Polar fleeced: Sen. Ted Stevens built a welfare state for Eskimos that made defense contractors rich.
Washington Monthly › Vol. 37 Nbr. 7-8, July 2005
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Polar fleeced: Sen. Ted Stevens built a welfare state for Eskimos that made defense contractors rich.
Many remote places claim to be the end of the earth, but the tiny Eskimo village of Tatitlik, set in near-mythic isolation on a small beach on Alaska's Prince William Sound, has a better case than most. The village has stood for a thousand years on a small strip of sediment that has collected at the point where the Chugach Mountains soar out of the sound. There are three dirt roads in Tatitlik, which loop around the beach and connect back to one another; you can only get in or out by boat or by plane, and all supplies have to be flown or ferried in. Tatitlik has a population of 97, subsistence hunters and fishermen who live in about 30 small, irregular ranches set on wood platforms. The mountains that surround Tatitlik are, even in summer, mostly covered in snow, and as you pull into the village, they look like shards of broken eggshell, the village encased inside.
The people of Tatitlik have had a spectacularly unlucky history. In 1964, much of the population was relocated from the nearby village of Chenaga, which had been destroyed by the Great Alaska Earthquake. (Chenaga sat on what turned out to be the epicenter of the 9.2 Richter quake, the most powerful recorded tremor in North American history.) Then, in 1989, the drunk captain of the Exxon Valdez plowed his tanker into Blythe Reef, just five miles down the coast from Tatitlik. The Valdez spilled 10.8 million gallons of oil onto the seal beaches and herring runs that the villagers retied on for food. Tatitlik tried to get Alaska to use some of the compensation funds to build a small boat harbor for it...See the full content of this document
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