Word: anaktuvuk
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Congratulations on your sensible article discussing the potentially dangerous problem that the Alaska village of Anaktuvuk Pass has with fallout [Sept...
...personally know Simon Paneak (head of the Eskimo village of Anaktuvuk Pass), and I have high respect...
...Eskimo village of Anaktuvuk Pass in Alaska's desolate Brooks Range north of the Arctic Circle has a post office, a school and an airplane landing strip. But for all its modern trimmings, Anaktuvuk is barely out of the Stone Age. Its 15 families (averaging five children and 12 dogs each) are remnants of the nomadic Nunamiuts. Their lives are devoted to hunting the Arctic caribou, which supplies 90% of their food as well as most of their clothing. Merely to stay alive, one Nunamiut family must kill 90 caribou a year...
Fortunately, caribou are still plentiful near Anaktuvuk Pass, and no one is going hungry. But contemporary civilization is closing in with deadly effect. Radioactive fallout from Russian and U.S. nuclear tests has dangerously poisoned the Nunamiuts' barren homeland. Fallout there has been no thicker than in many other parts of the world, but it has concentrated ominously in the bodies of the Eskimos. A report made for the Atomic Energy Commission by General Electric scientists showed that in the summer of 1962, the inhabitants of Anaktuvuk Pass had an average "whole body burden" of 421 nanocuries*of caesium...
...future, though, if the U.S. and Russia stick to their recently signed agreement to stop nuclear testing in the atmosphere, the contaminated lichens of northern Alaska will gradually lose their dangerous radioactivity. The body burdens of the caribou will fall little by little. Eventually the people of Anaktuvuk Pass will be no more radioactive than any other Americans...