When I was in my early 20s, I started a production company in my village, which is located 400 miles north of the Arctic circle, making films about Iñupiaq culture and resistance.
One night, I called my cousins to go out hunting.
My father’s boat, although riddled with holes and problems, was mostly ocean-worthy. An hour later, we were following the animals in and out of the polar ice pack and relishing the chance to get out on the ocean in the beautiful Arctic summer.
After hours of hunting without success, we pulled up on the ice. We were floating on the then-abundant ice pack. Looking out over the ice, we saw qaksrit (sleeping seals) just over a small ridge of ice. We went after them, leaving my youngest cousin behind watching the boat.
About halfway to the qaksrit, something in my gut tweaked. I turned around, only to see my little cousin following us. Behind him I could see my father’s boat as it slid straight into the ocean. I hollered and started running.
Inside that boat were our parkas, survival gear, extra ammunition, radios for communicating with other hunters – everything we needed to survive on the ice. We’d pulled the plug out of the boat so it could drain and, with the added weight of our supplies still inside, it had started to sink.
Three of us reached the edge of the ice just as the boat drifted out of reach. Anywhere else in the world a quick plunge into the water would be a natural response to retrieve a boat adrift. But in the Arctic, we are taught from childhood never to get wet and never ever jump into the open ocean.
The boat was only six feet away but moving inches further by the second. Panic momentarily made us forget our combined wisdom and knowledge of survival in the Arctic. My cousin Sam asked if he should jump in after the boat. I said yes.
The moment he hit the icy-cold waters of the Arctic Ocean, my brain, body and Iñupiaq sensibility switched back on. Arctic currents are powerful, capable of dragging even the strongest swimmer under the ice. The water is so cold it can induce hypothermia in under two minutes, and we were miles out to sea without any way of communicating with search and rescue.
We called Sam back and thankfully we were able to pull him from the water and dressed him in warm clothes from our own backs. Our boat was low in the water, but it hadn’t quite sunk. For a while, there was no one to be seen – but finally, as we looked to the horizon, we saw a boat approaching and with it our rescue was secure.
The impact of oil money
As Iñupiaq people, we have fought to maintain our subsistence lifestyle and socio-economic structures for decades. I now have three children, and this summer we packed our three chest freezers full with food we harvested from the lands and seas. We share with family and elders, and trade across the North Slope with other households who collect subsistence foods from different areas or who have an abundance.
Although they are largely undocumented in Western scientific language, subsistence economies are incredibly complex. They are also sustainable. What’s not sustainable are cash-based economic structures underpinned by fossil fuels and the fiction of perpetual growth.
The largest oil field in North America, Prudhoe Bay, was discovered on our lands in 1968. At 213,543 acres, it contained approximately 25 billion barrels of oil. Our community was catapulted into the global cash-based economy. Much-needed basic infrastructure was built across our villages, including hospitals and modern school facilities, and numerous new jobs and economic opportunities emerged. Indeed, my father’s boat was purchased using oil money dividends.
When the Prudhoe Bay oil field was built, it was placed right on top of the hunting ground of the village of Nuiqsut.
Within a few years of opening, local reports came in of hunters having to travel many miles to find animals, of increased levels of asthma and other respiratory problems. As Dr. Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, the then village clinician in Nuiqsut, said, “I began asking questions about the 1.7 million pounds of nitrous oxide emissions[…] When would this toxicity be considered?”
Our lands were being further colonised, alongside our people and culture. With the loss of the animals our people depend on, family structures started to disintegrate and cultural integration suffered. Within a decade of the oil field being established, our community has experienced increasingly devastating impacts: rises in alcoholism and drug abuse, suicide, domestic violence, and a myriad of other health-related issues.
Stormy seas and rising temperatures
The exploitation of fossil fuels has also caused an unnatural acceleration in warming, and 2023 was the hottest summer in Utqiagvik in the past century.
The polar ice pack that my people have lived off of for thousands of years will likely be gone in my lifetime. My grandchildren will not know what it is to hunt there. I can’t read this sentence out loud without a deep sense of loss impossible to articulate.
Polar bears, who live year-round on the ice, are migrating inland. Walrus are turning up on our shores, too tired to swim the vast distances to find what remains of the ice where they normally live all year. Fall storms are becoming more and more turbulent. It is now common for entire sections of our coastal town to be completely inaccessible for periods of time due to flooding.
Year after year we fight to keep oil development from moving offshore for fear of the potential impacts from an oil spill, which even the industry concedes is likely. Not to mention what another multi-billion barrels of oil will do to our environment.
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Beyond fossil fuels
This ship has been filling with water for some time. Fossil fuels are just one hole in the boat; they are not the root problem. When industries and governments ignore the knowledge systems that our ancestors passed on to us, in favor of a flawed, market-driven model, they ignore multi-dimensional thinking and solutions, at all our peril.
And while urgency is required, panic is not going to save us. Even if we stopped exploiting fossil fuels overnight, the structures which allowed exploitation at this level will continue to seek replacement revenue streams. Unless we change the system, these new revenue streams will continue to be driven by shareholder values, not human values.
As First Nations peoples, our “survival strategies” are underpinned by thousands of years of collective wisdom, manifesting in the form of complex and grounded societal systems. We have survived this long because we were able to construct pathways that sought out social and ecological balance.
But a neat, good-bad binary will not serve us at this time. Instead, our shared instinct for survival needs to switch on our communal knowledge. We need to remember how to work together.
In order to do that, we need to look into our past and truly interrogate how we allowed the relationship between each other and our environment to get so far out of balance.
Perhaps then we’ll be able to find consensus around truly sustainable solutions, instead of getting tangled up in useless debate and polarisation. Perhaps then we’ll be able to see past the panic and find a way back to our collective wisdom.
Illustration by Chela Yego who says, “I needed to illustrate the scene when Rachel Naninaaq and her cousins went hunting in their village 400 miles north of the Arctic circle in Alaska but also depict the oil fields that were being built on top of hunting grounds in the villages. This was the scene when they pulled up on the ice. It shows their youngest cousin still in the boat when they’ve just stepped out.”
