qualify for federal welfare programs in which dollars are transferred, particularly AFDC and Food Stamp distributions. The increase in the values, gross and per capita, of the public transfers shown in table 21 provides obvious indicators of the changes in circumstances in the villages: more families qualify for larger amounts of welfare than was the case a few years ago. Gambell residents receive more than twice as much as they did in 1984, Wainwright residents receive three and one-half times as much, and Unalakleet residents receive nearly four and one-fourth times as much.

The costs of living in the three villages have continued to climb between 1982 and the present. The rates are somewhat slower than the comparable rate at Newport Beach, California. The sole commodity used in large quantities in the three villages whose price is actually lower in 1988 than 1982 is heating oil, down about 15 percent. In 1982, prices on a comparable market basket of goods were about three times more expensive in Wainwright than Newport Beach and about two and one-half times more expensive in Unalakleet than Newport Beach. We had no Gambell figures for 1982.

In 1988, as can be seen in table 22, Wainwright prices are about two and one-half times higher than Newport Beach prices, and Unalakleet prices are about twice as high. Gambell prices are nearly three times as high. With so little employment in the three villages—fewer than 0.7 FTE per household overall—and with so much of that employment either short-term, part-time, or seasonal, it is evident that the high cost of basic market basket commodities does not invite reliance by natives on processed foods purchased from the local stores. Conditions, then, have not changed much since 1982. Villagers still get the bulk of their food from the harvests of naturally occurring, renewable resources.

Through A Glass Darkly

The situations of the three villages in this study from 1982, when we began our inquiry, to the present are not solely the consequences of oil-related developments prior to 1982 or of the ANCSA legislation that facilitated those developments, or

of subsequent attempts to lease and extract oil, or of the clown-turn in the worldwide price of oil, or of the Reagan administration's reductions of welfare and Indian affairs-related budgets. Rather, the situations are influenced by all those factors, although not uniformly in each village.

It is evident that as trading with and employment by nonnatives became available to natives in the three villages, many seized those economic opportunities. And as technologies became available which increased hunting efficiency, territorial mobility, and comfort, while decreasing labor time, those technologies were adopted. To avail themselves of the technology that has transformed so much of native village life, people had to sell their labor, sell goods, or become dependent on the government that expropriated them. All three methods have been

used, but dole, that is, government transfers of all kinds, has been the principal means by which Eskimos have been integrated into the world economy.

About 150 years ago, Europeans began trading directly with the natives in the vicinity of the three villages in this study. A few years later, residents of St. Lawrence Island and the vicinity of Wainwright were hiring onto whaling vessels. Soon thereafter, Christian missionaries operating federally subsidized schools and reindeer herds became ensconced in the three villages, and it was not long before Christianity came to dominate native beliefs and hence to obviate the function of shamans. During the past fifty years, the populations of the three villages have expanded, as smaller hamlets have withered. Women have become increasingly more active in the hunting pursuits that were once restricted to men. Permanent houses have been built in sufficient numbers to allow for the fissioning of many extended family households to nuclear families residing in single-family residences.

Since about 1960, some aspects of Eskimo culture have changed quickly and dramatically, following the widespread adoption of motorboats and snowmachines. Dog teams have been drastically reduced in numbers, lessening the necessity of daily hunting to feed the dogs. Populations have become more concentrated in a few villages. Wintertime movements for subsistence pursuits have come more to involve lone hunters or groups of men rather than entire families and wider networks of kinspeople and friends. And those pursuits that once required a few weeks for completion can now be completed in a few hours. Even long-distance caribou hunts take but a few days.

Except for the small commercial fishery in Unalakleet and the even smaller ivory business in Gambell, the local economies of all three villages have become increasingly dependent on sources of unearned income. Federal and state grants, transfer payments, legislative programs, agencies, and awards provide the cash that allows natives to maintain their subsistence pursuits and provide health, shelter, and clothing.

When we take a close look at the commercial fishery in Unalakleet, we see that as the operation becomes more capital in-

tensive, nonnatives have access to larger amounts of capital and come to dominate earnings. When we take an even closer look at native operations, we see that perhaps the majority of native fishermen could not fish if it were not for the loans and assistance that are made available through native corporations and organizations, which, in turn, have received their funds from the federal government. In 1982, the native carvers and ancient ivory sellers on St. Lawrence Island received as much in a small business grant to develop an ivory cooperative as they received from the total sales of their goods. After 1982, as the ivory market picked up, the majority of sales were from the excavation of ancient ivory from abandoned sites, an absolutely limited resource. The downturn of oil prices has had the effect of reducing the sales of ancient and new ivory artifacts.

The penetrations of the state and federal governments ever more deeply into the affairs of the three villages have brought about changes to the political economy of village life, influencing the regional corporations, the village corporations, the city governments, and the IRA councils, while also prompting residents to seek services and income from those institutions. The relations among the local institutions and the state and federal governments have introduced legal, professional interactions— tempered, if not shaped and controlled, by natives—where few had existed before. Nevertheless, relations between elected representatives and appointed officials of the local institutions and the residents of the villages have remained much the same as the traditional relations between leaders and followers: leaders are respected, and, therefore, they can use suasion in some situations, generally those in which they are knowledgeable. Professional-client relations have not developed between native officials and villagers.

Leaders in Gambell and Unalakleet have been successful in shaping formal, legal relations to reflect local idioms and local styles. Even in Wainwright, where local control is often exercised at the borough rather than the village level, the city government reflects traditional societies, rather than alien-legal, formal, particular practices.

Leadership in Wainwright has followed a much different course from that of the other two villages. Political and eco-

nomic decision-making authority has become centralized in the North Slope Borough, whose seat is Barrow. Although many decisions about village affairs, particularly about the behavior of village residents, are made locally, the key political and economic decisions for the village are made in Barrow, and the village residents are alienated from and uninformed about many of those decisions.

Our observations in the villages made it dear to us—that is, the entire research team—that the harvesting of naturally occurring, renewable species cannot be neatly separated from the cultural milieu in which the subsistence economy is embedded. In each village household, the "family" and the still wider networks of kinspeople are organized not merely as kinship-qua-kinship units to rear children, provide shelter, and emotional support. Such organizations are integrated as core units for the extraction, preparation, and storage of natural resources and for their distribution and consumption. Household units and kinspeople living in other households, that is, families as we have defined them, pool the technological equipment needed for subsistence, such as boats and snowmachines; pool cash to purchase gas and oil; share skills; and contribute cash from their various sources of income to the family larder. Members of these same units provide gifts of resources to affines, kinspeople, and friends in distant villages and cities. When possible and when needed, they often provide labor and share equipment with relatives in these distant communities as well.

In each of the villages, the residents express a wide array of sentiments and ideas that are associated with obligations to contribute to the household economy and the economies of the households of relatives, friends, elders, and people in need. Great value is placed on the consumption of naturally occurring resources because of their life-sustaining, spiritual, and medicinal effects. People believe that it is good to work willingly to provide food but that it is also good to revere the beauty of the environment from which the food is extracted. The ideology of sharing and helping is paramount among basic ideas in all three villages, and it finds expression in values, in sentiments, and in helpful and generous acts. Furthermore, the ideology of sharing and helping runs counter to the ideology of choice

that is alleged to motivate market behavior. Examples in all three villages of the behavior of natives in commercial activities demonstrate that sharing and helping, not choice to maximize monetary benefits, motivate native actions.

Within a few months, it was dear to the researchers that in each of the villages there exists a sense of community that is institutional, that is, long-lived, habitual, and expected. This sense of community, it is averred here, comes from several recurrent acts, such as those involved in the sharing of resources and skills through wide networks of kinspeople and friends and the helpfulness that is extended to persons in need. But it also comes from the repeating of beliefs, such as the recounting of common histories in each village; from the sharing of sentiments about the beauty of the land and waters; and from the threats posed to the environment by natural forces, by government, and by industries. Threats to the environment from government and industries, of course, are perceived (and spoken of) as threats to the community and to the native way of life.

Villagers remain wedded to their environment and to the subsistence economy in largest part because they prefer to do so. Wage labor and salaries are recognized as short term, as are the transfer payments and legislation on which both are based. Personal income from productive labor in the commercial fisheries at Unalakleet and ivory carving at Gambell are seen as potential long-term contributors to those economies. Nevertheless, long-term sources of earnings are recognized to be threatened by onshore and offshore energy-related developments.

Thus, whereas cash income is sought in all three villages, much of it is used to purchase the technology that will enhance subsistence harvest activities, which, in turn, render family and community life more predictable. When ANCSA made it possible for natives to return to their villages from urban settings, large numbers did so, especially in Unalakleet and Wainwright. Many of those returnees, indeed the majority of Eskimos between the ages of twenty-five and forty-five in all three villages, were educated away from their home villages at BIA schools and colleges. Although the BIA intended that those persons would pursue occupations away from their villages, many of

them returned home instead and worked to establish local schools for their own children. Moreover, retirees who have spent twenty years and more in occupations throughout the United States continue to relocate from urban areas to their natal villages.

Even the formally organized institutions that have been legislated into being since the enactment of ANCSA in 1971 have been used to protect the natives' way of life. They have not become the instruments to propel natives into the worldwide market economy as fully integrated capitalists.

Institutions have been shaped and used in culturally explicit, Eskimo ways, with the intention of preserving the native way of life while availing the natives of all the technology that will make that life more comfortable and predictable. Without doubt, village life is predicated on the continued presence, extraction, and use of naturally occurring, renewable resources.

