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Original Article at MSNBC (This is no longer available)

On the tundra, changes will hit hard Where jobs prove scarce as trees, reforms face test of two cultures (1997)

Once transportation, some dogs, like these two in Nanupatchuk, are pets, having been replaced by snow machines.

STORY BY ANDREA HAMILTON PHOTOGRAPHY AND SOUND BY JIM SEIDA       NUNAPITCHUK, Alaska. As the bush plane cruised over the desolate tundra, Nunapitchuk appeared, a cluster of small, weather-beaten wood cabins in the middle of the sub-Arctic.       On the ground, a vicious wind rushed over the frozen, snow-dusted earth, flat for miles in every direction, making it much colder than the 20-degree temperature on this November day.       At the center of the Yupik Indian village of 490, fish and caribou skins were hung out to dry. Men worked on faltering snowmobiles and a husky howled. The few signs of influence from the outside world included satellite dishes, and election posters for state legislative seats.

At the small community hall, about 20 villagers gathered to talk about the nation's new welfare law, which will profoundly touch their lives. The men sat around a long plywood table while the women, out of deference, sat on the floor.       None had heard of the reforms until that day &emdash; three months after Congress had passed them &emdash; and there was anger in their stoic voices. John Berlin has lived in Nunapitchuk all his life, and the story of those hard 62 years is told in his worn, no-nonsense face. When Berlin became the head of his family at age 14, he was an accomplished subsistence hunter and fisherman who provided for his grandmother and siblings.       Like his forefathers a thousand years before him, Berlin lived by the code of "yuuyaraq," the Yupik word for "the way of being a human being." He fished in the spring, gathered berries in the summer and hunted in the fall, and the bounty was used to feed, house and clothe the family.       Then the whites brought new ideas to Nunapitchuk. They said they would build schools, and the younger generation would be able to use education instead of traps and guns to feed its families.       The natives believed all of this, Berlin said through an interpreter, his voice rising, but none of it came to pass. Natives gave up the old ways but they have always had inferior schools and today most are barely literate, he said. There are no jobs. And now they want to take away welfare.       "The Western civilization has effectively come in and promised things to our young people," Berlin said. "Now they are saying, 'Hey, you are for yourself.' So effectively they are destroying our life, our generation, and what are we to do with that?"       Many native Alaskan leaders agree with Berlin. But they also say that what is known on the tundra as "mailbox money" is destroying their culture and that the reforms may present their only chance to salvage it.       But there is an overriding problem, however: Jobs are as scarce as trees in this part of the Alaskan wilderness, known as the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, and most natives have no intention of moving hundreds of miles away for work. Native leaders believe there are other solutions.       Time will tell, but the nation'ss welfare reforms will be severely tested by the forces of two cultures.

LIGHT-YEARS FROM U.S. MAINLAND

No roads connect the villages of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. During the summer, boats are a primary source of transportation. In winter, villagers ride snow mobiles (known in the Alaska bush as snow machines) or even drive automobiles on the frozen lakes and rivers.

The native Alaskan of Nunapitchuck have much in common with the rural poor in Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta and the Rio Grande Valley: They have little education, no job skills and live where work is scarce.       But there are also huge differences between the residents of Nunapitchuck and their impoverished brethren in the lower 48. The natives are isolated beyond compare.       The Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta is an area the size of Ohio with a population of roughly 22,000. About 4,600 people receive some sort of welfare cash payments, according to state figures. About 5,700 are eligible for food stamps and 6,200 for Medicaid.       In all, there are 58 villages in the delta. Some 17,000 people live in the villages and 5,000 in the town of Bethel.       Twenty miles east of Nunapitchuck, Bethel exists largely as the outpost for state government on the tundra. The nearest road to the rest of Alaska is 400 miles away, and there are no roads connecting Bethel to the villages &emdash; or among the villages themselves.

This isolation is something the state legislature, 2,000 miles away in Juneau, the capital, is thinking about as it works on the state'ss welfare reforms, which take effect in July.       Under the federal law, welfare recipients must be off state assistance and into jobs within two years. States could choose to provide training, subsidize jobs or provide child care, but they are under no obligation to do so.

WHAT IS WORK?

