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When crude oil flowed from the punctured Exxon Valdez super-tanker in 1989, residents of the Native Alaskan villages in the spill's path halted their harvests of local foods like salmon, herring, shellfish and seals. It was supposed to have been temporary.
But 16 years later, what Alaskans refer to as "subsistence" activities -- the traditional gathering of fish, game and plants for personal and cultural use -- remain diminished in the mostly Alutiiq Eskimo villages affected by the oil disaster.
There is an explanation for the downbeat trend, said Patty Brown-Schwalenberg, executive director of the nonprofit Chugach Regional Resources Commission. "During the oil spill and the years following the oil spill, the parents were out cleaning the oil. The kids were left behind," Brown-Schwalenberg said. While food was still collected by veteran fishermen and hunters -- experts who could work under difficult circumstances -- the generation that is today's young adults was left with a dearth of skills, she said.
In Prince William Sound, as in other parts of Alaska and the circumpolar north, a combination of environmental and social changes is threatening the traditional harvests of wild foods that form the backbone of Native society.
Global warming, long-range transport of contaminants, individual pollution events and other factors are making big changes in the natural world upon which Alaska Native culture depends. The changes are complicated; some are very subtle. But the end result is potentially devastating to cultures that are strongly linked to the sea and the land.
Threats to Traditional Foods
Much is at stake, say the region's indigenous leaders. "The nutritional value of our food is so much superior to anything else," said Sheila Watt-Cloutier, an Inuit from northern Quebec who chairs the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, an umbrella group that serves aboriginal people in Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Russia. "It is not just about eating. It's also the entire culture of getting out on the land and teaching the young, all of that. And we don't want to give that up."
Global warming, which has been affecting the far north much more dramatically than more temperate latitudes, is a region-wide concern. No place on earth is warming faster than Alaska, where winter temperatures have risen an average eight degrees Fahrenheit over the...