In the Empire of Ice (7 page)

She shows me her arms. “I got my tattoos here. A friend did it. In the old days, women in Wales had their chins tattooed, using the soot from the blubber lamp. On St. Lawrence Island the tattoos went all over the face, arm, and shoulder. I try to remember all of what my grandparents told me. Like eating little orange snails raw to prevent getting cross-eyed. They taught me that when the wind blows northwest, the ocean color changes to brown, and that’s what brings the clams and snails in. We are always watching the weather and how it can bring us food, because starvation is still real.”

Joe’s stomach growls and he suggests we see if anyone in the village is cooking. We tromp up a snowy hill to visit Betty, who, at age 82, lives alone in a clapboard house at the top of a hill. She’s small and soft-spoken, and so shy at first that we sit in silence for a long time.

Outside, wind winnows a snowdrift into an elbow that leans against a shed. An empty bird’s nest rests in the eave. Finally Betty smiles. “A long time ago we were strong and fast young people. Now I’m not doing so well. Back then we were healthier. We had only the Eskimo diet and greens.”

Betty came from a reindeer-herding family. Christian missionaries brought domestic reindeer to Alaska in the late 1800s. Men who had been marine mammal hunters for something like 20,000 years—the exact date is still contested—were being “retrained” to herd domestic reindeer. The training came with a hearty dose of Christianity.

“You could get a herd of reindeer if you converted, or put another way, food came with religion,” Joe says. “It was a clever idea, but not clever enough.” The reindeer project failed, was restarted, and failed again. But religion stayed.

Betty’s father was one of those retrained men. He learned to herd and managed reindeer for the resident missionaries, the Lopps. “We lived in a sod house with our in-laws. Then my husband built this house. It’s almost ready to fall down now. He built that birdhouse so I could watch the snow buntings come and go in the spring. We didn’t go whaling much. We just had the reindeer. My mother wouldn’t let us go to the village celebrations or visit the shamans. Her religion said those dances in the qasig were evil. But when I was young, I went anyway. There was nothing that made me afraid.”

Except hunger. Reindeer were introduced to alleviate famine. Everyone had famine stories. Between 1881 and 1883, the people along the coast from Wales to Point Hope had very little game or fish, and many people starved. The famine was said to have been caused by shamans fighting among themselves. People from the regions around Noatak River, Kotzebue Sound, and especially Kivalina were hard-hit. The caribou stayed away. The seals did not haul out. The fish did not spawn in the rivers. Geese and swans went elsewhere. One villager said half the population of these areas died and the survivors moved to Barrow, Unalakleet, and the central Kobuk.

The crew of the ship
Corwin
found dead people “scattered about the banks of a stream near Cape Thompson.” An epidemic of flu followed soon after, brought by the whites. The autonomous nation of the Kivallinigmiut, northeast of Wales, ceased to exist altogether.

Islands were particularly susceptible to hunger. If the seals and walruses and bowheads didn’t come by, and the ice was bad, there was nothing islanders could do. When hunger struck one village, its people packed up and moved to a village on the other side. Food was always shared, even if it meant eventual starvation for everyone.

James Aningayou of St. Lawrence Island remembers hunger: “We had short of meat, and poor year, poor spring. We had a little meat from the spring hunting, so we had used up during the summer. Then in the fall we have nothing to eat while waiting for the ice to appear. My stepfather had two dogs, I think. He kill one, is very fat. Then he boil the muscle of the hind legs and front legs. That was good.”

A villager said: “The best hunting was when the ice first got here. When it started coming, everybody would go to the top of the mountain, they were so glad to see the ice coming in. They had been eating old meat for a while, some families were out of meat, they had been along the beach all the time looking for seaweed so they would have something fresh to eat. Everybody wanted the ice. It meant they would have food.”

