Living on Thin Ice. Steven C. Dinero
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perspective. Given my training and interests in developing world settlement systems, I came to this particular indigenous community viewing it as a case study, providing a microcosm of the manifest issues and concerns that virtually all hunter-gatherer communities have experienced to some degree since European contact and colonization.
While these interests remained ongoing, in time other issues and opportunities developed that also attracted my attention. Chief among these was my involvement in two major development projects, one concerning the local church, the other on e-commerce, coordinated through the local high school. More to the point, my academic interests also evolved. As I spent time in the village, a cluster of interrelated issues undergoing change in the community repeatedly came to the fore during numerous discussions with the villagers: the climate, subsistence practices (namely, their decline), and behaviors among the village youth. Over the years, it became clear to me that from the Nets’aii Gwich’in perspective, these issues, while not initially my primary areas of emphasis, were the key indicators of the future strength and direction of the community’s social and economic development.
Thus, given the longitudinal and interdisciplinary nature of the study, various complementary methodological approaches were used that reflect the complexity of this work. For chapter 2, for example, considerable archival research was conducted primarily at the Alaska and Polar Regions Collections and Archives of the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Other archives consulted included those of the Episcopal Diocese of Alaska (Fairbanks) and the Archives of the Episcopal Church (Austin, Texas).
I carried out structured interviews with my interlocutors throughout the research period primarily in face-to-face meetings. Given the nature of the community in question, these meetings often took on an informal but serious tone. Many if not most took place in homes, schools, or even outdoors; very few took place in formal settings such as offices. In all cases, informants were aware that my interest and questions were not for me alone and that anything said might later be written down for public consumption. In this regard, the protection of my interlocutors’ identities is crucial; even in cases where some said it was “no big deal,” I have anonymized some names when the material under discussion is in any way controversial or potentially embarrassing.
Much of this project emphasizes if and how the villagers are adjusting to new technologies and lifestyles, brought on by interactions with outside influences (especially White/European contact), and in turn, how they are now fairing in an age of changing climactic conditions, country food availability, and distractions being experienced by the younger generations in particular. In order to address these larger questions, I sought to gather some quantitative data via a series of household surveys in Arctic Village from 1999 to 2013. Indeed, an analysis of both the quantitative and qualitative data I collected from these surveys provides the bulk of the empirical material on issues such as educational development in the village (chapter 3), among other concerns that appear in the chapters to follow.
I acquired permission of the tribe before entering the village the first time (following Norton and Manson, 1996: 857) by submitting a preliminary proposal to both the Arctic Village Council and the Tribal Council at Venetie. In this proposal, I explained to the community why I wished to conduct research in the village and how this research might potentially benefit them in the future (859). Upon receiving permission to visit the village, I initiated preliminary work on the first household survey research instrument before I started the research in 1999. After much discussion with community members, I then began my first study and adjusted the instrument subsequently in order to achieve better results. In so doing, the research became richer and more robust with each household survey that followed. I also changed the questionnaire based on my own experiences. Early on, for example, I did not fully appreciate the crucial role played by the motorboat when hunting on the Chandalar River. After taking some hunting and fishing trips with villagers, I began to gather data about this critical form of transportation. Through informal conversations during each stay in the village, I got a better sense of what questions I should be asking and which were largely irrelevant to the community. On each questionnaire, for example, I posed a variety of questions on educational achievement and other personal characteristics, as well as wage employment status, subsistence activity, attitudes toward community living conditions, living experiences and travels outside of the region, and so on. With each iteration of the survey, I also asked increasingly more open-ended questions in order to allow respondents to address issues they felt were especially important, and in greater depth.
I was not the first to use a structured household survey in the indigenous North; John A. Kruse, among others, used such tools since the late 1970s in his work among the Inupiat (Kruse 1982: 5), as had Jack C. Stabler in the Northwest Territories. Like Stabler, I also used structured interviews with residents and other “informed” individuals (Stabler 1990: 64–65) in addition to implementing the planning survey. I discussed the instrument with a variety of Nets’aii Gwich’in and non-Gwich’in community members prior to implementation in order to avoid asking sensitive or otherwise problematic questions that could jeopardize the data-gathering process. Following Richard A. Caulfield (1983: 8–10), the last to conduct a survey in the town (in the early 1980s), I defined a “household” as an occupied dwelling unit. I surveyed both men and women; as was the case with Caulfield, men in the first survey and in subsequent surveys were overrepresented due to several social and economic explanations. As Caulfield notes, men tend to play the role of household head in the Nets’aii Gwich’in community.
I also used “information recall” (following Caulfield 1983), allowing respondents to remember or estimate such information as their percentage of annual consumption of food harvested from the local land (what I refer to here as “subsistence rate,” see chapter 5). I interviewed Nets’aii Gwich’in, non-Gwich’in Native, and non-Native village residents (although there are very few non-Gwich’in villagers) in order to gain as clear and complete a picture as possible of present village social and economic conditions. Like Caulfield and Kruse, I paid each respondent a small gratuity ($10) for their time spent answering the first survey questions. By 2013, I had increased this amount to $20 per questionnaire. I implemented the first survey in August 1999. Of the forty dwelling units occupied during the survey period, I was able to gather data from thirty-five households (87.5 percent). In general, the interviews lasted from half an hour to two hours, although the average time spent with each respondent was about thirty-five to forty minutes. It was my observation then—further confirmed in later surveys—that the Gwich’in genuinely wished to share their views and stories with me. As Lincoln Tritt had said, it was my job to listen; many were quite forthcoming as a result.
In June and July 2006, July and August 2011, and June 2012, I implemented follow-up surveys that included questions on service provision in the village, including education. I posed virtually the same questions on each survey concerning the role of the school and educational development in the village. However, some questions were modified, added, or improved from survey to survey. In 2006, thirty-nine households were surveyed. In 2011, the village continued to grow and forty-six households were surveyed. In 2012, forty-eight were surveyed. Upon completion of each survey, all quantitative data were coded for analysis using SPSS Statistics for Windows. Given the small size of the data sets, chisquare significance testing was used for all quantitative data, where p ≤ .05 (Poppel 2015).
The implementation of the March 2013 Youth Survey was similar though not identical to the approach followed above. As one might imagine, institutional review board protocols demanded that I tread lightly when interacting with interlocutors under the age of 18. I did so only with the written permission of a parent or guardian and, even still, spoke to children aged 8 to 12 only with an adult present. The survey was cleared by village adults in advance and consisted of benign questions that merely sought a sense of how the children view their school, village, and futures (i.e., what is your favorite subject in school?). Lastly, although I seek here to quantify issues such as community views on the development of the village by using some standard planning tools, I combine these tools with participant observation methods, recognizing that approaches like the static survey often have