North of the Strait of Bering, the opening of a road to copper operations threatens the semi-tangling lifestyle of the Inuit, more and more numerous to leave the villages.
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The visitor who, in summer, ventures to Ambler, a small Inapiaq village along the Kobuk river, north of the Bering Strait, is greeted by a cloud of mosquitoes. But in winter, when temperatures sometimes fall below – 45 ° C, it is the reign of hunting. Kristy Walton, 29, explains what her life looks like under the polar circle. With her trapper husband, she operates a track of 50 kilometers of traps. Its targets? Wolves, foxes, lynx and carcajous, whose furs she assembles to make traditional clothes.
The family lives from subsistence: berries, fish, impulses and, above all, caribou. “We almost finished eating the one we had killed in early April,” she says. Recently, they shot a grizzly. “We have given it to the elders. Everything is shared. We ask them what they want, because they are no longer able to hunt.” This lifestyle of a hunter-celler concerns some handfuls of lost villages in Alaska, accessible Only by plane, snowmobile or by the river. But now the village of Ambler is threatened with losing its splendid isolation, due to the construction of a gravel road, called “Route d’Ambler”.
This 340 -kilometer single route is supposed to open access to copper and zinc mines in the region, rare land and other strategic minerals that abound but are poorly identified. It would connect the Inuit villages to the modern world, by connecting them to the road that goes from Fairbanks, the second city in the heart of the state, to the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay, on the Arctic Ocean, 800 kilometers to the north. “We like to live cut off from the world, with our subsistence model, as our ancestors did: without road, without destruction of animals or trees,” says Kristy Walton.
Boredom is that Inapiat also need mines that explore the riches of this immense virgin area, large as a fifth in France. Kristy Walton’s husband worked, in 2021, about thirty kilometers away, on the Bornite site, where Ambler Metals prospects copper. “I like Bornite’s mine, because it is very close and brings work, while each village fights for employment. At least ten people in the village work there,” greets the young woman.
“serious environmental concerns”
This mid-traditional life half-capitalist makes Alex Kurtser, 32, American of Russian origin, walking barefoot to harden and wearing a mosquito net, crossed by the river, while he Discharge of his boat the wood for the winter. “The inhabitants say that they are against the road, but, in their attitude, they are for: they all work for the mine,” explains the one who looks like the hero of Into The Wild, dead poisoned by berries in the tundra , in 1992. Without road to evacuate the ore, no mine or dollars.
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