And now, in mid-1989, the consequences of the first large Alaskan oil spill are being felt. The Exxon Valdez accident is not the first spill, but it is the biggest—11 million gallons of crude oil spread over 1,000 square miles of water and land (500 miles of shoreline). The seal population in Prince William Sound where the spill occurred had been reduced by 80 percent in the previous decade from the results of frequent small spills, freighter traffic, and the general consequences of marine changes from the Valdez port development. Natives are well aware of the problems. When one of my associates disembarked from a plane in a small village in the Bristol Bay region about a week following the spill, the local mayor greeted him with, "It's 100 square miles now!" The fourth, and least analyzed, consequence of oil-related developments is the one that natives fear the most—the "normal accident" in the oil business. This is because it is completely out of their control, because governmental responses to it will be determined by "big oil bucks," and because bureaucracies do not respond rapidly or effectively to large problems threatening natives, especially if the problems are caused by corporations with influence.

It is the case that in mid-1989, as the Minerals Management Service sought to study the consequences to natives directly affected by the Exxon Valdez spill, the Office of Management of

the Budget refused to let MMS proceed because of probable contractual obligations of Exxon to analyze the problem itself. The state of Alaska refused to fund research to study the consequences of the spill because it did not want to jeopardize its claims against Exxon and its Alyeska consortium (Arco, British Petroleum, Mobil, Phillips, and others) for negligence in preparation against such disasters, response to the spill, and punitive damages.

On August 1, 1989, four months and one week after the spill, the social and economic studies office of the Minerals Management Service in Anchorage gained approval to study the consequences of the spill to native villagers. I was asked to incorporate these hardest-hit villages into the social indicators study. We are currently studying ten severely affected villages in the Prince William Sound, Cook Inlet, and Kodiak regions—mainly villages of commercial fishermen who lost the entire commercial fishing season through ADF&G closure because of oil tainting of fish and all other sea life in the area covered by the spill.

Initial assessment of these villages suggest all of the problems that were encountered by small communities in the western United States that were affected by the energy boom of the 1970s, including inflation, increases in mental health visits and household violence, burnout of social service workers, and despair among elected local officials who have been unable to solve problems brought to them by constituents and who have found themselves powerless to influence decisions about their own areas made by Exxon or the state or federal government. In the larger, predominantly nonnative villages, local persons who have gone to work on the Exxon cleanup are at odds with those who have not. Transient workers do not observe local customs. Especially devastating to these communities, especially to the natives within them, has been the immediate loss of many kinds of naturally occurring resources normally harvested for subsistence.

Appendix A
Methodology

In the planning stage, we sought to conduct comparative primary research in which observations and interviews in each of the three study villages would be comparable, allowing us to prepare monographs on each village but also allowing us to produce a monograph in which comparisons among the three villages were controlled. I prepared a variable code in protocol format, encompassing hundreds of questions on nine key topics: environment, subsistence, technology, economic organization (ownership and control, labor, extraction, distribution, exchange, consumption), ideology, social organization, religion, political economic institutions, and helping services.

We sought to collect data on these topics for the early 1980s and also for the years immediately prior to the enactment of ANCSA. We were not successful in the latter task because the estimable ethnographers who had worked in those villages before us were not driven by the same questions that drove us (Hughes 1960; Nelson 1969; Correll 1974).

Information, both qualitative and quantitative in nature, was gathered through a multiple methodology. One part was made up of traditional anthropological observations, in which field investigator and principal investigator observed and participated in village activities and in which informal, open-ended discussions with knowledgeable villagers were held. Native assistants were hired in each village. Each participated in the activities that, as observers, the anthropologists sought to understand and even to participate in, if possible.

Information was also gathered through protocol interviews, that is, through discussions focused on specific topics and conducted with members of various networks in the village. For instance, we prepared special sets of topics from the master variable code to be discussed with members of a family-house-hold about family-household organization; their extraction, preparation, consumption, and sharing of resources; their at-

tirades about the environment and the naturally occurring resources within it; and so forth. On completion of the protocol observations, a member of the household provided the name of another household within the village with whom the initial household interacted in some fashion. In this way, networks of family-households, friends, political associates, people who engage in the extracurricular organizations associated with religious organizations, and the like, could be studied. Different protocols were prepared for different kinds of information—some to apprise us about village institutions, some about households, some about the village's market economy.

A third methodology, used in Unalakleet alone, was to post species inventories in village households and have those families tally their daily catches and bags for a two-month period. Still a fourth methodology was to collect and analyze all available archival data (health, mortality, crime, welfare, business, etc.); all published and unpublished wildlife, fish, and other biological reports; and all known historical, ethnohistorical, and ethnographic materials that pertained to the three villages.

The specific methods for sampling and data collection were modified as conditions and contexts required in each village. The basic methodology proved to be consonant with local expectations and agreeable—after some time—to local tastes in all three villages. Full discussions about the ways in which the research was actually conducted in the three villages are available in Jorgensen and Maxwell (1984), Little and Robbins (1984), and Luton (1985).

The Field Research Methodology and Its Rationale: Problems of Validity

Ethnographic analyses conducted within a single village at a particular time—a "static" or timeless state of six to twelve months in these cases—pose problems of validity. Validity, for our purposes here, is synonymous with the truth-value or logical consistency of a research finding. Office of Management of the Budget (OMB) regulations forbid the use of interview schedules or structured questionnaires with more than nine people in any study that is funded by a federal government contract, unless OMB approval is obtained. Obtaining OMB ap-

proval was specifically forbidden by the Alaska OCS Region (Contract AA851-CT1-59, 6), as were surveys and statistical analyses requiring formal methods of data collection (Contract AA851-CT1-59, 6). So we developed a research strategy to reduce threats to validity without the benefit of explicit, formal survey techniques.

By using several methodologies and several data sets developed from anthropological, protocol, and archival observations, we sought to compensate for the OMB-OCS strictures. As a caveat, we did not think that a statistical survey was a solution to the validity question. Such surveys are fraught with weaknesses, but they are of considerable value when used in conjunction with other methodologies.

The three aspects of our multiple methodology received different emphases and produced data of varying value in each village. The anthropological observations were most informative, yielding information from texts, open-ended discussions, attendance at public meetings, and from daily participation in and observations of village life. Protocol observation worked best only after a period of adjustment between researchers and villagers had occurred. We were never very successful in collecting responses to the topical questions in our protocol in Wainwright. In all villages, we sought protocol responses from persons representing important institutions (e.g., political, economic, educational, helping services, religions) and several kinship networks. Archival observations were richest at Wainwright. Here we located the most extensive federal, state, and borough archival data and other written records and reports pertaining to the village.

Each of these methodologies has its own strengths and weaknesses. When it was possible to do so, we used the strengths of one methodology to control for the weaknesses of another. Let us discuss in greater detail the three aspects of the methodology.

Anthropological Observations

A field investigator and native field assistants living in Gambell and Wainwright observed and recorded village life over a six-month period. Because the Unalakleet field investigator de-

cided to reside in the village, she remained for twelve months. And because the Wainwright field investigator returned to the village for three months, we benefited from his second stay. The principal investigator and the senior investigators were each assigned a village. Each worked in the assigned village for about twenty days, split between the winter and summer. Some of the observations were structured, inasmuch as the investigators prearranged to look for certain techniques, acts, objects, ideas, and sentiments in relation to the harvest of naturally occurring resources, for example, or to family subsistence practices. Investigators asked open-ended questions about those observations while sharing waterfowl hunting, egg gathering, roe-on-kelp gathering, fishnet clearing, fish camp preparation, or other such tasks. Resource areas were mapped on United States Geological Survey sectional maps, and the ideas and sentiments attached to those places were recorded.

Other observations were unstructured and unanticipated, amounting to discoveries in some instances. The native field investigators were helpful in pursuing the significance of these discoveries.

The two types of observations—structured and unstructured—informed by open-ended questioning stimulated discoveries as well as puzzlements, which, in turn, opened more leads and prompted further inquiry. Texts were collected from the statements made by native participants at public meetings, especially, but not only at those that were called to discuss crucial questions and problems confronted by the village. Texts were also collected from natives who discussed the history and lore of certain resource areas. These texts, too, led to further inquiry.

This methodology is the most crudely empirical of the three, and that is its strength. Anthropological observations, including various degrees of participation in some village activities (institutional, familial, subsistence), provide the richest possible understanding of village life. Quite often, phenomena are discovered from these data that could be discovered in no other way. Subjective understanding, beyond impressions, accrues to the observer and allows that person to interpret relations obtained from other methodologies and data sets.

The weaknesses of anthropological observations are obvious.

The data are synchronous—observations recorded at one particular time—and hence are inadequate for inferring change. The data are also prone to reactive arrangements, that is, they are subjective, not benefiting from the formal, structured interviews that are, ideally (but seldom in fact), controlled for bias, purged of error, and administered to all residents of a community. We can never be certain that what we saw and interpreted was what happened or what prompted the happening, or that what the investigator heard is what the villager said, or that the villager understood what the field worker requested, or, more generally, that the villager has not misled the fieldworker for some reason. Finally, anthropological observations are not easily analyzed, nor do they yield easily to formal analysis.

Protocol Observation

The investigators collected focused responses to several protocols, or sets of topics, that resemble an open-ended interview schedule. They were administered in conversations in any sequence that seemed to work. Some redundancy can be avoided in this fashion. Protocols were not administered as scheduled interviews or questionnaires. They were administered to determine the organizations and activities of the village institutions— including the economy, polity, religions, helping services, and sodalities—and also the family households and kinship networks. From the last mentioned, data were collected about how respondents used, or articulated with, village regional, state, and federal agencies and institutions. Household data were also collected on income and on the harvests, distribution (especially through networks of kinspeople, affines, and friends within and among villages), and consumption of renewable resources by species.

