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NPS in Alaska, 1973-1980
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The National Park Service and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980: Administrative History Chapter Five: The National Park Service in Alaska, 1973-1980 |
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B. NPS Activities in Alaska, 1975-1978 (continued)
The subsistence studies, as well as a significant portion of all NPS-contracted research in Alaska, were conducted through the Cooperative Park Studies Unit at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Established in 1972, the Cooperative Park Studies Unit (CPSU) consisted of a Biology and Resource Management Program directed by Dr. Frederick C. Dean, professor of wildlife management at the university; and an Anthropology and Historical Preservation Program headed by Zorro Bradley, an NPS anthropologist who held an adjunct professorship in the university.
The CPSU had evolved from an earlier discussion between Vida Bartlett, widow of the late Alaskan Senator and NPS Director Hartzog. As was the case with similar units at various universities around the country, the CPSU was designed to stimulate park related research that would benefit Park Service and university students and faculty. Although established independently of the Service's d-2 effort, the organization of the CPSU lent itself naturally to the flexibility required in that effort. [39]
The original contract establishing the CPSU provided for an ecological evaluation of impacts on recent changes in the use of the Mount McKinley park road, a bio-ecological survey of the proposed north extension of Mount McKinley National Park, investigation of the role of scavenging in the ecology of various mammals and birds, as well as consultation and field assistance to current and future NPS study teams. The Service was quick to grasp the opportunities offered by the biology and resources management program. During 1973 the Park Studies unit handled contracts for Dr. David Murray's visitation study at Gates of the Arctic, a biological survey at the Chukchi-Imuruk proposal, and a biological survey at Dixon Harbor. In following years, the Cooperative Park Studies Unit would produce a number of studies in a wide variety of fields that included geomorphology, climate, limnology, biology, wildlife management and zoology. [40]
On the other hand, the Service seems to have failed, immediately, to grasp the opportunities offered by Zorro Bradley's Anthropology and Historic Preservation program. His office experienced difficulty in filtering funding requests through the Pacific Northwest Regional office. During the first several years of its existence, as a result, the Service actually did little to support the program. [41]
This situation changed through the Park Service's participation in the Interior Department's efforts to implement mandates in section 14(h)(1) of ANCSA. This section allowed the Native regional corporations to select cemeteries and historic sites (not to exceed 2,000,000 acres outside village and regional withdrawals, including sites on wildlife refuges, and national forests). [42]
Implementation of Section 14(h)(1), which included the documentation of historic and cemetery sites significant to Alaska Natives and conveyance of eligible sites, would prove, conceptually and procedurally, a complicated and formidable undertaking. It essentially required outsiders to research and describe the significance of sites for peoples of entirely different cultures, and different sets of values. [43] Procedurally, implementation would involve the cooperation of three federal agencies and the twelve land-holding Native regional corporations created by ANCSA. The Bureau of Land Management would be responsible for adjudication and issuance of patents. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, which the Secretary of the Interior had designated as the lead agency in the process, would certify the existence and significance of all sites selected. As the Department of the Interior's authority and advisor on historical matters the National Park Service would serve as technical consultant to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. [44]
Following considerable discussion with BIA and BLM in Washington, D.C. and Alaska, the role of the NPS in the 14(h)(1) process had been resolved by early January 1975. [45] On June 23 of that year the Service contracted with the University of Alaska "to provide prehistoric and historic site surveys under provision 14(h) of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act". [46]
