When I entered the village store to buy some good cheap mosquito-repellent cigars I found the shelves loaded with cartons and cases of Pepsi-Cola, candy bars, Holsum bread, sweet rolls, cigarettes, Oreo cookies, Cheezits, Coleman fuel, propane bottles, not much else. No cigars. The manager of the store is a white man. The village post office (ZIP code 99747) is operated by a young white woman. The teachers in the ten-million-dollar school are all whites. When something goes wrong with the village plumbing or electricity (the steady bellow of diesel generators, louder than wind, makes a constant background noise at Kaktovik and Barter Island), as happens frequently, private contractors—white men—are flown in from Fairbanks or Anchorage, at enormous expense, to repair the damage. This has nothing to do with race discrimination; the natives don’t want the jobs.

And the wind blows day and night, forever, out of the north, from beyond the dead whale on the beach, from beyond the mangled ice floes, out of the infinite wastes of the most awesome sight in the North: that pale cold no-man’s-land, that endless frozen desert of ice leading as far as eye can perceive out over the Beaufort Sea and into the Arctic Ocean. Toward the Pole.

What will happen to these people when the North Slope oil gives out? The Eskimos and other Alaskan natives still enjoy the hunt, as much or more than ever, and when they do go hunting, on their screaming packs of snow machines, they kill everything that moves. (The musk-ox, for example, had to be reintroduced from Canada into the Arctic Wildlife Refuge because the natives, equipped with white man’s machines and armed with white man’s weapons, had exterminated the local herds.) But this kind of hunting, whether of land animals or of seals, whales, fish, polar bear, is entirely dependent upon technology. Impossible to imagine, I was told, that the new generations would or could return to the traditional nomadic way, following the game in its seasonal migrations from Alaska to Canada and back, surviving in hide tents and sod huts under the snow as their ancestors—their still-living grandparents—had done. Unimaginable. They’ll all move to the slums of Fairbanks, Anchorage and Seattle, join the public-welfare culture, before consenting to such romantic humiliation. Can’t blame them; until the coming of the white man the natives spent half their lives on the edge of starvation. Famine was common. Now, despite alcoholism, violence, suicide, their population is growing—and fast.

But we are told—and sometimes by the natives themselves—that they were a stronger, happier people before. They certainly don’t appear to be happy now.

What happens to these people when they migrate to the city? I think of “Two Street” (Second Avenue), Fairbanks, which resembles the center of Flagstaff or Gallup on a Saturday night. There is even a “Navajo Taco Stand” on one corner, selling genuine Athapaskan tacos (fry bread, shredded lettuce and hamburger), and the street is lined with grim little bars jam-packed with brawling Indians and Eskimos. Drunken aborigines lean on the walls outside, sit on the sidewalks, stumble toward the taxicab lineup to get a four-block ride home to some chain-saw shanty on the edge of town. Half conscious, they stare at you through eyes the complexion of strawberries, and try to bum a dollar. I saw one man descamisado, naked from the waist up, staggering down the street with one foot on the sidewalk and the other in the gutter; he looked confused.