The strengths of these data are best illustrated by comparing them to the anthropological observations. Unlike anthropological observations, protocol observations allow repeatable contrasts among families, among institutions, and between families and institutions on many topics. This capability permits some generalizations. Yet protocol observations have weaknesses as well. Because they are synchronous measurements, they are inadequate for making inferences about change. They also have

weak construct validity, though not as weak as those of the questionnaires or scheduled interviews used in surveys that require multiple-choice responses and often trivialize the link between a phenomenon and its measure. The protocol observation, restricted in focus by design, can be understood, and connections among data can be interpreted from the understanding that accrues through anthropological observations. Thus, a narrative can develop from the interplay between the understanding acquired through anthropological observations and the information derived from protocol observations.

Archival Observations

Village-level data, some reported as time series, were collected and analyzed, including data on commercial and subsistence fisheries, health services, population, crime, causes of death, and educational institutions. Traditional ethnographic reports and contract research documents covering periods before 1982 were also collected and analyzed. Some of these data are longitudinal, constituting several observations of similar phenomena through time; others are merely temporal but from periods before 1982. But taken together, they allow us to contrast the past with the present. Hence, they can support inferences about change over time. Archival data and ethnographic reports have several weaknesses, however. Most of them have weak construct validity. Often, they have not been collected for the same purposes that motivate our study. Often the data pertain to the North Slope and Bering Strait regions, rather than to the particular villages, and therefore have little value. Most frequently, regular time series reporting is not available. And many of the longitudinal data sets we sought were not available in government archives. Nevertheless, when temporal data could be used to compare generalizations drawn from synchronic data, either to confirm or disconfirm them, they were used.

Comparisons Among the Three Villages

In contrast to the original case studies, in this study, we can benefit from comparisons and controls, albeit informal, among

topics and among villages. We are aware, as McEwen (1963) pointed out in his seminal analysis of validation problems in social anthropology, that primary comparative studies can be invalidated by the weaknesses of the case studies from which the data base is derived. The baselines from which this comparative study is drawn are empirical statements of "what is." Because the data are time-bound it would be a non sequitur to claim that our data support generalizations about the causes and direction of changes. Put simply, my empirical statements about the villages in 1982 (and subsequently) will require validity checks over time.

Cross-cultural methods have proved useful in evaluating hypotheses based on synchronic data. The three villages are from a continuous area. The data are from a single time period (synchronic) and are primary, having been collected firsthand in the field. And the data are analyzed informally, essentially by typological comparisons among the three villages.

Comparative analysis instills some confidence in our generalizations because claims about the relations among several variables in one village can be compared with the relations among the same variables in the other two villages. On a crude level, then, controls are exercised to determine whether, for example, an increase in household income correlates with an increase in preference hunting and a decrease in the hunting of nonpreferred species. When income is high and the number of species extracted is low, yet the bag size of preferred species is high, then we might suspect that a real relation, not a fortuitous one, exists among the three variables. And contrariwise, if income is low and the number of species extracted is high without evidence of clear preference in bag sizes, we are further emboldened in our claim. We can then introduce other variables to the hypothesis to determine their effects on the relations.

The idea, of course, is to exercise controls to determine whether the relations among the two or more variables are determinate, that is, whether one or some combination of variables accounts for the relations that we think are real. The introduction of more variables—such as amounts of cash income, availability of processed foods, increased population, decreased naturally occurring resources, dislike of subsistence

activities, increased full-time employment of family members, and the like—might either wash out (invalidate the relations) or more fully account for the relations. I have exercised controls to instill greater confidence that our generalizations are empirically warranted.

Appendix B
Obstacles in the Path of the Inquiry

Obstacles to research, all of them different but related to a common source—expropriation and domination by federal government, state government, and oil companies—were encountered in each village. Because of their severity, as well as their importance to this study, I will discuss them here.

The preparation for this primary, comparative analysis began just as other Alaskan contract research did, I imagine. The Alaska OCS's Social and Economic Studies Projects (SESP) office defined the scope of the research, requested and reviewed proposals, and awarded the contract in October 1981 to the John Muir Institute, without soliciting village participation. The Mineral Management Service's Alaska OCS Region assumed that the research would be conducted, regardless of the wishes of the villagers in the villages that eventually would be studied.

In the early 1080s, the SESP office was staffed by persons essentially untrained in the social sciences and inexperienced in conducting research among Eskimos. Persons who had no research experience and who held master's degrees in business administration, business economics (commerce), coastal zone management, and sociology joined with a few persons whose formal educations terminated with a bachelor's degree to administer an annual research budget totaling Well over one million dollars.

It is my impression that the Alaska OCS Region, as managed in 1981 and 1982, was similar to social and economic research offices at other regulatory agencies throughout the nation then and now. The individual and collective ignorance of the studies office staff in the early 1080s was, itself, a major obstacle to overcome. The record of our contractor-researcher relations is tedious. I will spare the reader the details, although I provide an

example of bureaucratic decision making and its aftermath to convey some impression of the situation.

Before doing so, it is fair and correct to report that by the mid-1980s, some high-ranking officials at Alaska's OCS office recognized that some big changes had to be made in the SESP office. A new chief was appointed, and he soon replaced older staff members with two persons, both with a Ph.D. in anthropology. Each had extensive research experience among Native Americans. Things could not change overnight inasmuch as some projects of little scientific value were under way and others were out for bid. But by 1986, a very different social studies section was exercising dose controls over several important social science projects. In my view, the benefits to Alaska's natives from the research that is currently under way because of the reorganization and restaffing of the SESP office will be considerable.

But now a caveat from experience, government bureaus being what they are: today's gains can be lost more abruptly than they were gained. An office can be gutted if a couple of key persons leave government service or even move up the administrative career ladder. The two most competent persons in the studies office in the early 1980s left government service before the research was completed on which this book is based. Things got worse for the project rather than better because of these changes.

Let me return to my example of agency obstacles in 1982. As principal investigator, I proposed to MMS that funds be allocated so that several weeks prior to the initiation of research, the villages could be visited, the research could be discussed, and village approval and cooperation could be sought. The funds were denied. However, the director of the Alaska OCS Region informed the villagers of the study through letters sent in late November to the leaders of several village and regional organizations. Some village organizations did not receive letters. Some native organizations, on receipt of the letters, replied with queries, but they did not receive responses. Unknown to the researchers, the letters arrived shortly after public hearings on federal Oil Lease Sale 57, affecting the western Norton Sound-eastern Bering Sea region, had taken place in Unalak-

leet and in other villages of the region. Both Unalakleet and Gambell would be affected by the lease sale.

We did not know how the hearings were conducted, or how the activities of oil companies and of federal and state agencies were perceived by natives, but we were soon to learn. The following example from the village of Unalakleet will help the reader understand the meaning of "obstacles to research."

Unalakleet

In October 1981, the Alaska OCS Region held a public hearing in Unalakleet to gain public comments on the draft of the final environmental impact report that the office had prepared in anticipation of Oil Lease Sale 57. As is Eskimo custom, village leaders and residents planned for a twelve-hour, or perhaps even longer, public discussion of the report. Eskimos analyze well, speak elegantly, are articulate, and desire consensus. They expected a long session, because that is their custom in public deliberation but also because they had so many questions that they wanted aired.

Natives wanted to know how industry or the government would control oil spills during gale winds, when visibility is zero for weeks, or when oil is locked in ice and pushed by high winds and currents. They wanted to know what, in the event of an oil spill that settled on the kelp beds, would happen to the commercial herring fishery and to the seals, which the villagers hunt for subsistence and which follow the herring into their spawning grounds near shore. They wanted to know what would happen to the kelp, on which herring spawn, and which, as roe-on-kelp, is collected for subsistence and also sold commercially. They wanted to know what would happen to the clams, mussels, and crabs, which waterfowl, walrus, and villagers eat, if those marine invertebrates had to be extracted through, or if they were covered by, oil. They wanted to know the consequences to the villagers if herring, seals, and birds were oil tainted. They were particularly nettled because the report did not mention bearded seals (ugruk ) as resident to eastern Norton Sound, since they are the preferred seal hunted by Unalakleet residents. They wanted to know what would happen to the Unalak-

leet River if oil developments occurred nearby. For instance, would the salmon fishery be destroyed? What would happen to housing and housing prices? How would residents cope with inflation? And so on.^[1]

Much to the dismay of the villagers, the public hearing produced neither discussion nor answers, village leaders later told us. Villagers had expected to challenge the report and get answers to the larger issues that they felt threatened their subsistence economy and their way of life. The MMS representatives listened to testimony but did not respond. According to villagers in attendance, the representatives conveyed the impression that they were bored, perhaps disdainfully so, and flew out of the village after two hours of testimony.

Soon thereafter, village leaders were notified about MMS's intention to conduct an analysis of the importance of naturally occurring, renewable resources to Unalakleet society and culture and of the consequences to both if there were disruptions to the harvest of those resources.

The broad question that was posed to us was, "Are naturally occurring, renewable resources important to the villagers in Unalakleet, Gambell, and Wainwright?" The short answer is yes. Why is it, then, that when initially proposed to the villages by letter from the OCS Region in late November 1981 and by a following letter from me in late December 1981, this study was disapproved by the village of Unalakleet, mistrusted by the village of Gambell, and essentially ignored by the village of Wainwright?

The people of Unalakleet have been angered and embittered by public hearings, and in the recent past, they claimed to have seen several researchers move in and out of Unalakleet, conducting studies in haste. According to several knowledgeable hunters and fishers in Unalakleet, the researchers sought villager help, then reported only what they had been told by village residents—bringing nothing new to the research or the analysis, hence not teaching the villagers anything new—and,

[1] See the public testimony, written and oral, offered by Unalakleet residents on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement proposed for OCS Proposed Oil and Gas Lease Sale No. 57 (Norton Sound), October 1981, Unalakleet, Alaska.

in instances such as the environmental impact statement for sale 57, issuing research reports about their region that contained inaccurate information. Several village leaders clearly expressed the view that reports contracted by state and federal agencies have not met their expectations. Some reports had the potential to harm Unalakleet residents, and many of those residents believed that certain of the fish and game quotas and seasons established by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game specifically underestimated prior use rates in Unalakleet as well as current needs.

