OCS Study

•

MMS 96·0053

SOCIAL INDICATORS MONITORING STUDY

PEER REVIEW WORKSHOP

Proceedings

September 1996

MIfS

u.s. Department of the Interior

Minerals Management Service

Alaska OCS Region

-

1

~
oes Study MMS 96-0053

SOCIAL INDICATORS MONITORING STUDY

PEER REVIEW WORKSHOP

PROCEEDINGS

June 18 and 19, 1996

Anchorage, Alaska

Prepared for:

u.s. Department of the Interior

Minerals Management Service

Alaska OCS Region

949 E. 36th Avenue

Anchorage, Alaska 99508

Under Contract No. 14-35-0001-30570

Logistical Support and Report Preparation by:

MBC Applied Environmental Sciences

3040 Redhill Avenue

Costa Mesa, California 92626

September 1996
DISCLAIMER

This draft report has been reviewed by the Minerals Management Service

and approved for publication. Approval does not signify that the contents

necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Service, nor does mention of

trade names or commercial products constitute endorsement or

recommendation for use.
PROJECT STAFF

MINERALS MANAGEMENT SERVICE

ALASKA OCS REGION

Michael Baffrey

Meeting Coordinator

MBC APPLIED ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES

Kathryn L. Mitchell

Project Manager

Proceedings Editor

Charles T. Mitchell

Rapporteur

Proceedings Editor

Phyllis Barton

Word Processing
TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION

Donald Callaway - Introduction to the Social Indicators Monitoring Studies .. 1

PRESENTATIONS AND DISCUSSIONS

Joseph G. Jorgensen - Social Indicators of "Traditional" Customs 13

Joanna Endter-Wada - Empirical Findings of the Social Indicators Project ... 23

James A. Fall - Overview of Research by the Division of Subsistence,

Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game, on the Sociocultural Consequences

of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 35

Rachel Mason - The Continuing Relevance of the Social Indicators

Study to Subsistence Management 55

Nicholas Flanders - Outside Perspectives 67

Joseph G. Jorgensen - An Analysis of Social Indicators of the Exxon Valdez

Oil Spill 75

William Schneider - Demonstration Project Jukebox 107

James A. Fall - Sociocultural Consequences of Alaska OCS Activities:

Data Analysis/Integration 109

DISCUSSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS 113

Appendix A - Attendee List
Introduction

Social Indicators Monitoring Studies
INTRODUCTION TO THE SOCIAL INDICATORS MONITORING STUDIES

Donald Callaway

National Park Service

2525 Gambell Street

Anchorage, Alaska 99501

During my tenure with the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS), I was one

of the Contracting Officer's Technical Representatives for the social indicators research. It

is my intent to present a brief overview of the social indicators projects, and the products

that have been generated, and to clarify terminology such as "Key Informant Protocol" and

"Key Informant Summary." I will also present topical coverage of the questionnaires that

were utilized as well as a list of the communities included in the projects. I will then end

with potential uses and where we may be going from here.

The products presented here today represent the effort expended since 1988: eight

volumes on the Social Indicators Project produced by Dr. Joseph Jorgensen for the Minerals

Management Service, and six volumes produced by Dr. James Fall and the Division of

Subsistence at the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) (Table 1).

Social indicators is a research initiative that actually began about 1983 when Dr.

Jorgensen, working with Berger and Associates, attempted to take a series of secondary

source indicators, that is data that had already been published by the U.S. Census, by the

State, Permanent Fund, etc. and formulate a series of social indicators. What are social

indicators? Social indicators are measures that hopefully are sensitive enough that would

allow the MMS to understand the impact of their activities on communities. It is part of an

impact assessment or environmental impact statement process.

Therefore, early in the effort, there was an attempt to use the publicly available

information to develop predictive tools. At this time there was no questionnaire used, and

there was no face to face contact with people in communities. This was partially because of

the time constraints associated with the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)

authorization process.

The second phase of the Social Indicators Project was a contract issued to Steve

Braund and Associates with Jack Kruse as the principal investigator. The task was to

develop a questionnaire that could be used in research that would provide sensitive

measures of the impacts of OCS development. It is important to understand that the

approach was based on the literature from the western United States where large industrial

or resource development projects have been documented to have a characteristic set of

impacts on communities. For example, when a huge outside mining program is introduced

into an area, it stresses the community infrastructure, the ability to deliver services, and

creates inflation. It creates any number of problems. In the case of offshore development,

some of these problems can be mitigated by the use of enclaves and other techniques. It was

MMS's intent to examine the impact of OCS development, both positive and negative, and

to abstract the effect from the ongoing economic and social processes occurring within the

State.
Table 1. Products of the Social Indicators Monitoring Studies.

MMS-I MMS-IA MMS-II MMS-III

Year 1983 1985 1986 1989 1992-1994 1994-1998

Principal Jorgensen Kruse Jorgensen Jorgensen Fall-ADF&G Fall-ADF&G

Investigator Berger & Assoc. Braund & Assoc. Yale Univ. Yale Univ.

Technical Report TR-77 TR-116 8 Volumes 8 Volumes 6 Volumes

Vol. 1-3 Provided Provided

Study TItle "Social Indicators "A Social "Social Indicators "Social Indicators "An Investigation Sociocultural

for Impact Indicators System Project" Project" of the Consequences of

Monitoring" for OCS Impact Modification Sociocultural AKOCS

Monitoring" Consequences of Activities: Data

OCS analysis/lntegratio

Development in n

AK"

Method Statistical Analysis Key Informant Multi-method Same as MMS-I Harvest Survey No questionnaire

of Available Data Interviews asking Survey Res. Key Questionnaire

(Secondary people their Informant AOSIS Quest. Objectives:

Source) primary concerns Ethnography KI Protocol "Social Effects 1. Create meta

No questionnaire History & Questionnaire" SPSS file.

Secondary Source 2. Review existing

Materials, AOSIS literature

Quest., KI 3. TIme series

Protocol analysis of harvest

data.

4. Case studies

Intent Quick way to " Develop Collect & analyze Determine impact Determine the 5. Oral histories

monitor OCS questionnaire to a set of Social of EVOS on OCS social, cultural 6. GIS

activities measure Social Indicators and subsistence deliverables,

Indicators consequences of

EVOS: 21

communities in

PWS, Cook Inlet,

& AK Peninsula

~

CIl

g

E

So. o'

'"

...

0

(;l

~

s·

5'

OQ

CIl ...

e

0.

'<

~(1) ..•

~(1)

s.

(1)

~

I

~

0

I 8-

-I eI

.g

I
Callaway - Introduction to the Social Indicators Monitoring Studies 3

Kruse, et al. went into the field and talked to a number of key informants, people

in communities, etc., to attempt to determine what factors in their life they considered most

important. These would be the issues or parameters targeted for measurement. Obviously,

in small rural coastal communities where much of the impact from offshore oil development

was anticipated, the primary issue was subsistence. There is a Technical Report 116 in the

MMS series that covers that initiative.

In 1986, after this questionnaire was developed, there was a contract issued by MMS

to implement this questionnaire in a series of communities, large and small throughout

Alaska. That contract was awarded to Dr. Jorgensen and the Human Relations Area Files,

from Yale University. It was that project that is sometimes called "MMS I." It was a

multimethod research attempt to collect not only information from a survey questionnaire,

but from historical sources, from Key Informants, and from ethnographic research.

In 1989, as a consequence of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, there was a modification of

that existing contract. The intent up to this time had been to find a set of social indicators

that would be sensitive enough detect change. The Exxon Valdez oil spill provided probably

the worst case scenario of potential impacts of offshore development. In this case, the

impact of the transportation of oil upon small rural communities. To MMS's credit they

modified the existing contract to allow researchers to attempt to assess the effects. It is

important to point out that this modification had three major constraints.

One was OMB, who once they have approved a questionnaire, do not allow for it

to be modified. They will let you shorten it or change it by reducing it. But they won't let

you ask new questions unless you go back to them for approval. That approval may take

more than a year. So one major constraint was that the questionnaire that was going to be

used was developed for other purposes.

The second constraint was that as part of the process, it is incumbent upon

researchers to work with the communities, to obtain their permission to do research and to

their regional entities. Given the litigious nature of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, there was

some concern by the lawyers involved in the case to grant access. They weren't sure what

would happen to the information. Therefore the number of communities that could have

been included was reduced simply because of the potential litigation context.

The third constraint was that the original social indicators research had focused on

coastal communities. Mostly coastal communities in those areas where MMS had anticipated

oil development: North Slope, Navarin Basin, etc. It had been decided simply as a costeffective measure to minimize the number of communities in the initial analysis. Prince

William Sound, Cook Inlet region had been deleted, in favor of establishing baseline

information for coastal communities in the North and West. We did not have baseline

communities in Prince William Sound. Additionally there were other constraints in terms

of money, time, and ability to complete the task.

This modification was designated "MMS IA." This used the Alaska OCS Social

Indicators Study (AOSIS) questionnaire which I will talk about, and the Key Informant

Protocols.
4 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

In 1992, the original questionnaire did not have a lot of detailed harvest surveys. We

were very interested in subsistence - the role it plays in Native communities, the role it

played, particularly for the young children, in terms of socialization, in terms of ethics;

especially in terms of sharing and the profound issues that subsistence provides not only

food, but kind of the "glue" that binds many of the Native communities and small rural

communities. But the original questionnaire did not have a species by species harvest

account similar to type of information systematically collected by the ADF&G. As a result,

there was a cooperative agreement implemented in 1992 with ADF&G. This cooperative

agreement was to: 1) continue their long term research in many of these, if not all, of these

communities, in terms of harvest levels, and; 2) to add another questionnaire that would

study the effects of the consequences of the spill for community, households, and

individuals.

Finally, there was considerable information collected in a number of communities.

There was not the time or resources to integrate and analyze that information. This led to

MMS III which began last year.

MMS III is a three year project will integrate all of the information into a number

of analytical products. There is no more survey research, but there will be an integration,

a presentation of oral histories, talks with key people in a relaxed kind of format rather than

the long survey protocols. It will also contain Geographic Information System (GIS)

deliverables.

That is a brief overview of the Social Indicators-Exxon Valdez Oil Spill effort from

1983.

METHODS

The kinds of methods used in this research determine what kind of products that

eventuate from the research process (Table 2). We have completed considerable survey

research. Survey research involves a questionnaire, which requires you to sit down with an

informant and ask systematic questions, and get a forced choice answer. In other words, a

person is not allowed to present their contextual reaction to a question, but are forced to

pick among a number of choices as that which best fits their possible answer. This process

has a number of positive and negative aspects.

On the positive side, in the western science tradition and in terms of regulatory

boards, it provides a context of representative data. You know that if you have gone into

the field, have randomly sampled, and have sampled correctly, that the information that you

get back is representative. This can be very powerful, in terms of lawsuits, in terms of

arguments that may occur between different interest groups over regulatory or subsistence

issues. I think that the social indicators projects, in general, have provided a firm foundation

to be able to assert in any kind of forum, representativeness of the importance, for example,

of subsistence in the everyday life of people in rural communities, Native and nonnative. I

think it is indisputable. The kinds of arguments that are being presented by special interest

groups in the State now are very important. Some people think that there is really no

difference between sport hunting and subsistence, and there is. The Social Indicators Project

results showed the differences, and they showed them as not anecdotal.
Callaway - Introduction to the Social Indicators Monitoring Studies

Table 2. Types of multi-method research.

5

Data Collection Survey Research Key Informant Secondary Data Oral History

Type Protocol

Fonn of Forced Choice Open Ended No Informants Open-ended

Respondent's taped interview

Answer

Coding Format Pre coded Coded after fact Dependent on Hypertext Links

original collection (HTML)

source

Examples 1. AOSIS Volume III: Statistical analysis life History

questionnaire Part 3: of existing data Topical questions

2. Social Effects Chapter 4- sets, e.g., Bureau Transcripts

questionnaire "Analysis of of Census Multimedia

3. ADF&G responses to Key materials CD/ROM

Harvest Survey In fonn ant Project "Jukebox"

Protocol"

It showed them to be ubiquitous across rural communities in Alaska. So the strength of a

survey research effort is that it provides information that is relatively unassailable. At a later

date, if someone does another survey, with a larger sample, slightly different questions, etc.

perhaps it may bring your results into question. But until that time, this is the foundation

and basis for any argument.

On the negative side, forced choice questionnaires don't necessarily work. I found

it out, unfortunately with the first question we had on the AOSIS questionnaire. We asked

in an interview, "Do you think that fish and game have increased or decreased in the last

two years?" My informant, a middle-aged hunter from Gambell, a very conscientious person,

said, "Well, which fish and which game?" I knew I was in trouble right away. First of all it

is a compound question: fish and game. One may have increased, and one may have

decreased. But more importantly, people in rural communities, especially Native households,

give very close attention by species. So we had to modify the questionnaire into what is

called the "Key Informant Protocol," to go through all of the species. You can't say that fish

has gone up or down. You can't say game has gone up or down. So we had to list all of the

species. So there are some problems with what is called "construct validity" in terms of

questionnaires. And there is also a problem in that, in my experience, the results of

questionnaires never really tell the story. It is important to understand the context of the

response. It is important to understand the feelings and reality behind why people are giving

you the responses on a questionnaire. That can't be grasped in a questionnaire. But it can,

to some extent, be reached in what is called Key Informant Protocols.

Key Informant Protocols were our attempt to buttress the social indicators

questionnaire and avoid OMB. We said it is not fixed choice; it is not forced choice; it is

not a questionnaire. They said, "Well all right. We will just charge you for the burden

hours." For those of you who do not know, OMB requires that every minute you talk to

someone, be calculated in terms of burden hours. If a questionnaire is an hour long and you

talk to 100 people, that is 100 burden hours. OMB gave us permission to use the Key

Informant Protocol but indicated they were still going to charge us for burden hours. So

;.1
6 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

figure out how long you talk to people. However, a Key Informant Protocol is open ended.

You talk to people in a dialogue about some generic topics. Then, after the fact, you take

that information and try to systematically code it so that it may be analyzed formally

through statistical means.

"Secondary data" is another method. That is simply to take existing information and

try to extract what you can, in terms of changes through time. Employment data,

demographic data, health data, Permanent Fund data, etc. would be examples.

Finally, there is "oral history" data. Tomorrow we will have a presentation of what

is called "Project Jukebox." Project Jukebox, on which I have had the privilege to work with

Dr. William Schneider, really came from the communities. I can remember going into

Iquiqig and someone saying to us, "You know we get a lot of reports and nobody reads

them. What we want is something that is easily accessible, so that the children can have

access to the experience of the elders." To accomplish this now we go into the community,

and they select elders that they wish us to talk to. We tape record the elder. The elder gives

a life history. Simply selecting from their experience and background, those incidents and

those experiences, those morals that they wish to communicate to others and to the younger

generation. We tape that interview which is transcribed and then assembled in a multimedia

fashion with photographs of the elder, with maps of the region, and in some cases video

clips. That is all transferred to several CD/ROMs for use on the computer. If other people

in the community, especially children, are interested, they simply click on the image of the

elder with a mouse and they can hear that elder speak and tell his or her story. All of the

transcripts have "key words," and are annotated so if there is a specific topic they would like

to hear from the elder they can click on the topic, or they can simply listen to the elder and

read at the same time. These products, I have found, are especially well received in the

communities. It is a delight to work with an elder who has never used a computer before,

give them a mouse, and in about five minutes they are "really cruising."

TYPES OF SOCIAL INDICATORS PRODUCTS

There are several types of analysis that are produced in these volumes (Table 3).

Key Informant Summaries

The Key Informant Summaries form Volumes I and II, and Volume IV, parts 1 and

2. These are not Key Informant Protocols. Key Informant Summaries contain background

information on the region and communities within the region. They contain historical data

and demographic data. They also contain information from interviews with key informants,

officials, significant people within a community about certain issues with which they are

faced. These data provide an overview of the region and an historical look, especially

demographic, at the communities involved.

Key Informant Protocol

The second kind of product is a detailed analysis of the survey and the Key

Informant Protocol data. This would be Volumes III and VI in the eight volume set of the
Callaway - Introduction to the Social Indicators Monitoring Studies 7

Social Indicators Project. I highly recommend this volume, but Dr. Jorgensen has also

provided copies of his article, "Ethnicity not Culture" published in the American Indian

Culture and Research Journal. As is his wont, Dr. Jorgensen wrote a "brief' 124 page article.

It is a synthesis of many of the issues that are contained in the analysis here and I highly

recommend reading it. Dr. Jorgensen will spend some time, I believe, talking about some

of the results from that analysis.

Table 3. Overview of the types of Social Indicators products.

Type of Analysis Existing or Potential Products

1. Analysis of existing historical and secondary I. Key Informant Summaries: Vol. 1 & 2

source data combined with open ended interviews IV. Post Spill Key Informant Summaries Parts 1 &

with local officials 2

2. Analysis of survey research questionnaires and III. Social Indicators Study of Alaskan Coastal

Key Informant Protocols Villages: Analysis

VI. Analysis of the Exxon Valdez spill area 1988-

1992

3. Analysis of research design. sampling, II. Research methodology ...

questionnaire construction. validity & reliability V. Research methodology for Exxon Valdez spill

area

4. Descriptive and tabular analysis of harvest An Investigation of the Sociocultural

survey data and "Social Effects" questionnaire Consequences of OCS Development in Alaska.

Vols. I-VI

5. SPSS data files [for independent analysis and to Available upon request

overcome "ecological fallacy"

6. Oral history Project "Jukebox" on CDjROM

7. GIS deliverables ArcView II format

Research Methodologies

Other products are some very esoteric volumes on research methodologies; these are

Volumes II and V. These two volumes delve into issues of validity, reliability, and

construction of the questionnaire, etc. They provide a primer on how to develop a research

design. They also contain the condensation of wisdom attained during many of the

problems, mistakes, and successes that we had in terms of the methodology employed in the

Social Indicators Project. I highly recommend them to those that may want to initiate their

own survey research, whether it is a cooperative agreement to do harvest surveys, or on

issues of local or regional interest.

Descriptive and Tabular Information

The fourth type of product is descriptive and tabular information on a number of

communities in Prince William Sound, the Alaska Peninsula, and Cook Inlet. These are the

ADF&G products, Volumes I through VI. They contain all of the details on harvests over

a three year period, the change in harvest per community, per species. They also contain

details on what has been called the Social Effects Questionnaire.
8 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Statistical Package for the Social Sciences Database

Finally, the last is the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) data files.

Should you have the SPSS program on a computer in your region, community, or office,

MMS can provide the SPSS data files which have been stripped of all identifying detail so

the informants' anonymity remains preserved, but allow you to do analysis on the variables

that have been collected. They are an important way to overcome one of the methodological

problems called "ecological fallacy." Ecological fallacy can be illustrated simply by taking the

mean from two parameters from some kind of study. For example, if you have a community

that has a high average income and a high average harvest of subsistence species, can you

make the connection that high income is correlated with high subsistence? You can't

because you are dealing with averages there. What you really need to know is are the low

or high income people harvesting high or low resources. The SPSS files allow you to do that.

They allow you to associate per household which is a unit of analysis, income, harvest or any

other variable.

TOPICAL COVERAGE OF THE SOCIAL INDICATORS STUDIES

Table 4 is a breakdown of the kind of topics that were covered in each of the

questionnaires: the AOSIS questionnaire, the Key Informant Protocol, the Harvest Survey,

and the Social Effects questionnaire. You will notice that there is overlap in some of the

topics, but don't forget that they are asked in different ways. And these two are linked and

independent of the research that we have done in the previous two.

One thing that I would like to point out is if you do want to look at the

questionnaires they can be found in Volume II or in Volume VI in the ADF&G reports.

PARTICIPATING COMMUNITIES

Table 5 lists communities that were included in the "MMS I" study. Those

communities in italics are "post spill" communities, i.e., sampled after the Exxon Valdez oil

spill.

Communities Participating in MMS II.

Table 6 lists the communities that participated in MMS II. This sampling effort

focused mainly on communities that were impacted by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, with some

control communities from the Social Indicators Survey. The control communities served the

purpose of being far away from the direct impacts of the spill. We tried to use them as a

references against which we compared effects in communities subjected to the oil spill.

Table 7 shows a brief overview of the topical coverage of these volumes from

ADF&G.

Let me end by making a brief generalization. In the current context it seems unlikely

that there will be Federal funding devoted to research on these issues. However, I think that

this workshop is a very positive process anyway. The responsibility for conducting future
Callaway - Introduction to the Social Indicators Monitoring Studies 9

research on subsistence and other issues is going to lie with the regions or the communities

themselves. I would offer the experience contained in these products should you decide to

engage and initiate your own research. And I would advise that you use the people in this

room as a resource to provide expertise, background, and advice. It would be my hope that

the communities initiate this research, do it cooperatively, and define the issues.

Table 4. Overview: topical coverage of Social IndicatorsIEVOS questionnaires.

AOSIS Questionnaire Key Informant Harvest Survey Social Effects Survey

Protocol

Household composition Harvest expenses Residence/age Visiting

Traditional activities Variety of species Ethnicity Wild foods

harvested

Health Stability of income Educational level Sharing

Education Giving/receiving: labor, Commercial fishing: Elders

equipment, subsistence salmon

products marine invert.

within/between comm.

Employment Household size Large game Significance of place

Income, goods & Expectations for Non-commercial Participation and

services household composition harvest: leadership

salmon, non-salmon

finfish, shellfish

Voting Politics Marine mammals Oil spill employment

Residence in Ethics Furbearers Childcare during spill

community

Perceived well-being Attitude quantity of Birds Services

harvestable species

·Source: Appendix in II Management of Wild plants oes development

- Research Methodology harvestable species

Attitudes about state & Give/receive most

federal management species

Understanding natural Employment history

resources

Acquiring knowledge

·Source: Appendix in II ·Source: Appendix I in "Source: Appendix I in

- Research Methodology Volume VI Summary Volume VI Summary
10 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Table S. Communities participating In the Social Indicators survey.

BOROUGH NON-BOROUGH POST EVOS SPIll

North Slope Aleutians Prince William Sound/Cook

Barrow St. Paul Inlet

Anaktuvuk Nikolski Kenai

Nuiqsut Unalaska Tyonek

Wainwright Atka Seldovia

Point Hope Sand Point Valdez

Kaktovik False Pass Tati1ek

NANA Bristol Bay Cordova

Kotzebue Dillingham Chignik

Kivalina Manokotak

Deering Togiak

Buckland Naknek

KODIAK Ekwok

Kodiak Bering Strait

Old Harbor Nome

Karluk Shismaref

Unalakleet

Gambell

Calista

Bethel

Nunapitchuk

Toksook Bay

Scammon Bay

Alakanuk

Aniak

Note: Communities in italics are Post Spill communities.

Table 6. Communities participating in the Social Consequences of OCS Development in Alaska (MMS-II).

Prince William Sound Kodiak Island Alaska Peninsula "Control Communities"

Communities Communities Communities Kaktovik

Chenega Bay Akhiok Chignik Bay Kivalina

Tatitlek Kodiak City Chignik Lake Kotzebue

Nanwalek Karluk Nuiqsut

Port Graham Larsen Bay

Seldovia Old Harbor

Kenai Ouzinkie

Cordova Port Lions

Valdez

Table 7. Topical coverage by community in the six volume: "An Investigation of the Sociocultural

Consequences of OCS Development in Alaska."

1. Climate, Setting. and General History

2. Previous Research

3. Study Goals and Research Methods:

Fieldwork

Sample Selection

4. Demography

5. Monetary Economy

6. Resource Harvests and Uses - Year One

Participation Rates

Harvest Quantities

7. Resource Harvest and Uses - Year Two

Participation Rates

Harvest Quantities

8. Resource Harvest and Uses - Year Three

Participation Rates

Harvest Quantities

9. Discussion

Harvest Trends

Ongoing Issues

10. Social Effects Survey Findings
Callaway - Introduction to the Social Indicators Monitoring Studies

QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION

11

Edenshaw: Did you ever ask non natives living in these coastal villages their

definition of subsistence?

Callaway: Yes. All the sampling was random and while many of the communities

were a high proportion of Natives, there were nonnatives included in the sampling. This

brings up a very important issue now facing Federal and State government regulators. There

are people that feel that the activity they engage in as urban sports hunters are identical,

in terms of their civil rights, as the activities that a subsistence hunter in Kivalina engages

in.

Hild: In regards to the two sets of documents, have any of these been scanned and

put into electronic media that is accessible?

Callaway: I am told by Michael Baffrey of MMS that the second set are available

on disk. It is my recommendation that the results of the last 15 years of research by MMS

be placed on CD/ROM so that it can be made available to researchers and the local

communities. Perhaps an Internet site could be established.

Luton: We are in the process of putting all the series on an Internet site.

Callaway: Is this the TIMS initiative? So they all are available on diskette. If you are

interested in obtaining them, Michael Baffrey is the person to call.
Presentations and Discussions
SOCIAL INDICATORS OF "TRADITIONAL" CUSTOMS

Joseph G.Jorgensen

School of Social Sciences

University of California

Irvine, California 92697-5100

At the outset of social indicators research in 1986, a central issue was defining and

measuring "traditional" customs. The items among the questions we asked in the AQI

instrument (forced choice questionnaire) which survived our tests represented two dominant

features of life in the bush: (1) communitarian acts and sentiments, such as the sharing of

resources and meals with relatives, wider networks ofkinspersons, and friends beyond one's

household, even one's village, and also the active participation in community affairs; and (2)

engaging in hunting, fishing, and other extractive activities-some solo and some with

relatives or friends.

ON APPROPRIATE DEFINITIONS AND MEASURES OF SUBSISTENCE

We confirmed in all phases of our social indicators research that Native subsistence

economies remain quintessentially subsistence economies in their organizations of

production: ownership, control, labor, distribution, consumption. They are directly linked

to procuring food and shelter for the maintenance of life itself. It is the social fabric in

which the subsistence economy is embedded that is crucial within and among communities.

Throughout the first phase of the social indicators research in the 31 villages located

from Kodiak Island northward to the Beaufort Sea, the data analyzed here, we measured

features of subsistence activities as indicators of the subsistence mode of production under

which they were subsumed. The difference between disparate extractive activities and the

variety of related customs and practices that reflected a subsistence mode of production are

obvious. A host of measures of subsistence economics and measures of communitarian

customs in the Key Informant Protocol (KIP) and AQI instruments provide reasonable

indicators of "traditional" customs and the way in which they are related within the structure

of village life (Table 1).

Whereas, the harvests and preparation of wild animals occur as subsistence activities,

and also as activities within a subsistence mode of production, the restriction of activities

to a few species of large land mammals and salmon indicates a sport "tradition." When

extraction, preparation, distribution (a panoply of sharing practices), and consumption of

a wide variety of plants and animals are organized within kinship-affinal networks, extend

to networks of friends and elders, and are embedded in a nexus of visiting customs, the

relations among these variables indicate a subsistence mode of production "tradition," i.e.,

a set of related customs that have persisted over time. This is not to deny that changes

occur within features of these relations.
14 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Table 1. Contrasts between Pretest and Posttest Samples, and between MIXED:NATIVE Contrasts within those

samples, 32 AOSIS Variables Measuring Respondent Characteristics and Traditional Customs, 1987·1988 and

1989-199oaPRE PRE PRE POST POST POST

1987-1988 MIXED NA11VE 1989-1990 MIXED NA11VE

(N=548) (N=264) (N=284) (N=308) (N=170) (N=138)

ETIINICITI

Native 79%' 59%' 95% 67% 48%' 91%

Non-Native 21% 41% 5% 33% 52% 9%

AGE

Mean 41.5 39.9' 43 42.4 39.9' 45.5

SEX

Male 50.5% 44%' 57% 54% 45%' 64%

Female 49.5% 56% 43% 46% 55% 36%

EDUCATION

COMPLElED

Some High School 42% 38% 47% 46% 43% 50%

Some College

or Beyond 33% 48% 19% 30% 42% 16%

SOURCE OF

EMPLOYMENT

UnemployedlRetired/Other 24% 19%' 29% 28% 25% 32%

Public Sector 37% 35% 39% 39% 42% 35%

Private Sector 39% 46% 32% 33% 34% 32%

EMPLOYMENT

Md Months Employed 6 8' 3.7 8 9.9' 2.8

Persons Employed

~ 4 Months 52% 73% 51% 60% 70% 48%

Persons Employed

z 10 Months 37% 44% 31% 44% 58% 28%

INCOME

Median $22,940 $34,185' $16,000 $27,885 $38,172' $19,017

Mean $30,160' 537,900 $22,980 533,920 539,270 $27,030

Income z $50,000 18% 30% 7% 27% 38% 13%

HOUSEHOLD SIZE

Mean 2.84 2.64' 3.06 2.8 2.7' 2.9

3 Persons or More 71% 62% 80% 68% 66% 72%

6 Persons or More 23% 16% 30% 20% 13% 29%

HOUSEHOLD TIPE

Single-Conjugal- Nuclear 80%' 83% 78% 66% 73%' 57%

Stem-Joint-DenudedComposite 20% 17% 22% 34% 27% 43%

I.ENGTII OF

RESIDENCE

~ 5 years 17%' 24%' 10% 18% 28%' 5%

> 10 years 69% 55% 83% 56% 38% 78%

LAND MAMMALS

% Hunters 34% 33% 35% 42% 37% 47%

Months Hunting 2.4 1.8 2.8 25 2.4 2.6

Days Hunting 20.5' 19.2%' 21.4 11.5 12.6 10.5
Jorgensen - Social Indicators of "Traditional" Customs 15

Table 1. Continned.

SFAMAMMALS

% Hunters 32% 16%* 44% 28% 12%* 48%

Months Hunting 4.3 4.2* 6.3 5.6 4.8* 6.3

Days Hunting 38* 35.5* 41.5 34.7 37.4* 34.1

CAMPING

% Campers 49% 44%* 53% 42% 38% 47%

Months Camping 3 2.7* 3.2 2.4 2.4 2.4

Days Camping 13* 13.1 13.0 19.9 215- 18.2

FISHING

% Fishers 41%- 36%- 46% 60% 55%- 69%

Months Fishing 4.3 5.1- 3.9 3.5 3.5 3.7

Days Fishing 20.9* 20.4 21.5 27.7 23.3- 32.4

SUBSISlENCE FOOD

YESlERDAY

Yes 64% 49%* 78% 58% 48%* 71%

SUBSISlENCE FOOD

DAY BEFORE

YESTERDAY

Yes 61% 51%- 71% 57% 45%- 72%

EIlliER DAY FOOD

FROM OlliER HH

Yes 37%* 49% 50% 36% 36%- 35%

MEALS WIlli

RELATIVES OlliER

HOUSEHOLD PAST 2

DAYS

lor More 50% 43%- 56% 43% 33%* 54%

SUBSISlENCE MFA T

AND FISH IN ANNUAL

DIET

~50% 54% 40%* 67% 47% 34%- 64%

SPEAK NATIVE

lANGUAGE AT HOME

Most of lime or Always 47% 35%- 55% 40% 30%* 48%

lliINK ABOUT GAME

AVAIlABLE PAST 5

YEARS

Decreased 30% 22%* 41% 35% 40% 29%

Increased 31% 40% 20% 20% 18% 22%

lliINK ABOUT FISH

AVAIlABLE PAST 5

YFARS

Decreased 46% 40% 54% 42% 56%* 26%

Increased 17% 22% 10% 16% 16% 16%

DAYS VISIT FRIENDS

LAST WEEK

3 or More 46% 44% 47% 43% 45% 41%

PUBUC MEETINGS

ATlENDED lAST

MONlli

lor More 44% 41% 47% 48% 42% 54%
16

Table 1. Continued.

MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

V01E IN RECENT CIlY

COUNCIL ELECTION

Yes

V01E IN RECENT

VIllAGE CORP

ELECTION

Yes

SOCIAL TIES WIlli

PERSONS IN OlliER

VIllAGES

No Satisfaction

Complete Satisfaction

FEEUNGS ABOUT

INCOME

No Satisfaction

Complete Satisfaction

69%*

68%

6%*

22%

16%*

11%

64%*

63%*

6%

20%

6%*

13%

73%

72%

5%

23%

25%

10%

57%

64%

10%

57%

25%

30%

54%

60%

12%

51%

27%

29%

60%

67%

7%

65%

22%

30%

• Asterisks (*) denote Pretest/Posttest and MIXed/Native contrasts significant at P ~ .OS. Pretest (I)/Posttest (II) contrasts are

designated in the second column under Roman I. MIXed/Native contrasts for the pretest sample appear in the third column

under PRE MIXED and for the postlesl sample appear in the sixth column under POST MIXED. Significant differences for

MIXed/Native contrasts of nominal dichotomous variables are based on the test for the difference between proportions: the

Kolmogorov-Smirnov two independent sample test is used for ordinal variables; and the r-test is used for interval variables.

Native: Nonnative Contrasts in Reference to Subsistence and Traditions

The first phase of our social indicator research demonstrated that a strongly and

positively correlated group of traditional customs continued to be practiced through 1990

in large, complex, multi-ethnic villages as well as small, simple, more homogeneous ones.

The most powerful contrast between respondents who engaged in a traditionally organized

subsistence economy of production, and those who did not, was not between contrasting

types of villages, but between Natives and nonnatives (Tables 2 and 3).

