Alaska Dispatch

HOOPER BAY -- Everyone agreed the new, 74,000-square-foot school that rises like a battleship above the flat, wet, coastal tundra and ponds along the Bering Sea coast here was a facility on par with the best of any in America.

To get there, though, the visiting gang of Obama cabinet secretaries endured a bumpy, mile-long ride on a sandy, potholed road now threatened by erosion from a rising ocean. Riding in a convoy of battered pickup trucks, they bounced past gray, weathered deteriorating houses and a landscape littered with the carcasses of abandoned snowmachines and four-wheelers.

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On a clear day, the dreariness of the scene might have been broken by the beauty of a green landscape alive with birds stretching off toward the blue ocean.

But the secretaries of Housing and Urban Development, Agriculture, Energy and Education arrived on an hour-long flight from Bethel as the winds of the North Pacific Ocean brought in the fog and rain that so often settles over the western edge of the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta. A few of their aides, accustomed to the East Coast heat and feeling almost brutalized by the Alaska weather, wrapped themselves in Arctic parkas to fend off the cold.

But while the weather was unfriendly, the people were everything but. The secretaries were greeted with the the warmth and welcome that has met them everywhere in their travels in Alaska.

Bush Alaskans might not have much, but what little they have they seem always ready to share.

U.S. Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, said it was good for the rural-touring secretaries to see this. Begich recognizes that he, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and U.S. Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, are now fighting a rear-guard action to save the federal funds former Sen. Ted Stevens -- the man Begich defeated in November -- once brought north to Alaska. Citizens Against Government Waste once gave Stevens its "Whole Hog Award" for taking home the most pork per capita.

Steven's was famous for using raw political power to muscle home what it is easy for those outside Alaska to label "pork." Some might well see the $50 million in federal aid pouring in Hooper Bay to help with costly construction of the school, new housing, airport improvements and wind-generated electricity as that sort of "pork."

It is all very costly. And it is all being spent to reinforce a village on the edge of nowhere.

The sandy road from the end of the paved runway to the village and a few other roads are the only ones around for hundreds of miles. This village is so far off what Americans call "the grid" that it might as well be on the moon.

It is easy to criticize spending here as wasteful. But one man's pork is sometimes another's necessity.

Few places in America illustrate that better than Hooper Bay, a community of 1,100 about 550 miles west of Anchorage. Almost all the people are Yup'ik or part Yup'ik. They live where their ancestors have lived for 10,000 years.

Once, they were totally self-sufficient. Over time, they became dependent on outside assistance. Now, without it, their village is doomed.

"The houses are largely in need of replacement," city leaders told HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan.

He and his colleagues later toured a new, 19-unit, modular housing unit being assembled atop pilings not far from the school. Like nearly everything else in the village -- the school included -- it is on pilings to keep it from sinking into the ground as the climate warms and permafrost hidden below melts.

The housing complex, Donovan and others were told, has occupants anxiously waiting to move in, and there are 70 more already on a waiting list. More housing is desperately needed. As with most everything, it likely won't happen without government funding.

Nearly a third of Hooper Bay villagers live below the poverty level. The Alaska Department of Commerce posts the unemployment rate at 37.3 percent, but that is misleading because many people gave up looking for work long ago.

Commerce itself notes, "65.94 percent of all adults were not in the work force."

The few who do have jobs work for the school district, which, like most rural school districts, has a hard time recruiting teachers. Or they work for one of the many public or semi-public entities: the city, the native village, the local Native corporation, the clinic or the Post Office.

Twenty-seven people hold state or federal permits allowing them to fish for halibut or salmon and it sell to Coastal Village Seafoods, according to AVEC, but this is not a rich fishery like Bristol Bay. A few others earn cash weaving grass baskets or carving ivory for sale outside the village, or they are seasonally employed fighting fires for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

But there's no big money in any of it. Average per capita income is $7,841. A gallon of gas was going for $7.16 per gallon on Thursday. And people need gas if for no other reason than to fuel their four-wheelers to haul water to their homes and raw sewage away.

Most of the village has no plumbing. Water must be hauled home from the community well. Waste must be hauled away to the lagoon at the community dump.

Life has gotten easier with the construction of a piped water and sewer system for the washeteria. People can now wash clothes without having to haul that water in and the waste water away. The piped system also serves the health clinic, the school, the Head Start building, and teacher housing. But despite the latter, Lower Yukon School District superintendent John Lamont said it's still hard to attract teachers -- most of whom come from outside the village -- to stay.

But then, too, he admitted, it's hard to get school graduates to stay.

"Once they get their degrees, the road system entices them,'' he said.

Hauling your own water and waste is no fun. The lure of indoor plumbing is strong. So is that of the urban lifestyle, where food is comparatively cheap and easily obtained in the supermarket.

Here people must still hunt or fish for much of what they eat, and though the four-wheeler and snowmachine have made that easier, it is still a difficult life. It is only made more so by the high costs of fuel.

Some people say they are now being forced to choose between fuel for the machinery necessary to hunt for food and fuel for the furnaces that heat their homes. It is a difficult choice. It is no wonder those with an education, those with a chance to get out, drift away no matter how much they love the place where they grew up.

As they have left, the community's make-up has changed. Half the people living here now are under the age of 18.

Less than a quarter are in the prime working years from 25 to 44. Ninety-six percent of them are Alaska Natives.

Some of the older people who have stayed are not the best people. There are 21 registered sex offenders in the village.

The ratio of 1 for about every 50 people would be startling in any other community. Sexual crimes, though little talked about, are a disturbing problem not only here but throughout the Bush. But then maybe they are to be expected in community under stress.

This is a place fighting to survive, a community at a crossroads where an ancient culture runs head-on into the modern world.

Long ago, the economic realities were simple. Subsistence was the economy, and an abundance of seals encouraged a community of hunters to gather at a nearby point. In 1890, there were reported to be 138 people in the seal camp on the point.

Missionaries and teachers started arriving to help them in the 1920s. They brought reindeer to supplement food supplies, and for a time the people engaged in herding, but that passed quickly.

A post office was built in 1934, and cemented the village in place with the name "Hooper Bay,'' though the Yup'ik name remains "Naparagamiut," which means "stake village people." With the post office came change, and the change would keep coming.

Electricity arrived for the first time in 1968. Television came not long after. Comfortable, diesel-fueled homes on pilings replaced sod huts. Snowmachines and later four-wheelers replaced dog teams, which are time-consuming and difficult to care for.

Every change seemed good. Almost every change required money.

Now, local residents are tied to the cash economy, and there aren't many places to get cash here other than from the government.

Even efforts to wean the city from costly oil take big government investments. Windmills are turning the sky near the dump now. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu and the other dignitaries were impressed by the turbines. Wind could provide for about a quarter of the village's electricity needs when they are fully up and running.

But, as Chu was told, the costs of putting up the windmills in Hooper Bay are three or four times that of erecting them in the Lower 48. Fuel, a multiplier in the transportation system, drives all costs up fast. Shipping costs more. The local cost of living is more, so labor costs are higher. Everything increases to the point where a congressman from Outside looking at the project purely on paper might just see pork.

Maybe, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack suggested, costs could be brought down by shifting production activities.
"You ought to make these (wind generators) here somewhere,'' he said, and the same for the housing now being shipped in as modular units.

Some of that has been tried. Local officials say it usually costs more.

As with most problems in the Alaska Bush, there are no simple solutions.

Craig Medred is a contributing editor at Alaska Dispatch. Contact him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .