The Arctic dilemma: a perfect storm of environmental changes is transforming Native Alaskan food gathering and culture.

When crude oil flowed from the punctured Exxon Valdez supertanker 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 last 30 years, according to Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Projections are for warming to be up to ten times as fast in the Arctic over the next century as in the world as a whole.

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Shrinking sea ice makes it more difficult and dangerous to hunt marine mammals that typically live at the ice edge. Thin river ice and melting permafrost cut off areas that have long been used as transportation corridors. Beaver dams are appearing far north of where they used to be seen. Rising water temperatures in the Yukon River seem to be encouraging growth of a parasite that turns salmon meat to an unpalatable mush. Hot, dry summers have thawed permafrost layers and shriveled berry crops. Elders' advice about weather patterns, which is based on past history, is proving invalid in many cases. Entire villages, starting with the Inupiat Eskimo community of Shishmaref on the northwestern coastline, are facing the prospect of relocation because of severe erosion triggered by a rapidly warming climate.

"This is the most significant environmental and subsistence issue facing Alaska, period," Deborah Williams, executive director of the Alaska Conservation Foundation, said about global warming.

At the same time the climate is heating up, a noxious brew of contaminants--PCBs, DDT and other chemicals and pesticides--is being transported from southern latitudes to the far north. Many of the pollutants have long been banned in the United States, and few are emitted anywhere near Alaska. But atmospheric and marine currents carry them north, where the cold temperatures cause them to condense, precipitate and get into the food chain.

High up that chain, the accumulations of pollutants get concentrated. Some of the highest levels of persistent organic pollutants have been measured in the fat of marine mammals in remote Arctic and near-Arctic regions. They also turn up in the blood of people who eat marine mammals--and even in the breast milk of nursing mothers. The result is what has become known as the "Arctic dilemma"--unease about the safety of traditional foods, along with widespread acknowledgement that those wild foods, packed with healthful Omega-3 fatty acids, antioxidants and other qualities, are far better than the store-bought alternatives.

Shifts in Diet

For thousands of years, the Alutiiq people, sometimes called Pacific Eskimos, have been dependent on the area's marine bounty. It was no accident that their ancestors settled in the region stretching from Prince William Sound to the Kodiak Island archipelago and the Alaska Peninsula. The waters draw all sorts of sea life and today support some of the state's richest and most varied commercial fisheries. The land, shaped by a temperate, coastal climate, is thickly forested, mountainous and also rich with game and other resources that helped the Alutiiq people's ancestors thrive.

Today the region, commonly known as "Southcentral," is the most populous in Alaska. While many Alutiiq live in Anchorage, Kodiak or smaller cities, the coastline is dotted with their traditional villages. Like many of these villagers, the Alutiiq lack outside road access, depend on boats for basic transportation, are active commercial fishermen, and are involved in the growing tourism business and other industries.

In the Prince William Sound villages, it is hard to parse out potential Exxon Valdez impacts from those caused by other changes. "Today, we have to travel farther and hunt harder to gather the resources that were in our backyard before the spill," said Gary Kompkoff, tribal chief in Tatitlek, the tiny village near the grounding site at Bligh Reef. Residents know that some declines started before the spill, he added, "but we also know that the Exxon Valdez accelerated those declines."

The conviction that the spill is to blame for problems like a herring crash, marine mammal declines and subtle changes along the shoreline has hardened in recent years, said the author of a Department of Fish and Game study about subsistence. "There's actually more of a feeling now than there was five years ago. People are beginning to wonder about the connection between the spill and what they're seeing," said Jim Fall, who contacted 544 households in 15 communities for his study. He cites new research by the National Marine Fisheries Service's Auke Bay Laboratory showing that the oil is more persistent and more toxic than previously believed, and that chronic impairment to species' vitality and reproduction continues.