Knowledge that a person was not a Native proved to be the best indicator that he

or she did not engage in subsistence extraction activities; that subsistence foods were not

eaten in the previous two days; that subsistence foods constituted small proportions of the

annual diet; that few meals were eaten with relatives in other households, and that ties with

persons in other villages were satisfactory or less than satisfactory.

The nonnative factor was mitigated somewhat by interracial marriages, referred to

here as "mixed marriage," i.e., a nonnative respondent whose spouse is Native. The

mitigation, however, further evinces the power of race/ethnicity in accounting for traditions

of subsistence practices. Mixed racial couples were twice as likely as nonnative couples to

have eaten meals in relatives' homes and twice as likely as nonnative couples to have

received subsistence foods from persons in households other than their own. Indeed, the

best predictor of the source of subsistence foods for some of the meals eaten in the previous

two days by mixed couples was that someone other than the respondent had harvested the

food (12% from someone in the respondent's household, 53% from someone in a different

household). Yet even this prediction in regard to meal sharing was weak because the best
Ta~ie 2. Univariate comparisons of incomes,household sizes and types, and several measures of traditional communitarian customs, Native and \

nonnative respondents, entire pretest-posttest sample, N=856, 1987-1990". \

-- '-

-.~'--'-- -

NONNATIVE

INCOME 1·

>S50K <SIOK <S20K <S30K <S40K <S50K >S50K !

.38 .60 .53 .01 .34 -.19 -.05

.55 .2S -.25 .16

.61

<S50K

INCOME

NATIVE

.71 .25

<S30K <S40K

.ss

<S20K

.56

<SIOK

VIlLAGE

MIXED

CO"TRAST

NA17VE .60 .44 .32 .42 .32

• No tIOIIlllIlJvcrcspoudaIl earned less tbaD S20,OOO1IIDUa1Iy.

• ODe IIOIIIlaIive rcspoudaIt earned S3O,OOOaanua1ly. That penon had some posl-gradualC cducaliOD.

, Two DOIlDativercspoudaIls earning bctweeu S40,ooo IDd S50,OOOannually have high school educalions.

Meals Visit Visits

Subsistence Food in Meals With Friendsl (Trips)

Harvest Relative Relative Out of

Person Past Past Village

TDIal Types of Day Before Not Two Week Past

Income Household Type Household Size Subsistence Acts Yesterday Yestenlay Self Days (Days) Year

<S4OK >S40K Single Conjuga Nuclear Noonuc Mean 6+ 0 3+ Yes Yes Yes 1 + 3+ 3+

Native 80%

(N619) 80% 20% 12°/. 22% 3g0/0 28% 3 28"4 24% 57% 74% 70"4 (of 72%) 5l!"1. 48% 410/0

NonNative 61%

(N212) 39"/. 610/. 20"/. 39"10 260/0 150/0 2 7°/. 39"/. 36% 30"/. 340/0 (of 32%) 14% 39"4 23%

'All differences between native and nonnative dism1Julions an: significant at <.01 .__ .,...._.- -_.' --_.__ .' _.- ----_.--_. .---"'---' .~ .. _.

'-- -

"-,'-" '- ----- ._------- --'---

[Table 3. Gamma(~) ~-m-e~en~ ed:lronalalbi~~ol by m.o~.':~ employment,controlll•• for '~~e-a-nd-e-thni-ci~,-~~D~~~=-

I contra~.~'pre~st-~~test sa_m!.I_e,_N~856, 1987-1990. - .• --_. - .----

.'.

.,,,----- --------...~ •.-.-------------------------.-------------------
18 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

prediction among mixed racial couples was that no meals were eaten in relatives' homes

during the preceding two days, and that the respondent had not eaten in a relative's (or

affine's) home recently.

Who, we asked, among all nonnatives in our original samples practiced the greatest

number of "traditional subsistence" activities which are widely practiced by Natives. We

discovered that a tiny proportion (6%) of nonnative respondents best fitted the "traditional

subsistence" practices characteristic of Natives, but the fit was not very good. The 6% were

between the ages of 35 and 59, had resided in the village in which they were first

interviewed for more than ten years, earned more than $50,000 annually, engaged in hunting

several species of land mammals and fishing for several species of fish and established

camps for several extraction activities each year. Yet less than 50% had eaten at a relative's

home, or received food from a person in a household other than the respondent's, or gained

more than 50% of the meat and fish in their annual diets from naturally-occurring

resources.

Thus, a tiny percentage of middle-aged nonnative "rural village" respondents in our

31 village samples practiced some of the subsistence and sharing customs characteristic of

the Native subsistence economy of production. The results reveal marked differences

between Native and nonnative "rural subsistence" hunters, fishers, and gatherers.

ECONOMY AND ACCULTURATION

The adoption of big game hunting and fishing and the limited practices and visiting

and sharing meals by a tiny and select group of long-term, middle-aged nonnative residents

in Alaskan villages may be what some anthropologists in the 1950s and 1960s conceived as

acculturation: two cultures in contact, each accommodating to and adopting cultural features

of the other. The other 94% of nonnatives, by this accounting, are in the process of

becoming more Native-like, and vice versa. Acculturation, a concept of the 1940s that

lingered through the 1960s, was seldom defined or measured, although it was often used to

clinch arguments when accounting for culture change.

The results of the first phase of our social indicators research revealed the

consequences of modifications to Native subsistence practices from new technologies, legal

restrictions, population growth, and federal takings. The responses were integrated into

modifications of a subsistence-based mode of production necessarily integrated with public

and private sector economic forces. Few nonnatives in our sample - all 31 villages are

"rural" - had adopted many subsistence traits characteristic of Native residents. To be sure,

some were active sport hunters and fishers, and some benefitted from the "rural subsistence"

privileges which allowed them to place setnets in rivers, to harvest four caribou annually,

and the like. The evidence suggests that self-selection of nonnative persons for life in the

bush, coupled with long-term employment, and marriage to a Native is the most likely

explanation of the engagement of nonnatives in some activities that appear to be Native

traditions.

In sum, the multiple factors, taken together, that account for nonnative participation

in several subsistence activities associated with Native subsistence modes of production are:
Jorgensen - Social Indicators of "Traditional" Customs 19

mixed marriage, more than ten years residence in a village, middle-age (35-59), high income

(over $50,000 in 1988 dollars), and employment in the public sector. Even if we exercise all

of these controls, the best prediction is that if a person is a nonnative, he or she participates

in one or less subsistence activity, eats few subsistence foods, does not eat at the home of

relatives, and does not receive subsistence foods from others.

The reasons for public sector differences from private sector appear obvious,

although non-trivial. Public sector employees in coastal Alaskan villages who are nonnatives,

whether working for Native regional corporations (for-profit or non-profit), Native village

corporations (for-profit or non-profit), boroughs (equivalent to counties), the State of

Alaska, or the Federal government are overwhelmingly self-selected for life in the bush, earn

high incomes, and the majority have contacts of various kinds with Natives every day. They

reside in the villages year around, exercise their political franchise, and attend public

meetings. Private sector employees and entrepreneurs, if in commercial fishing, have

minimal contacts with Natives and seldom reside in Alaska year around.

Regardless of whether Natives reside in small, homogeneous villages with modest

infrastructure and services (Periphery and Native villages in our theoretical contrasts), or

large, heterogeneous villages with well-developed infrastructures (Hub and Mixed villages

in our contrasts), a variety of public services, and a relatively complex local economy of

public and private sectors, participation in the hunting of several sea mammal species and

doing so for 45 days or more per year are consistent indicators of many traditional activities

and customs, including the frequent hunting of several species of land mammals, the

extraction of several species of fish, the establishment of several camps throughout the year

to procure these resources, and the maintenance of equipment which makes camping and

extraction successful.

Natives who are actively engaged in fishing, hunting, and camping are also apt to

speak their Native language at home most of the time, to visit friends frequently during the

week, to vote in city council and village corporation elections, and to feel that their social

ties with persons in other communities are satisfactory. To make predictions even simpler,

knowledge that a person in our original sample is Native, unemployed, unemployable or

retired and earning less than $17,000 (household income) per year (in 1989-90 dollars) is

a very strong indicator (75%) that the person participates in subsistence extraction activities

and related customs specified above.

Income and age influence household composition and size, as well as Native

participation in subsistence extraction activities. Yet almost every Native in our original

sample shared naturally-occurring resources with persons outside their own household, and

almost every Native consumed wild resources as well. The differences between high and low

income earners among Natives appeared in every one of our samples and panels.

Households of Native high earners were likely to be nuclear and to have more than four

members. Unless they were very elderly, respondents in high income households were much

more apt to engage in several subsistence activities and to be donors of resources than were

low earners. Composition of the households of low earners were likely to be some

non-nuclear variety (denuded, fragments, single-parent, composite, stem). Low earners,

particularly elders and women who head households, were more apt to be a receivers of

resources (food, meals) than are extractors and donors.
20 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Differences obtained between Natives in large, heterogeneous villages and those in

small, homogeneous ones. In general, Natives in the largest villages were better educated,

employed for more months of the year, and earned greater incomes than their counterparts

in the small villages. They were less apt to have had subsistence food as parts of their meals

the preceding two days, less apt to have gained 75% of their sustenance from naturally-occurring resources, less apt to have dined and snacked regularly with relatives, less apt to have

received subsistence food from persons in households other than their own, and less apt to

speak their Native language at home most of the time than was the case for their congeners

in the small, homogeneous villages.

Nevertheless, the best predictor in large, complex villages for the practice of every

traditional custom cited above is that every Native engages in every one of them. The

differences between Natives and nonnatives in the large, complex villages was much greater

than the differences between Natives in either large and complex or small and simple

villages. Finally, as income increased, Natives in complex villages increased their participation in subsistence extraction activities and the consumption and sharing activities that

accompanied them.

THE PERSISTENCE OF "TRADITIONS"

First, Natives have maintained a variety of practices that were common features of

the lives of their forebears. Extraction of sea mammals, eating meals with relatives and

friends in their homes, and frequent visits with friends and neighbors are powerful indicators

of the retention of traditional practices in the fabric of Native lives in the 1990s. The

hunting of walrus in an 18 ft aluminum skiff, powered by a 50 hp Evinrude outboard motor;

meals in which Rice Krispies are served with low bush cranberries, murre eggs, and black

meat (smoked seal); and visits in which some of the discussion centers on action, which is

occurring on the TV screen (piped in by satellite), may fool the nonnative observer as being

wholly modem traits. To the contrary, these activities, and many others that we have

measured here, have been modified by modem technology and integration into the

periphery of a world-wide market, albeit as a dependent whose stability fluctuates with the

ups and downs of the public sector whose stability fluctuates-although with slower reaction

times-with the ups and downs of the private sector.

Sharing is traditional, as is the extraction of animals and plants of the land and the

sea (birds and their eggs included). The participation in village affairs as if the village was,

what it is, a network of friends and relatives sharing, for the most part, resources, labor, and

even cash, for survival, is also a "tradition," if altered by modem circumstance. Traveling to

work at the post office astride a snowmachine, then, shouldn't fool us into thinking that

Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) and oil have transformed Native societies

to a variant of Western society that has nearly matched the model.

For the initial phase of the social indicators study that commenced two years prior

to the Exxon Valdez spill and that has been discussed, albeit briefly here, the methodologies

through which the questionnaire and the protocol indicator systems were developed, and the

extensive analyses of those systems appear in Social Indicators Study of Alaskan Coastal

VillagesII Research Methodology:Design, Sampling, Reliability, and Validity. TR 153 Minerals

Management Service, Alaska OCS Region. New Haven: Submitted by Human Relations

Area Files Inc. (1993) and Social Indicators Study of Coastal Alaskan Villages//1Analysis.
Jorgensen - Social Indicators of "Traditional" Customs 21

TR 154 Minerals Management Service, Alaska OCS Region. New Haven: Submitted by

Human Relations Area Files Inc. (1994).

QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION

Edenshaw: Do you have information on the types of species that nonnatives

harvested versus Natives?

Jorgensen: In our Exxon Valdez study we inquired about 200 species but the list was

too long and had to be reduced to 77 species. We did measure what was harvested. I

distinguished between Hub and Periphery villages; Hub would be complex villages,

Periphery would be simple villages. Hub village people identified the species that were

commodities. But they didn't know nearly so many as the Natives in the Periphery villages.

The Hub villages were 69% nonnative in our samples.

Edenshaw: Why wasn't or was time a factor? If you look at all of the different

variables you have in regards to harvesting, I'm not sure how it is with other Natives but we

have traditional lands, certain places where we go to harvest.

Jorgensen: We asked those questions in Bethel, in Kotzebue. It is clearly becoming

a problem for long-term residents to use many of the places that they used traditionally. It

is probably much harder for people who have just moved into the villages. There were

pressures on the places where you could harvest resources in the very large villages. Not that

there weren't resources there, but for everybody to have access to places that were rich was

another question. We found in this research that many people who worked in Anchorage,

or even Kodiak, would take vacations in home villages when they can harvest resources.

Edenshaw: I would like to see a community like Eagle or Soldotna included. If you

look at the key species and what a person from Soldotna or Eagle harvests versus what

someone from ....

Jorgensen: It is there, it is Kenai instead of Soldotna. But look at the next study on

"Ethnicity not Culture."

Hild: In regards to your matrices, what I have seen here is that they have all been

predictive. Have they been evaluated to take that perception from the other two walls of

your box? To see if you have any other loopings or parameters?

Jorgensen: If you have a one dimensional solution it is like looking at a matrix. If

you have a matrix of correlation coefficients and you organize them so the strongest

correlations are fitted next to one another, that is the first dimension. Then, if you say but

every one of those items is related to every other item, not just the ones most strongly

related to, and so the best that you can do is say what is the next best order we can get out

this? That is the second dimension. Whether you do it one more time and say how many

ways are these things going to scale? We can get to a third dimension, but it is generally

beyond the capabilities of all but mainframe computers.
22 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Armstrong: I had a question on the word "subsistence." Would it have been better

to use "cultural" and "traditional" instead of subsistence?

Jorgensen: Maybe. The way I see it is you define phenomena that you think are

traditional. Then you measure them, and it is an issue of measurement. Culture has no

standing in court. Subsistence does because it has been defined in law and has a standing

in court. So if you were to change things to traditional culture or cultural traditions and if

they included all of these activities that swirl around the harvesting of resources, knowledge

of resources, knowledge of the environment, significant symbols attributed to the

environment, the way in which resources are prepared and distributed and consumed, the

way people visit-all of those things together-there is a structure to them.

Endter-Wada: In light of the relationship between the variables and how they are

structured over time, would you imply that we would need to monitor a full set of variables?

Jorgensen: Oh, no. I found so many redundant variables. It is not to say that they

measure exactly the same thing, but they were giving the same kind of information. Why I

got rid of them and how I got rid of them takes up most of Volume II. If you were going

to monitor a village I can give you eight variables out of the entire list to monitor. I think

that you would be very successful in monitoring a village.

Now if you were going to monitor a village you would have to have a panel. With

the panel you would have to keep going back year after year. Alaska people move around,

especially nonnatives. They are gone. If the economy goes south, so do they. So you chase

them and try to find them. Let's say you have a 33% sample of those that remained; the

very next year, you go back again and you only find 80% of the group you sampled last year.

It goes down. Everybody who works with panels finds that out. Here's what we found out

about panels. If they are nonnative and employed, they tend to be employed in the public

sector; therefore they are year-round residents. They tend to have lived in the villages for

more than six years. They are stable. What do we find for Natives? They tend to be

employed. They have been in the village for more than ten years. Or they tend to be elderly

or infirm. They are women with children and no husband. They have stability in the village.

Panels are stable and stationary. They tend to have higher incomes if they are nonnatives,

higher incomes if they are Natives. So when you are monitoring from a panel you have to

realize that you have long term residents and they are not going to be the same completely

as people who are moving through the villages that we kept capturing in our pretest

samples. But the differences are not significant.
EMPIRICAL FINDINGS OF THE SOCIAL INDICATORS PROJECT

Joanna Endter-Wada

Natural Resource and Environmental Policy Program

College of Natural Resources

Utah State University

Logan, Utah 84322

My talk today focuses on the experience of doing fieldwork with the Social

Indicators Research Project. I was asked to comment on general concerns of people in the

study communities where I conducted research and on some of the impacts from the Exxon

Valdez oil spill. In relation to the project overview given this morning, I did a portion of the

ethnographic and key informant research in the Bristol Bay and Kodiak regions. This

research contributed to the key informant summaries for those regions, which are part of

one of the seven volumes of Social Indicators reports. My intention is to give you a sense

of some general findings from the ethnographic and key informant data, which were

gathered in addition to the survey data that were talked about more extensively this morning

by Dr. Jorgensen.

The Process of Conducting Field Research

I want to begin with a brief overview of the process of conducting Social Indicators

field research. Several different types of data were gathered as part of that research process,

which is one of the strengths of the Social Indicators Project. Field researchers administered

the key informant and questionnaire survey instruments that Dr. Jorgensen discussed this

morning. Local people were hired to administer the questionnaire surveys, while senior

researchers conducted the key informant surveys. In addition, the senior researchers

recorded ethnographic observations, conducted institutional interviews with local officials

and heads of various regional and native corporations, gathered secondary literature and

documentation, and obtained oral histories in instances where people recounted their own

history.

As part of the process of conducting these activities, field researchers gained insights

that enabled them to formulate impressions and hypotheses about local situations. Those

hypotheses helped to guide and inform the statistical analyses. In the process of conducting

interviews, field researchers noticed patterns and even came to expect certain responses. For

instance, the significant differences between Native and nonnative households that Dr.

Jorgensen talked about this morning were apparent to us when we conducted field work.

Households that did not fit the expected pattern of distinction were interesting. I remember

specific interviews with Anglos who had not been raised in Alaska but who reported having

household harvests of a wide range of subsistence resources, many of which were generally

preferred by Natives, and being involved in extensive sharing networks. Since that was not

an expected pattern, I would look around the room for pictures of the spouse. Invariably

there was a Native spouse in that household. Dr. Jorgensen commented this morning that

the statistical analysis bears out the fact that mixed households are more like Native
24 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

households in terms of their subsistence patterns. So, the research experience is important

for starting to sense what later becomes systematized, documented and much more legally

defensible from the statistical data.

The Research Products

The key informant summaries on each region are the reports that senior researchers

who conducted field work produced. Those reports contain observations and analysis that,

in large part, come from the insights that local people gave to us. We attempted to capture

and reflect that information as well as we could. These summaries are integrated and

synthetic ethnographic descriptions that give readers a sense of the regions and the people

who inhabit them.

The key informant summaries follow a common outline so that there are systematic

and comparable descriptions for each of the regions. Researchers attempted to integrate

insights from all of the types of data that were mentioned previously into the key informant

summaries. In general, the key informant summaries provide historical overview, identify

significant sources of change and community trends, characterize the present context, and

describe the issues of concern to local residents. This information is important since the

purpose of the entire Social Indicators Project was to identify sources of change and sources

of stability. These summaries are useful for interpreting the survey data.

This morning, Dr. Callaway showed an overhead of the outline used in the key

informant summaries. Let me comment briefly on the elements of that outline. The key

informant summaries begin with a description of the historical context in each region, which

is important for understanding how the findings of the Social Indicators Project fit into

longer series of changes that have occurred. Next, patterns and trends in population and

demography are described, which are important for understanding the characteristics of the

people who live in the region. The third major category of information is community

organization and the economy, within which are descriptions of the different governmental

organizations in the region, the status of land ownership and management, natural resource

management issues, the sectors of local commerce and industry, the various services that are

available in local communities (health, education, social), voluntary associations active in the

region and community activities (the more informal patterns of social interaction), and

trends of political-economic and social change. Fourth, household organization and kinship

patterns are outlined in a more descriptive fashion than what Dr. Jorgensen has

demonstrated with the systematic survey data. The final topic is ideology, people's

perceptions of the world and how they explain events based upon their own experiences.

Significant Findings

Instead of going into detail on many of the specific findings, I would like to talk

more generally about some of the significant things that we learned. These findings come

from my reflections on the fieldwork experience.

Land and Natural Resource Issues. The first significant finding was that land and

natural resource issues drive what happens in the Social Indicators Study areas. These are
Endter-Wada - Empirical Findings of the Social Indicators Project 25

resource-dependent areas and natural resource issues are of major concern to the local

people that we interviewed. The dependence of local people, particularly Native Alaskans,

on naturally-occurring resources for subsistence purposes was discussed often in interviews.

Not only did we hear about the historical and present importance of subsistence, but we

heard local people articulate their desire for it to continue in the future. People were

concerned about planning for that continuance and about passing their subsistence traditions

on to future generations.

The areas that I worked in, Bristol Bay and Kodiak, were affected by a long history

of change related to the increased commercialization of land and natural resources. The

significant changes in this regard have been due to expansion of the fur trade, development

of commercial fisheries, more recently to increased use of resources from these regions for

sports hunting and fishing, and, finally, to the potential for non-renewal resource extraction,

particularly oil. This commercialization of land and resources is often juxtaposed to

continued subsistence use of natural resources by local people.

Institutional expansion has occurred in the Bristol Bay and Kodiak regions over the

past half century, and especially since the 1970s. That expansion has been driven largely by

increased government control over the allocation, management, and regulation of land and

natural resources. The most significant pieces of federal legislation relating to Alaska have

focused on these resource allocation and management issues, such as the Alaska Native

Claims Settlement Act and the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.

For local residents, difficulties related to sorting out ownership of, control over, and

access to resources are overriding concerns. Interviewees often addressed the issues of how

local people can protect their ability to continue to engage in subsistence activities and how

rights are being allocated to increasingly commercialized resources.

Variations in Relationships with the Natural Environment. A second major finding

is that there are significant variations in the ways local residents relate to their natural

environment, both behaviorally as well as conceptually. Dr. Jorgensen has done a thorough

job of documenting those differences and of explaining those findings to us this morning.

The differences were apparent and striking as I conducted field research. Natives'

relationships with the natural environment were generally based upon their being "rooted"

in the local areas, having very long-term historical and genealogical connections to the

resources and to other people in the use of those resources, and continuing to rely upon the

surrounding natural environment for subsistence purposes. The depth of wisdom and

insights about the natural environment that Natives have, which is based upon their

traditional ecological knowledge, was apparent. It is hard to do research in rural Alaska

without gaining a tremendous amount of respect for the knowledge that local residents have

of their environment.

The relationships that nonnative residents have with the natural environment were

obviously different. Those relationships are generally based upon short-term residence, a

commodity or sports orientation toward natural resources, and a more rational scientific

approach to understanding the natural world. Kinship connections in inter-marriage

situations would modify or influence that general pattern. Many of the nonnatives who live
26 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

in Bristol Bay and Kodiak are involved in resource management, often working for

government agencies or service and community organizations that have been part of the

institutional expansion mentioned previously. The nonnatives' rational scientific approach

to understanding resources was clearly distinct from the Natives' approach. I heard several

great stories about young college graduates who had been trained in colleges of natural

resources but who were very naive in attempting to apply a book-learned knowledge of the

environment in a situation where local people have such a profound traditional knowledge.

The point of the stories generally related to differences of opinion on which type of

knowledge carries more weight.

Local Frustrations in Dealing with External Influences. A third significant finding

from the Bristol Bay and Kodiak areas is that local residents experience a tremendous

amount of difficulties and frustrations in dealing with external forces such as state and

federal government, corporate America, and sports and other recreational interest groups.

Bristol Bay and Kodiak have been affected by a tremendous amount of change in relation

to the increased competition over natural resources by sports, commercial, and subsistence

users. Many contemporary land and resource management issues are in response to that

increased competition over the allocation and control of natural resources.

Another element contributing to local frustrations in dealing with external influences

is a basic "culture clash," and I use this phrase because it was used by local residents. Natives

and nonnatives have different perceptions of the world, different behaviors and conduct in

relation to the natural environment, and different ways of interacting with each other. Those

differences are often a source of conflict as local people try to deal with the external forces

of change that are increasingly affecting them. This was a major issue in regards to the

social impacts from the Exxon Valdez oil spill experienced by people in the Kodiak region.

Kodiak residents, many of whom are independent fishermen, experienced a tremendous

amount of frustration from dealing with Exxon and its hierarchical corporate structure of

decision-making. This culture clash is also evident in the interactions between local

subsistence users and out-of-state sports hunters and fishers, particularly in relation to

differences between them in what they perceive to be appropriate ways of using natural

resources. Some of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game research (e.g. work by Dr.

Robert Wolfe) has pointed out how Natives view sports fishing as "playing with the fish,"

while sports fishers view feeding prize salmon to dog teams as a misuse of resources.

The powerlessness of rural Alaskans, particularly Natives, is a third element

contributing to the frustrations they experience in dealing with external influences. The

inability of local people to have significant influence in many areas of government decisionmaking is a source of great concern to them.

Prospects of OCS Development. The last significant finding that I would like to

discuss today concerns the prospects for OCS oil and gas development and local responses

to those prospects. This issue needs to be understood in light of the historical and

contemporary context in the study areas. In particular, local people's responses to those

prospects are conditioned by alternative uses of resources in the region.

Take the case of the controversial leases off the North Aleutian Shelfin Bristol Bay.

Native residents of Bristol Bay have historical precedence and legally-protected rights to
Endter-Wada - Empirical Findings of the Social Indicators Project 27

harvest natural resources for subsistence purposes. However, there are also people and

corporations in the fishing and sports industries with significant commercial interests in the

region's natural resources. Local people, particularly Natives, have tried to understand what

they interpret to be the inconsistency in why those oil leases were offered for bid,

purchased, and, then subsequently, bought back. Many of them have come to the conclusion

that their legally-protected subsistence rights were not given the same considerations as the

commercial value of the fishing and sports industries. They think the commercial values

assigned to resources in the region carried more weight in the political battles to have the

government buy back those oil leases.

Having worked in both Bristol Bay and Kodiak, it was interesting to observe

differences between these two regions on the issue of oes development. Residents of

Bristol Bay have long been opposed to oes development in their region. The trade-off of

developing non-renewable oil resources and posing risks to renewable resources, particularly

salmon, just never made sense to them, especially in the early 1990s when high salmon

prices and low oil prices made an average-sized red salmon worth more than a barrel of oil.

In contrast, prior to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, a majority of the people we interviewed in

Kodiak thought it was worth considering oil development. The opinion of Kodiak residents

changed dramatically after they were impacted by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, while the

opposition of Bristol Bay residents to oes development was reinforced by that event.

Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

I also was asked to talk about research findings concerning the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

My comments will be brief since I talked at greater length about this issue at a previous

information transfer meeting (see "Social, Economic, and Subsistence Effects of the Exxon

Valdez Oil Spill on the Kodiak Region, n delivered at the Fourth Minerals Management

Service-AOes Region Information Transfer Meeting, Anchorage, Alaska, January 28-30,

1992).

I conducted field work in Kodiak in February and March of 1989 and had left just

two weeks prior to the Exxon Valdez oil spill. By the time the Social Indicators Project was

modified to conduct a wave of research in response to the spill, it was August of 1989.

When I returned to Kodiak, local residents had had nearly five months of dealing with the

oil spill. People were very tired and frustrated by that point. The impacts that we

documented relate to the timing of our return, with the advantage, we later realized, of the

fact that after several months, people had begun to reflect upon and summarize their

experiences and we had the opportunity to try and understand what they had been through

in dealing with the oil spill.

Several major themes run through Kodiak's experience with the Exxon Valdez oil

spill. The first theme is that the Exxon Valdez oil spill exacerbated existing pressures on, and

tensions within, the Kodiak fishing industry. Kodiak has a large commercial fishing industry

and, at the time, local fishers had been trying to position themselves in a highly competitive

and evolving seafood market. Kodiak fishing organizations had been working to build

market recognition and reputation for Kodiak seafood, in particular, and for Alaskan

seafood, in general. The oil spill negatively affected those efforts. In addition, the fishing

industry was being restructured and some segments of the Kodiak industry, as well as some
28 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

individual Kodiak fishermen, were struggling to make transitions that would allow them to

remain in fishing. The oil spill negatively affected those who were vulnerable at the time due

to that industry restructuring.

A second theme in the Kodiak oil spill story is that Exxon's response in handling the

oil spill resulted in some of the most significant social impacts. The physical impacts from

the oil spill were enough to anger local residents, but the addition of multiple problems

related to the response efforts exacerbated the tensions and frustrations surrounding the

accident. By the time drifting oil reached Kodiak, Exxon was retreating from its publicly

stated commitment to "make everyone whole" and to hire anyone who wanted to assist in

the cleanup efforts. In its attempt to limit its sphere of responsibility and prepare for

litigation, Exxon fought over what they would and would not clean and what they would and

would not pay for. They engaged in battles over definitions of clean beaches and measures

of sufficient effort, appealing for public support based upon figures of how much they had

spent. Exxon also attempted to circumvent local environmental regulations pertaining to

various aspects of the clean-up effort. These actions led to concerns and frustrations over

equitable treatment within and between communities affected by the spill.

A third major theme is that the Exxon Valdez oil spill differed significantly from two

previous natural disasters experienced by people living in the Kodiak region, the eruption

of Mt. Katmai in 1912 and the Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964. People who had lived

through those events or who knew the history of them recalled a spirit of cooperation as the

community attempted to recover and rebuild. Courageous acts of assistance undertaken at

personal risk had become part of the documented and the oral history. Efforts undertaken

in response to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, in contrast, caused divisions and tensions within

the community.

More specific impacts from the Exxon Valdez oil spill included institutional impacts,

economic impacts, and social, cultural, and psychological impacts. Institutional impacts

included burdens placed on local government, disruption of existing programs, strain on

local officials, and difficulties in dealing with Exxon. Economic impacts included: loss of

subsistence and commercial resources; the unequal distribution of those impacts; concern

over the long-term impacts to Kodiak's evolving position in the international seafood

market; impacts to the tourism industry which people in Kodiak had been promoting and

building; various effects on the service industry and local labor markets; and, increases in

the prices of various goods and services. The social, cultural, and psychological impacts

included: effects on the activities related to subsistence harvesting; community conflicts;

disruptions to customary habits and patterns of behavior; emotional impacts and stressrelated disorders; the strain of confronting environmental degradation and death; stress in

dealing with Exxon; and the violation of community values.

Usefulness and Implications of the Social Indicators Research

Finally, I would like to make a few comments pertaining to the usefulness and the

implications of the Social Indicators Research Project, which I understand is one of the

purposes of this meeting.
Endter-Wada - Empirical Findings of the Social Indicators Project 29

First, the Social Indicators Project has tremendous scientific value. The project is

significant in terms of identifying indicators that can be used to monitor change over time

throughout a large portion of Alaska, as has been explained by Dr. Jorgensen. In addition,

the project provides valuable documentation of conditions and trends obtained over a fouryear period of time through repeated visits to study communities and through reliance on

multiple sources of data. Such documentation is important for ongoing and future

assessments of the stability and change that will occur over even longer periods of time. As

historical documentation and as input into future assessments of trends, this research project

has a very long "shelf-life."

I mention the shelf-life of the products from the Social Indicators Research Project

because questions pertaining to the shelf-life of social research have been raised in funding

allocation decisions within the Minerals Management Service. I think these questions come

from the misconceptions that natural resource managers and people in other realms of

science have about what social scientists do. Their understanding of social research is often

limited to survey research that is more akin to opinion polling, and consequently they

perceive it as having a very short shelf-life in terms of agency decision-making. The Social

Indicators Project is one of the best examples of the sophistication that can be achieved in

social science research and of its usefulness for monitoring change over time.

Secondly, the Social Indicators Project has important implications in terms of

Minerals Management Service decision-making. The Social Indicators Key Informant

Summaries and the statistical data document issues and concerns that are important from

the perspective of local residents and local governmental entities. As such, these research

products give federal decision-makers a better understanding of some of their clients.

The findings regarding the frustrations that many local people experience in dealing

with federal and state agencies imply that these agencies need to find more cooperative

mechanisms for working with local populations in order to have effective resource

management. Reinventing government needs to be understood not just in terms of its

efficiency but also in terms of its responsiveness. The Arctic region, as a whole, is ahead in

this regard and offers important examples of attempts to engage in co-management,

adaptive management, and cooperative management.

The experience of Kodiak with the Exxon Valdez oil spill has implications for oil spill

response. Oil spill contingency plans have been too focused on how to get oil out of the

water, and may need too be revised to incorporate more guidelines for how emergency

response will be handled and how response efforts will deal with local populations in spillaffected areas. More planning on how to deal with people in oil spill situations can help to

ensure that people will be dealt with in equitable ways and that they will know what to

expect in terms of how response efforts will be handled.

My third point about the usefulness and implications of the Social Indicators Project

pertains to its policy relevance. As researchers, we always hope that our work will provide

data that have relevance in terms of informing resource management decisions. I end with

this point because I think this is the message that local people who participated in the

research would want to have conveyed. When we conducted this research, we had to

convince people to be interviewed not only once, but twice or three times. We did this by
30 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

trying to persuade them of the importance of their sharing information with us because of

its potential usefulness for government decision-making on issues that would likely affect

their lives. I believe their participation was generally based upon their hope that their

concerns would be documented and that decision-makers would pay attention to them. The

data that the people we interviewed provided can help to recognize and evaluate what is at

stake in these study areas, what trade-offs might be entailed, what the risks are as perceived

by local populations, and what the potential consequences to them might be.