So a very puzzling contradiction obtains. By early 1982, Unalakleet residents had been studied with regularity, but there are only a few tallies in government reports covering many more villages than Unalakleet to suggest that there have been any studies of the Unalakleet community at all.^[2] The connection between the studies and the regulations imposed by state and federal governments, as well as the threats to resources and community integrity by large-scale oil developments, has been made by the residents of Unalakleet.

It is not surprising that the people of Unalakleet told us that they are tired of being studied and that they challenge the presumption that their needs can be defined by, and that the satisfaction of those needs can be regulated by, outsiders. It is not surprising, either, that village leaders and other residents thought the sole purpose of the study that we proposed to conduct was to help the Alaska OCS Region to obtain information that would allow oil leases to be sold in Norton Sound.

The study was to commence in the three villages on February 1, 1982. The Unalakleet City Council and the IRA government did not swing into action until about a fortnight prior to the start-up date. First at the IRA meeting and the following night at a meeting of the city council, each attended by over a hundred people, the leaders of those governing bodies called for rejection of the study. Their requests were sustained unanimously.

The IRA president relayed these decisions by letter dated

[2] See Ellana (1980); Hemming, Harrison, and Braund (1978); Schwarz, Lean, and Bird (1981); Schwarz et al. (1982a , 1982b ); and Sherrod (1982).

January 29, 1982, to the funding agency and to the John Muir Institute. The mails were slow, and notice was not received until my associate, Jean Maxwell, arrived in the village and was informed by the mayor, the chairman of the Unalakleet Native Corporation, and the president of the IRA of the villager's decisions. I spoke by phone to each of the village leaders, explaining how we bid on, had been awarded, and would direct the study. I disclaimed any connection to oil companies or any connection to MMS's Alaska OCS Region office, claiming only that I and the John Muir Institute insisted on conducting research independent of government or corporation direction.

I arranged to meet with Unalakleet leaders to discuss the research and the feasibility of conducting it. I also sent copies of publications of past research that had been conducted by me and by Maxwell. The leaders met with me and agreed to reconsider their decision. Maxwell repaired to Nome for a cooling-off period but soon found herself in Gambell, helping us to get that project going after its very rocky start there. I met with the Unalakleet leaders again in March, after they had thought about the issue. At the second meeting, we were invited in with the promise of assistance in conducting the research, and on April 1, Maxwell took up residence in Unalakleet and resumed the research.

The actions of the villagers are particularly poignant. First, they insisted that research would not be conducted without their informed consent and their participation. Second, and equally important, the villagers spoke directly to the significance that they attach to subsistence resources. Acute concern was voiced about the study because of the presumed connections among the John Muir Institute, the Alaska OCS Region, and the transnational oil corporations. Moreover, deep concern was voiced about the study because its subject—subsistence resources and their uses—is so much a part of villagers' lives, as it has been from time immemorial. Their experiences with resource studies have shown them that these studies are inaccurate and misrepresentative to some degree and that they never convey a recognizable picture of the place of subsistence activities in village life. The village leaders clearly did not want to contribute to a study whose errors of omission and commis-

sion could contribute to government decisions on offshore gas and oil development that would adversely affect their own and their children's lives.

The study was reconsidered and approved in large part because villagers wanted to have subsistence activities and their community portrayed accurately. For their own protection in court, if necessary, although they were pessimistic about judicial relief, village leaders wanted to be sure that an empirically warranted ethnographic account would be presented of subsistence activities and the roles of naturally occurring resources within Unalakleet and of the significant symbols, or shared meanings, of the Unalakleet community in regard to those resources and activities.

Village leaders could not, nor did they even try to, control participation in the study or determine the course of its outcome. They agreed to critique draft reports and to provide information to correct empirical and analytical errors. The documents had to benefit them as well as the OCS and the environmental documentation process. As it turned out, those leaders were far too busy with their obligations to hunt and fish for their families, to fish commercially, and to lead community government organizations to do more than provide counsel and direction when such was needed. They were cooperative and helpful but not collaborators.

We soon learned that approval to conduct the study was not tantamount to a willingness on the part of the residents to participate in the study. There were many obstacles to overcome in Unalakleet and elsewhere.

Gambell

As we packed our bags and headed for Nome in March, our field researcher in Gambell decided to quit. During February, he had not received any assistance, let alone cooperation, from village leaders or other residents, save for a person who rented him a house. At that point, we had to quell the Gambell villagers' doubts about the study and enlist their support for its continuation.

The issues that animated Gambell's leaders were the threats

of federal intervention, state intervention, and oil company activities. They feared that their island would be expropriated and the land and sea would be fouled. They felt beleaguered by studies and reports that did them no good when state and federal decisions were made to regulate the animals of the sea or the oil and gas reserves beneath it.

Ron Little, Jean Maxwell, and I went to Gambell, Ron and I at the request of Gambell's leaders. In a series of meetings with village leaders, including a command performance before all members of the boards of directors and councils of the city government, the native corporation, and the IRA government, I was asked to explain the value of the research, of our presence, and of their answers.

Initially, we made little progress, although we learned the reasons for hostility toward the study, which were expressed, simply, as noncompliance. At that public meeting, in which I was the defendant, or so it seemed, we reached some mutual understanding about what the research would be. We explained that if our data were not used, or were used improperly in the environmental impact statements that were to be prepared by the federal government, we would assist the village in the federal courts if they wanted to bring suit.

The villagers proved to be tough-minded and also frightened by the future prospects. After an hour or so of questions, village leaders began to focus on the legal avenues open to them if they were to protect their island and their millennia-old subsistence economy. They wanted to know whether they could extricate themselves from ANCSA and from the village profit corporations that they were forced to create. They wondered if they could reconstitute IRA governments as they were prior to 1971: institutions possessing executive, legislative, and judicial powers. And they wanted to return St. Lawrence Island to federal trust status to avert the possibility of its alienation. They asked how they could free themselves of ADF&G and federal controls over wildlife. Our ignorance did not allow us to answer all their questions.

I solicited legal opinions for the villagers, but even before doing so, the village leaders decided to cooperate with the

study. Natives joined our research team, as did Lynn Robbins to conduct research and direct the native researchers.

Wainwright

Wainwright villagers had already experienced many indirect social impacts from oil development at Prudhoe Bay when we arrived. The social costs of these experiences had been high, although the obvious advantages in jobs, community infrastructure, service deliveries, and the like, had also been high. The mixture of deleterious and beneficial consequences made for confusion and anger. Change had occurred rapidly and dramatically, fueling insecurity about the present, as unearned income and transfer projects of various types waxed and waned, and nourishing anxiety about the future of dwindling oil reserves (hence dwindling tax revenues available to the North Slope Borough) and the consequences for village and regional corporations from ANCSA's provisions for 1991.

The nonnative population, mostly transient, had grown to 22 percent of the village total. Experts of various sorts—some delivering social services, some conducting research, some seeking to conduct business, many interested in oil extraction (onshore and offshore), some working for regulatory agencies—dropped into the village for short visits. The increased numbers of outsiders and the alien influences that they wielded threatened Wainwright life. Strangers were met with suspicion and some resistance. We were met with heavy doses of both. The obstacle in Wainwright was getting the research headed in the fight direction.

Whereas Unalakleet initially denied us entry and Gambell offered no assistance until we met its collective challenge to defend ourselves by making an acceptable case for the study, Wainwright and the NSB officials, with one exception, treated us with benign neglect, from beginning to end. One month after the study was under way, the NSB science advisor, a non-native professional, demanded to know what we were up to, why we were up to it, and why he was not consulted so that he could give us his approval or rejection. Our full replies to his

queries—including the information that the NSB had been contacted by several letters, telephone calls, and one visit—and a request for assistance went unanswered. We learned, rather casually and not from the NSB science advisor, that the borough had commissioned its own study of Wainwright subsistence one year earlier, to be made by Richard Nelson, whose previous work on ice hunting at Wainwright is a classic (Nelson 1969). We were stumbling over Nelson's tracks.

Wainwrighters felt that they had been "studied to death." And they also felt that research conducted among them benefits the researcher, the organization that funds it, and the oil companies but not the community. Sometimes researchers were met with hostility, but usually they were simply ignored.

Obstacles to Gaining Help From Village Leaders

Leaders in Unalakleet and Gambell were not able to collaborate fully with us. They desired to, but they could not. They are different from other village residents because they work long hours to guide their village institutions. But they are the same as other village residents, too: they hunt, fish, and extract wild plants and eggs for subsistence; they maintain and repair their motorized equipment and subsistence technology; and they are underemployed. Isolation, in conjunction with full rounds of subsistence activities and the sharing of the bag or catch that accompanies them (the attributes that are respected and desired), makes it difficult for them to be fully informed. Moreover, the structure of dependency in native Alaska is such that natives will undoubtedly stay uninformed and powerless. They are powerless over federal and state decisions and most oil company activities; they are unable to acquire much of the information possessed by oil companies; and they lack funds to acquire information or competent legal defense.^[3]

[3] See the epilogue for our assessment Of a suit brought by the people of Gambell against the secretary of the interior and several oil companies (as intervenors). The worst fears of the Gambell residents about the abuse of environmental impact statements and the power and arrogance of the federal government and oil companies have all proved to be justified.

The Specific Obstacle: Subsistence

Our study focused on the topics that are peculiarly sensitive in the arctic and subarctic today: naturally occurring, renewable resources, subsistence harvests of those resources, and the sharing and other uses of them.

