Response to the three-part series, ‘Point Hope: Waste, wounds and the hunt for truth'

Response to Part I: ‘Caribou crime: The hunt for the hunters'

To view the Point Hope caribou case from the village perspective, you would have to be on the receiving end of American policy and appreciate that as the context. For Point Hopers, it is a rich one.

That the teacher could get that kind of rapid response from troopers stationed all over the place (and this was not a slow response, as the story suggests,) seems another example of a white man with more access to outside law, his law, than Natives. Point Hopers would compare it with earlier times when they or their council called the troopers or even the US marshal. This connection between the white teacher and outside law enforcement gave teachers extra power in the old days. Then a working relationship was set up between councils and troopers. Now that has fallen away.

Before North Slope Borough founder Eben Hopson used oil wealth to create the North Slope Borough Police, one trooper covered the slope and Point Hope might have been covered out of Kotzebue or Nome. Most bad conduct was handled locally.

The lies told by the troopers when they arrived at Point Hope were unhelpful to say the least, suggesting that only the white teacher could be trusted and indicting the whole community. How many times had the troopers spent that much time in Point Hope covering a crime of violence?

Once upon a time the troopers appreciated the problems associated with fish and wildlife matters and used to have brown shirts to handle that stuff to maintain credibility with the locals on criminal matters. Understand that before and even after ANCSA, when I arrived in Alaska in 1972, there was open season on caribou for whites and natives north of the Yukon River. This was why the extinguishment of Aboriginal hunting and fishing rights in ANCA, the biggest disaster in Alaska Native history, went past people who were used to being left alone under state law. Earlier, when the feds enforced the migratory bird treaty in Barrow, magistrate Sadie Neokok had organized the famous duck-in with people from all over bringing in ducks and the feds had backed off.

Lies and betrayal during the Chariot period in the 1950s (Firecracker Boys by Alaskan Dan O'Neill is a must read) continued even into the early 1990s with the discovery of radioactive material left behind. Neither the state nor the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation ever admitted what Alaska Natives - including Point Hopers proved, especially people like Walter Russell of Kotzebue-- that AEC scientist Wayne Hanson had planted radioactive material in the tundra in the same areas where these caribou were killed to learn more about how radiation is absorbed into the food chain. Murkowski got millions for a cleanup but an actual cleanup of the Hanson experiment was never accomplished.

Point Hopers blame their cancers on contamination of the ecosystem and have good reason to do so. Outsiders like Doug Dasher with the state's Department of Environmental Conservation belittled them and blamed smoking and other bad habits shared by people with lower cancer rates.