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.