The subsistence studies at the three villages proved to be more difficult and more sensitive than other topics funded by the Alaska OCS Region. According to many contract researchers in Alaska, they could not be done. And according to natives, they should not be done.

State regulations on the commercial harvests of fish in all Alaskan waters and the subsistence harvests of fish in some Alaskan waters; regulations on moose, caribou, deer, and bird harvests; and the studies conducted by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game to monitor and regulate the wild species are all seen as direct threats to the cornerstone of the natives' social lives, their very existence. Federal regulation of marine mammals has caused particular concern and bitterness among North Slope and Bering Strait communities.

Obstacles Encountered While Under Way

Eskimo villagers carefully protect the privacy of their personal and family lives. Village life is carried on at such close quarters, often with heavy demands on people's emotional energies and their physical and material resources, that individuals and families create and maintain, as best they can, a bit of private space for performing daily activities and for grappling with unusual circumstances as they arise.

Subsistence activities are family, friendship, and clan centered. They are times of busy preparation and labor cooperation and also times of pure enjoyment, eagerly anticipated. Outsiders should join them only when invited. Moreover, many tasks require courage, such as embarking astride snowmachines on a 200-mile caribou hunt in -20°F temperatures and high winds. Other tasks in addition require considerable preparation and agility, such as whale hunting and walrus hunting. For example, a person does not want to get his feet tangled in the

harpoon and float lines that are being pulled from a boat at breakneck speeds by animals to which they are attached, who range in weight from 3,000 to 60,000 pounds. Outsiders, especially academic researchers, do not easily instill the confidence that they can help in many crucial subsistence tasks, and until they are invited along, they can only hear about them, rather than see them performed or participate in them.

It took time to gain sufficient confidence to be invited on subsistence harvest trips in Gambell, Wainwright, and Unalakleet and even more time to conduct family interviews. Indeed, as we plunged into our research projects, the responses from natives in Wainwright and Unalakleet were similar to the responses we initially had received from the Gambell and Unalakleet leadership, namely, an unwillingness to participate in the study that often suggested defensiveness, if not hostility.

Several times, the research teams found themselves trying to dispel the notion that they were associated with the oil companies or with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. For various purposes, representatives of both groups were in and out of the villages around the time the studies were beginning.

Government Regulatory Authorities as Obstacles

The federal government and the Alaska state government affect Alaskan native communities in many ways but especially through federal oil and gas lease sales and through fish and wildlife regulations, including harvest quotas. In all villages, the residents resent state-imposed and federal-imposed rules to regulate wildlife for commercial and subsistence purposes.

An example of the willingness of natives to violate regulations under some circumstances is well represented by an incident involving a bowhead whale. The bowhead is the most revered animal, symbolically, and the most desired animal for its "taste" among Alaska's coastal native villages. They seldom migrate through Norton Sound, but in 1980, several did. Hunters from the village of Shaktoolik, close to Unalakleet, led by an experienced whaler from the North Alaskan whaling community of

Barrow, killed and landed a bowhead whale. This violated the regulations of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

Natives in all villages fear the disruptions to harvests that may occur from offshore as well as onshore oil- and gas-related activities, including staging areas and recreational uses. They assume that such activities, both onshore and offshore, will affect naturally occurring species. The growth of the public sector, alone, including population growth, will affect native access to harvests, they aver.

This is the context into which we stepped. We did not have to create any obstacles for the research. The political economy beat us to it.

Appendix C
The Natural Environments

The natural environments of the three villages are sufficiently different to warrant more detailed discussion than is provided in the main text. We can begin with two givens: (1) the winter pack ice has exercised significant influence on the ways in which contemporary villagers and their predecessors have sustained themselves on the North Slope, on St. Lawrence Island, and at the head of Norton Sound by harvesting naturally occurring resources over several millennia; and (2) the options among the extractable resources available to the residents of Gambell during the long, harsh winters are fewer than the options available to residents of Wainwright, and the options available to the residents of Wainwright are considerably fewer than those that are available to the residents of Unalakleet.

The environments in which the three villages are situated will be assessed separately. Some comparisons, including tables tallying the availability of resources and the degree to which they are harvested locally will conclude this Appendix. Inasmuch as common names for species are used throughout the text, common names are associated with their scientific binomials in this section, including the tables.

In the following brief assessments, there will be occasion to use the definitions employed by Shelford (1964). Habitat refers to the abiological aspects of an area, composed of a surface with its minerals and climate. Food chains refer to the flow of energy through plants, herbivores, and carnivores. Dominance , or dominant organisms , are the predominant species found in a general habitat. Plants commonly dominate terrestrial habitats, but animals may do so as well, through their feeding habits. Influence , or influent , is an animal species that commonly affects the abundance or activities of other species without determining their presence in an area. Characteristic species are those usually found in a habitat. Climax is the last stage in a series of stages through

which the animal and plant species in an area pass. Biome is the largest community of relations among plants and animals, such as tundra. Association is the relation among the dominant species of a biome. Facies refers to associations within a subarea of a biome.

Gambell

St. Lawrence Island is primarily basaltic, the result of several volcanic eruptions, some quite recent. The northwestern end of the island is composed of igneous and sedimentary mineral formations. Gambell itself is located on a large gravel bar, which is devoid of bushes or flowering plants, although Troutman Lake on the edge of the town is host to some subarctic plants. The Kukuglit Mountains, themselves a series of volcanic cones, are situated in the center of the island. The mountains are barren, and at their base, the Bering Sea Tundra biome fits the description of "barren ground." St. Lawrence Island is treeless and has many lakes, ponds, and poorly drained sloughs. The Bering Sea Tundra is distinctive from the tundra regions farther north because the wet regions support a mix of flowering and berry-producing subarctic plants, which themselves host a wider variety of insects, including bees and flies that look like bees.

Gambell's climate is harsh: it is cool and moist in the summer (34°F average minimum to 48°F average maximum), cold in the winter (-2°F average minimum to 10°F average maximum), and fog enshrouded or cloudy all but about 30 days per year. Winds of 18 knots are average; frequent gale forces of 80 or 90 knots create violent storms on the Bering Sea.

Bering Sea ice is a special problem because of the frequent warming trends. Either warm currents or warm winds from the South Bering Sea and the Alaska Peninsula cause near omnipresent fog conditions but also cause considerable movements of ice. Ice leads near Gambell open rapidly and often, but they can close very rapidly, stranding boatmen. Or boatmen in quest of walrus and seals may venture into a lead, only to be quickly engulfed in heavy fog. Summer walrus hunts conducted several

miles from shore are always subject to quick and violent storms or to the still of a heavy fog, which may not lift for days. In 1982, one Gambell walrus hunter told me about running aground on the Siberian coast when he thought he was headed back to Gambell.

Among the characteristic subarctic flora near the island's ponds and lakes are hummocks of willow (Salix pulchra ), reindeer moss (lichens; Cladonia spp .), and bearberry/crowberry (Arctostaphylor alpina, Empetrum nigrum ). In the moist tundra and on the better-drained flanks of mountains there are growths of cloudberry (Rubus chamaemorus ), low-bush cranberry (Vaccinium vitis-idaea ), dwarf fireweed (unident), brook saxifrage (Saxifrage spp .), sour dock (Rumex arcticus trauta ), mountain sorrel (Oxyria digyna ), and king's crown, or nose root (Sedum rosea ). An unidentified subarctic plant similar to Rose arena appears throughout the island, as do several variants of the subarctic Bering Sea Spring Beauty (Claytonia acutifolia ), wild potatoes (Claytonia tuberosa ), and two types of wild celery (Angelica lucida, Lugusam hultenii ).

St. Lawrence Island hosts few land mammals. The principal species are the tundra vole (Microtus oeconomus innuitus ) and the arctic fox subspecies (Alopex lagopus lagopus ), which is the major influent and feasts on the voles. In 1903, the tamed reindeer (Rangifer tarandus ), a small version of Stone's caribou (Rangifer tarandus stonei ), was introduced to the island. A herd of about 200 animals is managed by Savoonga herders. During the winter, polar bears (Ursus maritimus ) migrate southward over the ice to the St. Lawrence coast, where they hunt for seals and are hunted in turn by islanders.

It is the rich sea life that distinguishes St. Lawrence Island food chains, brings millions of nesting and migratory birds to the island each spring, has provided the basis for human existence on the island for two millennia, and is most threatened by off-related operations. The Bering Sea near the island is rich in marine plants, which are harvested for food by islanders, provide food for some birds and fish, and provide protection for fish. Natives collect six varieties of kelp (Fucus spp .), several long-stemmed plants (unident), some of which are segmented, and several plants that attach to rocks and are neither long stemmed nor segmented (unident).

The Bering Sea near the island is also home to some Pacific walrus (Odobenus rosmarus divergens ) year-round. The migrating herds in the U.S. territorial waters of the Bering Sea from spring through fall are estimated at 120,000. Vast numbers of the migratory walrus pass by Gambell feasting on marine invertebrates and seals in the ice-free season, usually soon after the bowhead whales move past. Males average 2,200 pounds, females 1,800 pounds. Walrus is the principal source of animal protein for the islanders. The large bearded seals (Erignathus barbatus ) are less frequently sighted during the winter than are the small spotted seals (Phoca largha ). Ribbon seals (Phoca fasciata ) and ringed seals (Phoca hispida ) are usually sighted during their northward migrations in the summer months. Both spedes are relatively scarce.

