Alaska conflicted over mining push, indigenous customs

West Australian

2 hours ago

Fish camps still dot the banks of the broad Kuskokwim River in southwestern Alaska.
Wooden huts and tarped shelters stand beside drying racks draped with bright red strips of salmon.
Alaska Native families have harvested fish for generations and preserved them for the bitter winters ahead.
But the once-abundant salmon populations have declined so sharply in recent years that authorities have severely restricted subsistence fishing on Alaska's second-longest river.
They've imposed even tighter restrictions on the longer Yukon River to the north.
Various factors are blamed for the salmon collapse, from climate change to commercial fishing practices.
What's clear is the impact is not just on food but on long-standing rituals — fish camps where elders transmit skills and stories to younger generations while bonding over a sacred connection to the land.
"Our families are together for that single-minded purpose of providing for our survival," said Gloria Simeon, a Yup'ik resident of Bethel.
"It's the college of fish camp."
So when Alaska Natives debate proposals to drill, mine or otherwise develop the landscape of the nation's largest state, it involves more than an environmental or economic question.
It's also a spiritual and cultural one.
"We have a special spiritual, religious relationship to our river and our land," said Simeon, standing outside her backyard smokehouse where she uses birch-bark kindling and cottonwood logs to preserve this year's salmon catch.
"Our people have been stewards of this land for millennia, and we've taken that relationship seriously."
Put a pin just about anywhere on the map of Alaska, and you're likely to hit an area mulling a proposed mine, a new wilderness road, a logging site, an oil well, or a natural gas pipeline.
Such debates have intensified during US President Donald Trump's second term.
His administration and allies have pushed aggressively for drilling, mining and developing on Alaska's public lands.
Native leaders and activists are divided about extraction projects.
Supporters say they bring jobs and pay for infrastructure, while opponents say they imperil the environment and their traditions.
Trump singled out Alaska as a priority for extraction projects in an executive order signed on his first day in office.
"Unlocking this bounty of natural wealth will raise the prosperity of our citizens while helping to enhance our Nation's economic and national security," the order said.
Increasingly, words are turning to action.
Congress, in passing Trump's budget bill in July, authorised an unprecedented four new sales of oil and gas leases in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and still more in other locations.
Trump cabinet officials made a high-profile visit in June to Prudhoe Bay in Alaska's far north — an aging oil field that is one of the largest in North America.
They touted goals of doubling the oil coursing through Alaska's existing pipeline system and building a massive natural gas pipeline as its "big, beautiful twin".
It takes years for proposed extraction projects to unfold, if they ever do.
The extent of oil reserves in the Arctic refuge remains uncertain.
No major oil company bid during the only two lease sales offered to date in the Arctic refuge.
But the measures pushed by the new administration and Congress amount to the latest pendulum swing between Republican and Democratic presidents, between policies prioritising extraction and environmental protections.
The budget bill calls for additional lease sales in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, west of the Arctic refuge, and opening more areas to potential leasing than authorized under recent Democratic administrations.
Alaska's political leaders generally have cheered on the push for more extraction, including its Republican congressional delegation and its governor, who has called his state "America's natural resource warehouse".
So have some Native leaders, who say their communities stand to benefit from jobs and revenues.
They say such projects are critical to their economic prospects and self-determination, providing jobs and helping their communities pay for schools, streets and snow removal.
"We need jobs. Our people need training. To stand on our own two feet. Our kids need a future," said PJ Simon, first chief of the Allakaket Tribal Council.
But Native opponents of such projects say short-term economic gains come at the risk of long-term environmental impacts that will reverberate widely.
"We're kind of viewed as the last frontier, like we have unlimited resources," said Sophie Swope, executive director of the environmental advocacy group Mother Kuskokwim Tribal Coalition.
She said Alaska's most renewable resources — such as salmon, deer and other migratory wildlife — are threatened both by overly aggressive ocean fishing and by extractive industries.
"There's that lack of respect for our traditional subsistence lifestyles," she said.
Opponents of oil drilling in the Arctic refuge fear it will permanently disrupt the long-range migration of caribou, which Native people have hunted for millennia.
A massive caribou herd goes to the refuge's coastal plain to calve in the spring before fanning out across a wider area, providing a crucial food source for Native hunters in Alaska and Canada.
If the herd's migration is disrupted, opponents fear an impact similar to the salmon collapse — a loss not just of food but of a focal point of culture and spirituality.
Simeon said the disruption of communal hunting and fishing activities leads to a spiritual rootlessness that she believes contributes to alarming rates of addictions and suicide among Alaska Native people.
"What does it do to your heart and soul when you have to look at an empty smokehouse year after year after year, and you can't provide for your family?" Simeon said.