Exxon Mobil disputes those conclusions. It and its predecessor, Exxon Corp., have argued for years that Prince William Sound and neighboring parts of the Gulf of Alaska are recovered completely from the spill. Scientists hired by the corporation have pointed to the warming climate, disturbances from increased vessel traffic and accumulated pollution from small sources, like abandoned mines, as more likely contributors to the ecosystem change.

Villagers and the oil company agree on one thing--the environment is not what it once was.

Whatever the reasons for the changes, a vast majority of residents surveyed in those villages believe traditional food gathering is only a shadow of what it was before the spill, according to the Department of Fish and Game study. A shift in diet, to more salmon, halibut and deer meat, reflects the changes, said Brown-Schawlenberg. Herring, octopus and crabs are hard to find these days. Marine mammals, once a staple, are scarce.

But residents still eat wild food, even if the young have to depend on the old to harvest it. "The people in Tatitlek are going to prefer their subsistence resources over store-bought food forever, I think," Kompkoff said. "You put a plate of seal ribs in front of a Tatitlek resident along with a plate of prime rib, and every time they'll take the seal ribs."

Climate Change, Lifestyle Change

Store-bought food has its perils, as the experience on one Bering Sea island shows.

On St. Paul Island in the Pribilofs, the Aleut villagers have the dubious distinction of posting Alaska's highest diabetes rates. Today, one in ten residents is expected to develop the disease, which not long ago was relatively rare among Alaska Natives.

Fur seals, traditionally a mainstay in the Aleut diet, are declining in number for reasons that are not yet understood. At the same time, an active hunting lifestyle is gradually being replaced by sedentary habits, including desk-bound employment. The proliferation of packaged, processed foods and microwave ovens is helping make traditional diets seem antiquated.

In response, the nonprofit Aleutian/Pribilof Islands Association has established a "Traditional Foods Protection Program" that seeks to educate residents about the benefits and risks of the traditional Aleut diet. The program, funded by a National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences grant, helps local groups set up their own monitoring programs to test the safety of traditional foods, while also stressing the benefits of the traditional Aleut diet, said Mike Brubaker, community services director for the association. "We're trying to find a balanced approach," he said.

Residents know that there are good reasons why fur seals have been so important to the Aleuts. Aqualina Lestenkof, a St. Paul resident, wonders if high-fat marine mammals may become obsolete as food if the warming continues. "When it's 60 degrees in St. Paul, I don't think I'll want to eat seal," she said. Perhaps island and Arctic hunters will eventually become far-north gardeners, she mused. "Will they start growing iceberg lettuce in Barrow?"

Health Impacts

On another Alaska island, the questions began years ago. Longtime health aide Annie Alowa of St. Lawrence Island became worried when she saw what she considered a troubling trend of cancer cases, birth defects and premature births.

The treeless island's residents are Yupik Eskimos with cousins in the nearby Chukotka region in Russia. As remote as it is from the world's industrial centers, St. Lawrence Island--like other far north villages--is a hotspot for pollutants carried from distant southern latitudes. It was also a dumping ground for the U.S. military, which used the island as a Cold War watch post.

On the island's Northeast Cape, an abandoned Air Force surveillance station left a legacy of over 220,000 gallons of spilled fuel, plus solvents, paint, heavy metals, asbestos, PCBs and other pollutants. A cleanup launched in the 1990s by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is several years from completion.

Eight years ago, Alowa teamed up with Anchorage environmentalist Pam Miller, who was launching Alaska Community Action on Toxics (ACAT), a nonprofit organization focusing on local pollution issues around the state. At the request of Alowa and others from Savoonga, ACAT tested plants and fish from the Northeast Cape, along with contaminants in reindeer, murre eggs, bearded seal and walrus and the blood of 60 islanders.

The blood samples revealed PCB loads five to ten times as high than the average Lower 48 states' resident, with the highest concentrations measured in villagers who gathered foods from the Northeast Cape area.

