I thought I would post an article I wrote in 1996 at the request of my alma mater, the University of Montana. I lived in Barrow, Alaska for seven years and have been up there several times since I moved away. I have great friends at the top of the world.

 Enjoy.

         An opening paragraph in the script reads, “For thousands of years, We, the Iñupiat people of Alaska’s North Slope, have gathered berries, roots, mosses, leaves, flowering plants, sap and birch cuttings at estuaries, along small streams and across the spongy, tufted tundra of the Arctic landscape.”

            The script is for a video I just completed -- a documentary about the use of traditional edible and medicinal plants.  The perspective is that of an Iñupiaq Eskimo concerned about preservation of a culture both accepting and resisting assimilation into the dominant, largely white culture we know as America.  I am the writer and I am Caucasian, raised somewhere else in a different value system.

            The North Slope Borough, geographically the largest local government in the world at 89,000 square miles (142,400 km,) hired me in 1991 to fill the video producer position at the government television studio.  My responsibilities include developing ideas for video productions, research, script writing, planning shoots, directing, shooting, editing, narrating when necessary and graphics design.  The North Slope Borough TV Studio is an in-house facility.  The crew works under the public information office.  Our mission is to provide information to internal and external audiences.  Some of it is propaganda, intended to sway voters and politicians -- but much of what we do is focused on recording a lifestyle as old as time.  The chance to work at the top of the world, where polar bears are not uncommon parts of the local scenery, was exciting, though my relatives thought I was nuts to leave Anchorage for the Alaska Bush, where many people live without toilets and running water.

            I was used to being in a hurry.  Before coming to Barrow, I worked with companies that had me dragging myself to bed in the middle of the night and spending my days with a phone in each hand.  Television production was fun but bad for the health.  It could sometimes be hard on the conscience, too.  Depending on who was paying, I helped produce programs for Democrats, Republicans, environmentalists or industrialists. I wanted to work somewhere where I possibly could make a difference.

            When I stepped off the plane at the Barrow airport determined to do just that, a well-used stopwatch hung on a long cord about my neck; however, I soon discovered that rushing about isn’t the way things are done up here. 

            My first interview was with the mayor of the village of Kaktovik on Barter Island in what the outside world knows as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or ANWR.  I met Mayor Herman Aishanna at the local restaurant and lodge for what I thought would be a 15-20 minute chat that would allow me to arrange some activities to shoot.  Since I didn’t want to take up too much of his time or mine, I whipped out my notebook and began asking him about contacts and possibilities.  Instead of answering my first query he said, “You sound like you’re from the city.” 

             “Well, yes,” I affirmed. “I just moved up here from Anchorage.”  Where was he going with this?  He said, “Let’s order some coffee first.  We can talk about (business) after we visit.”  The 95-minute coffee break that followed was the start of my first lesson on working in a multicultural environment.  I left the camp lodge with his promise to hold a community potluck and Eskimo dance just for our cameras.  When I returned with the production crew a week later, without my stopwatch, the mayor met me at the airport with a bear hug.

            Six years have passed since I began training myself to act, as the Iñupiat would say, like a real person.  Being real means not only respecting the community in which I live, but participating in it as well.  Along the way I have broken more than a few rules, but have been forgiven because I honestly try to do better the next time.  Doing better means, among other things, successfully resisting the urge to gag when I sample some of the local delicacies, like migaq (pronounced mig-ee-yack.)  This highly prized dish is prepared by mixing bowhead whale blubber or maktak (muck-tuck,) meat, whale tongue and blood.  The mixture ferments at room temperature for at least a week and whaling captains’ wives carefully stir the mixture three times a day to ensure its perfection.  A whaling captain’s wife told me stirring is so important she gets up in the middle of the night sometimes to make sure it gets done.

            My first taste of this dish was an experience I’ll long remember.  At the blanket toss or nalukataq (nah-look-a-tuck,) festival held after a successful, spring subsistence whaling season, I scrambled past other people in line for a serving to make it to the port-a-potty to puke my guts out.  Sheepishly I returned to the gathering of smiling elders who knowingly said “tanik” (ton-ick/white person) and shook their heads not in disgust but in sympathy.  I just hadn’t been raised right.  Later one of them asked me, “Don’t you think cheese is disgusting?”  She had a point.  Cheese is rotten, curdled milk left to mold -- but I love it because I grew up with it.

            My place in the community as a tanik who at least tries to overcome what are seen as my cultural shortcomings was strengthened when I began talking with the old whaling captains who hang out at the post office every day.  After five semesters of studying the Iñupiaq language, I can have short conversations, which pleases the elders to no end.  They pat my back and nod approvingly at Qaummaluk.  That’s me.  My language teacher Fannie Akpik told me the name means, “bright sunshine bouncing off snow.” 

