ALASKA IS
FLAGGING
so sparse during the flooding, one
elderly woman recalled, that only
tribal elders could be speedily removed. The rest of the town — including most of its children — had
to wait much longer to leave.
There was a sad kind of poetry
to her story. Just as the majority of Galena’s residents were left
behind, the majority of Alaska’s
native peoples would be the ones
to bear the brunt of a major economic collapse.
The state’s population is mostly
composed of people whose historical ties to it are thin. If the
energy sector were to shrink, it’s
not a stretch to assume that most
of its employees would relocate,
perhaps to the Dakotas or Texas,
deep though their love for the
Alaska may be. There would be
plenty of folks left — working in
shipping, tourism and mining, and
stationed at any number of military installations — but the most
profitable industry would be gone.
But there would be few lifelines for most of the 20 percent
of Alaskans whose ancestors we re
here long before 1867, when Secretary of State William H. Seward
paid the Tsar of Russia $7.2 million for 660,000 square miles of
untamed real estate at the north-
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western-most corner of the continent. They would be the ones left
to scrape together an existence
with far less support than they
enjoyed in the 20th century, when
the oil boom and Alaska’s political
dominance brought about unprecedented growth and prosperity.
State trust funds have been set
up to ensure oil funds continue to
pay dividends for years, but budget shortfalls, declining services
and anemic job markets could well
become the norm.
Begich remains unflinchingly optimistic about his state’s ability to
cobble together a future, but even
he’s aware of the economic and political challenges that lie ahead. He
may have his finger on the pulse of
what Alaskans worry about most,
but actually answering the question
of how the economy will fare is far
more challenging.
“It’s the most frustrating question to figure out here in Alaska,”
he said, adding that the rest of the
country’s perception of the state
and its inhabitants doesn’t help.
“A lot of people from out of
state might look at Galena and
say, ‘Don’t you want to move?’
Well, the answer is ‘no.’ It’s
their home. It’s where
they live.”
Eliot Nelson is the editor
of HuffPost Hill.