Through their participation, their information, and their inquiries, the people in the

local areas where I conducted research posed an underlying, key question: what do we

value in this country and how do we decide that? This is a particularly important question

in many parts of Alaska where there are abundant renewable and non-renewable resources

and where equity issues involving different segments of the population are apparent.

Hopefully, the Social Indicators Research Project provides information that is useful for

thinking about and answering that question.

QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION

Hild: Have you received any feedback in regards to another set of clients, which are

the people who make the decisions about funding this type of thing in the future? One of

the things that I have heard from the National Science Foundation, through the Arctic

System Science program, is that the feedback in Washington, D.C. asks very specifically, "So

what?" What does it really mean? Why should we fund this aspect of the "human

component?" This question is becoming increasingly of higher profile. In studies like this,

do you see that coming full circle? Do you see the policy makers coming back and saying

what's in this stuff?

Endter- Wada: They haven't talked to me specifically. But that is a good question to

pose to the people from the agency who are in attendance today. In general, funding is

being cut. Every type of research confronts greater scrutiny and must be justified.

Hild: But the point was made this morning about the list of questions. You go in

with 150 questions and can you get it down to 20 or 40 key topics that could be debated,

in order to continue the evaluation? There are bigger questions there regarding the more

things you gain, the more things you can do with it to see the relationships. But when push

comes to shove and you only have seven or eight contact hours, burden hours, as that

shrinks, can you make a decision within these documents to focus in on the most critical

pieces to give the answers to the people who are going to give you further funding to

demonstrate that this is important?

Baffrey: It's got to be tied into the decision process. It is great to see it on the

screen, but our analysts don't use this information. It would be great if one of the

deliverables was to sit down with the agencies and show their people how the information

can actually be integrated into the decision process. Right now, it is a study and then we do

an environmental assessment, and there is no connection.
Endter-Wada - Empirical Findings of the Social Indicators Project 31

Hild: One of the reasons that I asked that question, is that last fall, there was a

recommendation to go back and do an evaluation of all the environmental impact

statements that have been done in the past. Such as evaluation would assess what was

predicted and whether it was accurate or inaccurate. Was this a whole waste of time in

regards to long-term impacts? Where is the North Slope Borough now compared to what

we predicted? Has anyone taken a look at that?

Callaway: Harry Luton and I have written EISs and realize that EISs are a

compromise document. They are not necessarily the scientist's best projection of what is

going to occur, but perhaps the best projection of what could get through the interminable

review process of what the impacts are.

Jorgensen: Even if we did, and we found 50 EISs and two of them proved to be

somewhat true and 48 were not, how do you know that those that appeared to be true are

true because of the factors that were used in the prediction? That is a serious empirical

question that you can raise only prior to research, then must be followed after the research.

So if in your design you forecast certain things to happen for the following reasons, that still

doesn't mean that you have got it right. It still means that other factors could have

intervened to cause that result. So I think that you would be wasting an awful lot of time

by going back to the old ones. But I do not happen to think that about the Social Indicators

Study. It is very good work. I am not worried at all about that. Not every variable works.

I do not think that science can necessarily be human concerns only, though they are

important. But if you really want to make the case where you eliminated threats to validity,

you better integrate all of the best tools that you have to do just exactly that, eliminate

those threats.

Hild: Are your social indicators values being incorporated in the new EISs?

Jorgensen: Michael just said no, they weren't. I don't know how many EISs are being

written now, but a lot of the science that you can do that would benefit an EIS statement

may require an awful lot of specific training on the part of those who write EISs. I cannot

expect everybody on the street to know the difference, even with Ph.D.s in social sciences,

between metric and nonmetric types of approaches. If you are going to deal with nonmetric,

how are you going to integrate them and how are you going to deal with panels, and

posttest, pretest designs? So it just may well be that you will have to have to have the MMS

Environmental Studies people working with the EIS people too, but that is time consuming,

from a management viewpoint, to do such work. What would be the final goal of all of this?

I remember the arguments from NEPA about EISs. It was not to really find out what

factors there are that must be mitigated and how to mitigate them, but to produce the

document and that was it. It could be of benefit, perhaps, to persons in the affected areas,

this is what things were like and this is what we might expect will happen. If they happen,

the government will do certain things.

It doesn't take a genius to know that the public sector is going to be challenged

when there is a normal accident, like the Exxon Valdez spill. That is, as you look over time,

there is going to be more stress, that downsizing in the mental health care delivery will

exacerbate that. If there is downsizing, they actually need more people to help out. So that
32 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

is one simple prediction that I can make. And that would hold everywhere in western North

America where impacts might take place.

The first principal investigator for social indicators was Bob Weiss who had worked

on stress in Gillette, Wyoming and other places. He told us essentially the things that we

keep discovering year after year, that when there is big time stress like this, people need a

lot of help.

Callaway: Joanna, you sit on the MMS scientific advisory committee that provides

research advice. What is coming out of that committee with respect to recommendations

and have they been accepted?

Endter-Wada: Harry is going to talk more about that tomorrow. A lot of research

has been driven by the EIS process, where we attempt our best guess at predicting what will

be affected. But the real strength of studies like this is to show how we could actually

monitor those changes.

Hild: To get back to the question, what is the value of the EIS?

Luton: This region demonstrated what they thought was the value of the EIS. We

do an EIS every five years, more or less. The last one was air-freighted up here on pallets

and we buried it. Several tons of EISs.

Callaway: That was a normal accident though.

Luton: One of the problems of EISs here, in Alaska and the region, is that this is

about the only place where cultural and traditional issues of people are addressed at all. The

EIS tradition comes out of a real simple projection process. You have this much

employment, these many services will be needed, that will drive up prices of housing this

much, etc. It is really a simple linear projection. That part of the EIS we have. The

demographic model that was used, the agency took a long time developing it and it is better

than most. We know sort of how that relates to reality, but not really well. But with the

other stuff, what we have been really trying to deal with here, I think you could say that you

can spin your wheels a lot in how to do it. This is the first time that it has been done. These

studies were the first real long-term systematic approach to looking at culture that any

government agency has ever done. I don't know where it goes, nobody does.

Edenshaw: When you were talking about the Exxon Valdez oil spill and what you

have done with EISs and when I look at what happened with the oil spill and incidents such

as that - I grew up in Sitka, and I watched a pulp mill from the time it started until it shut

down. People talked about what we would do when the mill shuts down, how to address

social, cultural, economic issues. Never once did they talk about the Natives. As soon as the

mill shut down, all of them started working over at the hospital. I really don't believe that

when someone was working at the mill, a Native who was making $40,000 or $50,000 a year

compared to someone who wasn't working; they were always going out to do subsistence,

they were always traveling to Juneau. For me, when I went up to Unalakleet and some of

the village places, through the southwest over by Bethel, it is almost like I envisioned how

Sitka was prior to development. This gentleman is talking about EISs. I can see a clear
Endter-Wada - Empirical Findings of the Social Indicators Project 33

pattern of how the nonnatives have proliferated from Metlakatla all the way up here to

exploit the resources, "get in and get out." The locals are still going to be there. There is

nothing too complicated about figuring that out because there is nothing too complex. The

local person who has lived there all of their lives sees how things have changed.

Endter-Wada: I think that what Harry was saying is a point well taken because a lot

of the assumptions of the traditional EIS models have been based upon a western view of

labor as mobile. By having the element of trying to distinguish between populations,

between long-term residents who are rooted in place vs, mobile populations, we gain more

understanding.

Edenshaw: Go up to Kotzebue and look at the Red Dog mine, when that shuts down

what is going to happen? There is already a lot of documentation on that.

Endter- Wada: In response to the question about the MMS scientific committee, one

of the discussions has been to make better use of existing data and to do more generalizing

from one region to another about what has been learned.
MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop 34
OVERVIEW OF RESEARCH BY THE DMSION OF SUBSISTENCE, ALASKA

DEPARTMENT OF FISH AND GAME, ON THE SOCIOCULTURAL

CONSEQUENCES OF

THE EXXON VALDEZ OIL SPILL

James A. Fall

Division of Subsistence

Alaska Department of Fish and Game

333 Raspberry Road

Anchorage, Alaska 99518

INTRODUCTION

This paper provides an overview of research by the Division of Subsistence of the

Alaska Department of Fish and Game to document changes to subsistence hunting, fishing,

and gathering, and other community characteristics, after the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Under

state law, the division is charged with collecting information about all aspects of subsistence

hunting and fishing. It has had an active research program since 1980 (Fall 1990).

The Exxon Valdez oil spill of March 24, 1989 fouled waters and lands used for

subsistence activities by 15 predominately Alaska Native communities, as well as many

residents of four other rural communities in the spill area (Figure 1). In total, these

communities had a population of about 15,000 people in 1990 (Table 1). Of this, 2,036

(13.4%) lived in the 15 small communities; 21.3% was Alaska Native in the area overall, and

82.3% in the 15 small communities.

Before the spill, the division had conducted at least one round of systematic

household surveys in each of the 15 small communities. Additionally, map interviews and

key respondent interviews had taken place. This information had been reported in a series

of technical papers and other ADF&G publications (see Fall and Utermohle 1995 for a list

of these papers). The findings of this research demonstrated the importance of subsistence

hunting, fishing, and gathering to the economies, cultures, and well-being of these

communities.

After the spill, the division began an oil spill response program that had several

components, one of which was systematic collection of subsistence harvest and use data that

would be comparable that available for pre-spill years. For 1989, the year immediately after

the spill, division researchers conducted 403 interviews in the 15 small, predominately

Alaska Native communities of the spill area. For 1990, funded in part by the US Fish and

Wildlife Service, 221 interviews in seven of these communities took place (Fall 1992 ).

Beginning in 1991 and continuing for three study years, the division entered into a

cooperative agreement with the US Department of the Interior, Minerals Management

Service called "An Investigation of the Sociocultural Consequences of Outer Continental

Shelf (OCS) Development in Alaska" (Fall and Utermohle 1995). Interviews took place in

12 of the small communities of the spill area, five other southcentral Alaska communities,
..

_,_._._....._._...

location

Map

Gulf of Alaska

o Other community

100 Miles

~ /a Subsiatenc e harvest areas 01 Sludy communotles

~ Outer limits of observed sheens. tar balls, and

mousse suspected to be from the Exxon Valdez

as of Augusl 10. 1989

(Source: Alaska F/ah and aam •. Special Oil Spill

Issue. July-Augus. 1989 (Vol. 21:4). pages 20-2l.

• Study community

50

PACIFIC OCEAN

Bay

Bristol
Fall - Sociocultural Consequences of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 37

Table 1. Population of communities in the area affected

by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, 1990.

Alaska %

Total Native Alaska

Community! Population Population Native

Small, predominately Alaska Native communities

Akhiok 77 72 93.5%

Chenega Bay 94 65 69.1%

Chignik Bar 160 85 53.1%

Chignik Lagoon 53 30 56.6%

Chignik Lake 133 122 91.7%

Ivanof Bay 35 33 94.3%

Karluk 71 65 91.5%

Larsen Bay 147 124 84.4%

Nanwalek 158 144 91.1%

Old Harbor 284 252 88.7%

Ouzinkie 209 178 85.2%

Perryville 108 102 94.4%

Port Lions 222 150 67.6%

Port Graham 166 150 90.4%

Tatitlek 119 103 86.6%

Subtotal 2,036 1,675 82.3%

Other

communities

2,579 272 10.5%

Cordova! 10,274 1,251 12.2%

Kodiak' 316 48 15.2%

Seldovia

Subtotal 13,169 1,571 11.9%

Totals 15,205 3,246 21.3%

and four Arctic communities. A total of

2,381 interviews took place over the course I of the project, including 968 for 1991, 668

"for 1992, and 745 for 1993 (Fall and

, Utermohle 1995).

Because the detailed findings from

; these studies are available elsewhere, this

I overview focuses on several general topics

iwhich relate to issues of long-term research

programs and impact assessments. These

include comparisons over time,

comparability of methods and data, and

application of findings in a variety of

:forums.

METHODS

Study Communities

Table 2 lists the communities

.included in the study and the sampling

fractions achieved in each study year. For

j

; the MMS cooperative project, interviews

were conducted in the Arctic communities

:of Kotzebue, Kivalina, Kaktovik, and !Nuiqsut for comparative purposes and to

contribute baseline data for evaluation of

future OCS developments in the Arctic

region.

Source: Alaska Dept. of Labor 1991.

1 1 Listed are communities and areas classified as "rural"

by the Alaska Joint Board of Fisheries and Game in 1989

and thereby eligible for subsistence uses.

I 2 Excludes 2B in group quarters in Chignik Bay.

3 Cordova Census subarea.

4 Kodiak Island Borough excluding the six small villages

and the Coast Guard Station.

'Survey Instruments

All data were collected during

!voluntary fact-to-face interviews which took

:place in the study communities. Two survey

instruments were administered during the

;project. The first, the "harvest survey

,'questionnaire" collected information on

subsistence uses and harvests, demography, cash economy, and some assessments of changes

in subsistence uses. It was based on earlier instruments administered by the division

throughout Alaska, and was designed to collect information compatible with that appearing

in the division's Community Profile Database (CPDB; Scott et at. 1995). For the MMS

cooperative project, a second instrument, the "social effects questionnaire," was developed.

It was based in part on questionnaires and interview protocols used in prior social indicators

research funded by MMS. It addressed changes in social and community organization which

could be affected by the oil spill and future OCS development. For further discussion of the

development of these survey instruments, see Fall and Utermohle (1995:1-3 - 1-8).
1_~b.!-e~2._S_tu_d~communities 81'!.dsampliDJ fractions~. .. _~. ~ .._.__

Study Year: 1989 Study Year: 1990 Study Year: 1991 Study Year: 1992 Study Year: 1993

Total iI~ercent Total ,I: Percent Total ;1: Percent Total J Percent Total J Percent

Community Households Sampled Households Sampled Households Sampled Households Sampled Households Sampled

011Spill Area

Small Communities

Akhiok 13 76.9% 24 100.0%

Chenega Bay 21 85.7% 21 85.7% 22 81.8% 26 88.5% 28 82.1%

Chignik Bay 39 89.7% 44 68.2%

Chignik Lagoon 15 100.0%

Chignik Lake 28 75.0% 33 72.7%

Ivanof Bay 7 100.0%

Karluk 17 82.4% 19 89.5% 15 86.7%

Larsen Bay 39 87.2% 40 87.5% 43 88.4% 42 88.1% 49 81.6%

Nanwalek 41 80.5% 41 85.4% 41 70.7% 41 78.0% 37 89.2%

Old Harbor 93 51.6% * 66 63.6% *

Ouzinkie 69 50.7% * 59 89.8% 55 58.2% * 59 88.1% 71 85.9%

Perryville 31 87.1%

Port Lions 67 53.7% * 80 56.3% *

Port Graham 61 78.7% 55 83.6% 58 84.5% 58 82.8% 61 83.6%

Tatitlek 28 78.6% 28 60.7% 27 70.4% 28 71.4%

Subtotal 569 70.8% 263 84.0% 404 72.8% 250 86.4% 354 77.1%

Other Communities

Cordova 784 12.9% * 784 5.2% * 946 11.0% *

Kenai 2137 4.7% * 2137 1.7% * 2274 4.4% *

Kodiak** 3207 6.5% * 1753 5.7% * 1994 5.3% *

Seldovia** 116 56.9% * 137 47.4% * 153 42.5% *

Valdez 1231 8.1% * 1257 8.0% * 1388 2.5% *

Outside the Oil Spill Area

Kaktovik 63 74.6%

Kivalina 72 86.1%

Kotzebue 809 12.4% *

Nuiqsut 91 72.5% *

* Randomly selected samples

- Sampling area included road connected areas for Kodiak in 1991 only; includes road connected areas for Seldovia for 1992 and 1993 only.

w

00
Fall - Sociocultural Consequences of the Exxon Valdez Oil SpiII

Sample Achievement

39

Prior to beginning fieldwork each year, approval of the research was sought from

village governing bodies. In all cases, this approval was granted. Additionally, informed

consent was sought from each household selected to be interviewed; participation was

entirely voluntary. High sampling fractions were achieved in most communities in all years

of the study. However, during the three years of the cooperative study with MMS, a higher

refusal rate was encountered (Figure 2). Notably, refusal rates were substantially higher in

the larger communities (most of which were predominately non-Native) than in the small

Alaska Native villages. Some reasons for these differences include:

----=-- - .:.:..-.:.>.::_-

30%

-e

CII 24.0'~ 24.2% -u 25% • All Communities 23.5%

C1l-C

~ Small Communities 0

0 19.9'~

III 20% o Large Communities

"Cl

"0

.:

CII

III

~ 15%

0

~

-0

CII 10% Cl

C1l -C

CII

e 5% CII

D.

0%

1989 1990 1991 1992 1993

Study Years

Figure 2. Percentage of households declining to be interviewed.

• The importance of subsistence uses in the villages, and the consequent interest that

households in these communities had in the project

• The use of local assistants to conduct interviews and/or assist with introducing the

project to the community (see additional discussion below)

• Endorsement of the project by village councils and community leaders.

• Familiarity with Division of Subsistence researchers, many of whom had a great deal

of previous experience working with the study communities.

• In the small communities, knowledge about the interviewing spread by word of

mouth; people expected to be contacted and had prepared to be interviewed.
40 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Some reasons for a higher rate of refusals included the following:

• Disinterest in resource issues and/or the oil spill, especially in the larger, non-Native

communities

• The length of time required to do the interview (generally an hour or more when

both the harvest survey and the social effects questionnaire were administered).

• "Survey burnout": many studies took place after the spill, and some people were

tired of being interviewed.

• Distrust about the uses of the information and/or a desire for privacy

• Frustration about the prolonged effects of the spill, the lengthy litigation which

followed, and the federal court' s dismissal of much of the Alaska Native Class' s

claim against Exxon (Fall and Utermohle 1995: 1-24 - 1-26); these factors produced

a feeling of "what' s the use" [in doing more research] among some potential

respondents.

Local Assistants

A goal of the project was to train residents of study communities to conduct

interviews. Training consisted of workshops in villages instruction in interviewing, and review

of completed work. A training manual was prepared and periodically updated. Of the 2,381

interviews (harvest surveys) conducted during the three-year cooperative project with MMS,

381 (16.0%)were done by local assistants (Figure 3). The percentage was higher in some of

the smaller and predominately Alaska Native communities. Communities with the largest

percentage of interviews conducted by local assistants were Port Graham (62.2%),

Entire project

(n = 2381)

Port Graham

Seldovia

Kivalina

Larsen Bay

Ouzinkie

Nanwalek

62.2%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70%

Percentage of Interviews

Figure 3. Percentage of interviews conducted by local research assistants.
Fall - Sociocultural Consequences of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 41

SELECTED FINDINGS OF THE

RESEARCH

Community Review and Products of

the Research

Preliminary results of the surveys

i were provided to village governing bodies

·for review and comment. In some cases,

·village council meetings were held to

discuss these interim results. Study findings

i have been reported in a series of technical

·reports, including the Division of

Subsistence Technical Paper Series and the

MMS Technical Report Series. The study

·findings have also been presented at

•symposia. Additionally, a findings synopsis

:for each community included in the MMS

cooperative project, and an overview of the

'general study findings, were mailed to

research participants, and in the case of

small communities, to each household in

the community.

Seldovia (35.7%), Kivalina (35.5%), Larsen

Bay (31.3%), Ouzinkie (20.0%), and

.Nanwalek (17%). This was a significant

: achievement, given the complexity of the

survey instruments and the length of time

required to complete the questionnaires.

Indeed, these factors discouraged other

·study community residents from helping

with the survey administration.

Additionally, other local community

residents served as facilitators and liaisons,

although they did not conduct surveys on

· their own.

.'The Year Following of the Exxon Valdez Oil

Spill

Table 3. Changes in characteristics of subsistence uses

by region, spill year (1989) compared to pre-spill

averages.

..

Characteristic I Pre-spill I Post-spill

Region Average Average Change

Per CapiJa harwsts (powuU)

Prince William Sound 436.0 188.3 -56.8%

Lower Cook Inlet 255.4 130.9 -48.7%

Kodiak Island Borough 391.1 195.5 -50.0%

Alaska Peninsula (AKP) 287.0 338.6 18.0%

All Regions 369.0 216.0 -41.5%

All Regions except AKP 381.8 180.5 -52.7%

A"eTaB" nwnber of resource: wed PeT howehold

Prince William Sound 19.0 9.0 -52.6%

Lower Cook Inlet 22.9 12.2 -46.7%

Kodiak Island Borough 15.4 11.2 -27.3%

Alaska Peninsula (AKP) 15.7 16.5 5.1%

All Regions 16.5 12.3 -25.5%

All Regions except AKP 16.6 11.2 -32.5%

AwmB" nwnber of raOlU'Ca aIIempted to harwst

PeT howehold

Prince William Sound 12.5 5.7 -54.4%

Lower Cook Inlet 16.1 8.5 -47.2%

Kodiak Island Borough 11.8 8.0 -32.2%

Alaska Peninsula (AKP) 10.3 11.5 11.7%

All Regions 12.1 8.6 -28.9%

All Regions except AKP 12.4 7.9 -36.3%

AvuaB" nwnber of raourca harwsted PeT howelwld

Prince William Sound 11.4 5.2 -54.4%

Lower Cook Inlet 15.4 8.6 -44.2%

Kodiak Island Borough 11.5 7.6 -33.9%

Alaska Peninsula (AKP) 9.8 11.4 16.3%

All Regions 11.7 8.4 -28.2%

All Regions except AKP 12.0 7.6 -36.7%

AveraB" number of rtsotJTets neriwd per lwuuhold

Prince William Sound 11.3 4.8 -57.5%

Lower Cook Inlet 12.3 6.6 -46.3%

Kodiak Island Borough 6.6 5.5 -16.7%

Alaska Peninsula (AKP) 9.1 9.8 7.7%

All Regions 8.5 6.5 -23.5%

All Regions except AKP 8.4 5.7 -32.1%

AvuaB" number of raourca given away PeT howehold

Prince William Sound 9.1 4.0 -56.0%

Lower Cook Inlet 8.1 5.5 -32.1%

Kodiak Island Borough 4.5 4.3 -4.4%

Alaska Peninsula (AKP) 5.8 6.7 15.5%

All Regions 5.9 5.0 -15.3%

All Regions except AKP 5.9 4.6 -22.0%

.- -- ---

Table 3 reports some of the changes

in subsistence use characteristics that took

Iplace in 1989, the first year following the

oil spill. In three of the four subregions,

subsistence harvests as estimated in pounds usable weight per person dropped substantially:

from 436 pounds to 188 pounds in Prince William Sound; from 255 pounds to 131 pounds

in lower Cook Inlet; and from 391 pounds to 196 pounds in the Kodiak Island Borough

(Figure 4). Expressed as a percentage (Figure 5), subsistence harvests were down about 57%
Figure 4. Subsistence harvests in the oil spill year compared to pre-spill averages.

20%

10% til ~

til

QI

c: 0%

111 :J:

QI

CJ -10%

c

QI ~

til

til -20%

J:l

::I

tJ)

c

-30%

QI

,Cl

c -40% 111

oJ:

(J

-50%

-60% -56.8%

QlE'O

~

QI

CJ 111 C ~ -

c::: ::I QI C

''::: 0 ~-

Q.~tJ) o~

..J g

(J

18.0%

-41.5%

s: 111 til

~'OOI 111:; c

,!!! c ::I ~tIl ,~

'0 111 0 til C Cl o - ~ 111'- QI ~tIlo -c

-£0 oct QI 0::

Q.

;;:

Figure 5. Changes in subsistence harvests, spill ycar (1989) compared to pre-spill averages, by region.
Fall - Sociocultural Consequences of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 43

in Prince William Sound and about 50% in lower Cook Inlet and the Kodiak Island

Borough. This geographic pattern to the spill's effects, in which communities closest to the

origin of the spill and its most destructive consequences to the natural environment, became

more evident over time. Also supporting this geographic pattern is the relative stability of

overall subsistence harvests in the five Alaska Peninsula communities for the first post-spill

year as a whole. In the spill area overall, subsistence harvests declined 42% in 1989.

Further evidence of the effects of the oil spill is provided by data on the average

number of resources used, harvested, and shared per household. As shown in Table 3 and

Figure 6, the average household in the Prince William Sound communities used about 53%

fewer kinds of resources in 1989 than before the spill; the range of resources used declined

47% in lower Cook Inlet, and 27% in the Kodiak Island Borough. This shows the sharp

decline in the variety of subsistence foods in the diets of spill area residents in 1989.

Evidence of a large decline in participation in subsistence activities is provided by the drop

in the average number of kinds of resources attempted to harvest per household, down 54%

in Prince William Sound, 47% in lower Cook Inlet, and 32% in the Kodiak Island Borough

(Figure 7). The research also demonstrated declines in sharing of subsistence foods (Figure

8).

10%

~

ell

ell 0% ::::)

ell

ell

~ -10% :I

0

ell

ell

D:: -20%

-0

~

ell

.Cl -30%

E

:I

Z

c -40%

ell

CI

c

IV

~ -50%

(J

-52.6%

-60%

eIlE~ ••ell

U IV C ~-

c: :I ell c

'0:::: 0 ~-

D.3:U) o~ ..Jg

(J

5.1%

-25.5%

ell

c

.2

CI

ell

D::

c(

------ ------- ------- ----------_._---- .__ ._------------

Figure 6. Changes in average number of subsistence resources used per household, spill year (1989) compared

to pre-spill averages, by region.

Interviewed households' evaluations of subsistence uses in 1989 matched the findings

from the harvest estimates (Figure 9). Almost all the Prince William Sound (87%) and

lower Cook Inlet (93%) households said that their subsistence uses had declined in 1989

compared to pre-spill levels, as did 56% in the Kodiak Island Borough and 36% in the
44 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

••en 20%

~

CIS ::I:

0 10%

••

11

Q. 0%

E

i -10% en

CI)

u~;:,

0

-20%

en

CI)

a:: .•..

0

-30%

~

CI)

.,Q

E -40%

;:,

z

.=

QI -50%

Cl

c:

CIS

-60% ~

-54.4%

o

U

QlE'tJ

CIS c

~J!- c:: ::l QI C

.;: :: 0 ~-

D.~CI) o~ ..Jg

0

11.7%

------- ------ ----------

Figure 7. Changes in average number of subsistence resources attempted to harvest per household, spill year

(1989) compared to pre-spill averages, by region.

Alaska Peninsula. Even higher percentages reported declines in at least one kind of

subsistence resource: 97% in Prince William sound, 100% in lower Cook Inlet, 84% in the

Kodiak Island Borough, and 71% in the Alaska Peninsula. When asked to offer an

explanation for these changes, most households pointed to the effects of the oil spill. Here,

again, geographic differences were evident. Virtually every Prince William Sound and lower

Cook Inlet households with lower subsistence uses blamed the spill. While most Kodiak and

Alaska Peninsula households with lowered uses also pointed to the spill, households from

these communities were more likely to offer non-spill explanations or say they were not sure

why the change occurred.

Of all oil spill reasons for declines in subsistence uses in 1989, fear of contamination

of natural resources by the spilled oil was by far the most prevalent (Figure 9). This was the

reason for reduced overall subsistence uses for about two thirds of the Prince William

Sound and lower Cook Inlet households; an even larger majority of these households said

that contamination fears led to their reduced uses of at least one resource. While

contamination concerns were a significant reason for reduced uses among Kodiak Island

Borough and Alaska Peninsula households also, the percentage of households which cited

this as a cause of lowered subsistence uses was much lower than in the other two subregions.

(For more discussion on the issue of contamination of subsistence foods by the spilled oil,

see Fall 1991; Walker and Field 1991; Fall and Utermohle 1995: 1-18 - 1-23; and Fall and

Field, forthcoming.)
,---

Fall - Sociocultural Consequences of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 45

10%

"~

'Qj 0% u

CII 0::

CIl

CII -10%

~

::l

0

CIl

CII -20%

0:: .•..

0

..CII -30%

,Q

E

::l

z -40%

,S:

CII

CI

c -50% III

.z:

0

-60% -57.5%

CIIE"

•..

CII

U III C ..-

c:: ::l CII C

'I::: 0 ~- D.3:cn o~ ..Jg

0

7.7%

III

1ll'E

~C/l

CIl C

Ill'-

-c

c:e CII

D.

-23.5%

Figure 8. Changes in average number of subsistence resources received per household, spill year (1989)

compared to pre-spill averages, by region.

Findings for Study Years since 1989

For the second post-spill year, subsistence uses rebounded in the study communities

of lower Cook Inlet and the Kodiak Island Borough, although harvests in general remained

below pre-spill levels (Figure 10). Although some respondents reported reduced levels of

concern about oil contamination, others said that they had returned to using these resources

reluctantly, despite their misgivings, because they could no longer afford to do without them

or because of their cultural value. Subsistence uses in the two Prince William Sound

communities of Chenega Bay and Tatitlek showed little signs of recovery during the second

post-spill year. Contamination concerns remained high in these villages, and perceptions of

severe reductions in many important resources were increasingly cited as causes of reduced

levels of use.

Over the three years of the cooperative project with MMS (1991 - 1993), further

evidence of this geographic pattern developed, with communities closer to the spill in Prince

William Sound and lower Cook Inlet (and in Ouzinkie in the Kodiak Island Borough)

reporting higher levels of spill impacts on subsistence harvests and slower rates of recovery

than more distant communities. In all communities, subsistence harvests appear to have

rebounded from their very low levels in 1989 and 1990, but in some communities, such as

Tatitlek, Chenega Bay, and Ouzinkie, harvests remained below pre-spill averages. In many

communities, respondents reported that while their harvests had increased, this increase had

been the result of greater effort and monetary cost than was needed before the spill due to

scarce resources.
46 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

• Prince William Sound ~ Lower Cook Inlet 0 Kodiak Island Borough ~ Alaska Peninsula

100%

90%

80%

70%

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

Overall Uses of

Resources,

Any Reason

Overall Uses of

Resources,

AnyOn Spill

Reason

Overall Uses of

Resources,

Contamination

Concerns

At Least One

Resource,

Any Reason

At Least One

Resource,

AnyOn SpHl

Reason

At Least One

Resource,

Contamination

Concerns

_______________ c_a_tegory and Reason for Lowered Uses _

Figure 9. Household evaluations of subsistence uses in 1989.

The gradual return to pre-spill levels of subsistence harvests and uses is also

illustrated in the range of resources used, harvested, and shared for subsistence purposes.

As shown in Figure 11, the average number of resources used per household in both

Chenega Bay and Tatitlek has bounced back from very low levels in 1989. In neither village,

however, has diet breadth yet equaled that estimated for years before the spill. In other

study communities, such of those of lower Cook Inlet, this range of resources used,

harvested, and shared had, by 1993, returned to match pre-spill levels.

There has been an important shift in the explanations people offer concerning why

the spill's impacts reduced their resource uses (Figure 12). As noted earlier, in 1989 a large

majority of households with spill-caused reductions in resources used cited fear of oil

contamination as the reason for the decline. By 1993, the vast majority of households who

still said that the spill's effects were impacting subsistence uses cited reduced resource

populations as the cause of the decline.

Results of the social effects questionnaire provided evidence of the persistence of

oil spill effects in certain communities and households, and the geographic pattern to these

effects. These include the effects of the spill on teaching children subsistence skills (Figure

13), effects on sharing (Figure 14), and the percentage of respondents who like living in

their community less since the spill (Figure 15).
Fall - Sociocultural Consequences of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

• Pre-spillAverage ~ 1989 D1990 ~ 1991 ~ 1992 Q1993

450 436

c

0 400

III ~

GI

Q. 350

~

GI

Q, 300

, .!2'

~-

250

~

~

,Q 200

CU

III ::;) 150

III

'1:J

C

:;, 100

0

Q.

50

0

Prince Lower Kodiak Alaska

William Cook Inlet Island Peninsula

Sound Borough

._--_._- -_.-

Figure 10. Estimated subsistence harvests in oil spill area villages.

47

• Chenega Bay o Tatitlek o Lower Cook Inlet

'1:J 25

'0 23 23 ~ 22

GI

III

:;,

0 20 :x:

~

GI

Q,

III

GI

t:! 15

:;,

0

III

GI D:: .•..

0 10

~

GI

,Q

E

:;,

z 5

GI

=f!

~

c( 0

Pre-Spilll Pre-Spillll 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993

Note: Pre-spill averages for Chenega Bay are minimums, because a less detailed list of resources was used than in subsequent research.

--_.~------ ------

Figure 11. Average number of resources used per household, Chenega Bay, Tatitlek, and Lower Cook Inlet,
48 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

90%

80%

en

~ 70% '0

s:

ell

en

:;, 60%

0

:z:: 50% -0

ell

01 40%

S

e

ell 30%

~

ell

D. 20%

10%

0%

• Fear of Oil Contamination DScarce Resources

.¥ >. .¥ QI

QlO) CII QI :i:0) -co a:I -0)

~O)

Cll

CO .S: co

CII"- ClIO) ~O) NO)

I- elCO C..- :1"- QlO) CII 0 C"- Z QI

s:

(.J

Figure 12. Reasons given for reduced subsistence uses.

