Joaqlin Estus
ICT
The film “Oppenheimer” shows U.S. scientists racing to develop the atomic bomb during World War II. It also hints at the post-war race to find peacetime uses of such bombs. Alaska became the site of a proposed nuclear experiment that turned simmering dissatisfaction over Native rights into a full-blown Native claims movement.
After the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the war ended, the Atomic Energy Commission proposed to use atomic bombs to alter the course of rivers and move mountains.
“If your mountain is not in the right place, drop us a card,” physicist Edward Teller is quoted in “The Firecracker Boys: H-Bombs, Inupiat Eskimos, and the Roots of the Environmental Movement,” by Dan O’Neil.
One idea was to bomb near the Mediterranean Sea to create an alternative to the Suez Canal. Another was to enlarge the Panama Canal.
However, a test run was needed. Scientists decided the site should be remote and unpopulated.
Alaska came to mind. That led the Atomic Energy Commission in 1959 to a site near Point Hope, a village of a few hundred people above the Arctic Circle on the Chukchi Sea.
Edward Teller’s proposed Project Chariot initially envisioned the use of 2.4 megatons of nuclear bombs —160 times the size of the explosion that destroyed Hiroshima — to move 64 million tons of earth and create a deep-water port.
As first considered, the project would irradiate and blast millions of tons of dirt into the upper atmosphere. Early on, little consideration was given to the effects of the bomb blast on the residents of Point Hope, 31 miles to the northwest, much less any thought as to how to mitigate them.
Alaska chambers of commerce were all for it and the Fairbanks News Miner newspaper dismissed concerns about radioactive fallout.
Alaska economist George Rogers advised Teller that Native people relied on sea mammals and caribou for food. They also harvested bird eggs from the area.
Teller responded they’d have to change their way of life. Rogers said Teller told him, “when we have the harbor we can create coal mines in the Arctic, and they can become coal miners.”
Coal deposits were hundreds of miles from the proposed harbor site. The site was ice-locked nine months out of the year so shipping was only possible during the short summer season. No problem, Teller said, we’ll build a railroad and warehouses.
Those facilities would have to be financed by the private sector, the Atomic Energy Commission said, to the tune of $50 million, an estimate that was later downsized without explanation to $5 million.
Eventually, in response to criticism and new findings from tests in Nevada, Project Chariot was downsized to the point it would no longer support a deep water port nor economic development.
Still, by 1961 scientists had already landed at the site to decide where to place the bombs. They built an airstrip and set up a camp of canvas wall tents. A young Willie Hensley, who later became a legislator and Native claims leader, worked there one summer as a laborer. He called the project “government gone awry.”
Project Chariot was one of the actions that spurred Alaska Natives to fight for their rights and land claims with new energy.
Frances Degnan, Inupiaq, said the project led representatives of a dozen Inupiat and Yup’ik villages to gather in Barrow (now Utqiagvik) in November 1961 to talk about how to stop it. Her parents Frank and Ada Degnan attended. Frances’ book, “Under the Arctic Sun,” documents the gathering with transcripts of the recorded sessions.
Representatives described the impact of setting off atomic bombs in their homelands. Degnan said, “(it) would totally destroy the area for our way of life in, around on the North Slope.” She said people lived on the land and utilized everything from the land, sea and air.
“That would all be contaminated, destroyed. It was all (a) very basic concern that we were the type of culture that we work together, share what we can share, whatever we can share, even if it’s just supporting in spirit or being called upon to do our thing.”
Delegates also discussed the need for schools, jobs, and housing. She said federal regulation of fishing and hunting was an issue as well as economic development. “The local economy was just purely subsistence, and there was need for a cash economy.”
The group formed itself as “Inupiat Paitot,” or the people’s heritage, and adopted a series of resolutions that addressed life for people of the North.
Out of the conference “came a resolution to get a newspaper started so that there can be communication between villages and get it out into the greater area and to the public knowledge. And that’s where Tundra Times was born,” Degnan said.
Inupiaq Howard Rock, of Point Hope, was nominated to be the editor. Dr. Henry Forbes, president of the American Association of Indian Affairs, funded the formation of the newspaper.
Related:
— Remembering Howard Rock, Tundra Times founder and editor – ICT News
—Lael Morgan: ANCSA was important for non-Natives too – ICT News
According to the association’s website, co-founder Alfred Ketzler, Athabascan, was quoted in a Washington Post article as saying “Before we started this newspaper, there was little communication among the Natives in these widely separated villages, especially the interior… many of them weren’t being informed about the land grab.” The new state of Alaska was making its land selections under the 1959 statehood act. Alfred was one of the first people to propose Congressional action to “fight land grabs” rather than going to court.
“The rest is history,” Hensley said. “(Howard Rock) had the only organ of public communication that was in Native hands at the time. And it had a rather minuscule circulation, like maybe 3,000 at the most, but it all went to bureaucrats and politicians and whatnot. And so he was able to convey the indigenous messages about politics and about that project, and also land claims later. So he played a key role in trying to help the world know what we were trying to do.”
Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, at a Tundra Times sixth anniversary banquet on Oct. 6, 1968 in Anchorage, said he questioned whether the claims movement would have succeeded without the Times.
“It was instrumental in creating a recognition of the need for leadership, of the need for organization and, yes, even saw fit to take the leaders to task when it felt they were not effectively discharging their responsibilities to the people,” Udall said.
Udall said the newspaper was not only a channel of communication among Alaska Native people but a vehicle for communicating the needs and aspirations of the Natives to the people “‘Outside,’ including those of us in Washington who are charged with the responsibility for doing something about them.”
“In its short life span the paper has effectively championed causes in which the Native people have a vital interest,” Udall said.
The Times also “alerted the conscience of the Nation to the potential consequences of reckless experimentation by stressing the dangers of atomic fallout and the plight of the Native people involved,” he said. The Times wrapped up publication in 1997 after it lost Native corporate funding.
The Chariot Project was abandoned in 1962 due to extensive opposition from the people of Point Hope, scientists working on preliminary studies, and the nascent environmental movement.
The Native rights movement that the Project launched resulted in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, which included the transfer of nearly a billion dollars and title to 44 million acres to Native corporations.
Another after effect was that material from a 1962 nuclear test in Nevada was taken to the site to see how nuclear materials would spread through the Arctic environment and food chains. In the 1990s, a researcher learned of the burial in archival documents. Point Hope residents, who experienced an unusually high rate of cancer deaths, demanded removal of contaminated soil, which the government did in 1993.
“The Firecracker Boys” is the source for facts in this article not otherwise credited.
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