Wilderness





The notion of wilderness came to the North Slope in the early 1950’s with its discovery by a small group of committed outdoor recreationists.  With the publication of their view of our homelands in “The Last Great Wilderness” we disappeared, our homeland became something it had not been for thousands of years: devoid of people.  Simultaneously, our homeland became the subject of great interest and concern to thousands, perhaps millions, of people who had never laid eyes on it and who in any case could not see that we continued to fully use and occupy the country.

Discounting the insult this is to us, to make us either not here or not human, this notion totally obscured the reality of this place.  It discounted what may be its greatest value to humankind, that it sustains physically, emotionally and spiritually a rare and precious component of the human experience, the Kaktovikmiut. As much as we detest it, the word genocide comes to mind.  Nobody came to slaughter us, to remove us, to confine us to concentration camps, but they did simply make us disappear.

With passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Act in 1980 came formal wilderness designation with an overwhelming set of laws and constraints limiting use of the lands and waters on which we depend for both our sustenance and our identity. In a host of complex ways, this process has put our very lives as Kaktovikmiut at risk.  Somehow, the human side of this place became of no consequence, indeed a burden to those who wish to see only caribou and snow geese and such out here, who fail to see us as a part of what makes this place what it is. 

Well, in spite of all of this, we remain here.  From the crest of the Brooks Range to far into the Arctic Ocean, we are here.  We are here not just in the summer when the rafters come, when the photographers come, when they chase the caribou and the muskoxen and harass everything in their paths, even us.  We are here always, winter and summer and forever, we the living and those who have gone before and yet never left. We the Kaktovikmiut and our homeland are one and the same, and we are eternal.
City of Kaktovik, Alaska.
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