Maggie Stutz, Alaska Community Action on Toxics, Anchorage, Alaska.
All summer, the small but mighty ACAT (Alaska Community Action on Toxics) team has been preparing for the big trip to Nome and Sivuqaq (St. Lawrence Island). Nome is a small remote town in northeastern Alaska, and Sivuqaq is a small island off the coast near Russia. Sivuqaq consists of three villages. Gambell is on the far side of the island by Russia; Savoonga is near the middle of the island; Northeast Cape is on the end of the island closest to Alaska.
During the Cold War, the United States Military established Aircraft Control and Warning radar stations, the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, and a line of Distant Early Warning stations on Sivuqaq. Between 1948 and 1956, seven military installations spread about 2500 acres on the native people of Gambell’s land. In 1951 the Native Village of Savoonga granted the Air Force land at Northeast Cape to build a White Alice site. A letter from the Savoonga Tribal Council to Charles Jenus, Area Director, Alaska Native Service, United States Air Force, dated April 7, 1951, shows how the people of Savoonga requested that any garbage or refuge not be dumped in the streams or beaches because it could affect the seal breeding grounds. When the military abandoned the bases, they left behind fuel drums containing petroleum products, containers of PCBs, and above and underground fuel tanks. These toxins contaminated the food sources the Yupik people have hunted and eaten for generations.
Between 1985 and 2014, the Army Corps of Engineers spent about $120 million on cleanup. Although in 2014, they determined the cleanup was sufficient, miles of wire, transformers, fuels, heavy metals, asbestos, solvents, and PCBs were left behind. People residing on the island collectively live on contaminated land and eat contaminated food. Due to the contamination, this population of 1,600 (about 800 per community on the island, Gambell and Savoonga) has higher percentages of PCBs and Mercury in their blood and higher rates of cancer than the rest of the United States.
The contamination of fish and other local resources is especially hard on the indigenous communities of Sivuqaq because about 70 to 80 percent of families eat traditional food —bowhead whale, walrus, and seals. Despite efforts to call on the U.S Army Corp of Engineers to reevaluate their cleanup efforts with the new data that the community of Sivuqaq and ACAT has collected, there has been no such effort.
Despite the disregard from the United States government, we went to Nome to conduct a field institute. We met about 20 people from the island in Nome and spent the week with them. We spent the mornings in the classroom learning about GPS systems, mercury, PCBs, PFAS, and other contaminants in the area and how to test for them. In the afternoons, we all went to different water sources in the town and tested for contaminants. We took water samples, set up mercury filters to test the air, and set traps for Stickleback fish. The week’s point was to teach people from Sivuqaq how to collect data, proving their environment is contaminated through Western scientific methods.
Our trip to Northeast Cape was canceled last minute due to runway issues on the island and was rescheduled for next year. Due to this, we headed back to Anchorage a week early. Although this schedule change was disappointing, my week in Nome was terrific. I learned a lot and met amazing people from the Island and around the country.
I love working with ACAT and helping this community fight back against this injustice. Still, I think about how we perpetuate Western science’s power over Indigenous knowledge. The people of Sivuqaq knew their environment was contaminated due to the military sites before we came in and “proved” it with Western science. The United States government only respects data and knowledge if it was found and “proven” through this Western research method. However, we only re-stated the facts the people from Sivuqaq have been saying for decades. Why do we respect and only listen to facts and statements if they have been found through the Western scientific method? There are other methods and ways to know if something is true. I understand that this is the system currently in place. It is helpful to find data through the Western scientific method that supports what the people of Sivuqaq have been saying to hold the government accountable because our legal system only respects and listens to data found through this method. But, I wish there was a way to fight back against the unequal weight we put on Western science.