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.