The results implicate the area's wild foods, said one expert. "When you have people who have a diet that's very high in animal fat, they get the full whammy of the contaminants," said David Carpenter, who supervised the St. Lawrence Island studies.

Most likely, the majority of contaminants are those transported over long distances from southern latitudes, Carpenter said. But the data indicates that some incremental damage is coming from the local pollutant sources, he said.

In 1999, Alowa died of liver cancer, a disease she had believed was triggered by exposure to the military pollutants. The following year, ACAT won a National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences grant to continue work at the island.

Anger over the military pollution and the long-range transport of contaminants has led some St. Lawrence Islanders to join in a human-rights complaint filed against the U.S. government lodged by a California Indian tribe concerned about inadequately cleaned mining waste.

"It is a violation of human rights to contaminate the foods that should nourish and sustain," according to the complaint, filed in January with the United Nations' Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.

Return to Traditions

Reversing the changes that affect traditional food gathering and culture will require a variety of responses, activists say.

The first step to take is to stop emitting the pollutants, said Miller. "Until we stop this stuff at the source, we're going to continue to accumulate these chemicals in the Arctic," she said.

Indigenous groups from the circumpolar north successfully campaigned for an international treaty to ban so-called "Dirty Dozen" POPs. The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants became effective last year. However, the U.S. Senate has yet to ratify the treaty. Miller said the reluctance is due to industry concerns about treaty provisions that will add new chemicals to the banned list in the future. Some conservative advocates have called on President Bush to pull out of the treaty.

While that battle goes on, ACAT is encouraging local changes. In 2000, the group, along with a youth environmental organization, convinced the Anchorage School District to adopt a new policy that sharply restricts pesticide use.

Efforts also continue to encourage continued consumption of traditional Native foods, with caveats. In Canada, for example, so-called "country foods" are promoted, but pregnant and nursing women are told to curtail their use of high-fat items like blubber, Watt-Cloutier said. The reason is that fetuses and newborns are most vulnerable to the potential effects of contaminants.

To Carpenter, that pre-natal advice is insufficient, however. Persistent organic pollutants accumulate in the body over time; dioxins have a half-life in the human body of about ten years, he said. "If you wait until you're pregnant to worry about what you're eating, it's way, way too late," he said.

Most important, say many, is accurate and complete information to local people so they can make the right choices.

"The people on St. Lawrence Island are probably more aware and more interested than people in any other community I've ever worked with," Carpenter said. "They're very anxious to get information."

He also suggests that the federal government substitute something more healthful for the surplus cheese and butter it ships to places like St. Lawrence Island, where residents have few jobs and are dependent on federal food-assistance programs. "Of course, it's very difficult to get fresh fruits and vegetables up there. But what we're sending them may be making things even worse," Carpenter said.

Subsistence and Cultural Survival

Achieving long-term changes in policy that will slow global warming is more complicated. Even those most ardent in their arguments for air pollution reductions acknowledge that any climate payoff would be years away, at best.

Native people have adapted to changes in the past, but they cannot do so now unless there are some corresponding changes to rules limiting where and when they can gather food, said Craig Fleener, an Athabascan tribal leader in Fort Yukon. "We have to have unlimited or unfettered, or reduced limits, to access to the resources," he told an Anchorage audience.

To ensure that subsistence is not a lost art, several Native organizations have established youth camps giving instruction on food-gathering traditions. One of the best-known is held in Tatitlek, where each May there is a "cultural heritage week," where young people learn such subsistence skills as skin sewing and seal-gut braiding.

Since it started 11 years ago, the program has flourished. The village of 100 nearly triples with students, chaperones and instructors from around Alaska. Kompkoff, who helped establish the event, hopes it will help young villagers make up for lost time and eventually take on their roles as cultural leaders.

"Whether or not it will fix things, I don't know," he said. "We won't know until it's their turn."

Yereth Rosen is a journalist in Anchorage with experience covering environmental and Alaska Native issues.