COMING DOWN FROM the hill at the far end of Wales, we pass a man on a side hill in front of his house. His snow machine is in pieces on the snow. He’d tried to get to Shishmaref but ran out of gas. “Walked home. Pretty cold with that wind. Now I’m trying to get this old snow-go going.” He offers to sell Joe a carving. He needs the money to buy gas. It’s a fossilized piece of mammoth ivory etched with images of ice age animals. Joe turns it over and over carefully. “You’re not asking enough for this. You should sell it in town, in Anchorage. You’d get a lot for it.”

The man protests. “Anchorage is a long way away,” he says. Joe gives him a hundred dollars in cash but refuses to take the carving. We slide down a steep hill in deep snow to the high school. It’s a modern building with central heating and flush toilets. The classrooms are equipped with computers; moviemaking equipment; art rooms for painting, carving, and woodworking; and a biology lab. Two enthusiastic high school girls ask if they can film Joe and me at the end of the day. “Are you doing oral histories in your community?” I ask. They shrug.

Between classes the halls fill with students of all ages. The mood is high-spirited and friendly, with students, teachers, janitors, and administrators intermingling easily. Ray’s son Clifford, who works as a school janitor and unofficial counselor, waves. He’s busy showing a young boy how to hold a carving tool. Joe looks in and nods approvingly.

I’m snagged by a teacher to say hi to her first graders. No rows of desks for these kids. The class dynamics are free-form and enthusiastic. The kids fire hundreds of questions, and two older girls interview us using a new video camera on a tripod.

“But no one speaks Inupiat, our language,” Joe says as we put on our parkas. It’s 50 below zero outside with the wind chill and getting dark. “They are using someone else’s language and they don’t even know it. English doesn’t have the words to explain who we are, what we know about the land and ice, and how the ice is changing.”

One of the young teachers invites us for dinner. She’s a gregarious Vermonter who has lived in the North for years. Her house is modern and cozy. Her ponytailed Inuit boyfriend, from Little Diomede, is carving a walrus-ivory handle in the shape of a polar bear for an ulu. It’s exquisite, and Joe compliments him on his carving. “My father thought that with every generation, things were being done less well. But seeing this, I’m not so sure,” he says. For dinner, we have a reheated tuna-noodle casserole and tea brewed from local herbs.

They lend us a flashlight for our walk home in the dark. The old part of town where Joe grew up is covered with hoarfrost. He shines a dim light on the broken boards. “We were never cold,” he says. “We always had fires going and food on the stove. Mountains of food—ducks, walrus, and seal meat. They’d divide it all up so everyone had something to eat whether their hunt was successful or not,” he says, switching off the flashlight. The ruined houses shine in the night.

JOE KEEPS SAYING we’re losing daylight, but all I see is the night sky wiped clean by the white cloth of snow. Maybe what he means is that his grasp of who he was and who he is in Wales is elusive. The whiteout is nearly continuous, with only short glimpses of the revolving airport light or the headlights of a snow machine dashing by. A wind picks up and gusts hard, shaking the windows. Earlier in the week five polar bears were sighted nearby.

Above the sky is darkness, and below the advancing and retreating ice pack counterbalances dusky days. When the ice came down the strait from the north,
nanoq,
the polar bear, was often seen hitching a ride. Bears travel, hunt ringed seals from their white deck of drift ice, eat prey, beachcomb, grab eider ducks, and wander the land between Tin City, where Joe’s father once worked, and Wales.

Villagers don’t want polar bears too close, yet they are always watching them, learning from them. They found a den carved in a wind-hardened snowdrift at the second inlet to the Lopp Lagoon near town. When spring came, the bears swam across gaping leads in the ice. Between March and May they began moving north again, hitching rides on pack ice as it receded from the shore. Another hunter found a denning female on the east side of Little Diomede Island that had excavated a cave in the cliff 50 feet above the shore. It was 4 feet high, with two chambers each 13 feet long. Only females hibernate. Once they go in a den, the males have been observed blocking the entrance with hardened snow, then going off until spring.

A hunter from St. Lawrence Island said he once had trouble with too many bears coming near, so he lit a bonfire using bear fat to ignite it. The smell scared the bears. They dived into the ocean and began swimming. Others joined them, forming a wedge in the dark sea that he said “looked like a large white ice floe.”