.¥ >. .¥ QI

QlI") CII QI :i:1") -0) a:I -I")

~O) ClIO) .S: 0)

CII..- CIII") ~O) NO)

l- elO) C..- :1"- QlO) CII C"- 0

Z QI

.z;

(.J

Kenai

Seldovia

Chignik Bay

Larsen Bay

Kodiak

Cordova

Chignik Lake

Karluk

Valdez

Old Harbor

Chenega Bay

Ouzinkie

Port Graham

Tatitlek

Nanwalek

I

I

------~----

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70%

Figure 13. Percentage of respondents who reported that the oil spill affected children's participation in

subsistence activities (1993 or latest year interviewed).
Fall - Sociocultural Consequences of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 49

Chignik Lake

Kenai

Chignik Bay

Larsen Bay

Karluk

Valdez

Seldovia

Ouzinkie

Kodiak

Port Graham

Cordova

Old Harbor

Nanwalek

Chenega Bay

Tatitlek

~ I

I I I I I I

I I I I I I

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80%

Figure 14. Percentage of respondents who reported less sharing of subsistence resources since the oil spill (1993

or latest year interviewed).

60%

ell

~

'0 50% .1991 .c

CIl

~ 1992 ell

::l

0 40% :J: D1993

~

CIl

Q.

E 30% IV

UJ

-0

CIl

CI 20%

IV•..

c:

CIl

(,,) ..

CIl 10%

Q.

0%

Kenai Kodiak Valdez Tatitlek Chenega Cordova

---.-

Figure 15. Percentage of respondents liking living in their community less since the oil spill, selected study

communities.
50 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

SOME APPLICATIONS OF THE RESEARCH FINDINGS

Litigation. Study findings were available to the litigants (both the plaintiffs and the

defendants) in litigation concerning natural resource and socioeconomic and sociocultural

damages alleged to have been caused by the oil spill. Respondent anonymity was preserved

through a protective order negotiated between the State of Alaska and Exxon. Key

documents prepared by experts for the Alaska Native Class were based to a large degree

on Division of Subsistence research conducted before and after the spill (e.g. Braund and

Associates 1993).

Fish and game management. The results of these projects have broad applicability

in a range of fish and game management issues, and have been used in both state and

federal regulatory processes to assess regulations and for customary and traditional use

findings.

Oil spill restoration projects. The study findings have been used to demonstrate the

persistent impacts of the oil spill on spill-area communities, and especially on Alaska Native

communities. The findings have been helpful in promoting subsistence restoration projects.

Impact assessment. State and federal agencies have used the study findings to

illustrate the potential effects of outer continental shelf development on uses of natural

resources. (For example, recently, the Environmental Protection Agency has used some of

the study findings in risk assessments of oil and gas development in lower Cook Inlet.)

DISCUSSION

The following section lists some of the major points about the division' s research

program on the effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill on subsistence uses. These include

issues and considerations pertaining to future long-term research programs.

Importance of baseline data. In order to demonstrate the effects of the spill, it was

essential to have reliable information about subsistence harvests and uses for pre-spill years.

It was also important to have these data for as many communities as possible in the spill

area.

Importance of consistent methods. The research attempted to collect information

with similar instruments and questions. This helped in having comparable data for the preand post-spill periods.

Importance of updating data. In order to understand the long-term effects of the

spill, it was necessary to repeat the interviews over a long period of time (five years). To

some extent, pre-spill comparisons were hampered by having only one pre-spill baseline

study. It is important to periodically update baseline data to keep it current and to

understand variations in subsistence systems.
.

_ ..

Fall· Sociocultural Consequences of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 51

----

Benefits of an ongoing program. The project had a high rate of participation,

especially in Alaska Native communities, in part because the division program and many of

its personnel were known and trusted in the communities.

Training oflocal research assistants. In some communities, local research assistants

made substantial contributions to the fieldwork. This was another reason for low refusal

rates in some communities. The combination of local researchers and regional specialists

contributed to a strong research design.

Respondent burden and "burnout". Despite an ongoing program, familiarity with the

researchers, community support, and generally acknowledged importance of the data, this

project did have a relatively high "respondent burden" as measured by the length and

complexity of the survey forms and repeated visits over five years. In some communities,

non-response from "respondent burnout" was an issue.

A combination of quantitative and qualitative data. Harvest estimates, demographic,

and economic data were combined with respondents' assessments, evaluations, and

opinions. These data complemented each other.

Importance of "neutrality." Especially in the litigation arena, the study findings

were strengthened because they were part of a well-established research program conducted

by a "neutral" third party.

There are a variety of applications for the study findings because the information

is readily available to the public. Perceived applicability and usefulness of the information

collected is a key to continued participation by respondents in long-term research.

The data are available in a variety of formats. These include formal technical

reports, workshop presentations, plain language summaries, and data bases.

The research was based on confidentiality and informed consent. Informed consent

was obtained at both the community and household (individual) level. The division

successfully protected respondent confidentiality during the prolonged discovery period

associated with the Exxon Valdez litigation.

REFERENCES CITED

Alaska Department of Labor. 1991. Alaska Population Overview: 1990 Census and

Estimates. Juneau, AK.

Braund, S.R. and Associates. 1993. Effects of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill on Alutiiq Culture

and People. Prepared for Cohen, Milstein, Hausfeld & Toll, and Sonosky,

Chambers, Sachse, Miller & Munson. Anchorage, AK.
52 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Fall, J.A 1990. The Division of Subsistence of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game:

An Overview of Its Research Program and Findings: 1980 - 1990. Arctic

Anthropology 27(2):68-92.

Fall, J.A 1991. Subsistence Uses of Fish and Wildlife and the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. Arctic

Issues Digest 1:12-25.

Fall, J.A, Ed. 1992. Subsistence Harvests and Uses in Seven Gulf of Alaska Communities

in the Second Year following the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill. Report prepared for the

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Division of

Subsistence. Anchorage, AK.

Fall, J.A and L.J. Field. Forthcoming. Subsistence Uses of Fish and Wildlife and the Exxon

Valdez Oil Spill. In Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Symposium Proceedings. S.D. Rice,

R.B. Spies, D.A Wolfe, and B.A Wright, Eds. American Fisheries Society

Symposium Number 00.

Fall, J.A and C.J. Utermohle, Eds. 1995. An Investigation of the Sociocultural

Consequences of Outer Continental Shelf Development in Alaska. Six Volumes.

U.S. Department of the Interior, Minerals Management Service. Technical Report

No. 160. Anchorage, AK.

Scott, C., A Paige, G. Jennings, and L. Brown. 1995. Community Profile Database Catalog.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Division of Subsistence. Juneau, AK.

Walker, AH. and L.J. Field. 1991. Subsistence Fisheries and the Exxon Valdez: Human

Health Concerns. Proceedings of the 1991 International Oil Spill Conference, pp.

441-446. American Petroleum Institute Publication No. 4529.

QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION

Jorgensen: Did non-response from Natives go up during the last year?

Fall: Yes. That has to do in part with that Judge Holland ruling. Certain

communities that weren't in the second year came back in the third.

Armstrong: Who was the assistant for Kivalina?

Fall: We had several: Gretchen Booth, Becky Norton, and Joe Swan, JT.

Levine: Does the publication of the survey results in your newsletter make villages

enhance their reported takings by the next survey?

Fall: That is an interesting question: Do you think by providing study findings and

as people become more aware of the political context and other contexts of this work, do

we increase the chances of strategic bias in the responses? I don't see any evidence of that

in our work. Maybe that is something we should talk about, but I don't see it. I think that

I can come up with a whole set of scenarios that people in Tatitlek and Chenega Bay, for
Fall· Sociocultural Consequences of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 53

example, really might want to emphasize. "Well our harvest went up but we better say it

went down so we can enhance our damage claim." You will see it didn't happen.

Communities situated in the same general geographic area responded in similar ways,

People couldn't have made it up. That will be evident when you examine the results.

Edenshaw: Have you seen other villages actually embracing and doing the surveys

themselves? One example is at Stephen's Village where they had a proposal to shut down

a drainage where they had customary and traditional lands. The village had the actual data

that went back many years and made a strong case because of the impacts of the pipeline.

Fall: That is one of the points of this work. The importance of anticipating [the

need for] baseline information. Information that communities have worked on with an

agency or on their own using established methods is very important. I think the oil spill

work really demonstrates that.

Levine: Were there community differences among Alaska Peninsula communities

in spill effects on subsistence?

Fall: Not among the Chigniks (Bay, Lagoon, Lake). They all stayed about the same

as before the spill, and Chignik Lake actually increased. They had a big caribou harvest that

year. And caribou is not a spill-affected resource which is another reason why the Alaska

Peninsula is different.

Jorgensen: Two questions: 1) Did villages on the Alaska Peninsula increase the

harvest of land mammals, and 2) if the onshore fisheries were closed commercially, were

they closed to the extent that we observed around the Kodiak Islands? And if they were,

did that account also for the larger harvest of subsistence foods?

Fall: The answer to the second question is no. Because they didn't have their

commercial areas closed entirely, but they were confined to certain boomed-off areas or

protected areas like in Chignik Lagoon itself. That resulted in less incidental harvest of

certain marine resources that people would have gotten in other years. So we saw some

declines in other fish and marine resources.

Mason: The oil took a lot longer to get down to those communities. Maybe people

were stocking up on subsistence resources before the oil arrived, stopped harvesting during

the oil spill, then stocked up again after it was apparent there was not as much damage as

anticipated.

Fall: I never heard of that in the Alaska Peninsula. However it did happen in

Nanwalek and Port Graham where people went out and harvested a lot of clams and

bidarkies, etc. before the oil arrived. On the Alaska Peninsula people did stop doing things

over the summer and fall. Then they went back. They didn't see a lot of effects, so they

decided to give it a try. Not for all resources, not all households. But they were more likely

to spend a part of the year not harvesting and then go back within the year. Remember this

is over the course of a year. At other locations people just stopped for the entire year, and

never returned that year, and in some cases didn't return for three years.

Schwantes: Do you have those differences broken down by resource?

Fall: Yes. We can do that.
54 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Schwantes: For Kodiak Island Borough as an example, could we detect a shift from

shellfish to using more of another resource?

Fall: That's right, that could be the case. In fact, that is the case in Prince William

Sound in the third and fourth years where we did see a tremendous increase and a

continuing increase in Kodiak Island Borough, Lower Cook Inlet. But in Prince William

Sound it is very notable that in the third postspill year that people really did get back to the

into the subsistence uses. However, the composition of the harvest in these years was

dramatically different than before the spill. The harvest that really decreased was marine

mammals in Chenega Bay and Tatitlek. People there harvested much more salmon and

other finfish than they had before the spill. In part that is because those resources were

considered to be safe, from the food testing program. It was pretty certain that fish were

okay. However, people were worried about seals.

Schwantes: I have a comment on the Kodiak Island area. There has been a

problem with paralytic shellfish poisoning (PSP) and shellfish and many people think it may

associated with the oil spill. I would really like to see a breakdown of what resources replace

shellfish?

Fall: You can extract that information from the database.

Jorgensen: In 1989 what proportion of those samples in Prince william Sound and

Lower Cook Inlet are nonnatives? Are they all Natives?

Fall: No, they are not all Natives.

Jorgensen: Our results showed nonnatives actually increased their harvest. They

increased their harvest in 1989 following the spill. The signal appears in the winter of 1990

sampling, then drops out afterward. Since you were working with Natives, did you see a

similar pattern?

Fall: Prince William Sound does not include Cordova or Valdez.

Jorgensen: Oh, that is right, you left them out.

Fall: There are probably only four or five TOTAL nonnative households being

interviewed in Tatitlek and Chenega Bay. The only place where we find a substantial

population of nonnatives in our 1989 sample is probably in some Kodiak communities and

Chignik Bay.
THE CONTINUING RELEVANCE OF THE SOCIAL INDICATORS STUDY

TO SUBSISTENCE MANAGEMENT

Rachel Mason

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

1011 East Tudor Road

Anchorage, Alaska 99503

My perspective on the Social Indicators project comes from my involvement in two

phases of it, both of them studies of the impacts of the Exxon Valdez oil spill (EVOS). In

three different years of the post-EVOS Social Indicators study (1989, 1990, and 1991), I

conducted research in Kodiak City, Karluk, and Chignik. I was also employed by the Alaska

Department ofFish and Game (ADF&G) Division of Subsistence in 1992 and 1993 to work

on the Social Effects metamorphosis of the Social Indicators study. For that project, I

conducted research in Kodiak City, Ouzinkie, Karluk, Larsen Bay, and Old Harbor. Most

of the examples I give will be from Kodiak City.

The previous papers have given you more details about the empirical findings of

those two projects. I want to talk about the continuing value of both the general approaches

and the findings of these two studies for subsistence management. First I will address the

Social Indicators Key Informant protocol, which although not explicitly linked to any specific

subsistence issue, told much about the behaviors, beliefs, and values associated with

subsistence, both for Alaska Natives and nonnatives. I will then discuss the Social Effects

study, which was conducted by the ADF&G Division of Subsistence in conjunction with a

subsistence harvest survey and, like the Social Indicators study, examined issues of individual

and community well-being, mainly as related to the EVOS. Finally, I will talk about how the

findings of both studies might be used today in the Federal Subsistence Management

Program, where I currently work.

There are still many people who see subsistence in Alaska as a matter of putting

food on the table. There is little understanding of the spiritual or moral components of

Alaska Natives' harvesting and processing of wild foods. The anti-subsistence arguments that

subsistence rights shouldn't apply where people can drive to grocery stores, or the

suggestions that subsistence users be given meat from sport guiding operations as a

substitute for getting it themselves, fail to see the importance of harvesting the food

yourself, processing it, sharing it with others, and teaching young people about harvesting,

processing, and sharing.

It is unfortunate, then, that the view has emerged in the Federal subsistence

management program that the most crucial of the eight factors, or possibly the only

important criterion used to determine customary and traditional eligibility is a long-term

consistent pattern of use, measured by documented harvests in the appropriate areas. The

Social Indicators study's insistence on the inclusion of ideological components in

understanding behavior, and the study's focus on the distinction between Western ideology

and traditional-communitarian ideology, make its findings useful for the Federal subsistence

, ')

)
56 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

program. The Social Effects study's combination of the harvest survey with questions

addressing traditional culture and community well-being offers an opportunity to look at

harvest levels in the context of beliefs and values. I will suggest that both studies are

particularly germane to the Federal subsistence program's consideration of proposals to

make determinations of customary and traditional uses.

THE SOCIAL INDICATORS STUDY

The Social Indicators study sought to discover, in various ways, the "quality of life"

experienced by people in Alaskan coastal communities (McNabb and Jorgensen 1992:14).

To the extent that subsistence is inextricably connected to the quality of life, the Social

Indicators project offers relevant material for subsistence management questions. The

"quality of life" aspect is often overlooked in debates over subsistence that focus on material

or nutritional needs.

The EVQS, while incurring tremendous losses to Alaskan coastal communities, did

allow insights (through the Social Indicators study and others) into residents' world view by

showing how they responded to this prolonged crisis. For example, the 1989 oil spill

happened two months after I arrived in Kodiak to do research on the commercial fishing

industry. It shut down that year's commercial salmon fishing season, curtailing my plans for

participant research in salmon fishing. But it did give me many opportunities to learn about

fishing lifestyle, because I went to a lot of meetings in which commercial fishermen

described their loss of self-esteem and well-being at being denied the opportunity to

fish-even if they were paid off by Exxon for their monetary losses. In a different way, I

probably learned as much about fishermen's occupational identity in those meetings as I

would have from fishing. Similarly, the Social Indicators study, especially the post-oil spill

findings in Kodiak, offers a window through which to look at the cultural meanings of

subsistence, by way of people's statements about what they had lost or stood to lose because

of the spill.

The study made a distinction between communities that were hub and periphery,

Native and mixed, and commercial fishing and non-commercial fishing'. The Key Informant

reports combine material from historical and ethnographic secondary sources with interviews

with local officials, service providers, local knowledgeable people, and sampled respondents.

They give information on employment by industry, income, household size, length of

residence, patterns of intermarriage between communities, age and gender profiles, sources

of economic conflict, and competition among user groups. This last factor is complicated

by the fact that in commercial fishing communities such as those in the Kodiak region,

commercial, sport, and subsistence fishing are often done by the same people.

The high transience of the Kodiak City population was apparent in the

administration of the multi-year Social Indicators study. In fact, it was sometimes difficult

to locate respondents who had been there for three years in a row. It is not too surprising,

1 Hub villages had well-developed infrastructures and superstructures, while periphery villages did not;

Native villages were at least 75% Native; commercial fishing villages derived at least 60% of their total

incomes from commercial fishing (Jorgensen 1995:15).
Mason - The Continuing Relevance of the Social Indicators Study to Subsistence Management 57

then, that in both 1989 and 1991, about two-thirds of key informants (KIs) thought it took

less than five years to acquire knowledge about an area. Only one KI, who was Native, said

her family had accumulated many significant symbolic places over generations (Endter et

aI. 1993:591, 659).

Kodiak is essentially a nonnative community; the population in 1990 was 12.7%

Native American. The city is economically and culturally dominated by commercial fishing.

Although other employment sectors, particularly services and government work, are well

represented, much of that work is also connected to the fishing industry. The KI summaries

contain many quotes from residents detailing their views on nature, wildlife, sharing, and

traditional values.

Before the oil spill, people in Kodiak had already been divided on their views of the

potential benefits or deleterious effects of oil development. In 1988, for example, there was

considerable debate between pro-development and quasi-environmentalist factions about

whether a new Navy base should be placed in Kodiak-an issue that became moot after the

oil spill. The EVOS diminished respondents' enjoyment of recreational and subsistence

activities, and it lessened their sense of control over their own destinies.

One Key Informant question asked people whether they took a spiritual or a

commodity view of resources. In 1989, Kodiak interviewees tended to see the environment

in commodity terms. In 1991, few of those interviewed in Kodiak wanted to be associated

with a purely commodity view. Fifty-three percent of the KI respondents said they combined

spiritual and commodity views (Endter et aI. 1993:656-657).

More nonnative respondents than Native ones thought it was important to teach

children to be competitive, rather than to cooperate with others. Some people said they

wanted to raise their children to be more cooperative than competitive. Others saw

competition as inevitable, especially in a fishing community such as Kodiak.

Between 1989 and 1991, Kodiak respondents expressed increasing opposition to

either Federal government or Native management of resources. In 1989, 43% of KI

interviewees favored management by ADF&G, while in 1991, 66% favored the State. There

was a strong bias against Federal management in both years, related more, perhaps, to the

impending imposition of Individual Fishing Quotas for halibut and sablefish than to the

McDowell decision (Endter et aI. 1993:586-587). Both in 1989 and 1991, Kodiak KIs gave

more recognition to Western scientists' understandings than to Natives' understanding. They

thought scientists were more objective (Endter et aI. 1993:590-591).

Most Kodiak City KIs were confident that they had a strong voice in resource

management decisions. In 1989, almost 64% said local people frequently influence ADF&G

decisions. In 1991, almost all (94%) thought that local people had at least some influence

on ADF&G (Endter et aI. 1993:589). This confidence can be partly explained by the

presence of the ADF&G regional office in the community and relatively high access (as

opposed to the surrounding Kodiak area villages) to area biologists and to participation in

the local advisory committee system. After the EVOS, it was particularly frustrating for

these Kodiak residents (most of them nonnative, many of them commercial fishermen) to
58 MMS • Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

deal with the unwillingness of Exxon and government agencies to incorporate local people's

suggestions in the cleanup effort.

Before the oil spill, Kodiak respondents were the most optimistic of all regions about

the potential local benefits of oil and gas development. The majority were not especially

concerned about the possible harmful effects of oil. They related to a pro-technology, antienvironmentalist sentiment prevalent in the community. In 1991, Kodiak residents were less

sure about the local benefits of development. Half of them thought the benefits would be

largely outside the community (Endter et al. 1993: 607, 609).

The oil spill response and cleanup caused great disruption in the city of Kodiak, and

this was reflected in interviews with local government officials and in the responses of

residents to the questionnaire. It was particularly difficult for Kodiak residents to deal with

Exxon's presence in Kodiak after the oil spill, and the company's management of cleanup

efforts, because of the perception that Exxon treated communities and individuals unfairly.

The belief in fair competition is an essential part of the occupational culture of fishing, at

least for the dominant voices in the Kodiak fishing industry. Another valued part of

fishermen's self-image is independence. Exxon's manner of channeling decisions through a

corporate hierarchy rubbed Kodiak residents the wrong way. It conflicted with commercial

fishing values of hard work, taking risks, and developing local knowledge.

In Kodiak, as also occurred in some Kodiak-area Native villages, there was division

between those who thought the oil spill damage was cataclysmal and those who thought the

damage was not that great. In a 1991 interview, a Native woman in Kodiak reflected that,

"The Johnny-come-latelies who were screaming about the environment and all were the first

ones in to get their claims. The old-timers were more philosophical about the situation."

Interestingly, one of the findings of the Social Indicators study was that Natives were

considerably more likely than nonnatives to think the EVeS was a unique event. Nonnatives

tended to think that spills similar to the EVeS were likely to occur again (Jorgensen

1995:89).

THE SOCIAL EFFECTS STUDY

The Social Effects questionnaire was administered at the same time as a harvest

survey which continued oil spill impact research begun two years earlier by the ADF&G

Division of Subsistence. The harvest survey collected information on levels of subsistence

takes of wild resources. The finely-tuned list of resources had been developed over several

years in consultation with knowledgeable local people. The surveys also asked for

information on commercial fishing, amounts of resources taken for household use from

commercial catches, use areas, patterns of sharing, cash employment (including occupation,

industry, hours and months worked, and amount earned), and other sources of household

income. Birthdate, birthplace, length of residence, ethnicity, levels of formal education, and

relationship to household head were recorded for each household member. In the first year

of the Social Effects study, people in some communities were asked for an inventory of

equipment they used for subsistence activities.

When the Social Effects study began in 1992, the Division of Subsistence had in the

previous two years already documented dramatic declines since before the 1989 spill in the
Mason - The Continuing Relevance of the Social Indicators Study to Subsistence Management 59

levels of subsistence resources harvested by communities in the oil spill area. There were

questions on the survey about specific resource issues, mainly relating to the oil spill. Either

for each major resource group (the first year) or for all resources (in years 2 and 3),

respondents were asked whether their harvests had increased, decreased, or stayed the same

since before the oil spill.

Respondents were also asked to describe any resources they had discarded because

of perceived abnormalities (Fall and Utermohle 1993:1-2). This was intended to address

residents' concerns about potential oil contamination of subsistence foods. Other current

subsistence issues were also incorporated. In Year Three of Social Effects research in

Kodiak communities, the survey solicited residents' views on proxy hunting, an issue then

on the table in both State and Federal subsistence management.

The Social Effects questionnaire, administered at the same time as the harvest

survey, explored social relationships, community and individual well-being, and views toward

oil development, with the goal of measuring changes that had occurred as a result of the oil

spill. Some of the questions originally used in the Social Indicators study survived the

transformation and were included in the Social Effects questionnaire. Others were modified

to address individual and community well-being in the context of the EVOS or in a locally

appropriate way. For example, the Social Effects questionnaires used in the Kodiak area

asked respondents how important bidarkies (chitons) and seal meat were to them and

whether those foods were safe for children to eat. These questions were based on the

knowledge that bidarkies and seal meat were favorite and meaningful subsistence foods in

the Kodiak area.

The questionnaire also asked whether respondents had eaten any wild foods

yesterday or the day before. It asked people to assess the health of various animal and fish

populations. It addressed sharing patterns and the importance of sharing, not only of wild

foods but also of labor and money. It asked respondents whether their households would

be affected if they could not harvest subsistence foods for three months, six months, or three

years. It asked how effective various entities had been in dealing with the EVOS.

The Social Effects questionnaire recorded concerns about the disruption of sharing

and of interruptions in teaching young people about subsistence. The study was an

opportunity for respondents to tell the implications of the loss of subsistence because of the

oil spill. However, many respondents mentioned other possible disruptions as well. Fortythree percent of Kodiak City respondents, for example, did not feel confident about hunting,

fishing, or gathering opportunities in the future. A third of these (34%) said that their

opportunities would be curtailed by increased regulations and restrictions, 22% cited

population pressure, 17% feared future environmental damage, and 15% thought their

access to Native lands would be restricted in the future (Mishler et al. 1995:X-22). This

contrasts with the responses to the same question in Larsen Bay in 1991, where 82% of

respondents were confident about future harvesting opportunities, or Ouzinkie, where 75%

of respondents were confident they could harvest wild foods in the future (Mishler et al.

1995:XII-19; XIII-20).
60 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Most Kodiak City residents were happy to live in their community. Many expressed

the underlying importance of subsistence harvesting in their lives. Some said that the

opportunity for subsistence harvesting' was one of the main reasons they had moved to the

community or the reasons they stayed in the community. More than half (58%) of Kodiak

respondents said they had come there for reasons related to employment (Mishler et al

1995:X-22).

Like the Social Indicators KI summary, the Social Effects data show the city of

Kodiak's focus on commercial fishing. Of total income reported, about 19% came from

commercial fishing and nearly 5% from manufacturing, mainly cannery work. That data also

showed the continuing importance of government employment (which include the military

and teachers) in the community; the combined income from local, State and Federal

government employment came to more than that from commercial fishing (Mishler et al.

1995:X-8).

Another trend reflected in both the Social Indicators and the Social Effects studies

was the Kodiak City residents' opposition to Federal management. Many respondents

reported to the State employees administering the survey the same thing they had told

Social Indicators researchers: that they were unhappy with Federal management of

subsistence. The three-year study began at about the same time that the Federal government

assumed management authority from the State on Federal public lands.

Like the Social Indicators questionnaires, the Social Effects survey asked about OCS

development. By 1993, the third year of the study, Kodiak City residents seemed to have

regained some of their earlier optimism about oil and gas development. In Kodiak in Year

Three, 50% of Social Effects respondents said that OCS development would decrease the

amount of shellfish and marine mammals available for harvest. A majority, 66%, thought

such development would create more jobs for local people (Mishler et al. 1995:X-23).

Finally, the administration of the Social Effects study benefitted from its association

with the Division of Subsistence's harvest survey. Most of the ADF&G researchers had longestablished contacts with the communities; some of them were Native village residents. The

researchers' knowledge of local issues and their cooperation with communities contributed

both to respondents' understanding of the research and to the researchers' understanding

of responses.

RELEVANCE TO FEDERAL SUBSISTENCE MANAGEMENT PROGRAM

The findings of the Social Indicators and the Social Effects studies offer an

opportunity to place subsistence harvests in the context of qualitative factors such as cultural

identity, self-esteem, family and community ties, and spiritual links to subsistence resources.

The way people dealt with the oil spill in Kodiak and elsewhere reflected the ways they deal

with and think about everyday life. The findings of the Social Indicators and Social Effects

studies are relevant to other studies that seek to find out values and world view-or that

2 Many Kodiak City respondents saw sports harvesting as synonymous with subsistence harvesting

(Mishler et aI. 1995:X-18).
Mason - The Continuing Relevance of the Social Indicators Study to Subsistence Management 61

could benefit from the discovery of such things. Specifically, the findings are relevant to the

Federal subsistence program. One of the main duties of the anthropologists employed in

this program is to complete Customary and Traditional analyses to determine rural

residents' eligibility to harvest specific resources.

The Customary and Traditional determinations currently on the books under State

management of subsistence were adopted by the Federal program in 1991 when it assumed

management authority for hunting on Federal public lands. The purpose of Customary and

Traditional determinations is to separate the sheep from the goats, i.e., to eliminate nontraditional uses and users from eligibility for subsistence priority. The eight factors are:

1. A long-term consistent pattern of use, excluding interruptions beyond the control of

the community or area;

2. A pattern of use recurring in specific seasons for many years;

3. A pattern of use consisting of methods and means of harvest which are

characterized by efficiency and economy of effort and cost, conditioned by local

characteristics;

4. The consistent harvest and use of fish or wildlife as related to past methods and

means of taking; near, or reasonably accessible from the community or area;

5. A means of handling, preparing, preserving, and storing fish or wildlife which has

been traditionally used by past generations, including consideration of alteration of

past practices due to recent technological advances, where appropriate;

6. A pattern of use which includes the handing down of knowledge of fishing and

hunting skills, values and lore from generation to generation;

7. A pattern of use in which the harvest is shared or distributed within a definable

community of persons; and

8. A pattern of use which relates to reliance upon a wide diversity of fish and wildlife

resources of the area and which provides substantial cultural, economic, social, and

nutritional elements to the community or area.

According to materials presented to the Alaska Boards of Fisheries and Game by the

Division of Subsistence in 1989, the eight criteria were originally meant to represent a

gestalt, i.e., a whole pattern that is more than the sum of its individual parts (ADF&G

1989). Taken as a whole, the criteria would ideally separate traditional subsistence practices,

and associated belief systems, from non-traditional ones.

In the Federal subsistence management program, however, some of the eight factors

have been given more weight than others. In considering customary and traditional

proposals, the Federal Subsistence Board tends to see quantitative information about

particular harvest levels and use areas as the most important, and to view cultural factors
62 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

as too vague or general to be helpful. These two studies, Social Indicators and Social

Effects, offer some means of quantifying nebulous cultural data to show how the behavior

and ideology of traditional subsistence users differ from those of non-traditional people.

In April of this year, the Federal Subsistence Board considered a proposal for a

positive customary and traditional determination for brown bear in Unit 8, which

incorporates all the Kodiak-area villages and Kodiak City. (Perhaps ironically, the customary

and traditional analysis was based in large part upon one completed by the ADF&G

Division of Subsistence for the State Board of Game in 1992.) In this example, examination

of harvest levels alone indicates that in some years the predominantly nonnative Kodiak

City, and even the entirely nonnative Coast Guard base, registered a higher percent of

households participating in brown bear harvests than some of the surrounding,

predominantly Native villages. A 1983 survey which asked "Have members of your

household eaten brown bear?" found a higher percentage of "yes" answers in Kodiak City

(23%) than in Port Lions (16%), Karluk (15%) or Ouzinkie (9%) (USFWS 1996). How

should one distinguish uses by Kodiak City residents from those of the villages? A commonsense answer would be that most of the residents of Kodiak are not heirs to the welldocumented Native tradition of subsistence use of brown bears", ADF&G Division of

Subsistence surveys in both the 1980s and the 1990s have consistently shown much lower

average per capita harvests for all resources in Kodiak City than in the surrounding Native

villages, and a lower average number of different resources used. However, the Social

Indicators and Social Effects studies offer support for the view that harvest levels do not tell

the whole story. By recording differences between Native and nonnative responses, they

might even help to document the distinctive subsistence patterns of enclave Native

communities within predominantly nonnative communities such as Kodiak.

I have mentioned above the Social Indicators study's finding that nonnatives tend

to view sharing as direct reciprocity, while Native sharing is done without thought of

immediate return. The post-EVOS version of the Social Indicators study hypothesized that

sharing would increase among Natives after the spill and cleanup, and that there would be

less internal divisiveness in Native communities than in nonnative communities (Jorgensen

1995:20-21). This was borne out by the Kodiak area findings.

Another way for the Social Indicators and the Social Effects studies to offer valuable

examples for customary and traditional analysis comes from the open-ended questions in

both protocols, and summary reports which honor people's own expressions of their views.

Stephanie Reynolds' Cordova report, in particular, contains many testimonies from local

Natives on the importance of subsistence in their lives. The losses or potential losses of

subsistence opportunities caused by the EVOS and Exxon's oil spill response inspired

reflection about the meaning of harvesting, processing, sharing, and consuming subsistence

foods. As an example, people's strong reactions in Kodiak area communities to the Social

Effects question, "What would happen to your household if you could not harvest wild foods

for six months, one year, three years?"-reactions predicting rage or despair, or of being

3 In making customary and traditional determinations, the Federal subsistence management program has

not yet found a consistent manner of dealing with subsistence uses by Native enclave communities within

larger nonnative communities.
Mason • The Continuing Relevance of the Social Indicators Study to Subsistence Management 63

unable to imagine the possibility-show the high importance of subsistence activities in their

lives.

However, a professed love of subsistence and professed espousal of a spiritual view

of resources may also be deceptive if taken at face value, as shown in the reluctance of

Kodiak City respondents to be associated with a commodity view of resources. During the

preliminary phases of a proposed customary and traditional determination in another part

of the state, I have heard that a sportsman's club claimed that its hunter safety classes for

youth qualified as the transmission of skills, knowledge, and values from generation to

generation. The findings of the Social Indicators and Social Effects studies could help to

document ideological and lifestyle differences between and within communities. Certainly

recreational hunting and fishing are deeply meaningful to participants. There are large

cultural differences, however, between pursuing a subsistence way of life and occasionally

enjoying sport harvesting.

The continuing relevance of the Social Indicators and Social Effects studies comes

as much from their combination of approaches as from the empirical findings. The studies

looked at many factors that contribute to quality of life. Subsistence managers would do well

to incorporate this multifaceted approach.