From 1975 until July 1976, the 14(h)(1) team—ten anthropologists, archeologists, and historians directed by Zorro Bradley with Melody Webb Grauman as project coordinator—worked closely with ten of the Native Regional Corporations that had requested Park Service assistance. Serving as cultural resource consultants, the researchers helped to compile cultural resource inventories from which site selections could be made, reviewed existing literature, and conducted archival research to prepare bibliographies of site reference in historical and anthropological literature, conducted interviews, and assisted in writing the statements of significance required for each site application. The researchers had advised the Native Corporations on a variety of cultural resource matters, such as planning, protection, use, and interpretation of the resources; writing of native histories; and the establishment of village or regional museums and other forms of cultural centers. In this early phase, the researchers and the corporations resolved problems of establishing criteria for evaluating Native sites. They developed appropriate new criteria which were incorporated in the formal rules and regulations for implementation of 14(h)(1). [47]
During two intensive field seasons 14(h) researchers inventoried more than 7,000 sites at a cost of $700,000. Based upon this list, twelve regional corporations applied for 4,035 14(h)(1) sites spread across the face of Alaska. In the future, each of these sites would have to be investigated on the ground to determine its extent and whether or not it met statutory requirements. Researchers would delineate boundaries, photograph and sketch sites, and write reports. The BIA estimated the entire process would take five years and cost $5,000,000. [48]
Onsite investigation of the 4,035 applications commenced during the 1978 field season. Using a research design devised by Field Director Elizabeth Andrews that was based upon subsistence pattern theory, research crews visited forty-two sites in three areas. While Jim Ketz, Tim Sczawinski, Leslie Conton, and Elliot Gehr surveyed sites on Hinchinbrook Island in Prince William Sound, Russ Sacket and Kathryn Koutsky investigated six sites near Haines and Juneau in Southeast Alaska and twelve more around the village of Shaktoolik on Norton Sound. [49]
Park Service participation in implementation of 14(h)(1) was more involved than that originally conceived, partially, because of internal problems in the Bureau of Indian Affairs. By 1982, during discussions regarding transfer of the Park Service's 14(h)(1) function back to the BIA, Dean John Bligh of the University of Alaska indicated NPS participation was crucial to the success of the program. Nevertheless, on January 13, 1983, the Park Service terminated agreements and contracts with the University of Alaska, including that with the CPSU. This action necessarily brought to an end the Service's participation in the implementation of Section 14(h)(1). [50]
For the National Park Service, participation in the 14(h)(1) program had benefits far beyond the immediate results. From the very beginning the 14(h)(1) studies brought expertise in cultural history to the Park Service's planning program, which had been long recognized as a necessity in the Alaska parklands. It certainly contributed to knowledge and understanding of subsistence in Alaska. The work of the 14(h)(1) staff with the Native Corporations earned considerable goodwill toward the Park Service and its Alaska programs that would contribute to the success of its Alaska proposals. [51]
The program proved to be important in a larger sense. As early as 1977, the 14(h)(1) program had resulted in publication of Elizabeth Andrews' two-volume report that detailed her work with Doyon, Ltd. at 37 villages in an area larger than California; Gary Stein's two-volume study of 422 historic sites in the Aleutian area; 9 published articles; 16 conference papers; and 13 reports and theses. Additionally, the staff had conducted 4 classes, workshops, and training sessions on cultural resource management aimed at Natives and representatives of other federal and state agencies. [52] The 14(h)(1) staff conducted basic research in the history and culture of Alaska Natives. Their work pushed back the frontiers of Alaska history, beyond the battles of World War II, the 1898 Gold Rush, and Russian exploration and settlement, to include in that panorama, the story of the Native peoples in that panorama.