Bowhead whales (Balaena mysticetus ) are treasured animals, preferred for taste over all others and central in native symbolism, community solidarity, and festivals. The bowheads migrate past St. Lawrence Island each spring as they journey from the winter feeding grounds in the Navarin Basin (southwestern Bering Sea) to their summer feeding grounds in the Chukchi-Beaufort seas. Gray whales (Eschrichtius robustus ) migrate past the island during the summer on their long journey from the Gulf of California. These whales do not provide a preferred meat and are not currently important sources of protein for the islanders, although they are hunted by them. Minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata ), although considered a delicacy, are also hunted minimally, as are beluga whales (Delphinapterus leucas ). Belugas do not migrate past the island regularly or in significant numbers. Grays are not preferred. Minkes and belugas are desired, but minkes appear infrequently or in small numbers, and belugas appear even less frequently.

Extractable fish resources in the inland and coastal shore waters are sufficient to lure natives to summer camps, but the short course rivers do not support large numbers of anadromous species. Two anadromous char, Dolly Varden (Salvelinus malma ) and arctic (S. alpinus ), whitefish (Coregonus nasus, C. pidschian ), and burbot (Lota lota ) are available in the rivers, whereas resident saffron or tomcod (Elaginus gracilis ), smelt (Osmerus mordax ), and capelin (Mallotus villosus ) species are caught dose to the coastline and in the ice-covered lagoons during winter.

The Bering Sea beyond the coast, in contrast, is a very rich fishing ground whose resources are not tapped by St. Lawrence residents. The waters near St. Lawrence Island are frequented by all five species of Pacific salmon, dog, chum or calico (Oncorhynchus keta ), pink or humpback (O. gorbuscha ), king or chinook (O. tshawytscha ), red or sockeye (O. nerka ), and silver or coho (O. kisutch ). It has not been established whether any of the species spawn in St. Lawrence waters, but at least four species pass by the island or enter the lagoons at sufficiently close distances to be caught in set nets.

The saltwaters also are inhabited by migrating Pacific herring (Clupea harengus pallasi ), Bering cisco (Coregonus autumnalis ), and sheefish (Stenodus leucichthys ). They also host resident fish such as Pacific halibut (Hippoglossus stenolepis ), arctic cod (Boreogardus saida ), sculpin (Myoxocephalus scorpius groenlandicus, Cottus asper, Cottus cognatus, Leptocottus armatus, Myoxocephalus quadricorhis ), sole (Limanda aspera, L. proboscidea ) flounder (Liopsetta glacialis, Platichthys stellatus ), and plaice (Pleuronects quadrituberculatus ). Some are not harvested by Gambel natives, but those that are not, such as herring, bring thousands of seals to the island area during the late spring as they head to and from their spawning grounds. They also provide food for the diving seabirds and waterfowl.

The resident bottom fish are harvested by walrus and by seals, as are the many species and varieties of marine invertebrates that occur both near the shore and offshore. Marine invertebrates include eight varieties of dams (Macoma spp., Mya spp .); three varieties of crabs, including tanner (Chinoecetes opilio ), blue king (Paralithodes platypus ), and red king (P. camtschatica ); and one each of mussels, scallops, sea worms, sea urchins, and starfish (Asterias spp. ). There are several varieties of shrimp as well, including a species preferred by natives (Pandalus goniurus ). Gambell residents harvest all marine invertebrates that they can catch by hook and line, find in the stomachs of sea mammals, collect as beach throw, or pull from rocks.

The nineteen seabird species that nest along the cliffs and in the sloughs in summer constitute over 60 percent of all seabirds in the northern Bering Sea (est. 2.7 million). Many other species, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, migrate

across the island. Principal species are auklets (crested [Aethia cristatella ], least [A. pusilla ], parakeet [Cyclorrhynchus psittacula ]), pelagic cormorant (Phalacrocorax pelagicus ), pigeon guillemot (Cephus columba ), gulls (glaucous [Larushyperboreus , mew [L. canus ], herring [L . aragentatus ], sabine [Xe'ma sabina ]), murres (common [Uria aalge ] and thick-billed [U. lomvia ]), terns (Aleutian [Sterna aleutica ] and arctic [S. paradisaea ]), puffins (horned [Fratercula corniculata ] and tufted [Lunda cirrhata ]), and kittiwakes (Rissa tridactyla ). In addition, harlequin ducks (Histrionicus histrionicus ), common eider ducks (Somateria mollissima ), peregrine falcons (Falco peregrinus ), and gyrfalcons (Falco rusticolus ) nest on the island.

Migrating waterfowl harvested by natives include many varieties of ducks, geese, loons, and cranes. The duck species are eider (Somateria spectabilis, S. fischeri, Polysticta stelleri ), oldsquaw (Clangula hyemalis ), scoters (common [Melanitta nigra ] and surf [M. perspicillata ]), and shovelers (Anas clypeata ). Geese are brant (Branta bernicla ), emperor (Philacte canagica ), and snow (Chen caerulescens ). The loons are common (Gavia immer ) and red-throated (G. stellata ). Cranes are sandhill (Grus canadensis ).

St. Lawrence Island is graced with austere beauty, but its modest resources, except for walrus, hold little prospects for local residents to harvest and sell as commodities in a market economy. With proper capitalization, they could venture into commercial fishing on the Bering Sea, but they would have to do so at the very time the bowhead whale and walrus are available, and they would have to forsake their normal subsistence practices during the ice-free months as well.

Because of the island's location and the villagers' choice in 1971 to forsake ANCSA cash for title to the island, the residents must depend on naturally occurring resources for their very existence. They sell by-products from one of those resources, walrus, to acquire the technology that assists them in the acquisition of more naturally occurring resources.

Unalakleet

Unalakleet is a Yupik word, which translates to "place where the east wind blows." The village of Unalakleet is located on a

spit at the mouth of the Unalakleet River. A large lagoon has formed behind the village, behind the spit on the opposite side of the river mouth, and upriver for about two miles. The river valley is wide and is cut by dozens of meandering channels. Hills rise to the south and north, eventually climbing into the mountains, upriver toward the headwaters. The taller hills and mountains through which the Unalakleet River systems flow are forested, but the lower hills and valleys are tundra. Average snowfall is about 41 inches annually. The annual precipitation is about 14 inches, whereas the mean annual temperature is about 27°F. Winter low and high temperatures average -4°F and 11°F; summer, 47°F and 62°F. This is a mild climate for so northerly a location. "Mild" is a relative term as used here, inasmuch as comparisons are being made with the Continental Tundra regions of the North Slope and the Bering Sea Tundra of St. Lawrence Island.

Bering Sea ice forms each fall and breaks up and thaws each spring. Thus, it is "new" ice annually. The Unalakleet River and Norton Sound begin freezing (icing over) in October. Because of the winter winds, which characteristically blow from the east down the Unalakleet River at over 17 knots an hour but which frequently achieve gale forces of 60 knots or more, the shore pack ice along the spit is often blown from its moorings and pushed westward into the sound. This ice was dislodged repeatedly from 1978 through 1082. This action renders seal hunting hazardous and also poses a threat to the village. The hazards are posed by ice being blown from east to west but also by violent storms in the Bering Sea which can blow the floating pack ice eastward onto the spit, as it did in 1071, destroying houses, caches, smokehouses, drying racks, and other structures.

Sometimes breakup does not occur until early June (as was the case in 1982), but Norton Sound ice formations can break up as early as late April. Regardless, Unalakleet is highly influenced by breakup of the Unalakleet River but even more so by breakup on the Yukon, which characteristically occurs in mid-May, discharging enormous quantities of ice into southern Norton Sound. If the breakup of the Yukon follows the breakup of the sound, the ice floes negatively influence the

greens collecting, bird hunting, herring roe collecting, and fishing engaged in by Unalakleet villagers. But those same ice floes positively influence bearded seal (ugruk) hunting by creating "ugruk ice," that is, floes on which bearded seals have hauled out and can be located by hunters.

Willow and birch shrub faciations cover much of the area, with willows growing rather dense and from 5 to 15 feet tall. The willows and birch shrub provide cover for the dominant organisms, willow ptarmigan (Lagopus lagopus ) and the snowshoe hare (Lepus othus othus ). They also provide browse for a minor influent, the Alaska-Yukon moose (Alces alces gigas ). Hummocks between the willows support tall grasses and arctic heath plants. Constituents in the facies include Betula glandulosa siberica (birch), Salix pulchra (willow), and Carex cryptocarpa (sedges, a favorite of moose). A layer of lichen rests beneath these dominant plants. The shrub vegetation gives way to Picea glauca (white spruce) fades at the higher elevations in the hills and mountains. Spruce grouse (Canachites canadensis ), rock ptarmigan (Lagopus mutus), and arctic hares (Lepus arcticus ) are characteristic animals in the spruce facies.

Snails, slugs, and centipedes; many flowering plants, including Heracleum maximum (masterwort), Iris spp . (flag), Epilobium spicatum (willow-herb), Aconitum spp ., and Delphinium spp . (larkspur); legumes, including Campanula (bellflower) and Pedicularis (wood-betony); and berries, especially Rubus chamaemorus (cloudberry or salmonberry), Vaccinium uliginosum (bilberry or blueberry), and Vaccinium vitis-idaea (low-bush and mountain cranberry) are all abundant. Caribou (Rangifer tarandus stonei ) are the major influent herbivore, whereas wolves (Canis lupus ) and brown bears (Ursus horribilis kidderi ) are the major carnivore and omnivore influents in all facies of the biome.

The shore and bluff regions of Norton Sound, the waters, ice, and islands of eastern Norton Sound, and the Unalakleet and Egavik River systems are the other major aspects of the environment that are lived in and used by Unalakleet villagers. The river systems host all five species of Pacific salmon, including king, silver, chum, pink, and red. Pink spawning runs are especially strong, whereas sockeye runs are very limited. Sock-eye salmon require lakes in which to spawn, and only one body

of water in the Unalakleet system appears to be adequate for that purpose. The river also hosts two anadromous char (locally known as "trouts"), arctic and Dolly Varden, that feast on salmon eggs and fry. Burbot (Lota lota ), also known as lush fish and ling cod, and whitefish (Coregonus spp .) also occur in the Unalakleet River. Ponds and poorly drained marshes in the estuary are homes to Alaska blackfish (Dallia pectoralis ), which formerly were taken in basket traps but are seldom extracted currently.