REFERENCES

Alaska Department of Fish and Game, Division of Subsistence. 1989. Defining Subsistence

Uses: The Eight Criteria. Materials Presented to the Alaska Boards of Fisheries and

Game, Anchorage, October 22-24, 1989.

Endter-Wada, J., R. Mason, J. Mulcahey, and J. Hofmeister. 1993. The Kodiak Region.

Social Indicators Study of Alaskan Coastal Villages. IV. Postspill Key Informant

Summaries. Schedule C Communities, Part 2: (Kenai, Tyonek, Seldovia, Kodiak

City, Karluk, Old Harbor, Chignik). Alaska oes Region, Social and Economic

Studies Program. Washington:U.S. Department of the Interior. Pp. 553-721.

Fall, J.A. and C.J. Utermohle, Eds. 1993. An Investigation of the Sociocultural

Consequences of Outer Continental Shelf Development in Alaska: A Preliminary

Overview of Selected Findings from the Household Harvest for the First and Second

Years of Research, 1992 and 1993.

Jorgensen, J.G. 1995. Ethnicity, Not Culture? Obfuscating Social Science in the Exxon

Valdez Oil Spill Case. American Indian Culture and Research Journal 19(4):1-124.

McNabb, S.L. and J.G. Jorgensen. 1992. Key Informant Summary Introduction. Social

Indicators Study of Alaskan Coastal Villages. I. Key Informant Summaries. Volume

1: Schedule A Regions (North Slope, NANA, Calista, Aleutian-Pribilof). Alaska

OCS Region, Social and Economic Studies Program. Washington: U.S. Department

of the Interior. Pp. 1-59.
64 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Mishler, C., R. Mason, and J. Barnhart. 1995. Draft Report on the Third Year of the Social

Effects Study. Chapter X: Kodiak City.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Office of Subsistence Management. 1996. Draft Staff

Analysis, Proposal 26. Request for a positive customary and traditional use

determination for brown bear in Unit 8 for residents of Unit 8.

QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION

Jorgensen: By about 1993 in Kodiak, at least the nonnatives were rather sanguine

about the value of oil. This is characteristic of those boom towns in the West. It doesn't

matter whether you are talking about lumber or coal. A community could have gone

through five boom-bust cycles, and if you ask two years after the last bust, they have

forgotten all about the negative consequences and they are optimistic. That is one of the

real differences between Natives and nonnatives. Natives think: "there might be a job for

my children" and they may stay around, even if they are only spending six months of the

year in Kodiak City and the rest of the year in Seattle. The attitude of "...that there might

be ...," has been displayed again and again. I would have predicted that result.

Mason: I have seen that in the fishing industry which has gone through many booms

and busts in Kodiak. You would think that people would lose faith after a bust. But there

is always hope.

Schwantes: I have a question regarding how you determine Native populations?

Mason: It was people's own self identification.

Schwantes: Do you ask whether they consider themselves a Native?

Mason: The question was, "What is your ethnicity?" It was basically self

identification.

Schwantes: Culturally, being a Native wasn't "accepted" for many years. Still, many

Native people say they are Russian, Norwegian, etc. and identify more with a subsistence

life style rather than ethnicity. What would the results have been if you had done studies

in winter months when the trend in populations is down?

Mason: That is particularly true in the Kodiak area,where ethnicity has been

questioned. People do identify more with the idea of subsistence life style. I think both of

these studies were sensitive to the fact that people aren't going to be around in the summer.

The question of other ethnic groups is a very interesting one. We didn't look at the

distinguishing factors of households that were Filipino or Hispanic. I do know that in the

Filipino households there were some distinctive sharing patterns. Often they would send

money to relatives that lived outside of the U.S.
Mason - The Continuing Relevance of the Social Indicators Study to Subsistence Management 65

Schwantes: How do you provide reliable documentation of subsistence use? No one

reports what they take; they are leery of reporting the actual amounts, which may be higher.

Mason: That is a separate sort of survey from the ones that I was discussing, which

asked for the recall of harvests over the years. The hunting tickets that you are talking about

are notoriously inaccurate measures of what people have actually gotten. Whereas these

instruments, the harvest survey that Jim has described, are very well-tuned and have been

shown to be remarkably accurate, or that people are remarkably candid about their harvest

in the year to year reporting.

Callaway: It is a factor of about ten to one throughout the State on many different

measures between what people report on tickets, and what they report on face to face

interviews. So these data are hugely more reliable and valid over the tickets.

Jorgensen: Reliable but not truthful. It sounds as if the reports to ADF&G are very

reliable. But the claim is that there are doubts. Do they report the same four species year

after year by the same person?

Mason: Some communities like Karluk never report harvest tickets.

Callaway: So they are reliable in that sense. You can count on them not reporting

anything.

Edenshaw: I look at patterns, not so much the oil spill but the decline in subsistence

activities. Is there a correlation with alcoholism?

Jorgensen: No one has successfully correlated those social dislocations in Alaska. We

tried with at least 200 back in 1981 and 1982 to correlate them with any event. Was there

an increase in alcoholism, an increase in murder, rape, or divorce? The trends were

absolutely uninformative. It is not to say that it couldn't be done. It is just that the research

that is required is personal, and they can't rely on the archival data that has been collected

by various institutions.

Endter- Wada: I like the fact that you are working with a different Federal agency

and trying to puzzle through the utility of this information for what you do, that is a helpful

. approach.

I have two questions: 1) We have the National Park Service and U.S. Fish and

Wildlife Service represented here today. It seems this is only because there is a personal link

between both of you, and the history of this project. Is there any formal agency sharing of

information and does this study have utility beyond the Minerals Management Service, and;

2) We made this central finding from the study that the distinctions between Natives and

nonnatives are more salient than distinctions on a geographic or community basis. Can the

Customary and Traditional determinations from a political point of view be responsive to

those findings?
66 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Mason: They haven't been, but I think that they should be responsive to differences

between communities.

Callaway: They can't be in the sense that the preference is rural so the Customary

and Traditional analysis is rural. They can be with respect to an 804 determination, or what

the State calls a Tier II. There is very nebulously defined criteria for apportioning access

to resources among equally qualified subsistence users. Who is first among equals? Ethnicity

has not been necessarily the fulcrum. In my experience there is a continuum from

subsistence users to what I call "headhunters." Regardless of ethnicity I think you can

separate people by the parameters we have discussed here such as the number of species

used, how much of the animal is used, with respect to socialization with children, with

respect to certain ecological components, etc. Ethnicity does not have to be one of the

criteria. I think that Native people engage in a subsistence life style as do mixed couples to

a large extent, as well as some long-term nonnative residents. But they can be parceled out

from sports hunters, commercial guiders, and trophy hunters. They haven't been, but they

can be.

Mason: I just wanted to quickly address interagency cooperation. I think it is pretty

deplorable, and should be made more responsive in the future.

Callaway: The sad fact is that Fish and Wildlife Service is the only agency that I

know that has not had a steady decline in the number of social scientists employed. MMS

has had a decline; the National Park Service is not going to add any in the near future.
OUTSIDE PERSPECTIVES

Nicholas Flanders

Arctic Research Consortium of the United States, Inc.

and

Institute of Arctic Sciences

Dartmouth College

Hanover, New Hampshire 03755

When Michael Baffrey contacted me about doing this and then sent me all seven

volumes, it reminded me of a conversation that I had with Dennis Tippelman up in

Kotzebue several years ago. Dennis and I were scheduled to go to the same conference

together. Dennis at that point was the president of the village corporation for Kotzebue. He

called me up about a week before we were supposed to leave for the conference and said

that he couldn't make it. He asked if I could make his presentation. The presentation was

going to be on the Red Dog Mine, which at that point hadn't been developed yet. Of

course, I had my own presentation to do. I didn't exactly want to do his, too. So we

discussed it back and forth. Then, finally, I pulled out my trump card. I said, "Dennis, I have

never been to Red Dog." He replied, "Aha! I knew you would qualify as an expert." But

then I read Jorgensen's description of the field work that the consulting anthropologist for

Exxon did (Jorgensen 1995) and I decided that he was an even better expert than I.

An advantage of coming last is that nobody really minds if you do not go on and on.

I wanted to talk first about the implications of this research for understanding cultural

change. I also think it important to talk about two related areas that suggest some

possibilities, in my mind, for follow-on research.

I would like to explain a little bit about my background. On one side, the part that

I will talk about first, is that I have had the opportunity of living in Alaska Native

communities for six years. I was working on programs that were largely aimed at providing

Native people and corporations and other organizations with bachelors' degrees in Alaska.

I had the opportunity to spend a year in Finland, including time with people at the Nordic

Sami Institute in Kautokeino, Norway, which is a Sami-run institute funded by the Nordic

Council of Ministers. I spent six months in New Zealand at a place called the Center for

Maaori Studies and Research at the University of Waikato. It is another that is run by

Maaoris. Finally, I had the opportunity to go to India in association with the Sardar Sarovar

dam fiasco that the World Bank got into.

A striking thing about my experiences in all these areas is that I have heard many

of the same arguments about indigenous peoples. It is somehow universal. The same

arguments that you find throughout the North and other parts of the world, are what I call

the "Assumptions of Change." These assumptions go something like this (I am making them

Alaska-specific):

{ I
68

1.

2.

3.

4.

MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Change is inevitable. The people who live in small villages are going to be

faced with change. They are going to have to accommodate, and they are

probably better off doing it sooner rather than later.

All change is from traditional to modern. This change is unidirectional

change: As people become more involved in the larger world, they are going

to become more like mainstream, middle class, U.S., lower-48 people.

Subsistence is going to decline.

If things are different from before, then the new situation is not traditional.

The interesting thing that always comes out for me in these assumptions is that we

can go back and read Sheldon Jackson in the early 1890s and see that he is saying precisely

the same things. A hundred years ago when Sheldon Jackson was writing, he assumed that

things were going to change. Here we are, however, a hundred years later and these

assumptions are precisely the same. Obviously, things have changed but they have not

changed so much that these assumptions have dropped out. They remain assumptions.

We can point to several instances in which tradition continues to soak through the

clothing of modernity: Jorgensen's studies suggest that more income tends to create a

florescence in Native culture. Money does not destroy traditions or necessarily move the

villages away from their long-held values. We can show any number of instances down

through ethnohistory, where we know when money has come in it has been used for very

Native purposes. This goes for the totem poles on the northwest coast and for the

florescence of the whaling culture on the North Slope when commercial whaling first came

in. We saw it in the Barrow area recently: as wage income went up, more people went

whaling.

The Maaori in New Zealand argue that they have a right to change. They had a right

to go and change according to their own precepts (J. Ritchie, personal communication). This

ability would be part of maintaining their identity as Maaori. Under this right, a social

indicators study would be unnecessary.

Anyway, what we now know and what we have seen over the last century is that

change is neither linear nor unidirectional. It is a very complex process where one can see

cultural strengthening based upon improved circumstances. Whaling is one example. In

Greenland, they developed a home rule authority. The language of political discourse went

from Danish to Greenlandic in the last ten years. We can see things go back and forth in

various ways between what might be termed "traditional" and "modern." All of which says

that we have to be very careful about predicting the effects of external change.

A virtue that I see in social indicators monitoring studies is that they avoid

prediction. Prediction is not just difficult, but dangerous as well. It is dangerous in the sense

that assumptions of change appear and the predictions can themselves be external forces

for change, albeit ideological. Monitoring studies on the other hand don't have that

difficulty. Social indicators studies argue for continuity. The approach assumes a continuous
Flanders • Outside Perspectives 69

thread that emerges despite the various major changes, booms and busts, that have gone on

in rural Alaska through the years.

This returns us to the final assumption of change: when are things still "traditional?"

I would like to quote Ulric Nayamin, now deceased, of Chevak, Alaska. Back in 1981, in a

meeting with a group of oil men, he tried to describe to them just how important coastal

resources were to the people of Chevak. He said, "Well, you know, you kassat [non-Cupiit],

you have banks. Whenever you get low on money or need some extra money to get through,

you go back and borrow from the bank. For us the coast is our bank." The point being that

it has always been traditional to adapt and that is what constitutes tradition. People may go

off and do other things for a while, but they still have a reserve, be it of resources or of

culture.

These studies may also be important as a baseline. We may be able to show that, in

fact, cultures have been strengthened as well as weakened. The original purpose of the

social indicators was to draw out the possible negative effects of oil development. It may be

equally possible to show that other kinds of change bring improvements. The proposed

co-management program for the western arctic caribou herd might be one example. It will

be interesting to go back in 10 years and see what influence co-management has had on

people's perceptions.

Another point: As I was sitting here listening, a story occurred to me. When I was

a graduate student in Maine, I was doing research for a state regulatory board that set

prices on a certain commodity. A group was fighting the board. They had brought in a very

fancy lawyer from New York, who turned out to be a nice guy. Even though he was on the

other side, he took me out to lunch. He told me a story from when he was a young lawyer

and working for the New Jersey public utilities board. For the very first time, they had an

electric company come in and request a rate change with a thick document written by an

econometrician at Princeton University. They were completely overwhelmed because they

had never seen anything like it. He referred to the document as being written in Greek. "We

decided," he said, "to go out and get our own Greeks."

To be frank, these social indicators studies are very difficult reading. The statistics

are of a high order. They show the level of sophistication that we have gotten into in the

argument over subsistence. Now we have to go out and get our own Greeks to make these

arguments. It is important, however, to make a sophisticated case for subsistence and what

it means. Using the Guttman-Lingoes statistical analyses shows that being Native is a

multidimensional feature. Nor is subsistence a single thing. These are points that Native

people make themselves. It is good to try and capture some of that multidimensionality.

The use of these statistics also leads to a discussion of science as a dialect of policy.

It has become necessary to use science in Alaska to produce some parts of policy. Policy

debates often center around natural resources. Scientists have something to say about

natural resources. Very often science is used as the trump card in arguments: We have the

science and you don't. We are right and you are wrong. Nobody, however, has really looked

at the science to see whether it is good or bad. One serious instance may be found in the

reported drastic decline of the western arctic caribou herd in the mid-1970s. The issues that

surround those findings and their scientific merit have never been investigated thoroughly.
70 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Yet the consequences of those studies, in terms of the divisive subsistence debate, continue

within the State. It is very important to do good science, particularly when it becomes a

gatekeeper for people entering into policy and management discussions.

I would now like to turn to a second area of observations. These have to do with

the role that social indicators studies might play in other studies and how these particular

studies might be carried on under new auspices. For instance, large scale environmental

change has become of concern in recent years. There have been various predictions about

the future of the Arctic as a result of global change studies and particularly climate change

research. You have probably heard predictions that climate warming, if it happens, will

occur at a much more rapid rate in the Arctic because of snow melt and a resulting drop

in albedo. What would be the consequences for local societies? The kinds of arguments that

I listed under assumptions on change (above) are reappearing in the scientific community:

If large environmental systems change from processes that are outside the scope of local

communities or regions, changes in the communities are going to be inevitable, the reliance

on local resources will be eliminated, and a loss of traditions will result.

To tie this social indicators research to other possible programs, I would like to

enumerate some of the sources of global change. Global change is not all climate change.

There are various forces that people are predicting will affect the Arctic. Climate change

is certainly one. There is a very real concern about the increase in greenhouse gases that

may come with thawing the tundra. We do know that if climate change occurs it is likely to

be nonlinear, very precipitous, and something that will be possibly outside the human

experience of the last ten thousand years. It is a very, very difficult question to deal with

from the perspective of human impacts and policy.

But, there are other sorts of changes that may have a similar effect in the shorter

run. Air pollution is present and visible in arctic Alaska. The effects are stunning in areas

of the Russian arctic, like the Kola Peninsula. In regions around the industrial cities, the

trees have just disappeared. But, the effects have spread beyond there. Traditional activities

in these areas, such as reindeer herding, have been severely curtailed.

Ocean pollution may be more significant. Heavy metals, organochlorides, and

possibly radionucleides are found concentrated in the marine mammals upon which people

depend. When I was in Greenland a few years ago there was a quiet discussion about the

level of heavy metals found in seals. Greenlanders are heavily dependent upon seals as a

major subsistence resource and as a source of cash income from fur sales. The concern was

that the contaminant levels were a public health threat. But if the health authorities were

to tell people about it, people might stop eating seals. What would they then do for food?

Because, in fact, there were very few alternatives.

Dr. Joe Jorgensen talked a bit about the expansion of the market system into the

Arctic. That is something that will probably continue to occur, in boom and bust cycles, into

the foreseeable future. We also have to remember non-market forces, which include things

like government transfer payments. In the former Soviet Union, the complete collapse of

the transportation system that had supplied most of the northern areas has had tremendous

consequences for people of those regions.
Flanders - Outside Perspectives 71

And finally under global processes, international agreements have become important.

The International Whaling Commission and its decision making is an example: It has

brought profound changes to the way in which people pursue traditional resources. Limits

on the take of whales in Greenland, for instance, has put pressure on community social

organization. Whales may not be a major livelihood, but, in contrast with cod and salmon

fishing that are organized around a cash relationship, the whaling crews are built on

extended kinship. To allow people to continue the cash-based economy without whaling may

have an effect on those relationships.

Military activities are another area of significant change. They have not been well

studied, but are certainly worthy of mention in the wake of the Cold Warm.

All of these global changes have impacts. They may not be the same. They do,

however, have one similarity with the Exxon Valdez: they affect people's ability to harvest

resources. They may have the same consequences that we see in the spill study.

The kind of data set that was developed under the social indicators study serves as

a good baseline for understanding future impact from global changes. Change from many

different sources needs to be followed. Does the hypothesis that I implicitly started with

hold in the future: That many of these things don't necessarily or immediately destroy the

differences between Native and nonnative peoples. In some cases external changes will

emphasize differences, in other cases they will lessen the differences. Melding, however, is

not a foregone conclusion.

I would just mention three research programs that might follow similar research.

One is the Arctic Systems Science Program (ARCSS) at the National Science Foundation,

which is developing a human dimensions component. This component should have growing

levels of funding. One of the major foci is the relationship between the biophysical and

human spheres. Do changes in one lead to changes in the other? If so, what kinds of

changes? The social indicators studies would aid in answering this question.

Another set of research programs is sponsored by the International Arctic Science

Committee. Two of them have focused integrated assessments or particular regions: One

on the Barents Sea, which is called BASIS, and a companion study on the Bering Sea

(BESIS). The idea is essentially to do impact studies of climate change scenarios for these

seas and their surrounding human communities.

And finally, the International Northern Sea Route Operations Program (INSROP)

would be another project that might benefit from social indicators studies. This research

program is looking at the possible consequences to communities in Alaska, Russia, and

Scandinavia of opening the northern sea route to international traffic. The northern sea

route is the way that Russia has provisioned isolated communities by shipping goods from

Vladivostok and other areas of the east coast, by ice reinforced ships through the Northeast

Passage. The goods are then sent down the major rivers that empty into the Arctic Ocean.

International shipping could have several unforeseen consequences that should be

monitored.

This list summarizes the possible tie-ins for the key informant studies. I will end here.
72 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

REFERENCES CITED

Jorgensen, J. 1995. Ethnicity, not culture? Obsfucating social science in the Exxon Valdez

oil spill case. American Indian culture and research journal 19 (4): 1-124.

QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION

Holder: Was what you did part of the Corps of Engineers study?

Flanders: No, that was a different study. INSROP is actually out of the Nansen

Institute in Oslo.

Holder: This was independent of the CRREL [US Army Corps of Engineers] study?

Flanders: It is a long story as to why they are independent. It has to do with politics.

But it is the same topic, different players. The INSROP study is actually the

European-Russian view. The Corps of Engineers was actually commissioned to help Ted

Stevens formulate the Alaskan view.

That was essentially what I had to talk about this afternoon. Like I said I figured if

I kept it relatively short nobody would object. There are some questions that I had but given

that most of the community participants, regional participants have left, I will save them.

I was curious to know from their perspective, particularly given our efforts at trying to

develop research, do they feel that the Social Indicators have selected or captured important

aspects of their culture? The other question being, is it possible [to capture them]?

One of the conclusions that I had was just the fact that the study was able to capture

differences is significant. As was pointed out in the talk this morning, if you know a guy is

nonnative, you are able to predict a lot of things about him. This, in a sense, indicates that

you have been able to at least show that there are these differences.

Jorgensen: A few years ago, I was on a committee of the National Academy of

Sciences that was talking to an attorney and a mining engineer for the Kennicott

Corporation. The mining engineer finally asked me, "Just what is it you are trying to do?"

What we were trying to do was determine the consequences to mining communities and the

consequences to non-mining communities if a surface mine would open near them. And he

said, "That is like trying to lasso a cloud!"

Flanders: My story about that was when I lived in Kotzebue back in the 1980s, the

Northwest Alaska Native Association Corporation (NANA) hired someone to try and

predict the consequences of Red Dog [a lead-zinc mine], and John Schaeffer said that the

bottom line was, I am sure they spent thousands of dollars on this, but the bottom line was

that you can't really predict anything except one thing: out of all the studies that they have

done about the consequences of mining you can predict one thing and that is you will have

an influx of population, a population increase. What happened in Kotzebue? The population

went down. So that shows you what you can predict.
Flanders - Outside Perspectives 73

So that is the long and the short of it. I wanted to point out that there are some

possibilities. There are some possible connections with other research. We hope funding will

be available for that. I will be interested to know what the communities themselves say

about this.

Jorgensen: Is it dependent upon the NSF arctic budget or from several sources?

Flanders: There are two things about this. First of all, it is like everything you have

heard about Washington and what you may have heard about NSF. There are parts of NSF

that are getting more money.

Jorgensen: Yes, the Arctic got $300,000 more but they had such a tiny budget. They

only had $1 million to start with.

Flanders: Yes, that is the Arctic Social Science. The Arctic Section as a whole is, in

year FY 97, receiving over ten percent increase in their budget. Part of that has to do with

the fact that Ted Stevens has finally put his foot down and said that NSF has to spend as

much on science in the Arctic as they spend on science in the Antarctic. The difference is

that the logistics for the Arctic comes out of the science budget. For the Antarctic they have

$168 million for logistics. But the science budget is $29 million. The difference is when you

fill out an application to do research in the Antarctic, you don't fill in the travel costs except

as far as costs to New Zealand, from then on it's all paid for.

So that is one of the thing ARCUS is working on. We are trying to set up logistics.

We are doing a white paper right now for the U.S. Arctic Research trying to describe the

academic research community's logistical needs in order to argue for assistance similar to

what is in Antarctica. Though, social scientists don't want to have to fly in C-130s.

Callaway: It would be tough flying into Kivalina.
MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop 74
AN ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL INDICATORS OF THE

EXXON VALDEZ OIL SPILL

Joseph G. Jorgensen

School of Social Sciences

University of California

Irvine, California 92697-5100

HYPOTHESIS ABOUT WHY, POSSIBLY, NATIVE AND NONNATIVE PRACTICES ARE

DIFFERENT

Soon after the spill occurred and as we prepared to expand our sample to include

ten villages affected by the spill, we hypothesized on the basis of our previous research

among 31 villages, all of29 of which were outside the spill area, that Natives would express

grief over the spill and attempts to clean it up. We also hypothesized that sharing would

increase among Natives as subsistence and commercial fishing pursuits were reduced or

thwarted altogether. We doubted that anything beyond temporary divisiveness would occur

among Natives within their communities over the spill. We expected considerable

divisiveness among nonnatives-personal as between commercial fishermen who contracted

their boats to ExxonNECO and those who did not, grass roots organizations vs, public

officials, business owners vs. erstwhile employees who abandoned low paying jobs for high

paying employment in the cleanup, renters vs. landlords who raised rents, public agencies

vs. ExxonNECO for failing to assist in accommodating public needs and personal

complaints about unmet needs.'

We reasoned that if Natives in the spill area were similar to Natives residing north

of the Gulf of Alaska, we expected households to be interdependent, not independent. We

expected Natives to exercise their political franchise at greater rates than nonnatives. We

expected Natives to espouse ethics about obligations to the community which were

correlated with their practices and which devalued some forms of competition by not

referring to them when asked. We expected ethics and practices to connect old and young,

employed and unemployed, healthy and impaired into Native networks which were

communitarian, not individualistic, in nature. These networks and the activities in which the

members engaged, we averred, served to spread risks and distribute resources, not as a

means of leveling pain, but as a successful means of maintaining friends, assisting elders,

and providing for households in good times while coping with difficult problems in bad

times. The ideology does not change when needs increase. Education, employment, high

incomes, good health, arid political involvement need not generate Protestant Ethic

behavior, particularly when the alternative is communitarian behavior.

1 There were too few landlords and too few small business owner-operators in our samples to test our

hypotheses about conflicts between landlords and tenants, employers and employee. The "ethnographic" evidence

collected by our key investigators supports all of our hypotheses about conflicts between nonnatives as

distinguished here. This evidence yields "concluding hypotheses" and informed our analyses of the AQI and KIP

responses.
76 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

For nonnatives to engage in practices we presumed would be commonplace for

Natives, we thought that nonnatives would have to be connected in extensive friendship

networks in the region, dispense with any bookkeeping about who owes whom, and be

willing to risk foreclosure, repossession, bankruptcy when giving and helping reduced their

own resources to the levels of the persons they assisted. For short-term residents among

nonnatives-1 to 5 years-we presumed selfless giving of resources and labor would not

occur or would be very rare. For long-term residents-10 to 20 years-to engage in practices

common to Natives, they likely would have to forsake their retirements and risk foreclosure

and bankruptcy. We hypothesized greater divisiveness among nonnatives in the spill area,

especially those engaged in or dependent upon the commercial fishing industry, stemming

from (1) perceptions of mistreatment by government, Exxon, or both, (2) fears of insolvency,

and (3) demands for solutions.

THE SUBSISTENCE MODE OF PRODUCTION AND CULTURAL "TRADITIONS"

We confirmed in our research among the original 31 villages, that Native subsistence

economies remain quintessentially subsistence economies in their organizations of

production: ownership, control, labor, distribution, consumption. They are directly linked

to procuring food and shelter for the maintenance of life itself. It is the social fabric in

which the subsistence economy is embedded that is crucial within and among communities.

Knowledge of naturally occurring resources in the local area. In 1989 and 1991 we

asked 388 Key Informant Protocol (KIP) respondents in the spill area, 69% nonnatives and

31% Natives, to identify 77 naturally occurring resources (animal and plant species, such as

spotted seals (Phoca largha), or groups of species, such as berries (Rubus spp., Vaccinium

spp.) in the areas in which respondents reside. We inquired about which of the 77 specific

species or groups of species were available locally, and whether the amounts that were

available were sufficient or not sufficient for local purposes. Those purposes could be

defined by the respondents.

We presumed, but did not know, that persons engaged in a complex subsistence

organization would know more about plants and animals and think about more relations

among them than a person who harvested very few wild resources, or harvested a limited

number of species, or harvested none at all, and who was not engaged in networks of

sharing resources, labor, and meals, or regular visiting, and who seldom established camps

for resource extraction. We further presumed that if persons harvested few species or no

species at all, but were engaged in sharing and visiting networks, as is common for many

elderly Natives, those persons would be knowledgeable about local flora and fauna.

Knowledge in these cases would stem from current conversations with extractors, sharing

in the bag, catches, and quarry, and preparing and storing food and by-products.

Response rates among respondents were lower on the questions about species among

1989 (postspill pretest) than 1991 (postspill posttest), while responses among panel members

were about the same in 1989 and 1991. The lower rates in 1989 reflect the differences

between a period five months after the spill in which transiency was at its peak, and a

period nearly two years after the spill when transiency had lessened.
Jorgensen - An Analysis of Social Indicators of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 77

Upon tallying proportions of response rates from highest to lowest for the 77 species

or groups of species, the principal ones about which residents of the spill area professed

knowledge were those which were extracted for commodities (e.g., salmon, halibut, cod,

crabs). Response rates were much higher for more species in Periphery villages than in Hub

villages (Table 1).

Table I. Response Rates by Species, Hub:Periphery Contrast, KIP Instrument, Pretest and Posttest Samples

Combined, N316, 1989 and 1991.

HUB

Species or variety

Silver salmon

Halibut

Red salmon

Pink salmon

Berries"

King salmon

Moose

Cod

Other mammals

Response Rate

74%

61%

59%

48%

48%

44%

43%

36%

36%

Rank

1.

3.

3.

3.

5.

6.

7.5.

7.5.

9.5.

9.5

11.5.

11.5.

13.5.

13.5.

16.

16.

16.

19.5.

19.5

PERIPHERY

Species ill: variety

Silver salmon

Chum salmon

Red salmon

King salmon

Pink salmon

Clams

Halibut

DuckS

Cod

Tanner crab

Red King crabs

Snow crabs

Ptarmigan

Brown bear

Dolly Varden

Variant fox

Otter

Moose

Kelp

Response Rate

92%

85%

85%

85%

82%

80%

79%

79%

69%

69%

68%

68%

67%

67%

64%

64%

64%

61%

61%

" Italicized items are not sold as commodities.

Table 1 rank-orders and contrasts the species by whether respondents resided in Hub

or Periphery villages. Nonnatives comprise about 90% of the populations of the three Hub

villages, Kenai, Valdez, and Kodiak City. Nonnatives also constitute 75% of the two largest

Periphery villages (Seldovia and Cordova), while Natives comprise from 78% to 100% of the

smaller Periphery villages. The differences between Hub and Periphery responses reflect

different knowledge based on different uses and different familiarity with environments.

Although the recognition of the differences between these two types of villages is

inescapable, the remarkable similarities among Natives is masked by the Hub:Periphery

dichotomy. Upon controlling for race/ethnicity, we discovered that over 95% of Natives in

Hub and Periphery villages responded to all 77 questions about resource sufficiency. No

nonnative responded to all 77 questions.

Natives and nonnatives differ significantly and dramatically in the knowledge they

claim to possess about the naturally occurring species in the local areas in which they reside.

Inasmuch as nonnatives responded to queries about so few species, and inasmuch as the

species about which nonnatives responded were almost exclusively harvested and sold as
78 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

commodities, we may question, then, whether Natives and non natives perceive the

environment in the same way.

Perceptions of local environments. The spill exercised effects on the ideas that

Native and nonnative populations expressed about the biological and abiological

environment. We addressed several ideological and ethical topics with the protocol, some

about the environment and some about the acquisition of skills to gain livelihoods in the

environment. We thought the ideas about environment and about ethical principles were

related and we hypothesized that traditional Native ideas would prove to be different from

nonnative ideas. We further hypothesized that if Natives were well-educated, fully employed,

and high earners, that they would more likely express ideas similar to those expressed by

nonnatives about ethical principles pertaining to competition and to the personal benefits

from acquiring and using skills.

Our reliability and validity tests yielded four variables which addressed (1) how

respondents envisaged the environment (K29), (2) whether they attached significant symbols

to features of the environment (Q7), (3) whether they expressed ethical ideals about the

responsibility for acquiring skills and about who should benefit from those skills once

acquired (K28), and (4) whether a person should compete for personal gain, or cooperate

with others for communitarian ends (K30). (See the box below, and also see the frequency

distributions of AQI and KIP data in Tables A1-AZ.)

Q7. Significant Symbols Attacbed to Places in Native Environments. Does

the respondent have special memories about the wildlife or the places.

such as springs, promontories, lakes, capes, hills, woods. bays, lagoons. in

hislher area which the respondent's family likes to recount?

(1) none,

(2) a few,

(3) many.

(4) many which have accumulated over two or more generations.

K28. Ethical Responsibility for Attainment. Who is responsible for

personal, family, and village attainments of all kinds: success in

occupations. education. income, businesses. village affairs and security. Is

the individual specified as the person who should be solely responsible for

hislher attainments, and are individuals free of obligations to others

except, perhaps, one's own nuclear family? Or is the individual recognized

as having responsibilities toward others--in the family, a wider network of

kiospersons and affines, or the village--and any successes that accrue do so

in a group context through the efforts of several persons?

(1) A person should strive to make hiroselClherself a success.

Success is earned through individual effort (saving.

delaying gratification. hard work).

(2) A person should work hard to assist hislher family, save

scarce resources to help hislher family in times of need

and for future expectations. such as educations for one's

children.

(3) A person should work hard with whatever skills

and resources he or she possesses to assist one's family,

wider circle of kiospersons and affines, and the village.

Giving and sharing take precedence over saving

and assisting self or nuclear family to the exclusion of

others.

K29. Ethics and Significant Symbols Attached to

Environment.

(1) The environment, or features of it (riven, forests,

coal seams, oil deposits, fish, sea mammals, etc.) are

viewed as commodities, that is, items whose values are

established in the marketplace and are available for

purchase or sale.

(2) Combination of commodity and spiritual views.

(3) The environment, or features of it, are viewed as

things endowed with spirits, or which possess special

relations to natives and to which significant cultural

symbols are attached (beauty, spirituality, helpfulness,

traditions). The general environment is not

conceptualized as a commodity. (Fish, ivory, and other

by-products may be sold, but what symbols are attached

to those items?)

100. Ethics of Personal Cooperation/Competition.

(1) A person should compete with others so as to do the

best for one's self.

(2) 1, 3, or 4 depending on circumstances.

(3) A person should do the best one can in developing

and employing skills. The fruits of some of those skills--

such as hunting. fIShing. and food preparation--should

be shared widely throughout the family and beyond.

