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.