It's one of those photographs that reveals more with every glance. An old Eskimo woman on a bright sunny day outside the senior center in Kotzebue, Alaska, her bronze face burnished by the wind, her cheeks nipped to a ruddy glow. Aging eyelids slump down and fold back upon themselves as do the corners of her mouth. It is a face you might have encountered on the Bering Land Bridge at the end of the Pleistocene Era.
But then your eyes pop at the old woman's fancy parka. It's sewn in the traditional way but made from rich blue corduroy sprinkled with multicolored hearts--bouncy little hearts, yellow and purple and red, tumbling this way and that, all lit up in the sunlight. This cloth didn't cross any land bridge. It crossed the continent on a UPS jet. And it doesn't humor some nostalgic notion of Arctic indigenes squinting into an icy horizon. It springs full force from American popular culture--this material might cover the legs of a teenager at the Mall of America.
But again you are jogged backward--a century, or a hundred centuries--when you notice that sewn on the edge of this playful fabric, fringing the hood, is the skin of a wolverine. White claws poke from big, brown forepaws nearly meeting beneath the elder's chin. The limbs seem to grip her from behind, as if the animal were riding her back as a child might.
So you go, back and forth, layers of incongruity stacking themselves upon the picture. And finally you realize there is no incongruity here at all--not when you consider what it might mean to be an Inupiat Eskimo in 21st-century America. Sometimes, in this far-flung corner of the North American continent, old and new worlds don't so much collide as they do accommodate one another. And nothing illustrates that rarity better than the possibility that this wolverine may well have been killed in a national park.
At first glance, it must seem more than a little strange that people may set steel traps for wolverines (and marten and mink and foxes and wolves) in the Kobuk Valley National Park, east of Kotzebue; or that they might run seine nets out into the Kobuk River, corralling 500 to 1,000 whitefish in a day; or that they are allowed to shoot up to five caribou per day. At Cape Krusenstern National Monument, just across Kotzebue Sound from the town, Native people set up spring camps to kill not only seals but also the eerily beautiful white whales called beluga.
These revelations may leave many people somewhere between uneasy and outraged, but to Jim Magdanz, who tracks subsistence activities for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, it's entirely logical. "These areas are 90 percent indigenous people," he says. "They have hunted and fished on this land for millennia--before there were parks. They are isolated, remote, and heavily dependent on fish and game in their diet." A 2004 study in the Norton Bay area, says Magdanz, showed that local people obtained 75 percent of their dietary protein through hunting and fishing. But beyond nutrition, these activities provide social sustenance, "Fishing for whitefish and salmon tends to be a family affair, with children, aunts, and uncles sharing the work," says Magdanz. "The fish camp might be a couple of white canvas wall tents or a small plywood cabin. Several families will work together to process the fish, washing, cutting, and hanging the fish to dry."
Still, why does the Park Service allow hunting and fishing within Alaska parklands when it has eliminated hunting elsewhere? The answer may be found in an enlightened piece of legislation enacted by Congress 27 years ago. In a stroke, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 (ANILCA) more than doubled the acreage of the country's national park units, doubled the national wildlife refuge lands, tripled its wilderness preserve acreage, and added 26 new wild and scenic rivers. With ANILCA, much of the Kotzebue basin, the traditional homeland of the Inupiat Eskimos of Northwest Alaska, instantly became national parks, preserves, monuments, and wildlife refuges. But Congress wisely recognized that there were thousands of people-- both Native and white--whose economic and cultural well-being depended to some degree on their freedom to hunt, fish, gather berries, cut trees, and so on. And this way of life in rural Alaska, Congress noted, "may be the last major remnant of the subsistence culture alive today in North America." Accordingly, the subsistence lifestyle was declared a cultural value and its practice was to be allowed in the newly established parks.
If we tour these hunting-grounds-cum-parklands around Kotzebue, the local people's connection to the land becomes powerfully revealed. Just across Kotzebue Sound, a few miles to the southwest, lies the north shore of the Seward Peninsula. Since the passage of ANILCA, most of this area is now Bering Land Bridge National Preserve. "Land bridge" is a misnomer, unless you can imagine a bridge 1,000 miles wide. An intercontinental thoroughfare did span the Bering Sea, but as a broad plain conjunct north to south with the entire Alaskan and Siberian landmasses.
At the height of the Ice Age glaciations, massive ice sheets up to two miles thick covered northern lands, causing sea level to drop about 400 feet below its present level. Because the Bering and Chukchi seas are shallow, a land connection emerged as the sea receded. And this terrestrial link permitted animals like the woolly mammoth and even plants to cross in both directions between Asia and North America. Eventually, Asian hunters, equipped with skin-sewing technology and expertly fashioned stone-tipped weapons, pursued the drifting aggregations of herbivores north and east across the land bridge and into the New World. It was one of the great accomplishments in human history: the discovery and colonization of an entire hemisphere of the planet.