            Studying the language not only connects me to the community but also improves the quality of my work.  I catch mispronunciations, misspellings and can more efficiently work on bilingual projects.  I usually don’t understand exactly what someone is saying in Iñupiaq, but I know what he or she is talking about. Some of my Caucasian friends ask,  “Why bother saving a language only spoken by a few thousand people?”  For starters, some ideas or ways of describing things just don’t translate well. There is a tremendous effort all across the North Slope to preserve the ancient memory and way of being wrapped up in the Iñupiaq language. 

            Language is a tricky tool.  Two people reading the same material may perceive it quite differently. This is especially true for those in a bilingual community.  For the tourism video Barrow, Alaska - A True Story that I produced about Barrow last year (for my own company Touch Alaska,) well-known Iñupiaq cultural preservationist Jana Harcharek agreed to read the script and make corrections and suggestions. I never produce material that has not been reviewed by my mentors or by members of the NSB Commission on Iñupiat History, Language & Culture.

            After reading the script for the tourism video, Jana made a change I would never have paused to consider.  The original version read, “We never lived in snow igloos or rubbed noses, for that matter. We don’t understand how these stories became known around the world.”  Jana changed it to, “We don’t know how these stories became known around the world.”  For Jana, the words “don’t understand” in the first draft could imply incapable of understanding.  What I have learned here is that it is absolutely critical to pay attention to, and respect, the way people perceive things.  What makes perfect sense to one person might seem inaccurate or even offensive to another.  I continually work at being aware of all the possible nuances in any script I write. To do that, I have to slow down a bit and really think about it. Such a habit among the worldwide media population, in my opinion, would be a very good thing.

            I am part of the minority on the North Slope.  An Iñupiaq woman I know in town refers to Caucasians as “people of non-color.”  A good friend from the Black community thought this was really funny.  She asked, “If you are a person of non-color, and a native person is a person of color -- what am I?”  Good question.  It is also another question of perception.  Here, there are natives and non-natives.  That’s it.  The descriptive “non” seems to have a negative connotation, meaning less-than what a person could be, but I’ve become used to it and regularly refer to myself as a non-native.  It could be that using these two titles helps the Iñupiat take back some of the pride that was stripped from them earlier in the century by a country that sold their land to another without asking, by missionaries that insisted many traditional Iñupiat activities, like dancing, were evil -- and by members of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs who took children away from their families and physically punished them for speaking their own language.                 

            I live in a nice apartment in Barrow with all the plumbing amenities including a flush toilet. I go to restaurants in town and am a regular at the video store.  As video producer for the North Slope Borough, my biggest challenge is not living in the Bush in a different culture, although I am reminded now and then that I am an outsider when I’m the only one in the room not joyously awaiting the arrival of a pot of boiled whale tongue. Presenting the Iñupiat voice to outsiders who may be ignorant, impatient or prejudiced is the most difficult aspect of my work.  In learning to better act like a real person, I’ve studied local history and learned painful truths about Native American efforts to be heard.            

            In the dominant society, the wrong suit or tie can be disastrous.  On the North Slope, minds matter more than wardrobe.  People dress practically here.  It is cold in Barrow much of the time.  If the temperature isn’t cold, the roads are muddy.  If they aren’t muddy, they are dusty.  Visiting business people stand out like beacons in the night in their shiny Wingtips.  Many in the dominant culture in our country view people who laugh or smile too much in the boardroom as people not to be taken seriously.  Here in the arctic, laughing, smiling and having extra long coffee breaks with people before getting down to business is polite.  If you rush to the point of the meeting, you are showing a lack of interest in the person you’ve come to see and that you care only for the information he or she might be able to provide.

            In any American city, if an executive from a country like Sweden is a guest speaker at a meeting, his accent will be forgiven.  After all, he probably speaks several languages and can’t be expected to use perfect English.  On the other hand, if the speaker is Native American, he may be considered less intelligent.  Though he might speak several native languages or dialects, his less-than-perfect English causes listeners to roll their eyes and tune him out.  I didn’t know that before I came here, but it is true.          

            A couple of years ago, as I watched a meeting between White House officials and Native American representatives on C-Span, I could not help noticing what looked to me like pained expressions on the faces of the officials as they waited for the event to be over.  When a Native spokesperson made a joke or laughed at himself for making a grammatical mistake, the government officials didn’t laugh along with him.  Instead, they averted their eyes or looked at their notes and tried to appear interested in what the man had to say.  Perhaps they were indeed, paying attention, but it didn’t seem that way to me. 