The NPS Alaska Task Force planners of 1972 and 1973, who had prepared the first planning and environmental documents submitted to Congress, had to work under severe time and political limitations. The people detailed to Alaska during the period were influenced, as well, by their own experience and had applied the park planning concepts they had learned in the "Lower 48." However valid these concepts might have been elsewhere, later planners, who had the benefit of extended field work and more detailed research, concluded that the early master plans were often deficient. While agreeing with basic purposes and objectives of those plans, Bill Brown wrote, the development proposals and visitor use specifics were often inappropriate to natural and cultural realities. As Brown and his assistants learned more about the Yukon-Charley area, for example, they concluded that recreational float trips on the Kandik and Nation rivers, which had been described earlier as "outstanding", were actually quite problematical because of wildly fluctuating water levels, access problems, upstream land ownership, and oil and gas development activity. Similarly, conditions in the country—dense stands of spruce, swampy muskeg and sloughs in the lowlands, as well as vicious swarms of insects—made unnecessary proposed campsites and trail systems where patterns of summer use of beach campsites and water travel had long been established. [53]
The recommendations the keymen made actually went beyond a revision of the 1973 master plans. Based upon several years of intensive work, they recommended a new approach for Park Service planning and management of the proposed parklands. In Alaska, they argued, extreme climatic conditions, terrain, isolation, distance, pre-existing cultural patterns, even the vast swarms of insects, would continue to determine modern use patterns. Under these conditions, imposition of the process that worked elsewhere seemed destined for failure, however well-intentioned the motives. Based upon their experience, the keymen recommended a more flexible, experimental, and evolutionary approach to Park Service planning and management in Alaska, one that would not have an irrevocable effect on the new parklands. [54]
Based upon this analysis the Alaska Task Force planners envisioned a system of parks in Alaska that Bill Brown has described as a "wealth of landscape mosaics":
1. Those that meet visitor expectations for traditional national park access, staffing, and facilities.
2. Intermediate spaces where access and visitor aids are rudimentary - equivalent to undeveloped or wilderness parklands in other states.
3. Outback spaces where visitors will be entirely on their own—wilderness in an absolute sense, compounded by size, weather, and terrain factors only rarely approximated elsewhere.
Only the developed areas and access zones of the older, established Alaskan parks were envisioned as meeting the first, or "traditional" criterion, and, even in those areas expected development would only approximate that traditionally identified with parks in the "Lower 48." The intermediate group would include some portions of the proposed parklands in close proximity to Anchorage (Lake Clark) or connecting to Alaska's limited road system (Yukon-Charley, Kenai Fjords, and portions of Wrangell-St. Elias). The rest—some 95% of all Alaska's parklands—fit the last category. Here, in the words of John Kauffmann, "people can find remoteness amid the open landscapes, avoid disturbance, and enjoy solitude . . . visitors will take the country on its own terms." [55]
In this "mosaic of landscapes," the Park Service's Alaska planners proposed abandoning the recreational/developmental approach that had long dominated Park Service management. Preservation of large ecosystems would be the dominant theme in the new Alaska parklands. Resource preservation would, however, exist side by side with a concern for the protection of traditional uses of the land, however contradictory that might seem to be. [56]
With the introduction of H.R. 39 in January 1977, the focus of the struggle over the Alaska National Interest lands shifted and brought on a new cast of characters. Secretary Andrus's order for an analysis of H.R. 39 and a re-examination of Secretary Morton's proposals elicited, of course, a flurry of activity in Alaska, and the administration's proposals required updating of the legislative support data. As passage of an Alaska lands bill seemed to loom closer in the latter part of 1977 and into 1978, both the Department of the Interior and the individual agencies that would be involved in management of the proposed areas began to prepare for implementation of the legislation. [57] As the emphasis in the Alaska Area Office gradually shifted to preparing for operations and as the keymen completed collecting the basic information required for legislative support data, the keymen functions wound down. Several of the keymen stayed on, taking on added duties. Bob Belous became public liaison officer, while continuing to develop an NPS subsistence policy and work at Cape Krusenstern and Kobuk Valley. Marc Malik continued to compile material for various areas while providing design functions for existing areas, and John Kauffmann participated in the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation's Recreation/Wild River Studies in the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska. Others left. Ralph Root returned to the Denver Service Center in spring 1977, and Bill Brown temporarily left the Service to assist North Slope Natives in a variety of cultural resource activities. The end of one phase in the Park Service's efforts to secure new parklands in Alaska came when Al Henson, who had done so much to shape the Service's program in Alaska, left in September 1977 to join the staff of the Denver Service Center. [58]
Chapter Five continues with...
Management of the National Monuments,
1979-80
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Last Modified: Tues, Jan 9 2001 10:08 am PDT
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