Seth Kantner's Changing Alaska

August 20, 2008

Andrew Greene after pulling in three shackles of fishing gear:
Photo by Seth Kantner.

The net is alive with splashing fish. Andrew Greene and his dad, Frank, are in the boat with me. Behind the boat, in the sunlit water, salmon swirl and their long dark backs show for an instant.

We’re standing in fish, pulling in netted fish, picking them out of the webbing as fast as we can. We’re working hard but have spare energy to tease each other. Andrew jokes about how well he’s done fishing since he got a greedy white guy for a partner. Seals surface near the net. Their sleek heads glint in the sun. They are stealing bites of fish, then resurfacing out in the channel. I joke that they don’t trust him, know he’s Eskimo and may shoot at them. 

Hanging from the windscreen on my homemade plywood boat is my tiny red shortwave radio. It’s tuned to KOTZ AM radio, broadcasting from Kotzebue, just a few miles across the water—broadcasting a contentious live debate concerning strip mining, salmon streams, and water pollution.

The debate has to do with Measure 4, on the ballot in Tuesday’s primary election. The ballot initiative hopes to raise protections of Alaskan streams from effluent releases into rivers by large mines. It would return those protections to what they were before our previous and well-hated Republican governor, Frank Murkowski, gutted the Alaska Department of Natural Resources.

On the YES side are the Clean Water folks, largely Bristol Bay salmon fishermen, hunters, and residents who don’t want the Pebble Mine—a proposed mega gold mine with a huge cyanide leach-field at the headwaters of the rivers that drain into Bristol Bay’s richest-in-the-world salmon fishery.

The NO side is a consortium—these days, international mining conglomerates and Alaska Native corporations, including the Northwest Alaska Native Association (NANA), who want to mine where, when, and as they see fit.

Is it surprising that the NO’s have out-spent the YES’s by millions?

These days none of us can check mail, read a newspaper or sign onto Yahoo without flashy ads telling us to vote no, to vote against the “anti-mining outsiders.” Many of the ads say to vote for tradition—suggesting ironically that this control on mega strip mines is a threat to native rights.

On the water, the sun glints off small ripples. The salmon run is strong this year, the fish fat and silvery and great-tasting. The numbers are not tapering off as they traditionally do this late into August. Nor is the quality. Most years, fish this late are toothy and “colored”—marked on their sides by colored bands indicating deterioration from contact with fresh water.

We fishermen are surprised by such a return of salmon. With all the talk of global warming, all the problems with recent returns to the Yukon River, I think we’d actually be less surprised with a feeble run.

These salmon are heading up the Noatak and Kobuk rivers. Up the Kobuk, near where I was born and raised, and further—where NANA and NovaGold (a partner with Barrick Gold Corporation) hope to build a massive mine for gold, silver, lead, and copper.

On the radio, reps from NANA and the Red Dog Mine—the largest lead and zinc mine in the world, just up the coast now—badger a lone man from the Clean Water side, who is connected by telephone.

He is Dr. Bruce Switzer, a veteran mining engineer with experience across the globe. He repeatedly asks the Red Dog PR man why they claim so vehemently that this initiative will shut down all mining in Alaska when Red Dog was developed under similar environmental restrictions.  Repeatedly the PR man deflects the question. The NANA rep steps in, telling villagers once again how to vote.

It’s an ugly battle. The day is clean and sunlit. Andrew and Frank tell me to turn the radio off.

I see the multinational mining conglomerates as a camouflaged version of the Great White Father. Instead of beads and junk glass, this time villagers are being offered snowmobiles, four-wheelers, and truck-driving jobs in trade for the gold in what land remains theirs. The value of clean water, clean salmon, clean land for caribou is relegated to rhetoric.

I see this as just the tip of the iceberg—not melting this one, but growing—and gliding straight toward Alaska.