Some other skills, such as net hanging or outboard

motor repair, should be used for personal gain.

(4) A person should develop and employ skills, work in

cooperation with others, and share in a communitarian

fashion (perhaps principally on the basis of presumed

need) the products of those skills.

Table 2 tallies only the proportions of Natives and nonnatives in 1989 and 1991

whose responses on the ideology and ethical topics were "Traditional-Communitarian." The
Jorgensen - An Analysis of Social Indicators of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 79

variables are ordered into either 3 or 4 ranks. The highest rank (3 or 4) represents

"traditional-communitarian;" the lowest rank (1) represents "Western;" and the mid-ranks

are blends. Thus, in Table 2 we see the proportions who thought that a person should seek

success for family, networks of kinspersons, elders, friends, and the village (K28), that

resources and the environment have spiritual and also cultural significance (K29), that

personal ethics should seek cooperation-comrnunitarian ends (K30), and that he/she

personally has many significant places in the environment to which memories of events are

attached (07).

Table 2. Communitarian, Historical, and Non-Commodity Ideas about the Environment, Native:Non-Natlve

Contrasts, KIP Postspill Pretest and Posttest Samples In Percent, N316, 1989 and 1991.

K28 K29 K30 Q7

Success for Kin- Resources & Env Persons Should Many

Friends-Village Spiritual/Cultural Cooperate Symbols

(Communitarian) Significance (Communitarian) over

and Compete Generations

Natives 1989 46 25 51 36

Natives 1991 46 46 80 44

Non-Natives 1989 14 6 26 7

Non-Native 1991 27 10 36 5

The differences between Natives and nonnatives are significant for each variable

(Table A1), suggesting that Natives and nonnatives have very different views about why

persons should acquire skills and for whom they should be used, how they cognize the

environment, and the symbols attached to significant memories and places within their local

environments. It is also likely that the spill affected (upward) Native and nonnative

assessments of the non-commodity values of the environment and the ethical idea that

cooperation should dominate work behavior, or should be coequal with competition.

The differences in proportions of responses for Natives and nonnatives on these

ideology and ethical questions between 1989 and 1991 reflect changes almost surely

attributable to the spill. To measure changes that occurred among ethics that were espoused

immediately after the spill and two years after the spill while controlling for specification

error, we assessed the responses of panel members in 1989 and 1991 and tested for the

significance of differences between panel responses and the responses of pretest and posttest

sample responses for the same years. The differences on the four items (07, K28-K30) are

not significant when controlling for ethnicity. Table 3 demonstrates changes in responses by

panel members on two items between 1989 and 1991.

The differences between ethnic subsamples in the pretest and posttest samples and

both waves of the panel are significant, although as is demonstrated in Tables 2 and 3

slightly larger proportions of nonnatives in 1991 than in 1989 expressed the idea that the

environment possessed an intrinsic spiritual value beyond the commodity value of the

resources which comprise it, and that personal responsibility extends beyond self (or

conjugal pair or nuclear family) to a wider network of kinspeople. Nevertheless, nonnatives

changed the least in their ideas about the environments value (K29 principally commodity

or a blend of commodity and such features as clean water and pristine views of the

landscape and seascape) and about whether they claimed to have many significant memories
80 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Table 3. Ethical codes for personal responsibility and ideas about the environment, Native and nonnative panel,

N72, 1989-1991.

1989 => Native Non-Native

1991 {l

. Personal Family Fam&Village Personal Family Fam&Village

Personal Succ. S 16 S 26 16 18 7 ~/

Family Success II 16 II 38 18 22 4 44

Village -Family

Success S 27 37 2 9 2 13

2/ 37 4J 36 ~9 13

K29 Ethics and Significant Environmental Symbols

1989 => Native Non-Native

1991 ~

Commodity Blend Spirit-Symbol Commodity Blend Spirit-Symbol

Commodity 6 13 12 3/ 8 16 3 27

mend 6 19 19 44 14 48 6 68

Spirit-Symbolic 6 (, 13 25 2 3 5

/8 38 44 25 64 /I

about their environments to which they attached significance (Table 2 only). The changes

in the Native panel toward communitarian ideas and ethics are more marked on all topics.

I conclude, as an hypothesis, that these changes do not represent chance variation,

but rather for non natives they represent reflection about the consequences of the oil spill

for the environment, for their occupations, and for family life in Alaska following a period

in which assistance among neighbors was more widespread than in the prespill period.

Assistance between and among nonnatives fitted the context of emergencies-immediate

and short-lived.

Among Natives, too, the oil spill and its protracted consequences influenced

reconsideration, or deeper consideration of the environment's meanings to them. Those

meanings are "traditional-communitarian." Their expressions of communitarian ethics about

responsibilities and ideas about the spiritual nature of the environment and the symbols they

attach to it, were perforce complemented by increased visiting and increased distributions

through wider networks of kinspersons and friends in and out of their home villages

following the spill.

Subsistence activities and the uses of local environments. There were huge

discrepancies between nonnative and Native incomes in each of the six waves of our

research from the winter of 1987 through the winter of 1991.2 Nonnative households, which

were smaller than Native households, enjoyed incomes which averaged twice those of Native

households. Two years after the spill the incomes of nonnatives were less than they were

immediately following the spill, while paradoxically the incomes of Natives were higher in

1991 than in 1989. Native sample and panel respondents earned about 50% of what

nonnatives earned in 1989, and about 60% in 1991.

2 We conducted two research waves in 1989, one before and one after the spill. The KIP variable K4

measures household annual income. It is based on an estimate provided by the respondent for the aggregate

income of all members of the household. The household comprises co-residents under a single roof, but includes

persons residing in attached housing whose domestic activities are integrated with those of the main residence.
Jorgensen - An Analysis of Social Indicators of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 81

With that backdrop let us review the differences between Natives and nonnatives in

1989 and 1991 as to how they used their incomes and how subsistence is fitted into the

organization of those uses. In both years Natives invested more of their incomes into the

harvests of wild resources than did nonnatives, but in 1991 Natives invested less than they

invested in 1989. A similar pattern of change occurs in the item measuring the variety of

species harvested. Natives harvested a greater variety of species than nonnatives, but less

than they had harvested in 1989.3

The most interesting difference obtains for the proportions of wild food in the diet.'

The proportion of Natives reporting 50% or more in 1989 was 52% and in 1991 was 46%.

The proportion of nonnatives reporting diets containing more than 50% wild foods was 24%

and 26% in 1989 and 1991. The proportion of Natives who gained more than 50% was less

for Natives and more for nonnatives in 1991 than 1989 (panel responses confirm these

differences, although panel respondents, both Native and nonnative, gained less of their

diets from wild resources in 1989 and 1991 than did pretest and posttest respondentsj.' In

good years and bad the proportion of Native households that gained more than 50% of their

diets from wild resources was twice that of nonnative households. There were fewer species

and less biomass harvested by Natives in the 18 months following the spill than in the 18

months prior to the spill. There were, consequently, less wild resources to eat and less wild

resources to share during 1990 and early 1991.

The sharing variables-distributions of cash, labor, and resources as donor or

recipient-reveal incommensurable differences between Native and nonnative subsistence

activities, the ways in which those relations are organized, and the ideas that rationalize

them. The 12 protocol items" measuring sharing-4 cash, 4 labor-services, 4

3 The KIP ordinal variable K1 measures the household's subsistence harvesting expenses as an estimated

percentage of total annual income. The expenses include the purchase and repair of equipment, purchase of

fuel, purchase and repair of clothing, purchase of ammunition, food, and incidentals required for travel and

camping. The ranks from (0) None to (4) High (30% and over). The ordinal variable K2 measures the variety

of naturaIly occurring resources harvested annuaIly by the informant's family household. The responses are

classified into 5 ranks in which (1) = no naturally occurring species harvested, (5) = more than 3 species in each

of the foIlowing categories for which species are available in the respondent's local environment: land mammals,

sea mammals, waterfowl or seabirds, marine invertebrates, fish (fresh, anadromous, and/or saltwater species),

and plants (marine or land). Ranks (2) through (4) measure intermediate amounts of varieties harvested.

4 The KIP ordinal K3 measures the proportion of naturaIly occurring harvested protein (wild meat) in the

annual diet of the household. It is an aggregate estimate for household members and includes items that are

harvested by members of the household as weIl as items that are received by household members through

gifting, sharing, or exchange. The range is from (1) less than 25% to (4) 75% to 100%.

s In 1989 and 1991 Native panel respondents gained less of their diets from wild foods than did Native

pretest and posttest respondents during those same years. For example, in 1991 50% of Native panel

respondents gained more than 25% of their diets from wild foods, whereas 75% of Native posttest respondents

gained more that 25% of their diets from wild foods.

6 Regular sharing within the village means that respondents, on a regular basis, donate or receive cash

(KllA-B), labor-services (K13A-B), and goods-resources (K15A-B) from persons in households other than their

own, not necessarily relatives. Regular sharing outside the village means that respondents donate to or receive

cash (K12A-B), labor-services (K14A-B), or goods-resources (K16A-B) from residents of a viIIage different from
82 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

goods-resources-are divided into donors and recipients, and divided again into whether the

sharing occurs between persons in the same village or different villages.

The mechanism of sharing remains deeply embedded in the economic system of

Natives in contemporary Alaska, even as they have been integrated into the peripheries of

the market. Things-food, services, cash loans-are bought and sold in the market. Except

as occasional gifts to relatives and friends, gifts to legally sanctioned institutions that can be

deducted from gross income in calculating taxes, and a variety of trusts that allow persons

to transfer resources while minimizing tax obligations, sharing is a modest feature of a

market system carried out in a very different spirit and rationalized in a very different way

from Native sharing.

In good times and bad, Natives have maintained their sharing practices, and these

practices are not restricted to holidays or to actions to avert tax liabilities. These practices

cannot be characterized as activities that occur solely because of exigencies, nor are they

practices in which each person who participates does so with the specific expectation of

being repaid in kind, amount, and in a specified time by the persons and households for

whom he or she gives or does something. The system works in a context of seasonal and

annual variations-frequently severe-so there is no intention to deny the utility of the

system. If anything, Natives are instrumental and are expert at adjusting to the vagaries of

environmental fluctuation. So whereas the Native system evens out bad times as best Natives

can, the Native organization of production has persisted because goods and services are

shared for their own sake and not for a hidden agenda or for a misunderstood agenda.'

Regardless of the season, most sharing between households occurs within villages.

The sharing is characterized by small quantities of food, short term uses of equipment, and

small services, such as tending children or repairing windows. Sharing also takes place

between persons who reside in different villages. Our data demonstrate that intervillage

sharing increased following the spill as fewer resources were harvested.

The sharing variables in the protocol are very informative. We note that the

variables that measure the sharing of income behave differently from the variables that

measure the sharing of goods (equipment, food) and the sharing of labor-services.

Native:Nonnative contrasts among sharing variables are especially distinct. Let us focus on

the sharing of cash to highlight the differences (Table 4). In 1989, Natives shared cash more

widely within and beyond the village (as donors and recipients) than did nonnatives. And

the respondents' on a regular basis. Sharing within the village is ranked from (1) "none," through (2) "pooled

within the household," and (3) "occasional sharing with other households in the village," to (4) "regular sharing

with other households in the village." There are three ranks for sharing with distant villages: "none," occasional,"

and "regular."

7 There is a large literature that treats subsistence economics such as the Alaska Native economy described

here, as self-regulating systems which work to optimize Native survival in places of unequally distributed and

fluctuating resources. The actions of giving resources, labor, and the like by the participants in the system are

unwitting, albeit crucial elements in maintaining a system that regulates itself. There are no independent

measures of the self-regulating system. It is an idea without empirical warrant, but then, so is the invisible hand

of the market.
! -

Jorgensen - An Analysis of Social Indicators of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 83

in 1991, with larger incomes but fewer wild foods in their larders, Natives reported increases

in sharing cash in and out of the village.

Table 4. Proportions of "regular" cash sharing, KIP pretest and posttest, contrasts of Native and nonnative

subsamples in percent, N316, 1989 and 1991.

1989

Cash-Donor

In Out

1991

Cash-Donor

In Out

1989

Cash-Receipt

In Out

1991

Cash-Receipt

In Out •

Natives

Non-Natives

2

6

8 24

11 14

8 0

19 2

7 20

4 L

4

4

., .,.,...; _.., ~~f':'~~':':?"aK''£4Lhz;::tSA8.~···~~;; _

Greater proportions of nonnatives, too, shared cash more widely in 1991 than 1989.

Yet the only form of income sharing in which they outstripped Natives was in the regular

sharing of cash with households in other communities (K12B). It is this item, over all others,

that distinguishes the way in which nonnatives fit into local subsistence economies. They

regularly (some occasionally) remit funds to households located in different communities,

presumably the communities from whence the respondent came, where members of his

family reside, and to which he/she will return. Following the spill in 1990 and 1991,

unusually large proportions of married nonnative respondents, including long-term residents,

were not co-residing with their spouses and families in the villages in which they were

interviewed (nonnative residency is discussed below). Remittances to family members were

commonplace for such respondents.

The relations between income and the three forms of sharing among Natives is very

much affected by employment. As months of employment increase, so do incomes. And as

incomes increase, the higher earners among Natives tend to share income, and resources

(equipment, say), but little else. Employment restricts the time that can be given to

harvesting, preparing, and storing wild resources, and also restricts the time in which labor

can be shared.

In 1989, when Native incomes were less than 50% of nonnative incomes, Natives

who earned the most tended to be frequent donors of cash and less frequent donors of labor

and services within the village. These high earners were also donors of resources (such as

equipment or food), although infrequent, to relatives in other villages from whence they also

received resources. The employment rates for and the months employed by the higher

earners were high, and several had recently returned from the spill cleanup as we conducted

our research in September of 1989. They had some time to share labor at home, and some

funds to share. They did not have time or, perhaps, the inclination to harvest resources

which they deemed oiled and tainted and then share those resources at home.

In 1991 Native employment and incomes increased. Most of the employment

increase was for short term jobs (between 1 and 9 months). The larger incomes among

people who were not employed full time correlates positively with every form of sharing,

significantly with sharing of resources-giving and getting-in and out of the village.
84 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Some comparisons of the sharing of labor and resources that occurred in spill area

villages in 1989 and 1991 reveal the differences in the scale locations of Native and

nonnative practices. Table 5 compares "regular" sharing activities of Natives and nonnatives.

Table s. Proportions of "Regular"Labor and Resource Sharing Within and Outside the Village, KIP Pretest

and Posttest, Contrasts of Native and ~on·Native Subsamples In Percent, N316, 1989 and 1991.

1989 1991 1989 1991

Labor-Donor Labor-Donor Resource-Donor Resource-Donor

In Out In Out In Out In Out

Natives 41 8 64 20 43 17 66 36

Non-Natives 15 5 35 10 19 2 29 14

1989 1991 1989 1991

Labor-Receipt Labor-Receipt Resource-Receipt Resource-Receipt

In Out In Out In Out In Out

Natives 35 8 64 20 45 18 68 25

Non-Natives 14 4 23 9 19 2 25 14

In 1989, significantly greater proportions of natives engaged in all types oflabor- and

resource-sharing practices than did nonnatives. In 1991, although the proportions of

nonnatives increased in sharing practices, the proportional increase of natives was

significantly greater, as was the extensiveness of the practices (Table AI).

Native incomes increased between 1989 and 1991, and so did all forms of sharing.

Nonnative incomes decreased, but all forms of sharing increased. The increases in sharing

by Natives are functions of (1) the decrease in wild resources available to Natives, and (2)

the reluctance of Natives to harvest tainted resources. Our prespill data demonstrate that

economic exigencies were more influential than either the availability of resources or the

reluctance to harvest tainted resources in accounting for the increases in nonnative sharing

practices during the emergencies of 1989 and the resumption of the bust cycle of 1991. The

proportions of nonnatives engaged in sharing increased between 1989 and 1991, but the

extensiveness of the sharing is very modest when compared with Natives.

Although Natives report sharing cash more widely than do nonnatives, the effects

of greater incomes are apparent in the Native subsamples for 1989 and 1991. Focussing first

on transactions within the village, in 1989 less than 50% of Natives were "regular" labor

donors or recipients, or were regular resource donors or recipients. In 1991 about two-thirds

of Natives were regular donors and recipients of labor and resources. Sharing with persons

in other villages reveals similarly marked changes. In 1989 less than one-tenth of the Native

respondents gave to or received labor assistance from residents of other villages, and less

than one-fifth gave to or received resources from residents in other villages. In 1991 a fifth

of the respondents both gave and received labor assistance. The most significant differences

are in the increases in regular sharing of resources with persons in other villages. Thirty-six

percent of Native respondents regularly gave to, and 25% regularly received resources from

persons in other villages. Thus, in 1989 sharing outside the village was less frequent than

sharing inside the village for Natives, but cash-an easy item to transport-was shared by
Jorgensen - An Analysis of Social Indicators of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 85

many who engaged in sharing between villages. As incomes increased and wild resources

decreased, all forms of regular sharing increased.

Nonnatives, too, increased the extent to which labor and resources, labor in

particular, were shared between 1989 and 1991. Nonnatives donated labor within the village

nearly two-and-one-halftimes more frequently in 1991 than 1989. Yet in 1989 Natives were

regular donors and recipients of labor and resources within the village at a rate 2.7 times

greater than nonnatives. The comparisons of relations between villages is more striking.

Natives gave and received labor 1.8 times as often as nonnatives, and gave and received

resources regularly 9 times as often as non natives. In 1991, the average rate differential

between Natives and nonnatives is nearly identical for all comparisons except the giving and

receiving of resources between persons in different villages. The marked increase in the

regularity with which nonnatives gave and received resources reduces the differential with

Natives to 1:2.2.

On univariate differences between Natives and Nonnatives in subsistence practices.

Ifwe ask whether Natives and nonnatives invest portions of their income into the harvesting

of wild foods, the answer is "yes" for both. Ifwe ask whether Natives and nonnatives identify

some species in their environments, again the answer is "yes"for both. Ifwe ask whether any

Native and nonnative identifies spiritual nature as the preeminent attribute of the

environment, reports that places in the environment have special meanings for them and

their kinspersons (past and present), harvests a variety of species, have wild foods in their

annual diets, and share resources and labor with persons within and beyond their village,

and if the answer to each is "yes" for at least one person in each population, then the

difference between Natives and nonnatives does not exist except, perhaps, as a matter of

degree.

Our interest was not only whether some Natives and nonnatives observed these

customs, held these beliefs, or engaged in these practices. We sought to learn what

proportions of, and to what extent persons in each subsample observed those customs, held

those ideas, and engaged in those practices. The topics, taken one at a time, reveal that the

"degree" of difference between Natives and nonnatives is significant on every idea, every

ethic, every sentiment, and every activity compared (Table AI). The sum of the differences

is interesting, while the claim that the differences are of degree is redundant. The

organization of the differences is more interesting than the sum of the differences. In the

sixth and final volume in the social indicators project (Social Indicators Study of Coastal

Alaskan Villages VI. Postspill Analysis of the Exxon Valdez Spill Area, 1988-1992.TR 157

Minerals Management Service, Alaska OCS Region. New Haven: Submitted by Human

Relations Area Files Inc., 1995) we focus our attention on a very large number of topics,

one of which is the organizations of the differences in the spill area, one Native and one

nonnative.

In that volume, far too complex to summarize here, I demonstrate that the spill had

effects on both the Native and nonnative populations. The responses to the spill were not

the same. Indeed, the differences between the responses of Natives and nonnatives were

characterized by marked differences in the manner and amount in which Natives engaged

the mechanisms through which they shared, including wide kinship and friendship networks

not available to nonnatives. The mechanisms and the activities of Natives were distinguished
86 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

from nonnatives by dint of place of birth, ethnicity, long-term residence, and different ideas

about community, the environment, and the benefits from work.

CULTURALLY DISTINCT RESPONSES TO THE SPILL

Some of the spill's effects were immediate and short-lived, others accumulated, as

differences between our 1989 and 1991 data presented in Social Indicators Study (SIS)

Volumes V and VI demonstrate. The spill:

• occasioned changes in some household compositions;

• precipitated disputes between commercial fishermen;

• prompted persons in large proportions of households to avail themselves of a wide

variety of social services, including family counseling, personal emotional

counseling, financial assistance, and health care;

• occasioned an increase in participation in extra-curricular activities and events

sponsored by church-related organizations;

• made increasing numbers of persons aware of political issues, economic conflicts

within their villages, and personal economic conflicts within their villages;

• made almost all respondents skeptical that future economic developments that

may occur in their local areas would provide benefits to local residents or be

controlled locally; and between 1989 and 1991,

• occasioned an increase in the proportion of non natives who espoused ethics,

sentiments, and ideas about rules in household membership and behavior, the

goals for the attainment of skills to become successful (in life's several pursuits),

the roles of competition and cooperation in economic and subsistence activities,

and the principles that should be followed in enculturating children that mixed

Western and communitarian principles, while also occasioning a significant

increase in the proportion of Natives who espoused communitarian ethics,

sentiments, and ideas.

Several ideological items and their corollaries distinguish Native from nonnative

social and economic organizations. These items comprise two contrasting sets (with some

overlap): one "Communitarian" (Native) and the other "Western" (nonnative). Among the

KIP data, some of the ideological items that characteristically differentiate Natives from

non natives are rules for household dynamics (K20), ethical responsibility of attainment

(K28), environmental ethics (K29), and ethics of personal cooperation (K30). The corollaries

in social practices of these ideological items include gender distinctions and other behaviors

commonly employed in the enculturating of children (K31), the dynamics of household

composition (K19), the kinds and amounts of sharing practices in which persons engage

(KllA-K16B), and the kinds and amounts of subsistence activities in which people engage

(KI-K3). I have demonstrated that Natives and nonnatives are organized differently on

these key social features--ideas, sentiments, acts. In SIS VI I demonstrate that these

organizations, one "Western" and the other "comrnunitarian," disposed nonnatives and

Natives to respond differently to the oil spill on several related indicators.
Jorgensen - An Analysis of Social Indicators of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 87

The differences between the structure of Native society, in general, and nonnative

society, in general, are measurable, empirical, real. Let us call the differences "cultural."

The movement of nonnative positions toward those of Natives I presume to be temporary

responses to the threats to household economies created by the spill and exacerbated by the

changes in the commercial fish markets. The movement of many Natives toward espousing

the most extreme communitarian ideas, too, is a response to exigencies. But those

"exigencies" were protracted over 22 months during our investigations, and continued

through mid-1993, 4Yz years after the spill."

There are some marked differences between Natives residing north of the Gulf of

Alaska and those south." Natives in the spill area are different from their congeners in

western and northern Alaska in that a much larger proportion of them fish commercially

and reside in complex villages in which they are a minority. Average Native households in

the spill area are smaller, the proportion of single person households is greater, the

proportions of persons employed, and employed in the private sector, are greater. There

is, then, some evidence that Natives in the commercial fishing, oil- and tourist-industry

regions of Kodiak Island, the Alaska Peninsula, Cook Inlet, and Prince William Sound are

more similar to nonnatives on some employment and demographic measures than are

Natives north of the Alaska Peninsula.

In the spill area, the major businesses-commercial fishing-related and

oil-related-and minor businesses-tourism and guiding-are owned and controlled by

nonnatives, as are the businesses that service the larger communities. Native practices have

accommodated to nonnative practices in this context, but Natives, even in the largest

villages, maintain communitarian activities that distinguish them from nonnatives.

The spill accounts for the increase of Natives who attribute spiritual and cultural

significance to the environment, espouse cooperation rather than competition, report that

they attained skills with the help from and so as to benefit their households, wider networks

of kinspersons and friends, and the community, and that they indulge their children, while

teaching them by precept to do likewise with their own children. For Natives, the spill is as

memorable as the earthquake of 1964, yet the spill was man-made, a "normal accident," not

a natural disaster. The response to the normal accident was to recognize the source of the

problem and the differences in power between the persons and corporations responsible for

the problem (and its cleanup) and the persons and environment which suffered the

consequences.

In response, Natives came to accentuate the communitarian principles of Native

society. They did so through reflection, through conversations that accompany daily practices

of sharing and visiting, and through attendance at public meetings that addressed

consequences of the spill for the community and region and remedies for those

consequences. In some cases as consequences of the spill, Natives accepted new members

to their households or bid their goodbyes to former members. Native recognition of the

a See Social Indicators Study, Volume VI, Chapter 2.

9 See Social Indicators Study, Volume III.
88 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

ideological basis of Native society was heightened by their posts pill predicaments, the

practical responses to those predicaments, and the conversations and activities in which

Natives engaged about the spill. The wide-spread similarity among Native social, political

and religious responses to the spill are drawn from the structure I will call "culture,"

empirically warranted, that our measures confirm.

Nonnative responses to the spill provide evidence of ideological and practical

changes in daily life as responses to a disaster that harmed the environment from which they

gained their livelihoods and which threatened their ability to survive economically. The

responses appear to be crisis-oriented and do not suggest a permanent change toward

Native practices, ethics, ideas, and sentiments.

Changes in Household Compositions and Sizes as Spill Consequences

The AQI samples and panel yield results that complement the KIP results. I

introduce AQI data to analyze changes in household composition and household size

because the protocol ratings lump household sizes of 1 to 3 persons into a single category,

whereas AQI data distinguish 1 person households from 2 and from 3 person households.

AQI data allow for a more careful analysis, then, of fluctuation in 1 and 2 person

households.

Whereas Native households were slightly larger than nonnative households in the

postspill samples and in the waves of the panel in 1989 and 1991, both Native and nonnative

households were smaller in 1991 than they were in 1989. The decrease in household sizes,

in conjunction with changes in household types between 1989 and 1991, reveal changes

occasioned by the spill and the consequent depression of fish prices. Nonnative household

arrangements demonstrate considerable flux in 1989, with a marked change toward single

person households in 1991.

The household arrangements for about 85% of nonnatives in coastal Alaska prior

to the spill were single person," conjugal pair, or nuclear family. During the summer of

1989 when population movement was at its greatest through commercial fishing closures and

clean-up activities, single, conjugal pair, and nuclear households accounted for about 76%

of nonnative living arrangements; 24% of nonnatives co-resided in a variety of non-family

households as renters and co-renters (Table 6).

In 1991 about 88% of nonnatives resided in single, conjugal pair, or nuclear family

arrangements. Among the 12% that did not, 4% were single parent households (stable for

the panel, and increase in proportion for postspill 2 over postspill 1). The changes in 1991

clearly indicate a return to the dominant household arrangements before the spill, and

demonstrate that households of panel respondents were volatile in 1989 when large numbers

of households had boarders.

10 Single person households comprise large proportions of nonnative living arrangements in the commercial

fishing villages, whether or not the respondent is married.
Jorgensen· An Analysis of Social Indicators of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

Table 6. Household Living Arrangements of Natives and Non-Natives, AQI Data, NS66, 1989 and 1991.

Non-Native Native

Single,

Single, Conjugal

Conjugal Pair, Other Pair, Other

Nuclear Forms Nuclear Forms

1989

Panel-Wave 1 77 23 49 51

Postspill 76 24 68 32

1991

Panel Wave 2 91 9 61 39

Postspill 2 86 14 66 34

89

./

Native households in 1989 and 1991 reflect states of flux. In every measure of Native

household types conducted both in the first phase and in the Exxon Valdez spill phase of the

social indicators research, household living arrangements other than single person, conjugal

pair, and nuclear family comprise large proportions of the totals. It is the case that most

married Native respondents between the ages of, roughly, 25 and 45, sought conjugal pair

or nuclear household residences. Economic circumstances normally determined whether

those persons could satisfy their wishes and how long they would be able to maintain those

residences .

Among Natives, conjugal pair and nuclear arrangements increase as months of

employment and income increase, while mixed and remnant households (and other

composite household arrangements) increase as employment and income decrease and/or

become less stable. Instability of months of employment, sources of income, and amounts

of income characterize Native respondents in both postspill samples and in both waves of

the panel." The contrasts with nonnative panel household arrangements in 1991 are

interesting. Discounting changes from conjugal pair to nuclear households (due to birth of

children), changes occurred among 27% of Native and 11% of nonnative panel households

between 1989 and 1991. The changes for both correlate with fluctuating sources and

amounts of income.

Unlike nonnatives, household living arrangements among Natives, I reiterate, do not

always coincide with domestic functions. It is common for two or more Native households,

linked through kinship, to recognize themselves as a domestic unit, storing food together,

eating together, tending children communally, and the like. The expectations for, and the

behavior of close kinspersons - such as an adult son or daughter, or aging parent" -

living nearby, but not in the household, facilitates the movement of persons from one house

to another as exigencies arise. The Native response to exigencies is to share and

accommodate.

11 Differences in panel household arrangements are direct measures of change. Panel:postspill

differences are not significant for 1991.

12 Frequently the son or daughter is divorced or separated and co-residing with children-notes

that 27% of Native households in both panel waves are single parents with children, and sometimes

the son or daughter is married and co-residing in a conjugal pair arrangement.
90 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Communitarian Behavior: Visiting, Dining as Guests, Attending Public Meetings

Again I use AQI data to supplement KIP data. Inferring from our prespill research

among nonnatives in coastal Alaska," the period immediately following the spill occasioned

visiting and dining among nonnatives much beyond our expectations: about 52% visited

friends or relatives within the village 3 or more days in the week prior to being interviewed,

and about 21% had eaten at least one meal as a guest in a friend's or relative's home during

the 2 days prior to being interviewed. In 1991 visiting and dining among nonnatives in the

days immediately prior to being interviewed had decreased markedly since 1989, but the

proportions who engaged in each activity remained high: about 40% visited persons on 3

or more days and about 17% dined as guests in the homes of friends or relatives (Table 7).

The visiting and dining activities of non-Natives in 1989 reflect the response to the crisis

caused by the spill, as analyzed in the section on subsistence. By 1991 both visiting and

dining had decreased to levels significantly below those of Natives.

Table 7. Frequency of visiting and dining with friends or relatives in past few days, Natives and nonnatives,

AQI data, NS66, 1989 and 1991.

Non-Native

Visits on 3+ Days 1 or More Meals

in Past Week in Last 2 Days

Native

Visits on 3+ Days 1 or More Meals

in Past Week in Last 2 Days

1989

Panel Wave 1

Postspill

1991

Panel Wave 2

Postspill 2

52

49

36

44

21

22

16

18

61

53

42

52

The important point here is that proportions of nonnatives and Natives who made

frequent visits to friends and neighbors were quite similar in the summer of 1989. In 1991

Natives continued to make frequent visits to friends and relatives while nonnatives visited

significantly less often. The difference between the proportions of Natives in the postspill

1 and 2 samples who recently ate meals as guests, however, was greater (18%)14 than the

differences between the comparable nonnative subsamples in 1989 and 1991. Natives more

frequently visited and shared meals than nonnatives in both research waves, but the decrease

in meals for Natives is a consequence of Natives having harvested many fewer wild resources

in the year following the spill than was normally the case for them.

Nonnative visiting and sharing of meals, although high in both postspill waves, had

reduced considerably by 22 months following the spill. As the early crisis response waned,

nonnative crises responses waned.

13 See Social Indicators Study, Volume III.

14 The proportions of the Native postspilll (1989) and 2 (1991) samples who recently ate several meals as

guests are highlighted in Table 10.
Jorgensen - An Analysis of Social Indicators of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 91

In the first phase of our study we found that one communitarian activity that

consistently proved to engage Natives was attendance at public meetings focussed on public

or corporate issues. As we predicted from the first phase research and from the

prespill:postspill Kodiak Island research, Native attendance at public meetings was high in

1989 and also in 1991: about one-third of all Native postspill respondents and from

one-third (1989) to one-quarter of all panel respondents (1991) had attended at least one

public meeting in the month prior to the date of their interviews. The summer of 1989 was

certainly a crisis period during which public meetings were held in every community in our

sample. Yet all business and all complaints and all problems triggered by the spill were not

resolved in the summer of 1989. Compensation claims were discussed, as were changes in

plans by various communities for local infrastructure developments, readiness preparations

for the next spill, issues in relation to the 1991 commercial fishing season, and the like.

In 1989 nonnatives matched, and in 1991 nonnatives exceeded the proportions of

Natives who attended public meetings." This was no fortuity, nonnatives-whether

employed in the private or public sectors-were vitally concerned about maintaining their

livelihoods in the spill area. Acquiring information, discussing alternatives, exerting political

pressure were deemed important to doing so: fish prices had plunged, and debts had

therefore gone unpaid for many spill area residents.

Another finding of the research conducted in the first phase was that greater

proportions of Natives than nonnatives voted in state and local elections. It is evident from

Table A2 that Natives and nonnatives voted at rates much in excess of national rates in the

most recent local and state elections. In the entire spill area, it is also the case that following

the spill nonnative panel members (not shown) increased their participation in statewide

elections by 20% (to 83%). Our interviews left little doubt that panel respondents were

voting their interests. The proportions of Natives who voted in the most recent Native

corporation elections following the spill were clearly voting their interests as well (about

80% of eligibles exercised their franchise).

The spill increased the communitarian activities of nonnatives for almost a year

following the event, but by two years after the event many of those activities had waned

(visiting, dining with friends and relatives and other activities discussed in the subsistence

chapters). Attendance at public meetings and exercising the franchise had not. These

legal-rational means to influence personal, occupational, and economic interests enjoyed

very wide participation during the two years immediately following the spill.