The definition of "work" is very broad, and Alaska will include subsistence hunting and fishing for Alaskans in remote areas of the huge state. This would mean that a Yupik in Nunapitchuk could trap, hunt and fish to feed his family, and be paid for a 40-hour-a-week job, even though his labor might amount to much less in an age of time-saving snow mobiles and motor boats.      "Addressing rural Alaska is a real challenge," said Jim Nordlund, director of the Division of Public Assistance. "There are no jobs out there, and it is isolated geographically and culturally."       Alaskan officials don't believe the state's best efforts will meet the challenge of the federal law's five-year, lifetime limit on welfare benefits for each American. "There just aren't enough jobs and cash in rural economies to sustain people," Nordlund said.       In the long run, the state hopes for local development to flesh out rural subarctic economies, including cottage industries based in homes, and construction and mining. "Some of that will take hold and there will be employment through that," Nordlund said, "but realistically there will probably have to be some migration out of the villages for work."       The state is not going to force this issue, however, and that means that Alaskans who stay on the tundra might require a permanent welfare subsidy to survive.       There is a provision in the federal law that allows communities with populations of more than 1,000 and 50 percent employment to be exempt from the five-year limit. "We hope to get a technical amendment [to lower] the population threshold, so any native village where there is unemployment over 50 percent will be exempt," Nordlund said.       The residents of Nunapitchuk had doubts about whether the state was being realistic in thinking that the younger generation could go back to the old ways at this point.

OLD SKILLS NOW WORTHLESS

"The cold here is very unforgiving," says Ivan Wessellie, 59, of Nunapitchuk. The village averages 17 degrees in the wintertime, and the cold is taking its toll on Wessillie's health.

Ivan Wessillie is a stout man with a large square head and a missing front tooth.       He dropped out of school at 16 when his father became disabled, and became the sole provider for 10 brothers and sisters. He trapped mink, muskrat, beaver and fox, worked in fish canneries and did odd jobs to build a decent home, buy a boat to fish and a snow machine to hunt.       Today, Wessillie said, his subsistence skills are worthless: The price for animal skins is so low and commercial fishing so poor that there is little return in either activity.       Wessillie said he struggles to support his family, including two children and a grandchild, but needs welfare and food stamps to survive.       At 59, he has trouble walking, the cold is hard to bear and his sinuses are easily infected. He believes he is disabled because of these ailments but he has not been diagnosed as such. Why is this, he asks?       He has no idea how the villagers would survive without welfare. "You are asking an impossible feat," Wessillie said.       During hard times in the past, the extended family helped its own, but Wessillie and the other men said even this tradition is fading.       Native Alaskans were not always dependent on welfare. The cash assistance came to the tundra during the Great Society social programs of the 1960s. As a cash economy emerged, the natives learned less about their traditions &emdash; and worked less. Drinking rose to such levels that most villages banned alcohol.       Today, native leaders say the despair of a people caught between two cultures and with no sense of the future can be measured in high suicide rates &emdash; particularly among young men &emdash; and alcohol abuse. According to the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corp., which runs the regional hospital, alcohol plays a role in most deaths, injuries, arrests and child neglect and domestic-violence cases.

UNITING WELFARE REFORM AND TRADITION

Harold Napoleon is one of the fathers of the native Alaskan back-to-basics movement.       Napoleon was a prominent native leader in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in the 1970s. In 1984, he went to prison for beating his 4-year-old son to death in the village of Hooper Bay. Like so many other natives, Napoleon had become an alcoholic, and he has said he was so drunk when he killed his son that he did not remember what happened.       During his nine years in prison, Napoleon wrote a seminal essay on what he thought had gone wrong in his culture, and in his life. He found many culprits: the arrival of white men, the illness and death they brought, the encroachment of Western culture, alcohol.       And welfare. "The way many of us live now is abnormal, like caged animals. We are fed, housed, watered, cared for, but we are not free, and it is killing us," Napoleon wrote in "Yuuyaraq: The Way of the Human Being."       "This almost total dependence on others further undermines the already depressed spirit of many Native people. And the only way it can end is if we take back the responsibility of feeding, clothing, and housing our people."       Napoleon now works for the Alaska Federation of Natives, which has been working with the state on the welfare reforms. He declined to be interviewed.       John Tepton, a federation spokesman, said the group believes "the welfare system has done more to harm our culture than anything else. Our history is self-reliance."       "Our feeling is jobs can be created in rural areas in the public-service sector," Tepton said. "If people who are collecting welfare checks would be required to do community service work like taking care of the elderly, child care or subsistence hunting for the community, this in fact could be a full-time job."       It is unclear at this point whether Alaska will deem caring for children or the elderly as work, but it is a possibility.

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Original Article at MSNBC is no longer available.