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St. Lawrence Island lies 150 miles southwest of Nome in the icy Bering Sea. From the gravel shores of Gambell, the snowy Siberian coast is visible 38 miles across the water.
Residents of the two island communities, Gambell and Savoonga, have for thousands of years relied heavily on marine mammals, reindeer and island tundra plants to sustain them.
It would be easy to imagine such a remote, northern location as a place of clean food surrounded by pristine waters, but the St. Lawrence Islanders are facing toxic levels of chemical contamination in the soil, water, air and their bodies.
Soft-spoken grandmother Barbara Kogassagoon has the gentle smile that you might expect from a woman who was a Savoonga midwife from 1945 to 1999. She says she's lived on the island her entire life. "I was born at my dad's camp."
Her oldest sister, Annie Alowa, worked as an island health aide who spent the last 20 years of her life sounding a warning about the alarming rise of diseases within the people of St. Lawrence Island. Annie was certain the cause of illnesses not historically seen on the island were because of fuel, PCB and pesticide contamination from two main sites. One is a former Air Force base and White Alice radar site at Northeast Cape -- an area used by Savoonga residents for hunting and plant gathering. The village of Gambell sits right on the waste buried by the military when they abandoned an old base.
Kogassagoon says her sister Annie had good instincts about what was happening to her people. "She'd tried her best, you know, as we didn't know it was from the Northeast Cape, but she realized it. She had stayed at Northeast Cape longer than me. I think that's how she knew some disease was from that one."
Annie Alowa, a woman who lived a traditional, subsistence life, died of liver cancer on February 19, 1999.
St. Lawrence Islanders have PCB blood levels up to 10 times higher than other Americans. The highest levels are found in islanders who spent the most time working for the military or gathering food at Northeast Cape.
Dr. David Carpenter is the director of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the University...