Arctic Voices by Subhankar Banerjee

Author:Subhankar Banerjee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: acrtic, ecology, indigenous rights, voices, activism, environment, polar, photography, current events, global warming
ISBN: 9781609803865
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: 2012-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

Red Dog Mine—the second largest zinc and fourth largest lead mine in the world, Western Arctic, Alaska. (Photograph by Florian Schulz, 2009.)

Sadly, that too is already twenty years ago.

Now, it’s almost too boggling to list all that has landed on us since.

The Internet has come to northwest Alaska. Rap music. Cell phones. Canadian whiskey. iPods. eBay. YouTube. Low-rise jeans. And what we call the Cabela’s Army—hundreds and hundreds of camoclad white sporthunters from the Lower 48 and beyond, descending here each fall. They come to hunt caribou, moose, grizzly bear, wolves, and whatever else they can “bag.” They buy nothing here, care nothing, and want nothing local—except the “big game.” They have already Googled us from afar, and that apparently is plenty.

Meanwhile, the word subsistence has ascended to the top, a loaded word, overflowing with politics, hatreds, and righteousness, a tie to the past, central to all the rhetoric about the future. Also at the top of the new list is the word jobs.

Meanwhile we’ve got our second round of monster new schools, new state-of-the-art clinics, new dumps, new airports, new fuel tank farms, hundreds of new trucks, and thousands of four-wheelers and snowmobiles and outboard motors. Nearly everyone has satellite or cable TV. Stove oil heats most homes and schools and businesses across the Arctic. Planes, big and small, zip the sky, hauling loads of freight, mail, passengers, countless loads to every village, multiple airlines flying in nearly every day of the year—looking down and spotting caribou and wolves, bears and seals and musk oxen and every other animal down below. Word flashes out to hunters by text, Facebook, e-mail—even cell phone from the sky.

Everyone has been to Anchorage. People go there to get X-rays and braces on their teeth, to shop, to attend Alaska Federation of Natives meetings and Subsistence conferences, to visit, to fish. To drink.

American television beamed north is full of reality shows about—Alaska. One even goes so far as to show a fantastically expensive caribou hunt and claim it is Subsistence.

Out on the trail, we kick our Cabela’s Trans Alaska shoepacks on the plastic skis of each other’s aluminum and plastic snowmobiles; we walk around each other’s UHMW plastic sleds and compare notes about Google Earth and where the caribou are crossing. The dog teams are few and far between, and made up of bouncy little shorthaired racing dogs, pulling high-tech aluminum and titanium sleds, often powered by chicken, beef, or even lamb flown in from New Zealand.

And that’s only people and material things—that doesn’t even start to include climate change: the warm winters and thin ice, the tall new brush and baby green spruce sprouting up on tundra, the forest fires and the new bugs, and draining lakes and mid-winter rains.

Now this whole area is called the “NANA Region,” and the Native Corporation pays dividends and provides jobs. Every local Iñupiat Eskimo is part shareholder in a multi-million-dollar corporation. NANA now is king. And the king wants those millions of tons of copper, silver,

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