            When I produce a video program for the North Slope Borough, my job is to get the target audience’s interest and present the Borough’s message in a way they can accept.  The target audience may be North Slope Borough Employees, hospital patients, elementary-school students, international environmental watchdog groups or federal government officials.  When the target audience lives in the Lower 48 states, I use mainstream words and communication methods to deliver political, economic, historical and cultural ideas of the Iñupiat.  Many times I’ll decide to use a quick, MTV-style to convey my point.  It seems that the dominant culture in America wants information like it wants fast food -- right now.

            Until decision makers in the outside world become more like real people by taking more time to ponder all the angles of an issue and listen carefully, the Iñupiat are content to use “non-native” words and ways when necessary to accomplish their goals. 

            For example, to cover the thorny issue of oil development in the 1002 Area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, known as ANWR, my advisers and I approached writing the script in a documentary style.  I felt strongly that taping the mayor in his office as he called on Congress to recognize his administration’s position on the issue of whether or not to drill for oil on the coastal plain would be entirely ineffective.  People all over the nation are polarized on this issue.  I felt that a traditional village gathering atmosphere world be more likely to grab the attention of anyone who might have an opinion somewhere in the middle of yes, drill or no, don’t drill. 

            So, we traveled to the area and talked with the villagers who would be most affected by any decision.  The 1002 Area is the coastal plain of ANWR, which in terms of Alaska distances is right next to the declining Prudhoe Bay oil fields that have provided, at the height of their output, up to 25% of our nation’s domestic oil production.  The land belongs, has always belonged, to the Iñupiat, but it is controlled by the U.S. Congress.  The Iñupiat want to expand drilling operations in the vast, open space of the plain near current oil production operations, where they feel cleanup of any spilled oil can be achieved. The economy of the North Slope Borough is based on the property taxes collected from the oil industry.  However, the Iñupiat do not want to drill anywhere near the mountains of the Brooks Range and are continually frustrated by claims that this is the case.  Offshore oil production is another matter. With the ocean pushing around icebergs the size of houses, the Iñupiat wonder how cleanup of a spill could possibly be successful. Subsistence hunting of sea life is too important, they say, to take the risk. The North Slope Borough has fought hard to prevent offshore oil development, but politics, technology and time will tell.

            To portray the Iñupiat point of view on the ANWR debate, we taped the dance and potluck activities pre-arranged by the village mayor with the enthusiasm of the whole community.  We also interviewed Jeslie Kaleak, then mayor of the North Slope Borough, but not in his office.  A NSB Search and Rescue crew flew us by helicopter to a glacier bed where we could interview the mayor in an environment difficult for our target audience to casually ignore -- the arctic.  The mayor stood on his land and made his points. 

            I chose a middle-aged, white narrator and tried to mold the production into something that came across more like a Discovery Channel educational program than a public relations tool.  The North Slope Borough Public Information Office sent a copy of the video to every member of the House and Senate.  I moved on to something else. 

            During the past four and a half years I’ve produced programs on cultural activities, archaeological erosion, subsistence issues, international Inuit (the name for the worldwide Eskimo community,) concerns, health and employee-assistance programs and disaster response training.  Some of the productions are in English. Some are in Iñupiaq.  For historical programs, I have found it is important to take the time to study local lore.  If I do not seek out this information, I may be, or be seen as, callous and too quick to get my project done.  If I was working on a project and didn’t include an elder who had been instrumental in the Land Claims issues of the 1970’s, for example, many people in the community would not take what I did seriously.  I would slip a few rungs and would have to work toward regaining respect.  Reporters and television crews coming up to get a taste of the Arctic are treated respectfully unless they are seen as only wanting to take from the community. If this is the case, they often go away with only half the information they could have used, half the story. The result is that many times stories are seen locally as skewed or just plain inaccurate and locals might say, “See, I told you she didn’t care about finding the real story.”  I don’t know how to resolve this problem since journalists have to work with deadlines, but being flexible and inviting people to coffee is a good start. Realizing that subsistence hunting activities will always take priority over any attempts to schedule an interview is another.

            I believe the most effective and professionally fulfilling way to work in a multicultural environment, with people anywhere for that matter, is to take a little extra time to listen carefully to what someone has to say about their community -- a close second is never assuming you know enough.

            I live at the top of the world in isolated Barrow, 330 miles above the Arctic Circle and 400 miles away from the nearest road, but I learn new lessons every day.  For each new project I am called to work on, depending on the message and the target audience, I do my best to make films that speak in the voice of the Iñupiat or in the voice of the outsider.  To speak in either voice I must be connected to both ways of thinking.  To be connected I must slow down, listen -- and leave my stopwatch at home.