We in the lower 48 hear a lot about drilling for oil in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. Money-grubbing industry reps and the politicians they have bought tend to represent it as a no-man’s land populated only by elk and polar bears. But Rosemary Ahtuangaruak, whom I know through APHA (American Public Health Association), has to live with gas and oil polluting air and water all around her village of Nuiqsut on the North Shore of Alaska, right on the Arctic Ocean. For decades she has led her community in fighting the industry despite being targeted for her work. She sees it as her mission to protect the people, the lands, and the waters of Alaska.

A graduate of the University of Washington Medex Northwest Physician Assistant Program and a community health aide, Rosemary “saw respiratory illness increasing amongst our people. I began asking questions and saw natural gas flares and noticed more people had trouble. We saw thyroid disorders, cardiac disease, obesity, and diabetes also rise.” She is a former mayor of Nuiqsut and an executive council member of the Alaska Inter–Tribal Council. She received the 2009 Voice of the Wild Award from the Alaska Wilderness League and is an Arctic Indigenous Scholar. She is also a leader of Grandmothers Grow Goodness, which promotes “Inupiat culture and people in the face of rampant oil and gas development and climate change.”

When we spoke on June 6, it was snowing, with snow piled all around her as she ferried a grandchild home from school. She says everyone calls her Rose.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Figure 1: Rosemary Ahtuangaruak

JMK: Hello! Is it EJ?

EJ: I'm EJ.

JMK: I'm Jean-Marie. Nice to meet you.

EJ: Rose should be hopping on any minute. I just got off the phone with her a little bit ago.

JMK: Awesome. Thank you so much for helping.

EJ: It's a beautiful day out here in Alaska. The sun was just up. It looks a little gloomy now

JMK: It’s pretty here, too, except, you know, the last few days we've had air pollution from the fires in Canada.

EJ: Oh man! No fun. I’m going to get my son some more goldfish. Oh, there’s Rose!

JMK: Hi! Is it Rose or Rosemary?

RA: Rosemary is my formal name—hardly anyone ever says Rosemary.

My grandson just started work, so I had to pick him up right at the start of this meeting. But we're just pulling into the driveway.

JMK: Well, I really appreciate you taking the time to talk. You're on the North Slope of Alaska. Is that right?

RA: Yes. We are in a village called Nuiqsut. We're a small whaling, hunting, gathering community on the Colville River of the Beaufort Sea, and we have reestablished this community in 1973. We had families that have always lived in this area.

Figure 2: Nuiqsut, Alaska

But when we had the boarding school process, many of the families moved to Barrow and other places where they didn't have to take the kids out of the village, but our village, reestablished in 73; 27 families came from Barrow and reestablished the community. I came in 1986. At the time I had one son, who was just about to turn three years old.

I came here to be a health aide and work in our small village clinic, and I started asking questions essentially from day one working in our village clinic in the different issues that we raise and see.

JMK: Well, and I noticed in some of the other things you published. I was reading up on you, and very interested to see that in fact, you have seen higher levels of things like diabetes, obesity, thyroid disorders, and those things tend to be really quite tied to some of these chemicals that are disproportionately affecting you.

RA: So for me, I started asking questions because we had respiratory illnesses that I noticed when I first came to the village, were in only one person in 323 used medicine to help them breathe. But as I continued to work in the clinic, more and more people started having that noise where you have the wheezing sounds. And I started asking a lot of questions. At the time when I first came to the village, oil and gas development was still 60 miles away. But after I moved here, the Kuparuk River Unit started, and oil and gas development now completely surrounds our village on all four sides.

Other questions that I started asking about was thyroid disorders, right away. That was another thing that we started dealing with, and trying to deal with thyroid storms in a small village with no resources, no access to medicines is very scary.

So we asked a lot of questions. With that they tried to belittle my concern and say, because we had TB exposures and radiation exposures related to X-rays, that's why we have thyroid disorders. We also saw skin disorders developing. We also saw problems with leukemia developed later on. We also saw problems with neurological and mental illness increase. I'm very concerned about genetic effects. It seems like we're having bouts of where we'll have a lot of boys born at one time and no girls or vice versa -- a lot of girls born. And so those kind of questions I keep asking also. I worry about the reproductive health questions because they never were really asked in culturally sensitive ways.

And I even had doctors tell me I didn't have to report miscarriages and things like that. So those are the kinds of things that I definitely worried about and still worry about tremendously with our near proximity to where the oil and gas development is occurring and the tons of emissions related to that.

JMK: Yeah, no, it's terrible. I was just at a webinar with Vi Waghiyi, who works with you with ACAT.

RA: Vi is one of the many people that we work with in many different ways. Vi comes from Savoonga [Sivuqaq or St. Lawrence Island]. She's been working with Alaska Community Action on Toxics (ACAT) for decades. A lot of her work has been about the military toxics that were left behind in communities where the military sites were, which her community has tons related to that. We also have sites near us that give us a lot of concerns and have worked in the process around all of that. And then there's others within ACAT that we also work with – Pam Miller and Sima…. I'm blinking on her last name. They've also been involved with our work around the air-quality industry self-reporting emissions report that we get with native village of Nuiqsut. We did work with Alaska native tribal health consortium, in which we got an evaluation around the process for air-quality concerns. But Alaska native tribal health consortium took their process into indoor air quality. And then now we have to combat and defend against what they have in their report versus our concerns from outdoor emissions and exposures.

