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Pollution fears threaten way of life in remote inlet

By Tom Horton
The Baltimore Sun

TOM HORTON / THE BALTIMORE SUN Children in Hooper Bay, Alaska, ice skate on their way home from the village school.

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But the bay has always been life itself to a few thousand members of Alaska's Native tribes in three nearby subsistence villages.

In recent years, however, people here and members of other Bering coast tribes in neighboring Hooper Bay and Scammon Bay have virtually ceased harvesting Arctic cod, blackfish, clams and other traditional foods from Kokechik, according to Richard Tuluq, tribal administrator of Chevak.

While they still fish elsewhere, Alaska Natives are increasingly troubled by evidence of contamination in this corner of the million-square-mile Bering Sea — source of about half of all seafood caught in the United States.

Amid reports of toxic leaks from the radar station at nearby Cape Romanzof, and of pollutants from distant lands carried here by winds and ocean currents, the Natives worry that there is a link to rising adult cancer rates among their people and sharp increases in early childhood illnesses such as pneumonia and chronic infections. They complain of increased encounters with tumors and other mysterious abnormalities in fish, shellfish and bird eggs in the Kokechik Bay region.

"The food from there is not the same as when I was younger," said James Gump, 78, a Hooper Bay Native who volunteers at the village school to teach children about traditional hunting and fishing.

Scientists and health experts don't agree on whether the contamination showing up in fish and wildlife here poses a health threat. But they do worry that fear is helping drive people from historically healthful subsistence diets to eating more modern processed foods.

That shift in consumption could be causing some of the ailments people are attributing to pollution, experts say — not to mention speeding the unraveling of traditional culture.

Increasingly vocal Native groups are insisting on an accounting. "We want to find out what's in our environment," said Agatha Napoleon, a Hooper Bay resident who has led efforts to track contaminants from the Cape Romanzof radar station.

The same issues face Native peoples from Alaska across Canada to Greenland, where studies have documented elevated levels of mercury, PCBs, pesticides and other toxic substances in the blood, hair and breast milk of people who eat a lot of wild fish and game.

Scientists and local leaders debate what is known as "the Arctic dilemma": how to answer Natives' demands to know about the toxicants in their diet, without scaring them away from healthful traditional foods.

Evidence of health problems is compelling, even if the reasons are debatable.

"There has been a rise in cancers and other health problems — Native kids in the Yukon-Kuskokwim area in their first year have 10 times the national rate of hospitalization for respiratory infections — so people are seeing things they've never seen before," said Dr. James Berner, director of health for the Alaska Native Tribes Health Consortium.

During the 1990s, studies showed Natives here died of cancers at a 30 percent higher rate than whites. Lung and digestive system cancers were prominent.

Berner has found above-normal levels of toxic substances such as cadmium, mercury and PCBs in blood from infants and their mothers in a number of Yukon delta tribal villages. At high enough levels, he said, such chemicals, in studies from the Eastern Canadian Arctic, do seem to cause significantly greater problems with infections.

There is a host of reasons other than toxic substances in the environment, Berner said, that are more likely causes of health problems: alcohol abuse, smoking, living longer and seeing more cancer develop, better diagnoses, poor sanitation (Hooper Bay has no running water).

	TOM HORTON / THE BALTIMORE SUN James Gump, 78, a Hooper Bay, Alaska, native, volunteers to teach children about traditional hunting and fishing techniques.

The evidence, said Carl Hild, a polar health expert at the University of Alaska at Anchorage, "is that while we know there's more environmental contamination than there used to be, the risk to health from the subsistence diet is still mostly theoretical, while its benefits are well documented."

The fish-rich traditional diet of Alaska Natives is enormously high in the omega fatty acids that prevent stroke and heart attack; also low in sugar that can lead to diabetes. Fats and oils, of course, are also where many toxins tend to concentrate — in wildlife and humans.

Health officials also stress that the year-round procuring and preparation of subsistence food is seen as central to maintaining Native cultures, whose unraveling is already linked to extraordinarily high rates of suicide, fetal alcohol syndrome and other problems.

So far, at least, Alaska Natives have not abandoned subsistence hunting and fishing, though their diets are heavily laden with store-bought foods. A survey for the Alaskan Native Health Board of 665 people, from teenagers to 80-something elders, revealed that sugared juices and soda were the most heavily consumed foods in all Alaska Native communities. Yet fish, moose and caribou continued to rank in the top 50, and even berries occupied a prominent place.

Springtime brings the big, bearded seals, beluga whales, walrus and masses of migrating eider ducks.

The herring run in May offers not only fish, but kelp, harvested from underwater and eaten with the herring roe that encrusts it. In June, the tribes trek several miles to "birdland," where they gather the eggs of nesting waterfowl. In recent years, they have found many "weird, soft, leathery eggshells," Napoleon said. "No one picks them up."

Summer features an exodus inland to "berry camp," where the villagers pick salmon berries and fish for pike in the freshwater rivers. But most vital to this season are the salmon runs.

Two summers ago, salmon began turning up dead, riddled with holes and "burnt-looking" skin and fins, nothing even the oldest fishermen had ever seen before.

Napoleon's family ended up with 10 gallons of salmon put away for the long winter — 60 to 80 gallons would be normal, she said. She has documented the drastically reduced harvests, family by family, to help Hooper Bay apply for state food aid.

Suspicion about the cause of the drop-off in catch, for the fish kills and weird eggs, has wavered between the radar station and "transboundary pollution," another name for the long-traveling fallout of toxic chemicals from the more developed nations to the south and west.

Napoleon said no one paid much attention to the Cape Romanzof station until 1998, when they heard of Air Force cleanup plans. She came across tests done in the late 1980s by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service around the cape, which lies within the sprawling Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. These found PCBs and 38 other "contaminants of concern" in fish, waters and mammals there.

The report ventured no conclusions on threats to humans, but said the contaminants "may be indicative of a more extensive problem." It recommended a follow-up, but nothing happened.

In 1999, tribes of the three villages, feeling stonewalled by the Air Force, traveled to Washington, D.C., to see Alaska's congressional delegation. That yielded a $650,000 monitoring program in which the Natives themselves, directed and trained by scientists, sample fish and wildlife, plants, water and sediments around Kokechik Bay and the villages.

Alaska to date is considered less affected than the eastern Arctic by the array of PCBs, pesticides, mercury and other pollutants carried northward and eastward in air and ocean currents. Eastern regions such as Greenland are most tainted, experts think, because they are closer to the pollutants' sources.

But the Alaskan Arctic is little-studied compared with other polar regions, notes Michael Smolen, a toxicologist with the Washington, D.C.-based World Wildlife Fund, who is acting as the tribes' consultant in testing the soil and water around the radar station.

"They are picking up things about their environment — salmon rotting away, soft eggshells, clamshells that crumble at the touch — things no scientist knew," Smolen said.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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