Almost an Island: Qikiqtagruk

Qikiqtagruk is a village on the northwest coastline of arctic Alaska. Its name, according to some translations, means "almost an island" which is a playful, descriptive reference to the fact that that three-mile-long slip of tundra jutting part way into the Chukchi Sea has been a gathering place for Native Alaskans and Native Siberians for hundreds of years. Kotzebue is the village's European name, a reference to the Baltic explorer Otto Von Kotzebue, who was one of the first outsiders to notice the thriving coastal Inupiaq culture there in 1818; that the village evaded such contact until such a late date is interesting given that archeological sites in the village date back to the Renaissance. The village is a few feet above sea level, but the municipality does stretch up into rolling tundra a few hundred feet or so affording incredible views of the Kotzebue Sound, the Chukchi Sea, the village wind farm, and the White Alice radar station which played a vital role in cold war era US air defense. There are many subsistence hunter gatherers in the community, but there are also many people who participate in a significant developing industrial economy. Kotzebue is 600 air miles north of Anchorage and is unreachable by roads of any kind. You have to fly there or sail almost a thousand miles up the coast through the Bering Strait and on into the Chukchi Sea, which is frozen from October to May. What may appear to to people in the lower 48 as piles of junk parked unceremoniously in front of houses is just a part of arctic reality, the way the world works where everything manufactured has to be shipped in by barge or cargo plane. When objects outlive their purpose they remain out in the open as it it is much too costly to ship them out again and it is much too expensive to build structures for storage.