Is There a Difference in the Native and Nonnative Expectations for Normal Accidents?

We established that commodity valuation takes precedence in the nonnative

definitions of the environment and resources within the environment, whereas instrumental

use, cultural and spiritual valuation takes precedence in the Native definition of the

environment. We also established that Natives know more about the local environments

than do nonnatives. So which of the two, Natives or nonnatives, think that the sky is falling

IS In 198933% and 199140% of nonnative postspill respondents attended public meetings during the month

prior to the spill.
92 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

in? If the Exxon Valdez can founder once and wreck havoc, are other spills as large or

larger than the Exxon Valdez spill, i.e., normal accidents of disastrous proportions, in the

oiled area likely to follow?

When asked, Natives were significantly less likely than nonnatives to think that spills

similar to the Exxon Valdez will recur frequently (Q13B). Natives thought the Exxon spill

was unique, nonnatives did not (Q13A). Nonnatives fitted what we have learned about

nonnatives elsewhere in the United States. Natives fitted what we have learned about

Indians.

SIGNIFICANT CONCLUSIONS

Native culture-that organization of acts, objects, ideas and sentiments that are

characteristic of Natives in the spill area-was implemented by Natives to cope with the

spill's consequences to the naturally occurring resources on which Native lives depend.

Nonnatives implemented acts and expressed ideas and sentiments that were common to

their culture to cope with the crisis caused by the spill. The responses were different.

On a wide variety of economic, subsistence, social, ethical, and political measures

prior to the Exxon Valdez spill, differences between Natives and nonnatives in Kodiak Island

villages that were oiled by the spill were significant and systematic. Following the spill,

Native and non natives in all villages in our spill area sample proved to be systematically

different in the amounts of income, number of months employed, amount of education

completed, proportion of persons employed in the public sector, proportion of persons

receiving unearned income, stability of income, amounts of income invested into the

harvests of wild resources, the variety and amount of wild resources that are harvested, the

manner in which those resources are distributed and consumed, the amounts in which

goods, equipment, and income are shared and the persons with whom they are shared, the

practices of contributing labor to relatives and friends, the way in which symbols are

attached to the environment, the places to which persons retire, the consequences of job or

business loss, the expectations for local benefits from oil-related developments, the sizes and

compositions of households, rules for membership and behavior in the household, the

amount of visiting and dining as guests in the homes of relatives or friends, cognitive

attitudes about whether and what species can be managed, who or what agency should

manage them, who best understands the biologic and abiologic environments, and what

consequences are most likely from oil-related activities.

The longitudinal, multidimensional, multivariate analyses of samples and panel

demonstrate stability in the principles which distinguish nonnative from Native societies, and

the temporary crisis created by the spill demonstrates the differences between Native and

nonnative responses to the environmental, political, and economic consequences of the

crisis.

QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION

Johnson: In your studies did you ever evaluate the effect of many of your

respondents being Russian orthodox?
Jorgensen - An Analysis of Social Indicators of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 93

Jorgensen: In Volume IV, I address that topic. We didn't break down things in the

Protocol as to the nature of the Christianity. However there seems to be a beautiful

coordination between Native sharing practices, and the ethics that support them, and the

ethic espoused in the New Testament (but not necessarily practiced). I think the Natives win

on that one.

Johnson: My relatives are mostly from the Prince William Sound area, Cordova. I

am part Chugach, and my wife is Athabaskan. My family encouraged sharing, to give

everything you have, and there was a belief that you don't expect anything back, but it will

come back three times what you gave.

Jorgensen: It would come back to you spiritually in things unexpected and

unimagined.

One thing that I didn't touch upon at all in this paper that has some relevance on

things that we heard this morning from Carl Hild. A series of questions that we asked and

Rachel Mason touched upon them, we wanted to know among the respondents: 1) whether

they thought resources could be managed, naturally occurring resources; 2) we wanted to

know who they thought knew the most about naturally occurring resources: scientists,

Natives, or ?; 3) we wanted to know whether there was some fit between whether they

should be managed and who knew the most. So we asked the question about who should

manage. In the questions of resource management and knowledge about resources, what

emerged were significant differences again between Natives and nonnatives. The things that

we learned in 1989 were not the same things that we learned in 1991. And they fitted again

how we had predicted Natives and nonnatives would differ. So without going into them too

much, you can see the evidence and how I think it fits with difference by ethnicity. We had

a suspicion even by the time that we entered into this research that the village contrasts

would not work quite so well as they had to the north because every village had been

affected by the oil. So that took out test and control. And because most of the villages we

had were very large and complex and because of the small villages that we were able to get

into, we could get into only one Native village in Prince William Sound, one time. We got

in a second time and Eric Morris got pitched out, thrown out of Tatitlek. So we were able

to do Eyak and Cordova outside of it and do Valdez within it. But we couldn't go to

Chenega, though we were invited into Nanwalek and Port Graham, after we arrived there

we were invited out because the attorneys had signed an agreement with a consortium of

regional nonprofits that denied our access to some of the small villages. So of the ten

villages we had, we did not get Chenega and we only had one look at Tatitlek right after the

spill. But I have no doubts that in those little villages, Chenega, Tatitlek, Port Graham and

Nanwalek, that we wouldn't have learned anything that would have changed the results that

we had from our 1800 or so interviews.

Baffrey: Native and nonnative respondents prior to oil spill... the surveys completed

in the last wave prior to spill?

Jorgensen: Yes. We have a lot of information throughout all of those 31 villages. We

completed all but the last in a few villages in 1990. Most of the things that we predicted

came to be as a result of what we had learned on Native and nonnative differences in those

villages. But many of the questions that we asked after the spill, of course, we hadn't asked
94 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

before the spill. That was one of the great things about the protocol because the OMB gave

us a green light to add some questions.

Callaway: Joe, we didn't ask OMB!

Jorgensen: The OMB would have given us the green light had we asked! Therefore

we could use the protocol to create questions that we did not have prior to the spill.

Particularly those about management, and knowledge of the resources. Questions such as

do Natives have knowledge of locally occurring resources and the environment? How is it

acquired? How long does it take?

"How long does it take to get knowledge of the environment?" was a standard

question. You would get at least one nonnative person in every sample that would answer,

"...well about five years." We never got that answer from a Native, never. For a Native, you

knew a local environment. You knew its fluctuations, the resources in that environment, etc.

Time was not expressed. It wasn't an uncommon response to say that it isn't just a lifetime.

It is cumulative lifetimes, in other words those that precede you. Now, the differences are

significant again between populations as to how you perceive. So when you then ask them

a question who knows most about the environment, what we found among Natives was their

willingness to be generous in 1989. That they recognized that scientists had considerable

information about the environment from experience and from research. They recognized

as well from their own observations and those from their parents and grandparents, that

they had considerable knowledge about the local environment. Nobody could predict what

the ice would do, except it could do anything it wanted to if the wind was pushing it. So they

had real knowledge. Who should manage it? They recognized who was managing it and they

recognized political obstacles between them managing it, and State or Federal government

managing it. So they thought it would be very good in 1989 that there would be some sort

of shared management, but they weren't sanguine that they were going part of such a

process. But by 1991, positions had firmed up quite a bit. It was recognized that Natives

knew a lot about the environment, and yes, they should be managing or co-managing the

environment. Had it been managed properly? No, it hadn't. So there is no doubt that not

only did nonnatives begin espousing ethics that other Natives had espoused in those other

31 villages, but there was an increase in both our panel and in the posttest of the espousal

of Native ethics and principles by Natives. What would you call that? Could that be perhaps

like relearning a language that had been nearly sentient? Would it be like taking up Native

dancing and singing again? Would it be as if you were restoring a tribe? Yes, a little bit like

that. Certainly you can act upon those things that you already knew but you now espoused.

Schwantes: Of total respondents what percentage were small villages?

Jorgensen: Probably about 25 to 30% resided in small villages. Ifwe distinguish small

village residents from Kodiak, Kenai, Valdez, and Cordova, about 25% are in small villages:

Tatitlek, Seldovia, Chignik, Karluk, and Old Harbor. We found the same patterns in the

spill area ... the small periphery villages, the hub villages, and the real difference was Native

and nonnative. That is the most interesting part, there is persistence to it.

Callaway: I might mention that I worked with Joe on this project for a number of

years. The enormous amount of time and hours Joe spent working with the data and
Jorgensen - An Analysis of Social Indicators of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 95

analyzing the data. I can't even imagine how many it is, but I sure it was 14 hour days, day

in and day out. Thank you Joe.

Table At. Frequency distributions in percents, KIP variables, theoretical contrasts for nonnative:Native

subsamples, postspUl pretest and posttest samples.s

Ke Informant Protocol Variables

Q7 SIGNIFICANT ENVIRONMENTAL SYMBOLS

NONE

AFEW

MANY

MANY OVER GENERATIONS

QI3A IS EXXON VALDEZ SPILL UNIQUE?

NO

YES

Q 13B WILL EVENTS SIMILAR TO THE EXXON

VALDEZ SPILL OCCUR IN THE FuroRE?

NO

RARELY

FREQUENTLY

QI4A HOW WILL nrruas RESPONSES TO SPILLS

COMPARE WITH THE RESPONSE TO EXXON?

WORSE

SAME AS

BETTER THAN

QI5 HOW DID SPILL AFFECT YOUR INCOME?

DECREASED

STAYED THE SAME

INCREASED

Q16A DID SPILL CAUSE DISPUTES AMONG

OR BETWEEN FISHERMEN?

NONE

VERY FEW

MANY

• Qi6B DID SPILL CAUSE DISPUTES BETWEEN

FISHERMEN AND NON-FISHERMEN?

NONE

VERY FEW

MANY

Nonnat

1989

(NU5)

6.3

34.5

52.1

7.0

54.6

45.4

1.4

65.2

33.3

4.3

37.7

58.0

25.4

47.2

27.5

14.3

26.3

59.4

29.6

22.2

48.1

Native

1989

(N67)

*6.1

33.3

24.2

36.4

47.7

52.3

0.0

71.9

28.1

3.1

25.0

71.9

28.3

41.7

30.0

*32.3

19.4

48.4

*44.8

24.1

31.0

Nonnat

1991

(N61)

6.8

44.1

44.1

5.1

55.2

44.8

3.5

38.6

57.9

0.0

26.8

73.2

23.2

57.1

19.6

1.8

27.3

70.9

16.7

31.3

52.1

Native

1991

(N25)

4.0

24.0

28.0

44.0

48.0

52.0

*4.3

65.2

30.4

0.0

29.2

70.8

24.0

44.0

32.0

*30.4

17.4

52.2

*59.1

9.1

31.8

"

-. Postspill, pretest research condu~ted -in ih~l~te s'i.J~~er~f 1989 and the early winter of 1990. Posttest research

in the winter of 1991. Tests for significance of difference: the Kolmogorov-Smimov test for two independent

samples is used for all ordinal variables, Significance of difference of proportions (X2) is used for nominal

dichotomous variables. The differences are tested between Nonnatives:Natives for 1989 and again for 1991.
96 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Table At continued.

Nonnat Native Nonnat Native

1989 1989 1991 1991

Ke Informant Protocol Variables (NU5) (N67) (N61) (N25)

K I HARVEST EXPENSES-PROPORTN OF INCOME

VERY LOW, 0-9% 87.6 *68.2 86.7 84.0

LOW, 10-19% 6.2 13.6 10.0 12.0

MEDIUM, 20-29% 4.1 12.1 1.7 4.0

HIGH, 30% OR MORE 2.1 6.1 1.7 0.0

K2 VARIETY OF HARVESTED SPECIES

NONE 9.0 12.1 18.6 12.5

FEW, NONE IN SOME CATEGORIES 51.7 40.9 67.8 54.2

AT LEAST ONE SPECIES PER CATEGORY 14.5 12.1 8.5 8.3

TWO-THREE SPECIES PER CATEGORY 9.0 16.7 1.7 8.3

MORE THAN THREE SPECIES PER CATEGORY 15.9 18.2 3.4 16.7

K3 HARVESTED PROTEIN IN DIET

LESS THAN 25% 51.7 *21.2 64.4 *25.0

25-49% 24.8 27.3 10.2 29.2

50-75% 16.6 36.4 15.3 29.2

76·100% 6.9 15.2 10.2 16.7

K4 HOUSEHOLD ANNUAL INCOME

$0-10,000 2.2 *21.5 4.9 *12.0

$10,001·20,000 8.8 24.6 9.8 32.0

$20,001-30,000 8.8 20.0 6.6 20.0

$30,001-40,000 16.8 15.4 16.4 8.0

40,001-60,000 24.8 10.8 34.4 20.0

$60,001-100,000 35.8 7.7 27.9 8.0

OVER $100,000 2.9 0.0 0.0 0.0

K9 STABILITY HOUSEHOLD EARNED INCO~E

IRREGULAR 0.0 *8.2 1.7 12.0

ERRATIC 2.8 4.9 6.9 8.0

SEASONAL 24.5 34.4 27.6 24.0

MONTHLY 72.7 52.5 63.8 56.0

K lOST ABILITY OF HOUSEHOLD UNEARNED

INCOME

(I) IRREGULAR 71.0 *53.0 50.8 28.0

(2) MONTHLY WELFARE OR TRANSFER

PAYMENTS 5.5 9.1 11.9 8.0

(3) REGULAR RECEIPTS alo ROYALTIES alo LEASE

w/(l) or (2) 22.1 30.3 37.3 60.0

(4) 1,2AND3 1.4 7.6 0.0 4.0

K II A INCOME GIVING WITHIN THE VILLAGE

PERSONAL USE ONLY, NOT SHARED 19.4 27.7 22.8 *12.0

POOLED WITHIN THE HOUSEHOLD 59.0 47.7 33.3 8.0

OCCASIONAL SHARING wi OTHER HOUSEHOLDS 15.3 23.1 29.8 56.0

REGULAR SHARING WITH OTHER HOUSEHOLDS 6.3 1.5 14.0 24.0

K II B INCOME RECEIVING IN THE VILLAGE

NO SHARING 29.7 33.3 51.9 32.0

POOLED WITHIN THE HOUSEHOLD 57.2 50.9 18.5 16.0

OCCASIONAL SHARING 10.9 15.8 .•;:! 25.9 32.0

REGULAR SHARING 2.2 0.0 3.7 20.0

.•..
Jorgensen - An Analysis of Social Indicators of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 97

Table At continued.

Key Informant Protocol Variables

~

"I

82.1 77.3

6.9 ' 15.2~

lui 7.6

*4.0

8.0

24.0

64.0

*8.0

8.0

20.0

64.0

8.9

14.3

53.6

23.2

50.9 52.0

30:2 40.0

18.9 8.0

83.0 64.0

13.2 32.0

3.8 4.0

8.6

13.8

43.1

34.5

*3.1

12.3

49.2

35.4

*3.0

9.1

47.0

40.9

8.4

26.6

51.0

14.0

6.2

24.8

54.5

14.5

90.8:' .• ' .'. ·85,0'

5.6 .•." ~ . 8.3

:) '3.5 6.7

KI2A INCOME GIVING BElWEEN VILLAGES

PERSONAL USE ONLY, NOT SHARED

POOLED WITHIN THE HOUSEHOLD

OCCASIONAL SHARING wi OTHER HOUSEHOLDS

REGULAR SHARING WITH OTHER HOUSEHOLDS

'~.." \\ -.' '\: ., r • '

KI2B INCOME RECEIVING BETWEEN VILLAGES

NO SHARING \

OCCASIONAL SHARING

REGULAR SHARING

••••• •• _., I '. ••• '''!'" ..• lA' • 1'••

K 13A LABOR GIVING WITHIN THE VILLAGE

PERSONAL USE ONLY, NOT SHARED

POOLED WITHIN THE HOUSEHOLD

OCCASIONAL SHARING wi OTHER HOUSEHOLDS

REGULAR SHARING WITH OTHER HOUSEHOLDS

" t.~.,

KI3B LABOR RECEIVING IN THE VILLAGE

NO SHARING, '"

POOLED WITHIN THE HOUSEHOLD . . .

OCCASIONAL SHARING

REGULAR SHARING

KI4A LABOR GIVING BETWEEN VILLAGES ~

PERSONAL USE ONLY, NOT SHARED .,1

POOLED WITHIN THE HOUSEHOLD

OCCASIONAL SHARING wi OTHER HOUSEHOLDS

REGULAR SHARING WITH OTHER HOUSEHOLDS

79.3

15.9

4.8

71.2

21.2

7.6

72.0

18.0

10.0

52.0

28.0

20.0

K 14B LABOR RECEIVING BElWEEN VILLAGES

NO SHARING

OCCASIONAL SHARING

REGULAR SHARING

83.7

12.1

4.2

67.7

24.2

8.1

74.5

17.0

8.5

52.0

28.0

20.0

K 15A RESOURCE GIVING WITHIN THE VILLAGE

PERSONAL USE ONLY. NOT SHARED

POOLED WITHIN THE HOUSEHOLD

OCCASIONAL SHARING wi OTHER HOUSEHOLDS

REGULAR SHARING WITH OTHER HOUSEHOLDS

4.9

15.3

60.4

19.4

*0.0

4.6

52.3

43.1

18.6

6.8

45.8

28.8

*4.0

12.0

20.0

64.0

.,

KI5B RESOURCE RECEIVING IN THE VILLAGE

NO SHARING

POOLED WITHIN THE HOUSEHOLD

OCCASIONAL SHARING

REGULAR SHARING

5.0

17.7

58.2

19.1

*3.0

9.1

42.4

45.5

8.8

7.0

59.6

24.6

*12.0

8.0

12.0

68.0

I

K 16A RESOURCE GIVING BETWEEN VILLAGES

PERSONAL USE ONLY. NOT S.HARED .

POOLED WITHIN THE HOUSEHOLD

OCCASIONAL SHARING wi OTHER HOUSEHOLDS

REGULAR SHARING WITH OTHER HOUSEHOLDS

75.9

22.1

2.1

*54.5

28.8

16.7

52.9

33.3

13.7

36.0

28.0

36.0

/'
98

Table At continued.

MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Key Informant Protocol Variables

KI6B RESOURCE RECEIVING BETWEEN

VILLAGES

NO SHARING 80.1 *58.1 55.1 50.0

OCCASIONAL SHARING 17.7 24.2 30.6 25.0

REGULAR SHARING 2.1 17.7 14.3 25.0

K 19 HOUSEHOLD COMPOSITIONIDYNAMICS

OPEN AND FLUID (TRADITIONAL) 13.1 15.4 8.5 20.0

INFREQUENT CHANGE 12.4 13.8 33.9 36.0

STABLE (WESTERN) 74.5 70.8 57.6 44.0

K20 RULES FOR HOUSEHOLD DYNAMICS

(I) NO STANDARD RULES (TRADITIONAL) 12.8 *31.3 23.2 40.0

(2) BLEND OF 1 AND 3 12.1 20.3 16.1 28.0

(3) CLEAR EXPECTATIONS (WESTERN) 75.2 48.4 60.7 32.0

K23 SODALITY MEMBERSHIP

NO MEMBERSHIPS IN HOUSEHOLD 42.1 56.1 39.7 40.0

ONE MEMBERSHIP IN HOUSEHOLD 18.6 21.2 19.0 32.0

TWO OR MORE MEMBERSHIPS IN HOUSEHOLD 39.3 22.7 4 \.4 28.0

K24 POLITICAL PARTICIPATION IN HOUSEHOLD

AT PRESENT

NO OFFICIAL CAPACITIES 90.3 75.8 89.8 72.0

ONE OFFICIAL CAPACITY 5.6 13.6 6.8 24.0

TWO OR MORE OFFICIAL CAPACITIES 4.2 10.6 3.4 4.0

K25 IDENTIFICATION OF POLITICAL ISSUES

NO ISSUES CORRECTLY IDENTIFIED 6.3 14.1 6.7 8.0

ONE ISSUE CORRECTLY IDENTIFIED 17.6 21.9 8.3 20.0

TWO ISSUES CORRECTLY IDENTIFIED 36.6 26.6 30.0 16.0

THREE OR MORE ISSUES IDENTIFIED 39.4 37.5 55.0 56.0

K26 RELIGIOUS PARTICIPATION IN HOUSEHOLD

DO NOT PROFESS RELIGION OR PARTICIPATE 35.9 30.3 38.3 36.0

ATTEND CEREMONIES OCCASIONALLY 3 \.0 3 \.8 26.7 24.0

ATTEND CEREMONIES REGULARLY 33.1 37.9 35.0 40.0

K27 EXTRACURRICULAR RELIGIOUS ACTS

NO EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES 53.8 47.0 60.0 60.0

ONmwO ON OCCASIONAL BASIS 25.2 24.2 16.7 4.0

ONmwO ON REGULAR BASIS 10.5 16.7 10.0 8.0

MORE THAN TWO REGULARLY 10.5 12.1 13.3 28.8

K28 ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR

ATTAINMENT

SEEK SUCCESS FOR SELF (PERSONAL) 38.5 *16.7 47.3 *8.3

SEEK SUCCESS FOR SELF & FAMILY 47.6 37.9 25.5 45.8

SEEK SUCCESS FOR FAMILY, NETWORK OF

KINSPERSONS, ELDERS, FRIENDS, VILLAGE 14.0 45.5 27.3 45.8
Jorgensen - An Analysis of Social Indicators of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

Table At continued.

99

Key Informant Protocol Variables

K29 ETHICS AND SIGNIFICANT •

ENVIRONMENTAL SYMBOLS

(I) RESOURCES ARE COMMODITIES 38.9 *30.2 30.8 *0.0

(2) BLEND OF I AND 3 55.6 44.4 59.6 54.2

(3) RESOURCES AND ENVIRONMENT HAVE

SPIRITUAL aJo CULTURAL SIGNIFICANCE 5.6 25;4 9.6 45.8

K30 ETHICS OF PERSONAL COOPERATION

(I) PERSONAL COMPETITION FOR'SELF GAIN 22.4 *7.6 15.1 ·*4.0

(2) 1, 3 OR 4, DEPENDING oNsrruATION 5\.7 40.9 49.1 16.0

(3) COOPERATION AND COMPETITION 13.3 19.7 24.5 32.0

(4) MAINLY COOPERATION-COMMUNITARJAN 12.6 3\.8 11.3 48.0

K31 ENCUL TURA TION AND GENDER

DISTINCTIONS

WESTERN ENCUL TURA TION & GENDER 86.6 *26.2 65.4 *16.7

WESTERN AND TRADITIONAL ARE MIXED 10.6 47.7 28.8 54.2

TRADITIONAL ENCUL TURA TION & GENDER 2.4 26.2 5.8 29.2

K33A ECONOMIC CONFLICTS?

NO 13.4 *37.3 12.3 12.5

YES 86.6 62.7 87.7 87.5

K33B PERSONAL ECONOMIC CONFLICTS?

NO 22.7 *37.7 24.5 34.8

YES 77.3 62.3 75.5 65.2

K35 PERCEIVED OBJECTIVES OF SERVICES

CORRECT IDENTIFICATION OF OBJECTIVES 84.1 79.0 80.4 80.0

INCORRECT IDENTIFICATION OF OBJECTIVES 15.9 21.0 19.6 20.0

K37 PLACE RESPONDENT BORN AND REARED

OUTSIDE THE REGION/ALASKA 83.8 *34.4 90.0 *37.5

IN THE REGION BUT NOT SUBREGION 4.2 4.7 3.3 12.5

IN THE SUBREGION BUT NOT THE VILLAGE 2.1 2 \.9 J.7 4.2

IN THE VILLAGE OF CURRENT RESIDENCE 9.9 39.1 5.0 45.8

K37B RESPONDENTS SPOUSE WAS BORN AND

REARED

OUTSIDE THE REGION/OUTSIDE ALASKA 83.2 *37.5 77.5 57.1

IN THE REGION BUT NOT SUBREGION 5.3 12.5 10.0 64.3

IN THE SUBREGION BUT NOT THE VILLAGE 2.7 10.0 0.0 0.0

IN THE VILLAGE OF CURRENT RESIDENCE 8.8 40.0 12.5 35.7

K39 SOCIAL SERVICES USED BY RESPONDENT

(I) AVOID ALL SERVICES 27.6 15.4 14·9 0.0

(2) HEALTH SERVICES 31.3 52.3 33.3 56.0

(3) FINANCIAL SERVICES 3.0 1.5 \.8 0.0

(4) FAMILY AND SOCIAL SERVICES I\.9 3.1 5.3 0.0

(5) HEALTH (2) AND FINANCIAL (3) 15.6 12.3 24.6 24.0

(6) FAMILY-SOCIAL (4) AND TWO OR MORE 10.4 15.4 21.1 20.0

._..._---
100 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Table A2. Frequency distributions by total samples and by Native:nonnative contrasts, AQI variables, postspill

pretest (N=3S0, 1988-1989) and posttest (N=216, 1990-1991)."

----- ._~- --..-----. ----- ----- -

-,-.----

-

PRE NATIVE NONNAT POST NATIVE NONNAT

N=J50 N=100 N=lJl N=116 N=59 N=119

Race? D28

Alaska Native 30.2% 31.4%

Other race 69.8% 68.6%

Respondent Sex RSEX

Male 50.3% 53.0% 50.2% 50.5% 50.8% 48.1%

Female 49.7% 47.0% 49.8% 49.5% 49.2% 51.9%

Respondent Age Group RAGES

18 to 34 37.6% 45.0% 34.9% 38.5% 33.9% 44.1%

35 to 59 46.8% 39.0010 49.3% 50.7% 57.6% 44.9%

60+ 15.5% 16.0% 15.7% 10.8% 8.5% 11.0%

Age of Respondent RAGE

Mean 42.33 41.20 42.70 40.73 40.54 40.03

Respondent Health? BI

Very poor .9% 0.0% 1.3% 1.5% 4.1% .8%

Poor 1.4% 2.0% .9% 1.5% 2.0010 1.6%

Fair 11.1% 18.0% 9.1% 10.8% 22.4% 8.7%

Good 42.3% 46.0% 40.7% 34.3% 26.5% 36.2%

Very Good 44.0010 34.0010 47.6% 35.3% 32.7% 33.1%

NA .3% 0.0% .4% 16.7% 12.2% 19.7%

Where Were You Born? D24

" "

Outside Alaska 66.0% 13.0% 87.4% 71.8% 11.9% 95.3%

Alaska [1.1% 28.0% 4.8% 7.4% 20.3% 1.6%

This region 7.7% 21.0% 2.6% 6.0% [8.6% 1.6%

Here 13.7% 37.0% 3.9% [3.9% 49.2% .8%

NA [.4% 1.0% 1.3% .9"10 0.0% .8%

How Many Years Have You Lived in

This Village? D25 a a

Year or Less [ 0.9"10 3.0% 14.3% 8.4% 3.5% 10.9%

2-5 Years 14.0% 7.0% 17.7% 21.0010 1.8% 27.9%

6-10 Years [8.3% 8.0% 23.4% 19.2% 22.8% 18.6%

11 Years or More 56.6% 81.0% 44.6% 51.4% 71.9% 42.6%

NA .3% 1.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0010 0.0%

Respondent's Home Before Locating

in Village? D26 a a

Beyond Alaska 47.3% 1[.5% 59.6% 53.6% [1.3% 69.0%

Alaska 3 [.0010 32.2% 30.9% 25.1% 22.6% 24.6% \

This region 6.0% 11.5% 4.3% 10.1% 26.4% 4.8%

Here 15.8% 44.8% 5.2% 11.1% 39.6% 1.6%

aTests of significance are calculated for dichotomous nominal data (proportions), ordinal data (Kolmogorov-Smimov for independent samples), and

interval data (t-test for independent samples). Differences at ~.07 are demonstrated by asterisks (a). Asterisks in column 1 (PRE) represent differences

between Pretest and Posttest, in column 2 (Native) between Native:Non-Native in the Pretest, and in column 5 (Native) between Native:Non-Native

in the Posttest. ·'·F1tmr ------ .., 1r-~
Jorgensen - An Analysis of Social Indicators of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 101

Table A2 continued.

.----- -.- .- --- --~-- _._--- "._. .- -~~~-

PRE NATIVE NONNAT POST NATIVE NONNAT

N=350 N=JOO N=231 N=216 N=59 N=129

Currently Married? 029 • •

No 37.2% 44.9% 33.3% 39.8% 54.2% 29.5%

Yes 62.8% 55.1% 66.7% 60.2% 45.8% 70.5%

Race of Spouse? D29A • • •

Alaska Native 36.4% 83.1% 11.8% 26.0"10 66.7% 12.8%

Other race 63.6% 16.9% 88.2% 74.0% 33.3% 87.2%

N umber of Years of Education

Completed? C I • •

1-8 Years 9.2% 24.2% 3.5% 5.6% 11.9% 3.9%

9-12 Years 39.9% 52.5% 33.5% 45.1% 55.9% 36.7%

College 39.7% 18.2% 48.3% 40.5% 30.5% 47.7%

Higher 11.2% 5.1% 14.8% 8.8% 1.7% 11.7%

Employment Sector PPEMP • •

Public 27.3% 34.2% 23.6% 30.3% 41.4% 27.9%

Private 72.7% 65.8% 76.4% 55.8% 41.4% 59.0"/0

NA 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 11.6% 17.2% 13.1%

Months Employed Last Year? C6M • •

None 18.6% 22.0% 18.3% 14.0% 16.9% 13.2%

1-3 Months 10.9% 25.0% 4.8% 11.2% 25.4% 4.7%

4-6 Months 12.3% 13.0% 11.3% 12.1% 13.6% 12.4%

7-9 Months 9.2% 12.0% 8.3% 13.0"/0 15.3% 13.2%

10-12 Months 49.0% 28.0"10 57.4% 49.8% 28.8% 56.6%

Household Income 02 • •

<$5,000 4.6% 13.0% 1.4% 5.2% 12.1% 3.1%

<$10,000 9.2% 22.8% 4.1% 10.4% 22.4% 4.7%

<$20,000 13.5% 25.0% 8.8% 16.5% 19.0"/0 15.0%

<$30,000 15.1% 15.2% 14.3% 15.1% 15.5% 13.4%

<$40,000 13.2% 8.7% 13.8% 15.5% 6.9% 17.3%

<$50,000 12.3% 7.6% 14.7% 12.3% 12.1% 12.6%

>$50,000 32.0% 7.6% 42.9% 25.5% 12.1% 33.9%

N umber of Rooms in House 08 • •

<3 rooms 5.8% 11.1% 3.9% 9.3% 1.7% 11.6%

3-4 rooms 19.3% 24.2% 18.3% 32.4% 28.8% 33.3%

5-6 rooms 29.4% 30.3% 27.9% 31.0% 32.2% 29.5%

7+ rooms 45.5% 34.3% 49.8% 27.3% 37.3% 25.6%

Household Size HHSIZE

I 18.3% 17.0% 16.9% 21.3% 13.6% 20.2%

, J

2 27.4% 26.0% 29.0% 20.8% 27.1% 15.5%

3-5 45.4% 47.0% 45.0% 51.9% 50.8% 58.1%

6-8 8.9% 10.0% 9.1% 5.6% 8.5% 5.4%

9-11 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% .5% 0.0% .8%

Total Composite Activities in which

Respondents Engaged Last Year

TOTACT

None 46.9% 46.0% 47.2% 46.4% 51.9% 40.2%

I Composite Act 24.6% 20.0% 26.8% 28.2% 18.5% 32.3%

2 Composite Acts 16.9% 19.0% 15.6% 15.3% 2Q.4% 15.7%

3 Composite Acts 10.9% 12.0"/0 10.4% 10.0% 9.3% 11.8%

4 Composite Acts .9% 3.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0"10 0.0%

Jorgensen - An Analysis of Social Indicators of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill 103

Table A2 continued.

- _._----- -_ .. _._- ---.._-

PRE NATIVE NONNAT POST NATIVE NONNAT ~

N=J50 N=lOO N=2Jl N=116 N=59 N=119

Game Available Since Exxon Valdez

Spill? A25A

Decreased 29.7% 38.3% 27.1% 39.2% 53.3% 34.4%

Stayed Same 48.7% 39.5% 51.2% 45.8% 37.8% 49.5%

Increased 2.7% 2.5% 3.0% 3.6% 2.2% 3.2%

NA 19.0"10 19.8% 18.7% 11.4% 6.7% 12.9%

Fish Available Since ExxonValdez

Spill? A26A2

Decreased 44.7% 43.2% 43.3% 47.0% 51.1% 50.5%

Stayed Same 31.7% 30.9% 33.5% 37.3% 35.6% 33.3%

Increased 13.7% 16.0% 13.8% 7.2% 8.9% 5.4%

NA 10.0% 9.9% 9.4% 8.4% 4.4% 10.8%

Percent Wild Food in Diet Since

Exxon Valdez Spill? A32B •

None 22.0"10 14.8% 25.6% 10.1 % 5.1 % 8.7%

<50% 61.3% 59.3% 62.1% 78.6% 76.9% 79.3%

<75% 10.0% 17.3% 7.4% 5.7% 10.3% 5.4%

75% + 6.0"10 7.4% 4.4% 4.4% 7.7% 4.3%

NA .7% 1.2% .5% 1.3% 0.0% 2.2%

Days Visited FriendslRelatives in

Past Week? 013

None 17.2% 12.0% 20.1% 21.3% 20.3% 20.2%

1-2 Days 32.5% 35.0% 31.0% 34.3% 27.1% 35.7%

3-4 Days 19.5% 21.0"/0 19.7% 18.5% 16.9% 21.7%

5 + days 30.7% 32.0% 29.3% 25.9% 35.6% 22.5%

Times Visited FriendslRelatives in

Other Communities in Past Year?

