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Jewell meets Alaska legislators on Northwest tour

By Casey Grove

 

KOTZEBUE — Converging on this small northwest Alaska city above the Arctic Circle on Monday were the state’s governor, congressional delegation, Alaska Native and legislative leaders, staffers and no fewer than eight news crews.

 

Oh, and Interior Secretary Sally Jewell was here, too.

 

The visitors were in town in part for what had been billed as a showdown between Alaska’s leaders and Jewell, though that was not the original reason for the visit. It turned out to be less of a confrontation than a conversation, but Alaska leaders said they got their point across: Let us develop our land.

 

Jewell had agreed in November to participate in an Alaska Federation of Natives leadership retreat to discuss such issues as subsistence rights and global warming on Tuesday.

 

But recent attention-grabbing moves by the Department of the Interior — in the words of state and federal lawmakers, to “lock up” Alaska’s natural resources in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, National Petroleum Reserve and elsewhere on federal land or offshore — resulted in several meetings between Jewell and the various visiting politicians. Only a community reception in Kotzebue with dancing and speeches and Jewell’s meeting Monday in the tiny village of Kivalina about 80 miles to the northwest were open to reporters or the public.

 

Kivalina, with its 370 residents, sits on a narrow spit of land next to the Arctic Ocean and for years has suffered from coastal erosion attributed to rising sea levels and global warming. It was a perfect, if ominous, backdrop for the villagers to share their stories, Jewell said, when a reporter noted it had been warmer in Kivalina on Monday that it had been in Washington, D.C.

 

“You can see the impact of coastal erosion in the village. You can hear the fear in people’s voices about what’s happening with climate change,” Jewell said. “Things are changing up here, and that’s part of what I’m on this trip to learn about, as well as visit with the Alaska Federation of Natives, who are hosting our visit here.”

 

Jewell, wearing a blue kuspuk made and given to her by a Kivalina resident, listened to the villagers’ worries in the community’s small school gym, which had been decorated with colorful paper banners separately welcoming each of her staff members by name.

 

The Kivalina residents said problems included having to pile sandbags for protection, the removal of bodies from the local graveyard so they would not be washed away, and changing migration patterns hunters follow farther and farther away to harvest caribou and whales. As Jewell took notes, video of the crashing waves and whalers in skin boats played behind her.

 

And the village still needs basic services that others take for granted, some said.

“You gonna take my honey bucket to where you come from?” asked elder Russell Adams Sr., referring to the plastic buckets used as toilets in communities without plumbing.

Many in the gym laughed.

 

“Take it back with me?” Jewell asked.

 

“That’s all I’m worried about, and I’m worried about my grandkids, no place to build a house. I got — how many living with me now?” Adams asked, turning to a relative.

 

With less land to build on, some families are cramming 10 to 20 people into two- and three-bedroom homes, one woman said. Maybe the village would have to move, Adams said.

“Hopefully this session will bring the kind of visibility that you need to Kivalina for the challenges you have with climate change,” Jewell said, pointing out the television cameras. “Because you’re on the frontlines, right here.”

 

Jewell got a close look herself. Without hesitation, she hopped in the back of a pickup after the meeting with a Kivalina resident and a couple of reporters to see the erosion damage. The short tour wound past sled dogs tied to their houses, past expensive diesel electricity generators and ended at the airstrip, adjacent to the crosses marking Kivalina’s 50-plus graves.

 

“We’re stepping on them all the time,” an elder had said. “Remember that.”

 

Along with the AFN meeting, a main focus of the visit, Jewell said, was to talk and learn in an attempt to come up with solutions for the village and others affected by climate change, which she said was clearly caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

 

“This is the beginning of what may be to come for other areas,” Jewell said. “This is a story I’ll be able to take back to D.C. There are pictures I’ll be taking back to help people understand just how significant what we’re seeing on the ground is and how it affects people’s lives.”

 

Alaska politicians react

 

Jewell’s goals could not have been more different from those of the state senators and representatives who spoke to her behind closed doors later in Kotzebue.

 

Before the meeting, in an outdoor news conference on the coast, Jewell acknowledged the fact that recent announcements on ANWR likely had drawn more attention to her visit to Alaska, which was currently feeling “a lot of pain” because of low oil prices and a state government that is heavily dependent on oil tax revenue.

 

“I may be an easy target,” Jewell said. “But the reality is oil prices have fallen dramatically, and that’s impacted the state’s budget. We are supporting responsible and safe oil drilling in the National Petroleum Reserve and in the Outer Continental Shelf.”

 

“I don’t believe this is a showdown,” she said. “This is an opportunity for me to listen to them, and hopefully they can listen to me. A meeting of the minds to work on a longer-term solution but not at the expense of the incredible resources that Alaska has, the natural resources that are here.”

 

In a news conference later, after their closed-door meeting with Jewell, Alaska legislators said Jewell had expressed a desire to “hit the reset button” on the federal government’s relationship with Alaska. It had been a good conversation and there had been no “fireworks,” said Sen. Mike Dunleavy, R-Wasilla.

 

Alaska has always been a resource-development state, and it would be great to generate similar revenue through something like eco-tourism, Dunleavy said. But even if that were to happen someday, it would not pay for things such as schools and roads — maybe plumbing in villages — that Alaska needs now, he said. The federal government needed to listen better to those needs, he said.

 

“We want to have a voice. We don’t want to be subjects of the United States. We want to be citizens of the United States,” he said.

 

Rep. Bob Herron, D-Bethel, said legislators made it clear “that we’re frustrated.”

 

“But maybe there should’ve been some fireworks in this conversation today,” he said. “She left the door open. She wants to open up the communication.”

 

“What if talking does not work?” a reporter asked. “What then?”

 

Legislative leaders will be discussing options with Alaska’s senators and congressman, including Republican U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who oversees the Senate Appropriations Committee panel that sets the Interior Department’s budget.

 

That was an option Republican U.S. Rep. Don Young mentioned in an interview later over a cup of coffee.

 

The Obama administration’s plans for ANWR, announced just a couple weeks before the Kotzebue trip, had created a distraction from the issues that were supposed to be central to the visit, said Young, who has fought for decades to open the coastal plain to drilling.

Young said past administrations had treated Alaska like a “little jewel,” forgetting that people live here, and Obama had been the worst, so far, on that.

 

The conversation about ANWR had not changed much, Young said, adding that if it were not for the refuge-related announcements, “this would be a nothing meeting.”

 

“What’ll be accomplished? We don’t know,” Young said. “I’m not overly optimistic, because this is not the secretary’s, personally, I don’t think it’s her personal opinion. It’s an environmental group around the president. And the president’s decided to be against fossil fuels.”

 

The idea that global warming is caused by people is the “biggest charade” ever perpetrated on the people of Alaska, Young said.

 

The key to blocking a wilderness designation in ANWR is controlling the department’s budget, Young said.

 

“They’ll not have the money to implement ANWR wilderness,” he said. “They want to protect the polar bears more than the people.”