Living on Thin Ice. Steven C. Dinero
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Arctic Village was the most distant and remote of Gwich’in villages, making it all the more challenging to get there (1985: 112).
Thus, when researcher and anthropologist Robert McKennan traveled to the village in 1933, for example, only nine people were present upon his arrival, and the village was comprised of about a dozen cabins (Mishler and Simeone 2006: 168–69). Katherine Peter notes that throughout this period into the late 1930s, there was still constant movement between Arctic Village and neighboring Gwich’in settlements including Fort Yukon, Chalkyitsik, and Venetie. For the most part, the Gwich’in remained largely nomadic to this point, having little if any interaction with the outside world short of the ongoing trading activities at Fort Yukon. Increasingly, this began to change, as the men went out to hunt more frequently on their own while the women stayed at the village to care for their children, who began to attend school more consistently (Peter 1992: 91).
Indeed, the population of Arctic Village fluctuated considerably throughout the early years as seminomadism persisted, dropping to negligible numbers around World War I before beginning to climb steadily after World War II and the creation of the Venetie Reservation in which Arctic Village and the Village of Venetie are situated (see Dinero 2003b: 145). The reservation, created in 1943 to promote social and economic development in the Native sector via “a fixed, limited, and protected land base” (Hosley 1966: 206), fostered internal stability and also drew external pressures that encouraged further settlement. Between 1950 and 1960, the permanent village population more than doubled. With settlement, temporary tentlike shelters were replaced by log cabins (Hadleigh-West 1963: 311). Yet, as “traditional” nomadism declined, the community maintained a significant degree of residential mobility.
Illustration 1.1 Main Street, Arctic Village, Alaska (July 2011).
That said, settlement at the village cannot be viewed as entirely “voluntary” or in any way as a benign or benevolent process. Isaac Tritt Sr. noted that, due to a lack of reliable food supplies, life in Arctic Village was typically much more challenging and the population often smaller than in other communities—Venetie or Fort Yukon, for example—with easier access to these resources (1987a). Therefore, to fully understand the Nets’aii Gwich’in of Arctic Village in the early twenty-first century, it is important to realize that settlement in the early twentieth century occurred largely due to external economic and social forces acting on the community from outside of their control and, to a degree, of their full appreciation or comprehension.
As elder Sarah James put it in one of my earlier interviews with her (8 August 1999):
We were forced to settle here. The White people came with disease and change. They wanted to put Western education here. We were forced to settle in one place so there would be enough kids for a school. If we didn’t settle they would take our kids away, adopt them, send them to mission schools.
So we settled here. We have fish here year-round, so we can always have fish. This is a place where caribou are likely to pass, so that’s why we settled.
We supported the school getting started, but I still was sent to boarding school [because] half the time the school [in the village] was barely operating.
By being near the timberline, this is also a good trapping area. So they [i.e., the White men] also introduced us to trapping.
The Church was also a big part [of settlement]. They bring in used clothes. We had a bishop, Gordon. He flew a plane, and would bring in oranges. It was the only time we got [things like that] …
Before the White people, it was a time of plenty … [Now] there were a lot of people on the land, and it was harder to find food … Then they brought in the game warden. They put in regulations on game. If they get caught killing out of season, the head of the household, the husband, was arrested. Without a man who will provide for them? The game warden would look at the bones the dogs were chewing on; we had to hide the meat. We used piles of willows to hide it if the airplane came. As I was growing up, it made me feel like—well, what would you feel if you had to sneak around and your parents were a part of it?
To be sure, the coming of White settlers had mixed outcomes. White men brought alcohol and disease, but they also brought doctors and cures. Medicine and religion went hand and hand. The traditional shaman was not powerful enough to fight the new diseases the Nets’aii Gwich’in encountered, which, in time, would further strengthen the power of the Christian church (Mackenzie 1985: 8).
The creation of the Venetie Reservation did not fully resolve all land claims issues and struggles between the Nets’aii Gwich’in and the White settlers, who were slowly but surely coming to Alaska throughout the postwar period. Politicization of Alaskan Gwich’in interests also increased in the 1950s as the community struggled with the United States federal government to protect and maintain its traditional lands. The Nets’aii Gwich’in sought to increase the amount of land beyond that initially allotted to the reservation in 1943.
In 1950 and again in 1957, Arctic Village petitioned the US Department of the Interior to enlarge the Venetie reserve west and north (Lonner and Beard 1982: 101), but to no avail. Rather than surrendering land, the US government adopted a different approach to dealing with Indigenous Americans. By the early 1960s, the Johnson Administration had implemented its Great Society initiative, which extended into Native Alaska. On the one hand, the Nets’aii Gwich’in of Arctic Village benefited from the War on Poverty plan, insofar as new housing and buildings were constructed to help improve the communal standard of living (at least, from a Western perspective). At the same time, however, the programs also fostered increased dependence on the government and greater participation in the cash, wage-labor economy (131–32).
Illustration 1.2 The village context—the Vashr’aii K’oo Creek as it drains into the East Fork of the Chandalar River (July 2011).
Soon thereafter, in 1971, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) was developed and implemented, a major outcome of which was the creation of 13 Native regional corporations and 203 village corporations (Arnold 1976: 146). The regional corporations were to serve as for-profit companies, as holders of traditional Native lands and the resources therein that invested their by-products in order to “promote the economic and social well-being of [their] shareholders and to assist in promoting and preserving the cultural heritage and land base” (Doyon 2015). The village corporations were governed separately from the regional corporations and did not “replace village councils or the governing bodies of municipal governments” (Arnold 1976: 160).
Thirty-seven villages were included in the Doyon Native Regional Corporation, established in Alaska’s interior region. Arctic Village and Venetie determined they would take title of their own reserve rather than participate in the land claims settlement. In so doing, the Nets’aii Gwich’in opted to take fee simple title of the 1.8 million acre Venetie Reservation from the federal government, furthering Nets’aii Gwich’in control of natural resources in the region (Stern 2005: 47). Bureau of Land Management studies at the time indicated that the area in and around Arctic Village potentially held gold, iron, zinc, tin, lead, tungsten, silver, chromium, and other minerals, and that oil and natural gas might also be found locally (DCRA 1991).
Thus, the 1.8 million acres were patented to the Venetie and Nets’aii corporations. As “tenants in common,” the two villages shared the land, dividing on a percentage basis, with 303 total residents and others with land claims in Venetie and Arctic Village combined. Venetie was given 156 out of 303, or 51.5 percent interest of the land, and Arctic was given 147 out of 303, or 48.5 percent interest of the land, as a temporary first step. The ultimate goal was to control the land and its resources, and to go through the necessary legal processes that would lead to that end. “Subsequent to acquiring the patented lands, the two corporations transferred title of the land in trust to the Native Village of Venetie Tribal Government [NVVTG] for the purpose of managing the land and its resources. Following this transfer