Kelp in the sound provides food, protection, or spawning grounds for several species of saltwater fish, including herring (Clupea harengus ), rainbow smelt, pond smelt (Hypomesus olidus ), and saffron cod (locally referred to as tomcod). The rocky shoreline provides nests for sculpin (family Cottidae , several species). The sound's floor supports several species of invertebrates, including tanner crabs, red king crabs, clams (Macoma calcerea ), and snails, shrimp, sea worms, and mussels (several species of each). These marine invertebrates are important in the local food chain, providing principal food sources for several of the species of sea mammals and birds that inhabit the waters of eastern Norton Sound for part of the year or stay year-round and haul out on Besboro Island and on the ice throughout the region.

The sea mammals that harvest fish and shellfish in the area include spotted seals, ringed seals, bearded seals, beluga whales, and, in ever-increasing numbers, walrus. Local natives complain that belugas have seldom entered the Unalakleet River or migrated past the coast since the late 1970s because of increased boat traffic and noise in the eastern part of the sound. They hold this to be true for minke whales as well. Belugas and minke whales are highly prized.

Sea ducks, such as eider (all species cited above), bay ducks, such as the greater scaup (Aythya marila ), and even surface ducks, such as mallards (Anas platyrhynchos ), dive for shellfish (mollusks, principally) and fish in Norton Sound. Whistling swans (Olor columbianus ) dive for vegetation.

The river systems and the tidal flats of eastern Norton Sound provide spring and fall fly-ways for many species of waterfowl (twelve species of ducks, five species of geese, one species

of swan, and one species of cranes) and shorebirds (snipes, sandpipers, galwits, dowitchers, whimbrels). They also provide nesting areas for a wide variety of birds, including eight species of raptors, two species of gulls and loons, one species of murres and puffins, and several kinds of ducks, geese, cranes, and swans.

The ecology of the eastern Norton Sound region provides several integrated food chains that link animals of the land to animals of the sea, animals of the sea to plants of the sea, animals of the land to plants of the land, and so on. The place of the Unalakleet villagers within these chains is important, inasmuch as their subsistence economy, their commercial fishery, and their commercial trapping activities are dependent on naturally occurring resources.

Wainwright

The village of Wainwright is located on a peninsula separating the brackish Kuuk Lagoon from the Chukchi Sea. The lagoon expands more than 50 miles inland before it narrows into a complex maze of inlet streams and rivers, the principal one being the Kuuk River itself, which rises another 80 miles inland. Major tributaries of the Kuuk rise in a 110-mile arc around it. The Kuuk system is a passageway to the foothills of the Brooks Range and to the range itself, which lies about 100 miles south of the village.

Wainwright villagers extract resources from a vast area, which extends at least 30 miles offshore, 200 miles along the coast, and, on occasion, 120 miles inland. Their homeland biome is bilberry—caribou—reindeer moss (lichen). A thick mat of dead twigs and roots hosts the lichens, mosses, and low bushes. The tundra plants of importance to birds, bears, rodents, and caribou may include, in addition to bilberry (or blueberry), cloudberry (or salmonberry), low bush cranberry, wild spinach (Rumex arcticus ), wild rhubarb (Polygonum alaskanum ), and sour dock (Rumex arcticus trauta ).

Spotted among the maze of rivers are sloughs, poorly drained ponds, and lakes, around which grow sedges and grasses. The arctic fox subspecies (Alopex lagopus innuitus ) is a minor influent,

and lemmings (Dicrostonyx torquatus ), which are very abundant, fall prey to foxes as well as to several raptors but especially the year-round resident snowy owl (Nyctea scandiaca ).

Crude oil often bubbles to the surface in and around Wainwright, and within ten miles of the village, there are three inactive coal mines. There are also large gravel deposits in the immediate area. Gravel is a requisite as a foundation for all road and building construction in the arctic. It provides a smooth surface that is capable of expanding as the capillaries of water, which ooze into it during summer thaws, freeze during the winter.

The mean annual temperature at Wainwright is 11.7°F. The seasonal mean minimum temperature is -22°F during winter, and the seasonal mean maximum is 45°F during summer. The far northerly location yields nearly continuous sunlight for about half the year. During the other half, there are six weeks with no sunlight and twenty weeks with partial sunlight. Around the time of the summer solstice, when the sun is directly overhead, an average of three air masses pass through Wainwright. These air masses usually produce dear skies and subject the villagers to the possibility of sunburn because of the high amount and duration of ultraviolet exposure.

It is the ice, however, not the possibility of high radiation exposure, that most influences the adaptations made by Wainwright villagers to their environment. Nelson (1969, 1981) has reported the natives' understanding of ice. We follow this description.

The Arctic Ocean is very cold, but it is navigable during the summer months. The frigid winter causes it to freeze. The surface can become a solid mass of ice, but it can also become a vast jigsaw puzzle of ice floes. Whether solid or broken into floes, the ice has the capacity to move with great force when driven by winds or currents, and no counterforce on earth can stop it. The residents of Wainwright, by precept and experience, have learned how to cope with the sea in its sundry manifestations.

By late summer, the great pack ice lies north of Wainwright, beyond the horizon, although some huge hunks may remain shorebound. Snow is least likely to fall in August. Rivers and

lakes begin to freeze in late September, making overland travel possible. The ocean may begin to freeze in October, as slush ice develops, but the movement of the pack ice southward is unpredictable, and the pack ice usually moves in and out several times. Ice floes are usually blown to shore, anchored, and piled high by gale winds in November. The land-fast ice often extends several miles seaward and allows for winter ice hunting. Yet heavy winter seas beneath the ice and powerful winds above it cause offshore ice to move, opening cracks, holes, and leads, which make travel difficult.

By late March and the onset of long periods of sunlight, the pack ice begins to thaw, and the sea ice loosens. Leads in the ice appear more frequently and grow wider. Rotten ice, or ice that forms over ponds or slush, is a ubiquitous problem to the springtime hunter on the ice, as is the ice around river mouths as it becomes sloppy.

By late June, the sea ice melts, and hunters must journey northward by boats to reach the pack ice as it recedes. Danger is inherent to hunters on pack ice, because as it melts, huge hummocks fall into the sea. And as river ice breaks up with explosive force, huge floes move with the current. Nelson (1981) reports that portions of caribou herds are often sighted drifting downstream on ice floes in the Utuqqaq and Colville rivers.

In recent years, caribou have inhabited the tundra, from the Brooks Range almost to the coast, year-round, providing an important staple for villagers. In addition, resources of the sea and the Kuuk River have been extremely important to Eskimo adaptation for several millennia, and some of these resources are also available year-round. Ringed seals occur along the coast throughout the year. During winter they haul out on ice floes, or they reside under the sea ice, breathing through holes in the ice. Bearded seals inhabit the region year-round, but many fewer are encountered during winter than during summer. The winter also occasions the southward migration of polar bears from the pack ice to the beach area along the Arctic coast. They move south to hunt the tinged seals.

The opening of leads in the sea ice in the late spring occasions the migration of beluga whales, followed by the most preferred item in Wainwright villager diets, bowhead whales, headed for

their summer feeding grounds, and then by walrus. A few walrus remain year-round. All of these species are harvested by Wainwrighters.

As the ice recedes still farther, spotted seals and ribbon seals, the latter in insignificant numbers, inhabit the waters near Wainwright. Prior to the increased oil-related activities along the coastlines of the Chukchi and Beaufort seas, most of the seal species and the beluga whales frequently migrated up the tidewaters of the Kuuk system, eating fish and marine invertebrates. Beluga whales were seldom seen during the late 1970s and early 1980s. As at Unalakleet, the natives usually specify noise and tugboats as the principal reasons that belugas and many seals are seldom seen.

Fish in the Kuuk River system year-round include whitefish, cisco, char, burbot, northern pike (Esox lucius ), and grayling (Thymallus arcticus). The coastal waters near the peninsula are inhabited by sculpin, arctic cod, saffron cod, tomcod (Microgadus proximus ), and capelin.

Pacific herring (Clupea harengus pallasi ) migrate along the coast during the summer, as do three species of salmon, chum, pink, and king. In increasing numbers between 1977 and 1982, salmon have entered the Kuuk system to spawn. Char, whitefish, and cisco spend a part of each year at sea. During winters, pelagic smelt (Osmerus eperianus ) and tomcod are found beneath the ice of the Kuuk Lagoon, as are cisco.

Marine invertebrates, including clams (Macoma calcera ), tanner crabs, and shrimp (Pandalidae spp., Cragonidae spp. ), inhabit the ocean floor and the Kuuk Lagoon bottom, providing food for migrating seals. The presence of fish lures belugas into the lagoon. Marine invertebrates, fish, and seals comprise the walrus's diet. Villagers extract all of these species for their own tables.

Gray whales, killer whales (Orcinus orca ), and minke whales move through the Chukchi Sea during the summer. The killer whale, considered a brother by Wainwright villagers, hunts all other whales, hunts seals, and eats fish. The minke whale, like the bowhead, eats the zooplankton that float in huge globs along the edge of leads. None of these large animals is hunted by Wainwright villagers.

Birds in large numbers nest throughout the marshy areas of the tundra and river systems of the region or along the coast or migrate through the territory. The principal birds include seven species of ducks; four species of geese, loons, and gulls; three species of jaegers; two species of murres, ptarmigans, phalaropes, plovers, auklets, and sandpipers; several species of raptors; and a single species each of swan, crane, cormorant, dunlin, kittiwake, guillemot, tern, puffin, fulmar, and petrel. Thousands of small birds also summer in the Wainwright area, such as two species of sparrows, longspurs, and buntings, seven species of sandpipers, and one species of whimbrel, godwit, and dowitcher.

