OPINION: Our road to Cold Bay is not Hooper Bay’s loss

We’ve been at this for decades, advocating to have a road from King Cove to the Cold Bay airport. It has meant endless hours of listening to our opponents use their well-polished testimonies to label our health and safety arguments for the road as duplicitous and insincere. They have ascribed ulterior motives to us without the support of the facts. They have sailed forth on a boatload of impassioned speeches about the negative impact this road will have on all the creatures of the Izembek, but most especially for the migratory wildlife that touches down on our lagoons for respite and food and peace, in spring and again in the fall.

We call them our lagoons because this is where we live also. Sharing what the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge has to offer, respectfully and gratefully enjoying this space with the likes of the emperor goose and the Pacific black brant, is our honor and our privilege. We celebrate their return by the thousands every year, setting down like the skilled pilots that they are, along the shoreline of this beautiful expanse of uninterrupted wonder that is the Izembek, all 310,000 acres of it resting at the end of the Alaska Peninsula. Think about the truth of that fact for a moment. We are Aleut people. We have fished and hunted and raised our families in this place long before the Russian fur hunters came and left behind the name of Izembek, and way before Columbus took credit for finding this place called North America. All this time we have lived here, and yet, the land rolls on untrammeled, the birds spiral down to our waters so thickly some days that their wings block the sun. How about a little credit for the Aleut people who didn’t need hunting quotas to know when to stop? Mightn’t we be more than a little justified in taking offense at having our conservation credentials questioned by outsiders whose history suggests that they didn’t know when to stop?

Naively, we thought that we had sufficiently hardened our hearts from further injury, believing that after all these years of battling with opponents, our shields against further hurt feelings were impenetrable. We were wrong. Turns out when the criticism is coming from an insider to the Alaska Native community, our shields proved useless as this was a voice from within, and so our initial reaction was one of bitterness. Because when we read the words written by Chief Edgar Tall Sr. in the Aug. 4 edition of the Anchorage Daily News, we were disappointed, to say the least, by the way in which he had accepted as fact the arguments of our adversaries. Chief Tall Sr., speaking on behalf of Hooper Bay Native village, framed his argument through a world view of winners and losers, meaning that our road, if it happens, will have to come at the expense of the subsistence hunters of Hooper Bay, Alaska, for generations to come. He purports to know that our single-lane gravel road will be harmful to migratory birds in a way that will jeopardize the subsistence diet traditions that sustain his people.

Let us address Chief Tall Sr. directly: We have read and reread your statement of concern. We have thought about how best to respond such that we successfully persuade you that our road to Cold Bay’s airport will not come at Hooper Bay’s expense. To that end, we want you to know that this single-lane gravel road will traverse the Izembek for a bare 12 miles, it will be located at least 1.5 miles from the Izembek Lagoon and a half-mile away from Kinzarof. The speed limit will be posted at 25 mph. All construction of the road will be accomplished as much as possible when migratory birds are not around and with every consideration given to minimize the disruption in their lives. Our research has told us that with these limitations, there will be little negative impact on the migratory bird populations.

We are only a few short weeks away from the publication of the Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement on this land exchange and potential road. Public hearings are expected to be held in King Cove, Cold Bay and Bethel, with dates to be determined. We hope Chief Tall Sr. will please accept our invitation to be our guest during the hearing in King Cove. We will listen to his fears. We will show him the route this road will take. He will hear first-hand from our residents, sharing their worst fears: that a day is just around the corner when someone they love collapses in pain and, because of our geography and bad weather, they will have to watch them die before the clouds can lift. Meanwhile, what would have been their medevac out takes off on time from the Cold Bay airport.

The invitation is Chief Tall’s for the taking. Good things may come from our being face-to-face, to speaking with open hearts of our sincere intentions. Hard as this may be for him to believe, we are as invested in the success of his children as we are in our own. We are as passionate as you are in wanting our kids to spend their lives in these remarkable places, where just over the hill are the same berry patches picked every fall by our great-grandmothers. Let’s see if we can’t make our way to common ground, to that place where we work as partners, not just in each other’s survival, but also in each other’s success. In such a world, losers are nowhere to be found.

Etta Kuzakin is president of the Agdaagux Tribe of King Cove. Lynn Mack is president of the Native Village of Belkofski.

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