027

None 17.7% 13.3% 19.8% 19.6% 13.6% 19.7%

1-2 Times 34.9% 30.6% 34.8% 40.2% 33.9% 43.3%

2+ Times 47.4% 56.1% 45.4% 40.2% 52.5% 37.0%

Vote in Most Recent City Council

Election? 019

No 43.1% 42.9% 44.2% 45.8% 51.2% 48.0%

Yes 56.9% 57.1% 55.8% 54.2% 48.8% 52.0"10

Vote in Most Recent Statewide

Election? 020

No 33.3% 36.4% 32.6% 34.8% 33.3% 37.1%

\ Yes 66.7% 63.6% 67.4% 65.2% 66.7% 62.9%

\~..
104 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Table A2 continued.

PRE NATIVE NONNAT POST NATIVE NONNATIVE

N=150 N=/OO N=11/ N=1/6 N=59 N=/19

.Number of Public Meetings

Attended Last Month? DI6

None 66.2% 66.7% 67.5% 63.7% 67.2% 60.5%

1-2 19.5% 24.2% 17.3% 23.7% 24.1% 24.8%

3+ 14.3% 9.1% 9.1% 12.6% 8.6% 14.7%

Vote in Last Village Native

Corporation Election? D22

No 20.5% 20.7% NA 19.5% 17.5% NA

Yes 79.5% 79.3% NA 80.5% 82.5% NA

Vote in Last Region Native

Corporation Election? D23

No 21.3% 21.6% NA 18.5% 17.0% NA

Yes 78.7% 78.4% NA 81.5% 83.0% NA

Employed Last Year? C6N

No 18.6% 15.7% 20.3% 14.7%

Yes 81.4% 84.3% 79.7% 85.3%

Work Away from Your Community

Last Year? CI2 • •

No 87.4% 92.0% 84.8% 78.9010 82.1% 75.0%

Yes 12.6% 8.0% 15.2% 21.1% 17.9% 25.0%

Months Left Village for Employment

Last Year? CI2M •

None 76.2% 74.7% 75.8% 84.7% 83.1% 83.7%

1-3 Months 12.2% 16.2% 11.0% 8.3% 10.2% 8.5%

4-6 Months 5.8% 7.1% 5.7% 4.6% 6.8% 3.90/0

7-9 Months 3.2% 1.0% 4.4% 1.4% 0.0% 2.3%

10-12 Months 2.6% 1.0% 3.1% .90/0 0.0% 1.6%

Employment of House Member Due

to Exxon Valdez Spill? C13

None 66.7% 69.1% 68.3% 74.1% 75.6% 76.7%

One Job 23.3% 19.8% 24.1% 16.9010 11.1% 16.7%

': "" Two Jobs 7.0% 8.6% 6.0% 6.0% 11.1% 5.6%

Three or More Jobs 1.7% 2.5% 1.5% 1.2% 2.2% 1.1%

Did Spill-Related Employee Leave

Village for Work? CI5 • •

No 57.0% 51.2% 66.6% 81.0% 71.4% 80.6%

Yes 43.0% 48.8% 33.3% 19.0% 28.6% 19.4%

Loss of Employment Due to Exxon

Valdez Spill? CI6

None 83.0% 79.2% 83.2% 74.4% 73.7% 74.7%

One Job 13.5% 13.8% 13.3% 18.6% 26.3% 15.7%

Two Jobs 2.5% 7.0% 2.0% 4.8% 0.0% 7.2%

Three or More Jobs 1.0% 0.0% 1.5% 2.2% 0.0% 2.4%
,.

Jorgensen - An Analysis of Social Indicators of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill

Table A2 continued.

105

Relocation Due to Exxon Valdez

Spill? CI8

None

OneTime

Two Times

Three or More Times

NA

Smallest Monthly Income Required

by Household? D4

<$500

<$1,000

<$1,500

<$2,000

<$2,500

$2,500+

PRE

N=350

86.0%

2.3%

.7%

.3%

10.7%

•

11.1%

26.1%

18.6%

20.1%

8.1%

15.9010

NATIVE

N=100

88.9%

1.2%

2.5%

0.0%

7.4%

•

24.7%

34.0%

16.5%

17.5%

2.1%

5.2%

. NONNAT

N=131

85.2%

2.5%

0.0%

.5%

11.8%

5.0%

22.5%

19.3%

21.1%

10.6%

21.6%

POST

N=116

88.6%

1.2%

0.0%

0.0%

10.2%

8.9%

20.7%

22.1%

15.5%

13.1%

19.7%

NATIVE

N=59

82.2%

2.2%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

•

16.9%

28.8%

30.5%

13.6%

5.1%

5.1%

NONNAT

N-119

90.3%

1.1%

0.0%

0.0%

0.0%

7.1%

15.0%

18.1%

17.3%

18.1%

24.4%

Is Household Better Off Now than

Five Years Ago? D6

Worse Now

Same

Better Off

20.2%

23.2%

56.5%

• -,

22.9%·. \.

35.4% .

41.7%

-.>

19.0%

17.6%

6f3%

27.9%

23.3%

48.8%

32.2%

30.5%

37.3%

27.3%

18.0%

54.7%

Adequacy of Current Income? E29 • 1''-'' - •• ,.,

Not Satisfied x:-- . 25.0%~"""~ 36.4% '\

Somewhat Satisfied ,,--:--::':--:-42.8%' 40.4%

Completely Satisfied 32.2% 23.2%· •••

20.0%

43.5%

36.5%

32.6%

46.5%

20.9010

39.0%

40.7%

20.3%

27.3%

50.8%

21.9010

:-'I \\,

Is Respondent Commercial

Fisherman or Owner of Business? D3

No

Yes

Amount Invested in Commercial

Fishing or Own Business in Past

Year? D3A

None

<$2,000

<$5,000

$5,000+

NA

Will Search for Oil Create More Jobs

for Locals? E50

No

Yes

How Will Search for Oil Affect Fish

and Game? E51

Reduce

No Change

Increase

NA

•

57.9

42.1

•

17.7%

12.7%

4.3%

18.0%

47.3%

•

27.4%

72.6%

47.7%

40.7%

I 1.7%

10.0%

55.5%

44.4%

23.5%

22.2%

3.7%

16.0%

34.6%

28.3%

71.7%

45.7%

29.6%

2.5%

22.2%

61.9010

38.1%

16.7%

9.9%

3.9%

18.2%

34.6%

25.4%

74.6%

45.8%

46.8%

1.5%

5.9%

68.7%

31.3%

38.0%

7.0%

1.2%

12.9010

40.9010

34.0%

66.0%

51.6%

42.8%

2.5%

3.1%

65.3%

34.7%

•

49.0%

8.2%

0.0%

4.1%

38.8%

40.7%

57.6%

61.5%

35.90/0

0.0%

2.6%

68.2%

31.8%

23.4%

6.4%

1.1%

20.2%

48.9%

33.6%

66.4%

52.2%

41.3%

4.3%

2.2%

---------------- ---- ------------------_ ..}~-----------
106 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Table A2 continued.

_ .._--- --" --------- -- _._--- .._- _. - .---- - ----.... --- ----- -

PRE NATIVE NONNAT POST NATIVE NONNAT

N=350 N=100 N=231 N=216 N=59 N=129

Is the Search for Oil a Good or a Bad

Idea? E52 •

Bad 33.2% 41.4% 26.4% 24.7% 22.2% 25.8%

Mixed Opinion 41.8% 35.4% 47.2% 42.8% 57.8% 39.8%

Good 21.2% 12.1% 25.5% 30.7% 17.8% 32.3%

NA 10.3 11.1% .9% 1.8% 0.0% 2.2%

Who is Responsible for the Exxon

Valdez Oil Spill? E58

Unavoidable Accident 3.3% 2.5% 3.4% 4.2% 6.6% 2.2%

Captain's Error 17.7% 32.1% 13.3% 22.5% 26.7% 21.5%

Breakdown of Ship's Technology .3% 0.0% .5% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0%

Exxon Corp's Negligence 10.3% 9.9% 9.9% 4.8% 8.9% 2.2%

State of Alaska's Negligence 32.0% 30.9% 34.0% .6% 0.0% 0.0%

Federal Gov'ts Negligence 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 1.8% 0.0% 2.2%

Combination of all but

"Unavoidable Accident" 15.3% 8.6% 11.8% 65.1% 57.8% 70.0010

NA 21.0% 2.5% 27.1% 3.0010 0.0010 1.1%

Property Lost Due to Exxon Valdez

Spill? CI9

None 95.7% 95.1% 95.6% 95.2% 93.3% 96.8%

One Item 1.0010 1.2% 1.0% 1.2% 2.2% 1.1%

Two Items .3% 1.2% 0.00/0 0.0% 0.00/0 0.0%

Three or More Items 1.3% 0.0% 2.0% 1.8% 0.0% 2.2%

NA 1.7% 2.5% 1.5% 1.8% 4.4% 0.0%

If Respondent Sustained a Financial

Loss Due to the Spill, Did Exxon

Compensate? C20

None 46.0% 60.5% 40.9% 64.6% 60.5% 54.7%

Inadequate 10.7% 7.4% 11.8% 29.1% 21.1% 43.8%

Adequate 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 1.6% 5.3% 0.0%

More than Adequate 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0010 0.0%

NA 43.3% 32.1% 47.3% 4.7% 13.2% 1.6%

Has Exxon Compensated Respondent

for Loss? C20A

No 29.2% 40.6% 28.6%

Inadequate 12.5% 6.3% 20.6%

Adequate 3.3% 6.3% 3.2%

More than Adequate 0.0% 0.00/0 0.0%

NA 55.0% 56.9% 47.6%

,\ Did You Gain (Financially) from the

\

Oil Spill? C20B

No 90.8% 96.8% 85.7%

Yes 8.4% 3.2% 12.7%

-----
DEMONSTRATION PROJECT JUKEBOX

William Schneider

Alaska and Polar Regions Department

University of Alaska

Elmer E. Rasmuson Library

Fairbanks, Alaska 99775

Project Jukebox was demonstrated on June 19, 1996 in the "Ongoing Research"

section of the Social Indicators Monitoring Study, Peer Review Workshop. Unlike many of

the other presentations which featured quantitative research techniques, Project Jukebox

features individual narratives which are accessed via a computer and are accompanied by

associated photos, maps, and text. Also, unlike the other presentations, the jukeboxes focus

on local perspective as opposed to research reports which talk about a particular population.

Research will begin shortly in Prince William Sound communities to document the

history and cultures of the region and the changes that have ensued in subsistence activities

in recent years with the Exxon Valdez disaster. Initial meetings have been held in the

communities and at the regional level. The research will be coordinated by the State

Department of Fish and Game and the technical construction of the computer-based

program will be done by the Oral History Program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Copies of the program will be available in the communities. Each community will play an

integral role in the design of the program.

QUESTIONS AND DISCUSSION

Audience Member: If you take it (the computer program) back to communities do

they ever say we don't want it?

Schneider: No. They sign a release. People are conscious that they are making a

public record.

Audience Member: How much computer memory is needed?

Schneider: Five or six CD-ROMs.

Audience Member: Have any legal issues come up yet?

Schneider: Yes. One community was concerned with providing an historical record

that disclosed fishing patterns. In one administration it was against law to fish in an area;

in another administration it was not. There are some very difficult decisions that have to be

addressed.

Ivanoff: Have Native organizations and corporations been contacted?

lOr
108 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Schneider: Yes.

Callaway: Bristol Bay is putting in high transmission lines so they can access this and

other programs.

Audience Member: Do you plan to run a network to schools?

Schneider: In the near future, we will give the CDs and the hardware to people. But

in the future we would like to set up on local area networks. Alternative users will benefit

and reinforce the lifespan of information.

Callaway: The National Park Service is using "jukeboxes" in parks.

Schneider: We would encourage agencies to use this approach to get information

back out to the regions.

Audience Member: Being on line would be a good resource.

Schneider: We are not moving quickly enough to put it out to the "Great

Unwashed."

Audience Member: There is an Alaska Traditional Knowledge Home Page. Part of

this is on line.

Audience Member: How could we get the Social Indicators information out to the

public?

Callaway: I would like to see the text put on CD-ROM and have a key word search

mechanism.

Levine: That has appeal but it is a different kind of information.

Schneider: One could have a village council meeting with Joe Jorgensen and video

tape it and put it on.

Schwantes: With the Trustee Council, a big issue is how to get information back to

the public. They have been summing up research conclusions in radio spots.
i

SOCIOCULTURAL CONSEQUENCES OF ALASKA

OUTER CONTINENTAL SHELF ACTMTIES: DATA ANALYSIS AND INTEGRATION

James A. Fall

Division of Subsistence

Alaska Department of Fish and Game

333 Raspberry Road

Anchorage, Alaska 99518

In 1995, the Division of Subsistence of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game

(ADF&G) entered into a three-year cooperative agreement with the U.S. Department of

the Interior, Minerals Management Service (MMS) to continue the investigation of the

sociocultural consequences of Alaska Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) development. The

study's major goals are to analyze and integrate subsistence, economic, and sociocultural

data from two previous cooperative agreements between ADF&G and MMS, to provide

comparative data analyses for Alaska's OCS planning areas, to collect unique information

about socioeconomic change at the household and community levels for Exxon Valdez Oil

Spill-affected communities, to cooperate with agencies and community and regional

organizations in assessing the occurrence and implications of sociocultural continuity and

change, and to effectively communicate study results to local communities and regional

organizations. Below, the seven project tasks are briefly described.

Task 1. Creation of an ADF&G SPSSI Meta File

The purpose of this task is to develop a database using the results of earlier

ADF&G systematic household interviews. These include harvest surveys and social effects

questionnaires. The database will include information from 24 communities in Prince

William Sound, Cook Inlet, the Kodiak Island Borough, the Alaska Peninsula, and the

Arctic. The database will protect the anonymity of participants in earlier household surveys,

and none of the products which are based on this information will reveal individual or

household identities.

Task 2. Literature Review

This task consists of a review of relevant literature of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill and

other socioeconomic studies as they relate to understanding sociocultural change and

continuity in communities of the spill area. The literature review will serve as the basis for

developing testable hypotheses which will be explored through analysis of the database and

follow-up key respondent interviews. Under a subcontract with ADF&G, Dr. Joanna

Endter- Wada of Utah State University is assisting with this task.

1 Statistical Package for the Social Sciences.

// (I
110 MMS Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

Task 3. Time-Series Analyses of Data Sets

Using the database assembled as part of Task 1, work under this task will include

a multivariate analysis of all independent variables, and an investigation of presumed

relationships between variables that were identified during the literature review. The

findings will be reviewed in a workshop and evaluated by key respondents. Most of this

analysis is being undertaken by Dr. Douglas Levine of the Bowman Gray School of

Medicine as part of a subcontract with ADF&G.

Task 4. Ethnographic Case Studies and Key Respondent Interviews

Products of this task will be five ethnographies (case analyses) of communities for

which information has been collected in previous studies. Several case ethnographies will

involve paired communities. Pending community approval, case communities will be from

Prince William Sound, Lower Cook Inlet, and Kodiak Island. These are:

• Chenega Bay/Tatitlek

• Nanwalek/Port Graham

• Valdez

• Cordova/Kodiak

• Old Harbor/Ouzinkie

Additional fieldwork will take place to fill in gaps from earlier research. This

fieldwork will consist of key respondent interviews and participant observation. No

systematic household surveys are planned for the project. Each ethnography will be a

separate "stand alone" report. Thorough review of the ethnographies by each study

community is a requirement of the cooperative agreement.

Task 5. Oral Histories C'Project Jukebox")

The goal of this task is to plan, develop, and distribute a series of oral histories from

Alaska Native elders and other knowledgeable people in Chugach Region communities

using the techniques developed by the University of Alaska's Project Jukebox. Jukebox is

an interactive, multi-media computer system which preserves oral histories and associated

photographs, maps, and tests in a CD-ROM format (compact disk - read only format). The

content and themes of the oral histories will be developed in collaboration with each study

community and regional Alaska Native groups. A project goal is to coordinate closely with

other ethnographic and cultural heritage programs. Two regional workshops to demonstrate

Project Jukebox products and plan the program took place in Anchorage. Also,

demonstrations of Project Jukebox were held in the four proposed study communities of

Tatitlek, Chenega Bay, Port Graham, and Nanwalek. Following these workshops, approvals

to move forward with the Project Jukebox and ethnographies tasks were obtained from the

four study communities. Taped interviews will take place with about 20 to 25 people in the

four villages, supplemented if necessary with interviews in other Chugach Region

communities. All participation will be voluntary. Local project assistants for each community

will be hired. Training will also be provided in the use of the products in each study

community.
Fall - Sociocultural Consequences of Alaska Des Activities: Data Analysis/Integration 111

Task 6. Geographic Information Systems

In this task, a geographic information system (GIS) database will be prepared that

will support the development of the ethnographies and the final report. This system will be

based on existing information. No new mapping interviews will be conducted.

Task 7. Final Report

This task will produce the final project report - a comprehensive, comparative

analysis drawing upon all the project's quantitative and qualitative information.

Products

In summary, the project will result in the following products:

• A household-level database of subsistence, demographic, and economic

information

• A quantitative analysis of this database

• A literature review

• Five "stand alone" ethnographies

• A set of Project Jukebox CD-ROMs that contain oral history information for

Chugach Region communities

• A GIS database

• A final, integrative report

Schedule

October 1995 Project Startup

December 1995, January 1996 Workshops for planning Project Jukebox

March 1996 Database preparation complete

May 1996 Project Jukebox work plan complete; begin field work

June 1996 Literature review complete; begin time-series analysis and ethnographies

December 1996 lime-series data analysis complete; workshop to review findings

September 1997 Submit draft ethnographies for review

September/October 1997 Complete Oral History CD-ROMs and distribute to communities

May 1998 Submission of draft final report; Submission of final report; end of project
112

Personnel

MMS Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

For ADF&G, principal investigators for this project are Robert Wolfe (research

director), Charles Utermohle (research analyst), and James Fall (regional program

manager). Other ADF&G staff include Louis Brown, Jim Magdanz, Rita Miraglia, Craig

Mishler, Amy Paige, Sverre Pedersen, Lisa Scarbrough, Cheryl Scott, Bill Simeone, Sandy

Skaggs, and Ron Stanek. Personnel from the University of Alaska Fairbanks will assist with

the oral histories (Project Jukebox). Under subcontracts, Dr. Douglas Levine of Wake

Forest University will conduct quantitative data analysis, and Dr. Joanna Endter-Wada of

Utah State University will assist with the literature review and the ethnographies.

For more information, contact the Division of Subsistence, ADF&G, 333 Raspberry Road,

Anchorage, AK 99518, (907) 267-2353, FAX (907) 267-2450.
Discussion and Recommendations
DISCUSSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

PAST USE OF SOCIAL INDICATOR DATA

During the past two days we have had the opportunity to review the MMS Social

Indicators studies that were initiated during the mid 1980s.

These indicators were put to use during the Exxon Valdez oil spill and demonstrated

that the database was sufficient to characterize the effect of the spill on the local Native

communities. Over time, additional data from more recent sociological studies and surveys

have been added to the database, and the process continues today. It is an evolutionary

process.

The question we are faced with is: How do we incorporate that information into our

overall decision making process?

When we examined how we have used social indicators in the environmental impact

statement (EIS) process, the conclusion was, "They are not used." Generally, sale-specific

EISs and five year program EISs are prepared; and to date, the social indicators information

has not been utilized extensively.

Within the format of an EIS there is an environmental setting section. The intent

of this section is to provide a current description of the "affected environment." It is perhaps

unique to the Alaska oes Region EISs that they have a social-systems section and a

subsistence-harvest patterns subsection. To generate a description of the affected

environment, ethnographies with the greatest portion of the data from the Alaska

Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) information are used. MMS also uses the

Community Profile Database and what has been referred to as "MMS II" which was

generated by ADF&G.

Normally all of these data are used to describe the current sociocultural systems and

the subsistence harvest patterns.

In addition to sale-specific and five year EISs, the potential effects of specific

exploration, development, or production activities are analyzed.

Unfortunately, the social indicators data have not been utilized extensively in the EIS

process. The most likely reasons are:

1. That the social indicators information is too technical, and that staff do not

understand it, and

2. That it represents a theoretical monitoring program, and not information that can

be used to predict effects.
114 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

HISTORY OF THE SOCIAL INDICATORS DATABASE

Social indicators have been evolving at MMS's Alaska OCS Region for the last 13

or 14 years, and have influenced how MMS relates as an agency to the social sciences. The

Gulf of Mexico Region is just beginning to do social science, even though oil development

and production have been on-going in the region for many years.

Alaska is unique. It is one of the few places in the world where there is an

abundance of small unique communities that have a strong historical relationship with

subsistence - communities that have not atrophied or been destroyed by outside influences.

The original MMS "social indicators" concept began in the Alaska OCS Region in

1983. It is expensive to collect field data and do research, so alternative methodologies were

explored. At that time a number of public agencies (local, State and Federal) were collecting

and archiving data for a variety of reasons - data that could provide a significant database

if assembled into a usable format. These data could potentially provide indicators of social

change in communities resulting from oil and gas exploration and development, and in

particular the effects associated with the "boom-bust" changes.

The available data were assembled and analyzed to find parameters or measures that

were sensitive to change. These initial attempts were complicated by the size and complexity

of the database, and the statistical tools required to conduct the analyses. Additionally there

were questions as to the quality of the data collected by other agencies for purposes other

than that intended by MMS, and the superimposition of other influences and changes (such

as the OCS Lands Act) on Native and nonnative rural communities that were occurring

concurrently. The influences of offshore oil and gas development were only a small portion

of the change to which people and communities were adjusting.

The Kruse-Braund study in 1985 (MMS 85-0079, TR 116) evolved from the

shortcomings of the prior studies. New formats in the participant questionnaires were

developed to focus on correlating measures of well-being with the activities of the Federal

agencies.

In 1986 the Jorgensen-Yale study was initiated by MMS with a more complex, but

improved questionnaire. Shortly thereafter, the ADF&G Division of Subsistence initiated

their own study. The combined effect was a cooperative effort and commitment to assemble

more detailed information on subsistence.

POTENTIAL USE OF DATA IN THE EIS PROCESS

The major emphasis should be on assimilation, making the material more accessible

and more useable for the EIS writer and the public.

The question has been asked: Where do we go from here? Perhaps that can be

expanded to: Where can we go from here? It has been stated that "social science doesn't

forecast, it is an historical science that has never been successful at forecasting." During the
Discussion and Recommendations 115

Exxon Valdez oil spill however, certain sociological events in the Native communities were

predicted successfully, based on the assumption that the future would be like the past.

We have assembled a great deal of information and generalizations that could be

integrated into the EIS, perhaps in what is called "baseline" part of Section III on the

Affected Environment, and specifically in subsection C on the social systems. According to

the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) guidance, this does not have to be a static

description, but an explanation of the environmental status without the proposed project

that is being considered. Therefore it is imperative to have some understanding of the

dynamics in, and between, communities. Similarly, the social systems impacts have to be

addressed under Section IV on the Environmental Consequences. However, it is difficult

to integrate the social indicators information here since the social projections are based on

economics. The impacts are driven by employment, by how many people will be moving into

the community, by how many children will be enrolled in school, by how much will local

business increase, etc. Such data generally lend themselves to credible projections, and the

social or cultural impacts represent a small portion of the total impact. However in the

Alaska OCS Region, this "Social Systems" section of the EIS has been expanded into a

substantial part of the document. This is to be expected: social effects are what people are

concerned about and EISs are supposed to address what people are concerned about.

The social indicators data contains hypotheses and findings that could be synthesized

into information useful for making projections. However, extracting and synthesizing the

information for an EIS that deals with complex societies requires a good grounding in the

social sciences.

INTEGRATION OF MONITORING DATA

There is a possibility of initiating a monitoring program that would utilize those

parameters (indicators) that have been determined to be credible predictors in the past.

Some agencies that had contributed to the social indicators database have spent 14 or 15

years looking at the concept of monitoring, trying to develop a system. We have the basis

for a monitoring program that, when combined with other active databases, could be

structured and enlarged to include more parameters, then pared down to the elements or

variables that have been demonstrated to be valid and reliable. Funding for such studies has

been radically reduced in recent years so that it would be a matter of necessity to focus any

future efforts on variables that have shown the strongest correlations and that are easiest

to measure. Such a program was successfully implemented during the Exxon Valdez oil spill,

with the number of sampled variables reduced to no more than 20.

There may be trade-offs to reductions in the number of variables to lower the cost

of such monitoring efforts. Transportation and support for field sampling teams is the major

source of cost. The incremental cost of an added variable is usually relatively minor since

it primarily affects just the analysis. Perhaps alternatives such as telephone interviews, or

having local persons conduct the sampling, could result in a more cost-effective effort

without compromising the statistical integrity of the data.
116 MMS - Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

The MMS is encouraged to formulate cooperative research agreements with Native

organizations to assist in the formulation of local panels of informants, and the conduct of

the field surveys. It not only is more cost effective but would provide more efficient and

effective access to the community. It would require some training and exchange of

information, similar in scope to the very successful program at the initiation of the 1983

social indicators surveys. At present, the ADF&G estimates the cost of each survey at about

$30,000. Since a significant portion of the expense is transportation and per diem, the use

of local personnel could reduce the cost considerably.

The issue may not be the number of variables, but rather the selection of "key

indicator villages," based on the social indicators database and experience. Since many

villages may be affected by a variety of events, both natural and man-induced, it would be

desirable to have a number of key indicator villages.

Additionally it is possible to reduce the frequency of sampling. For example it may

be possible to develop a sampling strategy that would allow alternate villages to be sampled

in alternate years. This would have the advantage of reducing costs, and the burden on the

persons and communities being surveyed. If six Native villages and six Hub villages were

selected, and one each sampled every year, it would be possible to reduce monitoring effort

significantly. There is considerable information for a number of villages. It has been

demonstrated repeatedly that Hub villages are similar and Native villages are similar. If one

contrasts Natives from nonnatives, Natives are similar and nonnatives are similar. We know

how villages differ. We know how the Natives and nonnatives differ. And by that fortuity

of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, we found how they happened to respond during a normal crisis

event.

Utilizing the social indicators database already assembled by MMS to provide a

baseline, an effective monitoring program can be designed. The social indicators data comes

directly from the villages; it comes from individuals, the primary source of information.

Those data are then returned to undergo scientific analysis. Perhaps the indicators can be

used as a "trigger," calling for a mitigation response if an effect is detected.

POTENTIAL ADDITIONS TO MONITORING PROGRAMS

While we have an excellent database there are questions that remain to be answered

and perhaps questions that have not been asked. In some cases the answer may reside

within the existing data and has yet to be discovered, and in other cases the answer may

require the collection of additional data.

Such examples are the effects on culture of governmental agencies in general, and

on subsistence specifically. How do we identify these governmental effects and how do we

monitor them? It is not a subject that has received much attention and one that has most

certainly not been monitored.

How do we measure changes in levels of subsistence? Sharing of subsistence food

items is a dominant characteristic of the Native community; however, the frequency and

number of shared things make it difficult to track. The data are within the database, as well
Discussion and Recommendations 117

as documentation of the changes in those sharing patterns during the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

It would be valuable to look at long-term changes and variability to determine the degree

of flexibility.

How do we measure cultural strength - not necessarily cultural integrity, in the

sense of always doing the same thing - but the ability of cultures to adapt to new or

changing situations? Is there an ability to maintain that structure, a degree of durability?

Can we measure that? The answer is "yes." It was demonstrated in monitored parameters

during the Exxon Valdez oil spill. Basically, there was more sharing, accentuating the Native

ethic as described in the Social Indicators studies. If the Native communities feel the need

for additional parameters to document this resilience, or describe other important features

of their life, they could be easily incorporated.

The MMS is charged with mitigating the effects of the offshore leasing program and

exploration and development operations. The primary reason for the monitoring is to

determine the effects of the program. Experience with the Exxon Valdez, an oil

transportation accident, indicates that short-term effects can be mitigated, but not long-term

ones.

RECOMMENDATIONS

1. The Social Indicators materials should be made more useable. The data should be

reformatted and synthesized to make the information more accessible and readable for EIS

writers and readers. It is imperative to have some explanation of the dynamics in, and

between, communities.

2. The social indicators data should be utilized more effectively in EISs. It comes from the

primary source of information. It represents the collective knowledge and input of 41

villages, and is scientifically sound.

3. A monitoring program to maintain the database should be initiated. It would be reduced

in scope but focused on the most demonstrably sensitive and reliable of the social indicators.

4. The reduction in scope should be directed at the frequency of sampling, the number of

variables, and interview procedures. Perhaps telephone interviews could result in a more

cost-effective effort without compromising the statistical integrity of the data. If possible,

the number of villages sampled should remain the same to maintain the vigor of the

sampling program.

5. It is recommended that MMS enter into cooperative agreements with Native groups to

involve the local community and help reduce the cost of field surveys.

6. Funding alternatives should be sought to maintain the database and to provide greater

dissemination.
Appendix A

Attendee List

'LdIIIIIi
MMS - Alaska Des Region

Social Indicators Monitoring Study Peer Review Workshop

June 18 and 19, 1996

Attendee List

Barbara Armstrong

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

P.O. Box 270

Kotzebue, AK 99752

(907) 442-3799

Mr. Michael Baffrey

Minerals Management Service

949 E. 36th Avenue

Anchorage, AK 99508

(907) 271-6677

Mr. Bob Brock

Minerals Management Service

949 E. 36th Avenue

Anchorage, AK 99508

(907) 271-6045

Mr. Mike Burwell

Minerals Management Service

949 E. 36th Avenue

Anchorage, AK 99508

(907) 271-6681

Dr. Don Callway

National Park Service

2525 Gambell

Anchorage, AK 99501

(907) 257-2408

Dr. Cleve Cowles

Minerals Management Service

949 E. 36th Avenue

Anchorage, AK 99508

(907) 271-6617

Mr. Cliff Edenshaw

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

1011 E. Tudor Road

Anchorage, AK 99503-6199

Dr. Joanna Endter-Wada

Natural Resource and Environmental Policy

Program - College of Natural Resources

Utah State University

Logan, UT 84322-1675

(801) 797-2487

Dr. Jim Fall

Division of Subsistence

Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game

333 Raspberry Road

Anchorage, AK 99518-1599

(907) 267-2359

Dr. Nick Flanders

Institute of Arctic Studies

Dartmouth College

6193 Murdough Center

Hanover, NH 03755-3560

(603) 646-1455

Mr. Carl Hild

RurAl CAP

P.O. Box 200908

Anchorage, AK 99520

(907) 279-2511

Dr. Tlffi Holder

Minerals Management Service

949 E. 36th Avenue

Anchorage, AK 99508

(907) 271·6625

Mr. Art Ivanoff

Maniilaq Association

P.O. Box 256

Kotzebue, AK 99752

(907) 442-3311

I
Mr. John Johnson

Chugach Heritage Foundation

4201 Tudor Center Drive, Suite 220

Anchorage, AK 99508

(907) 561-3143

Dr. Joe Jorgensen

9 Baruna Court

Newport Beach, CA 92663

(714) 654-2471

Ms. Mary Lou Kennedy

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

1011 E. Tudor Road

Anchorage, AK 99503-6199

(907) 786-3888

Dr. Doug Levine

SSHP/PHS

Bowman Gray School of Medicine

Medical Center Blvd.

Winston-Salem, NC 27157

(910) 716-9233

Dr. Harry Luton

Minerals Management Service

1201 Elmwood Park Blvd.

New Orleans, LA 70123-2394

(504) 736-2784

Dr. Rachel Mason

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

1011 E. Tudor Road

Anchorage, AK 99503-6199

(907) 786-3879

Mr. Charles T. Mitchell

MBC Applied Environmental Sciences

3040 RehdiU Avenue

Costa Mesa, CA 92626

(714) 850-4830

Ms. Kathy Mitchell

MBC Applied Environmental Sciences

3040 Rehdill Avenue

Costa Mesa, CA 92626

(714) 850-4830

Dr. Tom Newbury

Minerals Management Service

949 E. 36th Avenue

Anchorage, AK 99508

(907) 271-6604

Dr. William Schneider

Oral History Program

Alaska & Polar Regions Dept.

Elmer E. Rasmuson Library

University of Alaska Fairbanks

Fairbanks, AK 99775-1005

(907) 474-5355

Ms. Brenda Schwantes

Kodiak Area Native Association

3449 E. Rezanoff

Kodiak, AK 99615

(907) 486-9800

Mr. Jim Shaw

Minerals Management Service

949 E. 36th Avenue

Anchorage, AK 99508

Dr. Charles Utermohle

Division of Subsistence

Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game

333 Raspberry Road

Anchorage, AK 99518-1599

(907) 267-2360

;-1