The severe climate of the Arctic coast, the meager number of days in which the Arctic Ocean is navigable, the long distances and expensive transportation to large market areas, and the paucity of renewable resources on which a self-sustaining industry can be based all prevent Wainwright from accommodating to a modern market. The nonrenewable, finite resources beneath Wainwright's ice and tundra belong to the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC). The potential extraction of those resources has created anxiety among many villagers. The extraction of the resources may bring cash for the short haul, but the effects that are feared are the possible harmful consequences to their subsistence life-styles and to the environment from which their subsistence resources are obtained.

Comparisons of the Three Habitats

Unalakleet possesses a more moderate climate and a greater variety of year-round resources than either Gambell or Wainwright, but the biomass available for harvesting is probably equal among the three villages. The large numbers of massive sea mammals that pass by St. Lawrence Island and the Chuckchi coast each summer and the abundance of caribou near Wainwright year-round balance the wide variety of resources near Unalakleet.

Yet caribou populations fluctuate widely, and the numbers that can be killed by hunters are regulated by the state. The

hunting of bowhead whales is regulated by the federal government, as are by-products from marine mammals such as walrus. Each of these restrictions poses a threat to people whose subsistence is in large part dependent on a few regulated species. So political issues rather than environmental resources place some severe restrictions on key resources available to Gambell and Wainwright residents. And those key resources are also threatened by oil-related operations—political economic factors, that is.

Moreover, although several sea mammal, fish, and marine invertebrate species reside under the ice packs of the Chukchi and Bering seas, including Norton Sound, harvests of those animals are not assured. Such harvests may be dependent on the unpredictable nature of the powerful winds that are capable either of breaking shore-fast ice from its moorings and opening leads near shore or of piling up huge quantities of ice and pushing it up over beaches and seawalls, sometimes crushing any village structures that are built too dose to the seawall.

During coastal storms, it may be possible for Wainwright residents to move inland to hunt caribou. Gambell residents are much more restricted because of the paucity of terrestrial animal life on the island. Unalakleet residents are less restrained by wind, water, and ice conditions. Their environment is less harsh and more complex (in numbers of species and facies in the habitat) than either the northern Bering Sea Tunda of St. Lawrence Island or the Continental Tundra of Wainwright.

Unalakleet residents hunt small game—principally hares—near town, jig for fish in the slough and farther up the river, hunt snowy owls, ptarmigan, and spruce grouse, and, during storms, they can hunt moose or push farther inland to the calmer regions to hunt caribou. During severe winter coastal storms, Wainwright and Gambell residents may be able to jig for fish, but there are few protected places where they can do so. Moreover, small game nearby is much less plentiful than at Unalakleet, as are fish weighing a pound or more. Winter access to polar bears at Wainwright and Gambell does not offset the variety of animals that are available near Unalakleet or the sheltered and calm places in which they can be harvested.

Map C1.
Vegetation Areas of the Three Villages

Climates

Table C1 provides some comparisons of the climates in the three habitats, demonstrating that those of Gambell and Wainwright are severer than that of Unalakleet. Gambell receives nearly seven times as much snowfall and two and one-half times as much precipitation as Wainwright. And whereas Gambell's

average winter temperatures are higher than Wainwright's, persistent strong winds at Gambell create windchill factors nearly as low as those registered at Wainwright.

Resources Available and Resources Extracted

Assessment of the resources that are extracted in each village is presented above, but because of the large number of species available in each environment and the differences among the villages as to which species are harvested and how much or many of each is harvested, the tables presented below are a use-full source for comparisons. It will be obvious that Gambell residents have access to fewer species than either Unalakleet or Wainwright villagers overall. St. Lawrence Island is rich in birds, which the islanders harvest with gusto, but also rich in saltwater fishes, which they do not harvest at all. The choices made by Gambell's residents are determined by the importance

of harvesting walrus for their economic wellbeing year-round (there is neither local capital nor local infrastructure to assist them in penetrating the commercial fish market). The choices made by Wainwright's residents are preferences for food types and are conditioned by the large amount of public sector cash that flows through the village as a consequence of access to oil revenues through NSB.

Marine Mammals

Table C2 classifies marine mammals according to their relative availability and whether and how much they are hunted. The bearded and spotted seals are important constituents in the harvests of all three villages, the bowhead whale is of greatest importance—symbolically if not materially—in Gambell and Wainwright, and the walrus makes the single greatest contribution among all the species of plants and animals that are harvested by the natives of Gambell.

Walrus could make much larger contributions to Wainwright and Unalakleet diets than they do, as could gray whales to Gam-bell diets. (Walrus are not hunted at all by Wainwrighters, although they were hunted two decades ago.) Killer whales, which appear in considerable numbers during the migrations of the other sea mammals on which they feast, are not hunted by residents of any of the three villages.

Land Mammals

Table C3 provides a list of the land mammals, small and large, that are available within the normal hunting and trapping territories of the three villages. The rank ordering of the villages in terms of number of species available, their relative availability, and the relative frequency at which they are extracted is apparent in the table. Gambell has access to the fewest land mammal species. Unalakleet has many more species, in greater quantities than either Gambell or Wainwright, and Unalakleet trappers and hunters extract more of the species available to them than do their counterparts in Wainwright.

Of the twenty-one significant land mammal species available

to Unalakleet hunters and trappers, only the hoary marmot (Marmota bower ) and two subspecies of brown bears (Ursus horribilis kidderi, U.h. alascensis ) are seldom hunted or trapped. By contrast, of the fifteen significant land mammals species available in their region, Wainwright hunters and trappers extract only five, focusing on the caribou, of course, and the arctic fox, red (variant) fox (Vulpes fulva alascensis ), wolf (Canis lupis), and wolverine (Gulo luscus katchemakensis). The variant foxes and the wolverine are rarely encountered, so the actual number of species hunted or trapped regularly and in some quantity is only three.

The caribou is the only large land mammal, besides the polar bear, that is regularly hunted by Wainwright men. The small rodents are no longer harvested by Gambell or Wainwright villagers, although the animals that feast on them, especially foxes, are trapped. Moreover, rabid foxes or wolves presumably con-

tract rabies from lemmings and subsequently infect caribou. There was a major rabies outbreak during the winter of 1981-82. One case of rabies contracted by a Barrow villager was attributed to rabid caribou meat.

The reduction in the number of species of land mammals hunted or trapped is most conspicuous at Wainwright. From about 1978 to 1983, the villagers' protein needs were served principally by whales and caribou, with more limited use of bearded seals, walrus, and less preferred species. With their high rates of employment and relatively large amounts of cash for discretionary purposes, there was little reason for Wainwrighters to pursue less desired natural resources as staples. The relatively large amount of cash available to the average household provided a flexibility of choice that was unusual in the past century of village life on the North Slope. As income has withered since 1983, however, natives have reverted to procuring more species from their environment (Luton pers. comm.).

Fish, Birds, Marine Invertebrates, and Plants

The importance of the effects of cash income on subsistence is especially clear in the extraction of fish, birds, eggs, and marine invertebrates. Gambell residents have the lowest average incomes among the three villages and are consummate harvesters of the food resources that can be collected efficiently and close to the village and camps. They are much less selective than either the Unalakleet or the Wainwright natives. Wainwright residents, whose cash incomes far outstrip those of Unalakleet and Gambell residents, have restricted their takes of fish and birds to those that are most preferred.

Gambell hunters and fishers extract, often in huge quantities, bird and fish species that are either eschewed or ignored by Wainwright villagers. In general, Gambell residents use highly efficient techniques to extract these resources. And they do so not only for immediate consumption but also to store for difficult periods. The issue is neither the necessity of locating sufficient resources to feed dogs nor the freedom from being required to feed dogs. In only a few instances do Gambell residents appear to bypass or put a minimum of effort into extract-

ing locally available resources. Usually, they give short shrift to resource harvests only when more preferred resources can be extracted more efficiently and with greater rewards. For example, ocean fish are not pursued when sea mammals are available in large quantities or when nesting birds and birds' eggs can be retrieved.

Unalakleet has an abundance of fish and access to large quantities of waterfowl, seabirds, and grouse. The abundance of fish sets them off from the other villages. The types of birds that are preferred and the manner in which they are extracted, however, place Unalakleet between Gambell and Wainwright. Unalakleet residents focus on fewer varieties of birds, use fewer techniques, and employ more expensive techniques to extract birds than is the case for Gambell residents. But they harvest a wider variety of birds and eggs than is the case for Wainwright residents.

Wainwright villagers have restricted their fishing almost exclusively to a few favored species, principally salmon, char, grayling, smelt, and whitefish. Saffron cod (or tomcod) are no longer sought through cracks in the sea ice during the winter season; flounder and sculpin are eschewed; and winter fishing, in general, is less frequent than in earlier decades and is primarily restricted to the Kuuk Lagoon. Large quantities of fish are no longer needed to feed dogs, as they once were when bad weather inhibited seal hunting.

Bird hunting, however, is a preferred activity of Wainwright hunters. It is an expensive and inefficient way to retrieve natural resources, but it is also pleasurable, and it provides highly desired food. As is the case for fishing, Wainwright hunters have restricted the kinds of birds that they hunt to exclude undesired species. Wainwright residents usually have sufficient cash to supplement their diets with the desired meat that is available at the local stores if they run short of their preferred caribou, whale meat, maktak, fish, geese, and ducks.

Fish . Two tables are provided for these comparisons. The first, table C4, tallies species and their harvests. The second, table C5, compares the nutrition values of several important species.

It is evident that the three villages have access to about the