Reflections from Kyrgyzstan in the Arctic
I couldn’t sleep last Saturday night. It was my second night in Anchorage, having arrived the day before to help lead an exchange that brought Evenk people from Russia’s Republic of Sakha-Yakutia and environmentalists from the island of Sakhalin to Anchorage and Barrow to discuss indigenous rights vis a vis oil and gas development.
But all I could think about was Kyrgyzstan, the country that I called home for the year before I came to Pacific Environment last fall. The country had been embroiled in political turmoil since earlier in the week, when soldiers opened fire on a group of protesters that eventually stormed the government’s headquarters. That evening, the mobs tore up much of the city; searching for loot or just looking to smash things. Photos showed bodies lying on streets that I had crossed every day. The supermarket next to my apartment had been looted and burned, and two professors from my university were dead. In the following days I discovered that all of my friends were safe, but the images followed me north.
What bothered me the most on that Saturday night wasn’t so much the actual violence, but rather the coverage of the events in the American media, which focused entirely on the revolution’s potential implications for an American airbase located in the capital. One lead-in to a CNN story illustrated this perfectly. “It’s hard to spell, and hard to pronounce,” announced the smirking journalist as video of Kyrgyz riot police played in the background, “so why should YOU care about political upheaval in Kyrgyzstan? We’ll tell you, after the break.” The implication, of course, was that if it doesn’t directly affect us, we really shouldn’t care about people being shot in the street. But to me those people being beaten in the place with the funny name were potentially my friends, people who are like family to me.
What does this have to do with indigenous rights in the Arctic? A couple of days later our group met with George Edwardsen, the outspoken president of the Inupiat Community of the Arctic Slope, in his Barrow home. There he described how wind and ocean currents pull dangerous materials from the rest of the world north, resulting in dangerous levels of toxic materials and radiation in the blood of indigenous peoples. The U.S. government used Inupiats to test anti-radiation drugs during the Cold War, the effects of which can still be seen in extreme rates of cancer among natives. Now upcoming drilling projects threaten the marine mammals that the subsistence communities of the Arctic Slope depend upon for protein.
This isn’t history from years ago, this is continuing today and, except for a few advocates and environmentalists, the great majority of America’s citizenry doesn’t know or doesn’t care. I’m not an idealist, and I’m not even sure if there even is a solution to these problems. But at least by leading these exchanges we can help our Russian friends prepare for and avoid the complications of rapid industrialization that America’s indigenous populations have faced for years. And by writing this post, perhaps I’ve opened a few more peoples’ eyes to a tragedy that, until last week, I didn’t even know existed.
Tags: Alaska, Arctic, climate change, community partners, environment, Evenk, Kyrgystan, offshore drilling, Russia, Russian Far East, Sakhalin
