Opinion | Dont auction the life-giving waters around our Native village to oil companies

Chief John Kvasnikoff leads the tribal government of the Native Village of Nanwalek, Alaska.

I am the chief of the Native Village of Nanwalek, located in Lower Cook Inlet in south-central Alaska. Our Sugpiaq people have lived here for millennia off the rich bounty of the land and the sea.

We have a saying: “Kenesgangqan awa stuululuimauq” — When the tide is out, the table is set.

There are no roads connecting our village to the cities. When our cupboards become empty, we cannot just drive to the food store. Instead, we rely on the knowledge and wisdom passed down from our elders to collect the wild foods around us.

The massive tides in Lower Cook Inlet can swing 25 feet in six hours, and when the ocean drops away from our small village, I walk out onto the exposed reef with my family. We pry mussels off the rocks. We coax octopus from dens. We dig clams. We harvest kelp and other seaweeds. Sometimes we’ll take a skiff to catch halibut or rockfish, or head up the river for salmon.

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Then we share our bounty around the village, hanging kelp to dry, putting fish in a smokehouse or pulling meat from shells. Finally, we gather with our family and friends to enjoy our harvest (elders eat first) and give thanks to the Creator for sustaining us.

Our foods — and the act of collecting, preparing and sharing them — define who we are as Native people. But today, our culture and our people face a grave threat.

The federal government is pressing ahead with a 1-million-acre offshore oil and gas lease sale (Lease Sale 258) in our front yard. If this sale occurs, our waters will be littered with a maze of pipelines, giant platforms flaring into the night and ongoing pollution and spills. The industrialization of this productive area will spell the end of our subsistence lifestyle.

Our people still live with the trauma of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989, when oil lapped up on our beaches and coated the birds and the fish and the clams. We could not collect our foods; we were suddenly poor in ways we’d never known.

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We had been told such a tragedy could never happen. The oil companies would use state-of-the-art technologies, they said. But they failed.

We hear the same promises today. But according to the federal government, there is a roughly 1-in-5 chance of one or more large spills if oil development occurs near our home.

Then there’s climate change. Two years ago, federal managers closed the important Pacific cod fishery in Lower Cook Inlet because of a decline in fish population numbers linked to warming waters. Now, the Biden administration is pushing ahead with a plan that will aggravate climate change in the very same waters where the science tells us it’s already a problem. It makes no sense.

Today, we face a fork in the road. One path will take us backward, to more oil development and the pollution, climate change and unsustainable development we see wherever oil development takes place.

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This is the other path: Cook Inlet has world-class renewable energy resources. With smart investment, our volcanoes and tides and winds could produce clean and sustainable energy — and the jobs needed to harness it — for years to come.

The path to the future must not sacrifice our lands, our waters or our people. The previous administration rushed through an incomplete environmental review for Lease Sale 258 that took a mere four months. The Biden administration has the clear legal authority — and a compelling moral responsibility — to make things right by taking the waters of Lower Cook Inlet off the auction block.

President Biden promised he would stop offshore oil development, and his administration has already taken steps to break our addiction to dirty energy. His administration has also promised to elevate and respect the voices of Native people in decisions that affect our ways of life, and we welcome that opportunity.

Our people have lived many lifetimes of broken promises from the federal government. We can only hope, for the sake of our children — and our children’s children — that things will be different this time. Quyanaa — thank you.

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