The preserve protects the archaeological remains of these people, as well as features that illuminate geologic processes. Projectile points first reported by geologist David Hopkins at Trail Creek Caves in 1948 may be 10,000 years old. Near Devil Mountain Lakes (which are really a pair of volcano craters called "maars"), Hopkins found a buried portion of the land bridge still intact. With trowel and brush, he excavated this singular find, collecting leaves, stems, seeds, insects, rodent nests, and animal dung--all frozen and preserved beneath a layer of volcanic ash for 18,000 years.
John Reynolds was part of the Park Service team that selected this area as a national preserve. It isn't physical grandeur that stands out here, he says, but woven layers of meaning: "the interrelationships of time and sea level… volcanism and biology and paleobotany and the succession of different tundra types, and intertwining all of that with the movement of people into North America." By the time he retired as director of the Park Service's Pacific West Region, Reynolds had seen many magnificent landscapes. But Bering Land Bridge, he says, is his "favorite national park in the whole world… because it taught me about those layers."
At Cape Krusenstern, an unprepossessing grassy lowland belies an extraordinary archaeological treasure. The beach here is advancing as sand and gravel drifts to it from eroding beaches elsewhere. Periodically, a big storm will drive this material to shore, heaping it into a ridge that emerges when the storm tide recedes. In this way, 114 beach ridges have been added to the Cape Krusenstern shores over the course of thousands of years. In 1958 an Alaskan archaeologist named Louis Giddings found ancient house pits on every ridge. Normally, archaeologists dig downward knowing they'll encounter older strata as they descend. But at Krusenstern, Giddings saw the possibility of a "horizontal stratigraphy." He theorized that people who hunted sea mammals would want to live on the outermost beach ridge, near their boats, just as they do today. If so, the 114 beach ridges extending inland for three miles represented a chronologically arrayed sequence of human habitation, with the oldest cultures situated farthest inland. The record Giddings unearthed at Cape Krusenstern included every known cultural stage of prehistoric Eskimos in northern Alaska.
But above the beach ridges, on top of a bluff, he found two more cultures that were unknown and, he thought, very old. These two sites, which he called Palisades I and II, contained projectile points that were notched at their base so they could be attached to spears with lashings, something rarely found in the Arctic. When colleagues doubted his dating, Giddings searched his memory for a site where notched points might be found--but in a vertical stratigraphy and below the more familiar points, proving his theory. Finally, he remembered a site on the Kobuk River, just inside Kobuk Valley National Park, that he had visited decades earlier. What Giddings found at a place called Onion Portage could scarcely be imagined.
Where the Kobuk River makes a big bend below the village of Ambler, a number of geographic and biotic features converge to make a perennially attractive campsite. Women and children could take a shortcut, cutting off the bend in the river, and pick wild onions along the way. A nearby creek flows down from Jade Mountain, and jade could be gathered there. But most significantly, caribou tended to flow through here in the fall on their migration south. For thousands of years, Inupiaq people sat in this camp working jade into tools, waiting for the caribou to appear, and then spearing them in the river from kayaks.
The cultures Giddings had found at Krusenstern he also found at Onion Portage, but now the evidence was stacked vertically. The Palisades-type side-notched points were there, but five feet deeper in the ground than the other flints, making the Palisades cultures incontrovertibly older. Layer after layer of dark strata containing hearths and artifacts descended an incredible 18 feet. The Smithsonian Institution's Henry Collins called Onion Portage "undoubtedly the most important archaeological site ever found in the Arctic." It contained more than 30 cultural layers extending back 8,500 years.
"It would have been pretty ironic," Jim Magdanz points out, "if the national park had protected Onion Portage for its archaeological value and at the same time disconnected the people from the traditional activity of hunting there." For local people, Onion Portage remains the most reliable place to find migrating caribou.
These archaeological sites obviously hold a valuable record of human activity--the people's range, food sources, hunting techniques. But they also present a justification for the continuance of subsistence hunting, fishing, and trapping in Alaska parklands. They document, with every harpoon head and flint projectile point, a cultural tradition that holds 10,000 years of precedence over American governmental institutions. Subsistence gathering of animals and plants--not to mention the intrinsically related practices of collaboration, sharing, sewing, dance, and song--is cultural glue. It binds together generations of people, Inupiat and white, who are not merely using this land, but who are, in a way, created by it.