In the morning there are no bears in sight. Ronnie, Winton Weyapuk, and others come to work in the office, a small room off the main hall. We talk to Winton about uncontrolled natural resource extraction, about sovereignty, self-rule, sustainable economies, and indigenous peoples—issues that are always on the front burner up here, but about a hundred years too late, Joe says.

Winton explains that the 1971 Alaska Claims Settlement Act provided the 80,000 Alaskan natives with 44 million acres of land and $962 million as payment for lands given up. But the question of how to use this “tool of money” for the benefit and health of the land and its people is a continual debate. Still, spend it they do.

Oil and gas development have been intense and have brought great wealth to the North Slope Borough in Barrow. Drilling on land and sending the oil south through pipelines bother the Alaskan natives less than the idea of the offshore oil drilling being proposed by Shell Oil. These people are maritime hunters, and the impact on marine mammals would be crushing. Oil spills from tankers have shown the world that petroleum extraction is environmentally perilous no matter how you move the crude oil around.

North of Point Hope, where the Bering Sea meets the Beaufort, Shell Oil has been issued an exploration permit to look for oil using seismic testing that, in itself, endangers bowhead whales, walruses, birds, and fish in those waters. As the pace of global oil grabs accelerates, environmental impacts are seldom thoroughly assessed. Now, after a lawsuit put forward by Earth Justice on behalf of the Inuit hunters of northern Alaska, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has halted Shell Oil. But it is only a delay. It now must decide whether the potential for environmental damage was properly considered by the federal agency, the Department of Interior, when it issued the exploration permit to the oil company.

“The climate is our biggest problem,” Winton says. He’s aware of some of the complexities of the ocean-atmosphere exchange and its effect on the warming or cooling of the planet. “Maybe whatever we do will be wrong because it’s not been going in a good way for a long time. If it gets hotter, it will be bad; if it got real cold, there would be no cracks in the ice and all the marine mammals would die.”

He’s been keeping weekly sea-ice observations in an attempt to chart the course of global warming on the Bering Strait. He hands me a sheaf of paper with his writings:

Winton takes me for a quick drive to the shore on his snowmobile. The frigid air feels good on my face. There are cracks in the ice but no open leads. The sky has cleared, and far out I can see a white wall of pack ice and beyond a vague blue hump that is Little Diomede Island and Siberia—where Winton’s relatives originated thousands of years ago. He says his favorite sound is wind-driven pack ice piling up. I hold my hands behind my ears and listen: Blowing snow scratches, a tilted ramp of ice gives out a hollow crack as the tide goes out, but that’s all. No primordial collisions.

Ice never sleeps. It has its own life. It is always moving. Maybe our ideas about time and consciousness come from sea ice. The way it piles up, pulls apart, melts, and freezes, spins and splinters into drifting islands carried by tidal currents to Siberia. The way its albedo drives heat away yet also sequesters black soot that causes it to melt and alters what climatologists call the surface energy budget.

Winton, like all of us, tries to understand exactly what is happening. But if the consensus-driven climate models from the scientists at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have failed to give us accurate predictions, then where do we look? Winton says there’s nothing for him to do except observe. “We don’t have theories about ice and weather and climate. We have experience,” he says.

I ask him to describe the ice we are seeing: “
Tugayak
means ‘shore ice breaking up and separating from the beach—ice going away.’” He has to yell over the wind. “Now the
ivu,
the pressure ridge, comes in fast and gets shoved up on the beach when the wind is strong like it is now, and the tide is high. Pressure ridges form where it just starts to get shallow. They aren’t as big as they used to be and they break up more easily. The pressure ridges act as a barrier allowing the ice to stay. It makes our world calm. It gives us nice weather. Wales was a place where winter once came easily. Now it’s stormier. Now winter may not come at all, or maybe too much of it will come. Either way, I think we are not going to prosper.”