Word: kaktovik
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Furthermore, the coastal plain is far from a pristine wilderness untouched by human hands, unlike the other 17.5 million acres already protected. It is a flat, treeless, almost featureless plain in northeastern Alaska home to a military radar site and the Inupiat Eskimo community of Kaktovik, a village of 260 complete with houses, stores, a school, power lines and many other modern-day facilities. The town even has its own oil well...
...must not ignore the needs and opinions of the Alaskans. The state’s entire Congressional delegation, the state’s Senate and House, the governor and 78 percent of residents of the village of Kaktovik, the Native village within the coastal plain, support development of the ANWR. Those who are closest to the area and know the unbiased facts of the situation understand that drilling can be done responsibly. Done correctly, oil drilling in the ANWR will both increase conservation efforts and aid economic growth...
...What it is going to come down to is a couple of hundred guys in D.C. pushing the panic button, because that's the way it always happens," says Kaktovik mayor Lon Sonsalla, who supports drilling but is unhappy at how little the local communities have been consulted on the issue...
...industry insists has the greatest potential of any land in the U.S. Only two native villages abut this vast park: Arctic Village, on the southern border in the foothills of the Brooks Range, which is home to 100 Gwich'in members of the Athapaskan Indian group; and Kaktovik, on Barter Island, far to the north at the edge of the Beaufort Sea, where 200 Eskimos live. These two villages, divided about the wisdom of oil exploration, are microcosms of two positions in the battle for the future of Alaska...
...Eskimos in Kaktovik also hunt caribou, but they depend more heavily on the sea, where captains like Isaac Akootchook go out in 18-ft. boats after seal and bowhead whale. The Inupiat (as they prefer to be called), who chose to participate in the 1971 claims settlement, have benefited from oil revenues in the form of a school, a community center and other projects. "We feel caught in the middle," says Akootchook. "We don't like exploration, but if we oppose it and they impose it anyway, we get nothing...