Eskimos’ Heritage Preserved in Less-Than-Pristine Land

This is the nation’s premier wilderness park, cherished by seekers of solitude and protected by law from degradation, a soul-stirring expanse of rugged mountain rivers, caribou and grizzly bears.

But something is wrong with this picture. All-terrain vehicles are rumbling across the tundra, and park officials entrusted to guard the land propose removing 75,000 acres from wilderness status, the largest deletion in the history of the national wilderness preservation system.

What’s going on here?

Struggle for Balance

The answer involves a concept of wilderness different from anything found in the Lower 48 states. It involves a struggle to balance the value of Alaska’s wild land against the rights of humans who still live in it.

Most of all, it involves people like Joby Ahgook, a Nunamiut Eskimo who lives in a little village high in the Brooks Range, bounded on three sides by the park.

“Years ago, when people settled here, they followed the caribou,” Ahgook said the other day as he and his family bounced across the tundra in an eight-wheeled ATV. “We’re still following the caribou. I want to continue to hunt, even if this is a park. This is very important to my family, and their families to be.”

Ahgook’s village is called Anaktuvuk Pass, after a native word meaning “place of caribou droppings.” It is an odd name only to outsiders. Caribou has been the Nunamiuts’ staff of life for generations. Their grandparents ate caribou meat fresh and dried. They walked in caribou-skin shoes, lived in caribou-skin tents and slept in caribou-skin blankets.

Like the animals they hunted, the Nunamiut were nomads. Each spring and fall, they walked into the mountains to intercept caribou migrating through the passes. In summer, they headed north to trade with coastal Eskimos.

This is not ancient history. The Nunamiut had no permanent settlement until the late 1940s. By 1960, they still lived in sod huts.

A few huts remain, but most residents now live in well-insulated prefab houses. The huskies that hunters once used as pack dogs have been replaced by snowmobiles and Argos, big ATVs with six or eight low-pressure tires.

But the Nunamiut still lead a harsh existence. No roads connect Anaktuvuk Pass to the outside world. When the winter sun barely sneaks over the mountains, temperatures can sink to 60 below for days.

Food and fuel are outrageously expensive, since everything must be flown in. So residents still depend on caribou for much of their diet. Antlers adorn roofs all over town, and skins hang drying on porch rails.

It’s the kind of life that makes you want to cut these people some slack--and that is just what Congress did in 1980 when it passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.

The act set aside more than 100 million acres of Alaska in national parks, preserves, forests and wildlife refuges. Within these areas, it designated 56 million acres as wilderness, more than doubling the size of the national wilderness system.

Gates of the Arctic’s 7 million acres of wilderness, together with 5.8 million acres next door in the Noatak National Preserve, make up the nation’s largest stretch of unbroken wilderness.

Vast as it is, Alaska’s wilderness is not as pure in definition as the Lower 48 variety. Congress compromised some traditional wilderness restrictions out of concern for rural Alaskans such as the Nunamiut--who, it was argued, were as much a part of the wilderness as the caribou.

For example, motorized travel is strictly prohibited in most Lower 48 wilderness areas, but Alaska’s wilderness system allows snowmobiles, motorboats and airplanes.

Anaktuvuk Pass residents supported creation of the park around them because they thought it would keep out sport hunters while allowing them to continue their subsistence hunt of caribou. But they bridled at unexpected park regulations.

Fight Over ATVs

The biggest fight has been over ATVs, one of the few forms of mechanized transportation prohibited by the lands act. Anaktuvuk Pass hunters argue the ATVs are essential for summer trips.

ATVs leave tracks in the fragile tundra, sometimes digging deep ruts into wet ground. Although long-term damage to vegetation has not been proved, tracks often can be seen for years afterward, detracting from the “ultimate wilderness experience” that the park strives to give the 2,000 or so visitors who fly in each year.

A 1983 agreement established a narrow ATV corridor from Anaktuvuk Pass to a popular lake. But that proved too limiting, and in 1986 the park service gave villagers temporary permission to continue what they had been doing illegally all along: following the caribou, even if it meant driving across wilderness.

Local park officials, meanwhile, worked out a complicated deal with the natives that both sides feel addresses most of the problems.

The park service would deauthorize 75,000 acres of wilderness near the village and allow the natives “wandering rights” over 159,000 additional acres of park land. In exchange, 18,000 acres elsewhere in the park would be designated wilderness, and the natives would give up development rights on 93,000 acres of their own land.

‘Fair Exchange’

“I think it’s a reasonably fair exchange of interests,” said park superintendent Roger Siglin. “It definitely compromises wilderness. But it’s also a significant compromise on the part of the natives involved.”

Siglin still has to sell the idea to his superiors, the public and Congress. Only Congress can deauthorize wilderness, something that’s been done just twice before, for minor adjustments to wilderness areas in Vermont and Florida.

Environmentalists want to see a draft environmental impact statement, due out this winter, before responding formally. But they express sympathy for the Nunamiut.

“I don’t consider taking wilderness out of the preservation system very lightly, no matter what the circumstances are,” said Allen E. Smith, Alaska regional director of the Wilderness Society. But, he added, “The reality is there has to be some give. There is a legitimate problem here that has to be fixed.”

Siglin said he believes the compromise will win approval, “if only because I don’t think anybody else has a better idea.”

Follow the Caribou

Joby Ahgook hopes that Siglin is right. When Ahgook was 10, he walked behind his father on hunting forays into the mountains. Now, at age 40, he loads his own five children into an ATV for hunting trips. The mechanism is different, but the point is the same: follow the caribou.

Indeed, as he maneuvers the noisy ATV across the tundra, he seems to have some wandering caribou spirit in him. He sweeps his hand, encompassing a dozen mountain peaks flanking the pass.

“We go way past those mountains in these machines,” he shouts over the roar of the engine. “It’s great. We go all over.”

Wherever you want?

“Yeah,” the son of nomads says, smiling broadly. “Wherever we want.”