Alaska North Slope Elections
The recent 2011 elections for mayor of Alaska's vast North Slope Borough reflected deep divides in a community that depends on subsistence whale hunting for food and whose only major source of income is oil exports. Now oil drilling is moving out of Prudhoe Bay and into the Arctic waters on which the Inupiat Eskimos have depended for millennia, and fears of an oil spill like the Exxon Valdez or BP's Deepwater Horizon have driven the community into deep self-examination of the values they cherish as native people.
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Alaska North Slope
The new mayor of the North Slope Borough, Charlotte Brower, will now lead America's largest borough the next three years. Brower opposes offshore drilling, but understands the decision is not hers. "The federal government has leased the land offshore and I will work very hard to protect our subsistence resources and our way of life," she says. The borough that is based in Barrow serves all Arctic villages in Alaska and gets more than 95 percent of its revenues from oil and gas industry land taxes.
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Alaska North Slope
L.A. for less than the price of sunblock. 
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