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.