RiGht Stoke S Point

By Jamie Bastedo

Did you ever see that crazy cold war movie, Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb? It was definitely a product of its time, the good old days of nuclear megadeath, missile envy, and “mutually assured destruction” or MAD – the military theory that neither the U.S.A. or Soviet Union would dare launch the first H-bomb for fear of triggering a massive retaliatory attack on themselves. The idea was that both attacker and defender would be wiped off the map.

Director Stanley Kubrick didn’t originally want Dr. Strangelove to be funny. But the more he learned about cold war practices, the more they seemed absolutely ridiculous. The result was a side-splitting nightmare comedy that was nominated for four Academy Awards.

There’s nothing funny however about what happened at Stokes Point, another product of cold war craziness. Back in the late 1950s, when many Americans were building bomb shelters in their backyards, U.S. military strategists took aim at Stokes Point to construct one of their many Distant Early Warning or DEW Line stations, meant to warn us of looming nuclear destruction – mutually assured, of course. A military radar base and air strip were promptly carved into the sands of Stokes Point, or “BAR-B” as it was called on U.S. Air Force maps.

Completed in just a few months and ultimately stretching from Alaska to Greenland, the DEW Line project was hailed as a unique triumph of scientific design and logistical planning.

But, in the case of Stokes Point, did those military masterminds care to ask the local Inuvialuit if they had any concerns about building on this site? Were the Inuvialuit offered economic benefits from construction at Stokes Point or other associated spinoffs?

Were they informed that construction wastes and other toxic materials had been bulldozed straight into the sea? In short, were the Inuvialuit involved in this grand military project in any way shape or form?

Basically, no.

Did things improve when Stokes Point was later used as an exploration camp during the Beaufort Sea oil boom of the early 1980s?

Not really.

But, thank goodness, times have changed.

More than sixty years after the American flag was raised at Stokes Point, the Inuvialuit have made it very clear who’s in charge of that precious piece of coastline.

Why precious?

Unknown to military planners bunkered down in Colorado or oil and gas executives in downtown Calgary was the fact that the sweeping sand beaches and protected coves of Stokes Point have, for generations, made it an important Inuvialuit site for harvesting wildlife, finding protection when boating along the coast, or just relaxing and picking berries. It was these kinds of traditional values that promoted the site’s inclusion in Ivvavik National Park, established in 1984 as a result of the Inuvialuit Final Agreement.

The people of Aklavik are among the most frequent users of Stokes Point. They were the ones who, back » in 2004, got the ball rolling on properly cleaning up the place after decades of abuse and neglect by southern interests.

“A lot of people that use that area felt that it wasn’t safe,” says Evelyn Storr, Aklavik’s Senior Administrator Officer. “They were really concerned because of the amount of waste that was there. If it’s not removed it’s going to effect the berries and the caribou and everything eating the berries, anything that is close to the ground. That was the biggest concern. On a few field trips, I saw big steel items like old vehicles sticking out. There was concern too about a few cabins built from plywood and stuff off the Dew-Line site which of course was painted and had all the contaminants on it. People had concerns because they felt that maybe in the past some elders might have gotten sick by staying in the cabins and breathing that stuff in.”

Over the years, no one had done a detailed study of contaminants left by past activities and any cleanup efforts at Stokes Point had been piecemeal at best. The community of Aklavik joined forces with Nellie Cournoyea, Chair of the Invuvialuit Regional Corporation (IRC), and, after a series of back-and-forth letters, finally convinced Parks Canada that something had to be done.

Ifan Thomas, Parks Canada superintendent for the western Arctic says that, “We ultimately agreed with them that Stokes Point needed to be cleaned up, both from a human safety perspective but also because it’s part of a national park and we have a mandate to make sure that the ecological integrity of the site is maintained.”

This agreement led to the formation of the Stokes Point Steering Committee. Inuvialuit concerns were voiced by members from the Aklavik Community Corporation, Aklavik Hunters and Trappers Committee, the Wildlife Management Advisory Council, and IRC. Federal interests were represented by members from Parks Canada and the Department of National Defence.

“The steering committee was established to really look for the concerns of the community, the concerns of the Inuvialuit people that use the Stokes area,” says Evelyn Storr, “and to ensure that their needs and concerns were addressed.”

Struck in 2005, the committee’s overall job was to provide guidance throughout the site investigation and advise on what should – and should not – be in the cleanup plan.

“We worked with the community on how we would do the cleanup,” Ifan Thomas says. “We determined which things we would remove and which were better to leave in place, because digging them up would cause more damage than leaving them. Then there were also some cabins. We wanted to make sure if we were pulling materials from the cabins that they were actually contaminated. We were making sure that the cabins that are still used continue to stand.”

The road from community concerns to cleanup took a long time, probably longer than anyone on the Steering Committee expected.

“We didn’t rush through the process,” says Storr. “There were different stages and so much testing. There were still concerns, testing for this and that, and results were brought back to us to ensure that everything was done properly. It took time.”

“It took a little while to get the funding lined up,” explains Nelson Perry, an ecosystem scientist with Parks Canada, “because it was a six million dollar project. Once we knew we were going to have funding each year, the steering committee was created and full site investigations started in the summers of 2006 and 2007. We did a complete site investigation, sampling water, vegetation, and wildlife to determine what contaminants were there and also what type of physical debris needed to be cleaned up.”

Besides securing funding and doing all the field studies, another step that took time was to maximize the chances of Inuvialuit contractors getting economic benefits related to any site work.

“Parks Canada really tried to make sure that most of the economic benefits went to the Inuvialuit Settlement region,” Perry explains. “We also put a specific focus on Aklavik to ensure that all contract opportunities, sub-contracts, and direct employment were maximized to the extent possible. We set up a special contract process that was open tender but the company bidding got extra points if they demonstrated they were offering maximum opportunities to Aklavik and to the region as a whole. We feel that we succeeded on the economic benefit side.”

Once the money and the field studies and the contracts were all in hand, the actual cleanup job got done in just three and a half weeks.

Looking back on the entire process Parks Superintendent Ifan Thomas admits it took a lot of time.

“But,” he says, “I think that the time it took reflects the fact that we're working in probably one of the most isolated and most difficult places in the world to work. It’s the arctic, we're way above the Arctic Circle, we're on the Beaufort Sea, there aren't any roads, you’ve got to use incredible measures to get to the site. If you want to do a cleanup you’ve got to bring in all sorts of equipment. That just takes patience and time. And you need to plan these things out, you need to rely on local knowledge to make sure you're thinking about all the implications of one approach over another. So that’s the message I'd share with others – that we really benefited from working closely with the community throughout the process and allowing the community, in a meaningful way, to influence the process.”

Are the people of Aklavik happy with the outcome? Well, at last January’s official Stokes Point Cleanup party held in the community, the mood was pretty darned positive.

Who better than Aklavik’s own Evelyn Storr to answer that question? “The actual cleanup was very well organized, I must say. We went down there on a day trip just to look at the cleanup and I was quite impressed. They had a good crew and everything went smoothly. I think the community might have some questions in the back of their minds, but at least they have more of a comfort zone now when they go down there. They know how much stuff was brought out and that the approach was the best. People will continue to use that area. It’s just right along the coast, you can’t miss it. It will give them just a better feeling of going in there and using it like how they used to.”∞