Living on Thin Ice by Steven C. Dinero

Author:Steven C. Dinero
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Berghahn Books
Published: 2016-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Since then, villagers have relied on the self-service system of packing water, as well as the use of outhouses and honey buckets. Some households have developed an informal system of using walkie-talkies in the village to call for a runner who uses a four-wheeler in summer and a snowgo in winter to pack water for a small fee. Interestingly, when analyzed statistically, women expressed less satisfaction than men did with personally having to haul water, perhaps a reflection of the present system’s exceptionally demanding nature and inconvenience. That said, those residents with more educated parents were also critical of water provision, confirming that the desire for running water in the village is not merely an issue of gender or physical strength but also a quality of life concern.

Other notable statistics concern air travel, the health clinic, schools, and trash removal. Air travel consistently receives high rates of satisfaction yet is provided by a private airline. Wright Air Service is known to be reliable and safe, but most villagers constantly complain it is “too expensive.” The schools received poor ratings up until a new school was built in 2009; similarly, ratings rose when the solid waste system was improved and the dump moved. While ratings for the school have shown particular improvement, women, who predominate in the village as single mothers, expressed less satisfaction with the school in the 2011 survey than did men. Conversely, those who rate the school more highly tend to have fathers with lower levels of education.

As for the health clinic, its history complicated. Once managed by the Tanana Chiefs Conference (TCC) out of Fairbanks, the Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments (CATG) centered at Fort Yukon has recently taken over many of the village’s health-care-related responsibilities. The council provides personnel training, visits from aides and clinicians, pharmacological assistance, and the like but has long experienced a great deal of criticism from local villagers (see Dinero 2005: 150; 2007: 264). Although some view CATG as an improvement over TCC (Stern 2005: 63), many feel the arrangement is still not ideal, as the clinic continues to suffer from a lack of equipment and welltrained staff (see Tables 4.3 and 4.4). The clinic was rebuilt in 2012, so residents might now rate it more highly than they did in 2011. Still, at the time of the 2011 survey, statistical analysis determined that more educated residents were more likely to criticize the clinic and less likely than other villagers to use its services. Those with more educated parents were also less likely to use the Arctic Village clinic for their health care needs.

The quantitative outcomes presented above are compelling but present only one aspect of the evolving development of planning in Arctic Village over the past two decades. In addition to the numeric data presented here, I also interviewed dozens of residents in order to gain a direct understanding of how villagers themselves view village development planning. I present empirical evidence of this perspective in their own words with little if any editing.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.