We do have indoor air quality concerns and issues that are also contributory to respiratory illnesses and issues and concerns. We do have natural gas heating sources in our homes. And so those are true factors that are also related. But they're not the main issues that we're facing. It's collaboration with others who get to try to deflect our concerns.

JMK: Yes. I wonder do you feel like the problems are worse on the north slope compared to the rest of Alaska? Or is it really disproportional effects through the whole state? Because I know you're disproportionately affected by climate change. But then, also with the global distillation, I mean, you get a lot of pollutants coming up to Alaska.

RA: Definitely, we have the national emissions; we did a cord blood study in Alaska, in which we identified Alaska Natives have over a hundred and twenty contaminants. And when you do the breast milk study, we also have issues that are related to our communities and the issues that we're facing. So for us, some of the 3M emissions that are produced in other countries even make it to the Arctic and have ended up in our studies.

But when we need to look at these various studies to look at the issues that are causing us concerns for exposures or trying to make sure we have a baseline evaluation that can stand up to scrutiny with additional studies that need to be done. We can't even access it like when Nuiqsut went through the Repsol blowout 17 miles from our village. We couldn't get some of those basic blood studies that were done with our population related to the early oil and gas development process, and so trying to formulate a study that is similar that will stand up to muster, because if you don't do it similar to what was done before then, you can't say it's a follow-up study. There are factors that can play into why it's not a good study, that kind of thing. But yet even the tribe couldn't gain access to that basic information.

So I think there is a lot of manipulation in the state and in the federal process in which information is selectively included as politics, promote discussions and actions, and create the reactions that create our issues and concerns—like we had 80 days of continuous flaring, but industry got to use two days of similar canister testing to evaluate the issues and concerns around emissions for our community. But yet we've got independent university studies that are showing that industry is manipulating the way that data is being accumulated like using dead air zone areas to try to obtain samples, which aren't getting readings, but are used to say, hey, we have no problems with any of the emissions and concerns. Or with industry when they took and put pipes because there were sensors that were put into the smokestack to assess emissions, and so they got away with bypassing pipes to reduce the amount of product that was actually getting by the sensors – or that we only have two air quality regulators in our State with so many areas of environmental emissions. Or that we have the Prince William Sound’s regional Advisory Committee, which is involved with oil and gas development, but they can only do port testing. And yet the oil and gas processes all the way from the Arctic Ocean with exploration and development and the continued effort to bring the product farther.

JMK: Yes. You know, in the lower 48, I've been reading about these impacts for a long time, especially the cord blood and the breast milk, and yes, of course everyone pays attention when there's a huge event. But you're living with daily flaring. That's really hard. It sounds like, it's been very difficult to live there, more difficult than normally. Would you say there's one thing that has been hardest about the experience.

RA: Yes, definitely, it's been the hardest throughout the process because as soon as I started asking questions, then the opposition created strategies against me. There is even a process in which the North Slope Borough hired individuals to combat the process that I'm bringing forward.

I’m blanking on his name right now, our guy that's been working with the city for a number of years. Now he was hired with the borough when I was a health aide to combat my concerns for human health issues around oil and gas development, and he also went to the State of Alaska to continue to build a process against me, as I continue to promote issues and concerns related to human health and the oil and gas process. Tom Lohman and Jason Bergerson. And you can see how they've been put into various positions as I try to rise within the process around me like when I moved back to the city after I went through the divorce, but I had to come back and watch my grandkids play ball. I taught basketball to little dribblers in my own family, taking our kids to state, so I could not watch my granddaughter play ball. So I came back to the village and they strategized against me again and created the Nuiqsut Development Foundation, reducing the volume of what I have to say, giving Conoco a seat at the table, even though it's supposed to be a trilateral process between the city, tribe, and the corporation.

So it's been really, really difficult in the process. I've had people come to me: “Oh, but we have natural methane emissions. You don't have to worry about what's being flared. We have emissions that are coming out of the ground. It's not industry's fault” – Special Assistant to the North Slope Borough Mayor. So I've had corporate board members swearing at our community during the disaster calls with ConocoPhillips with the CD1 gas leak because it was my responsibility to allow the public a chance to state their concerns, no matter how many times each individual was repeating concerns that were already stated.

Efforts to try to silence the community, by swearing at them and calling them names and everything during those calls really stagnates the willingness to try to voice concerns and oppositions. But yet just this week I had to assist with another neurological patient who developed status epilepticus, and we had to do rescue breathing, breathing for 3 hours.

JMK: My goodness.

RA: These are real serious issues. You're out in the middle of nowhere. You have very little resources. You don't have enough supplies and equipment – like we ran out of oxygen at one point during all of this. These are real serious issues; bringing our issues and concerns into the process, but not being able to stay at the table to ensure health, life, and safety guides decisions instead of profitability for the permiters who stay at the table after I leave.

JMK: Yes, I am on an advisory committee to the EPA for Children's Environmental Health. And it's just discouraging to see how much power representatives of the corporations have. It's it must be even more so when you feel outnumbered in that way.

RA: I deal with state-chartered native corporations who are allowed to be consulted with as tribes, but don't want to address any of the social or health issues only the reality that they can get profits.

JMK: It's very discouraging. I saw that you've been really active in speaking out. You've been an activist a long time. Is there one thing that you are very proud of?

RA: Yes. I am very proud that I worked very hard to be educated very strongly when I had to become the Mayor in November, and we had the CD1 gas leak in March. The one above guided some of those engagements, and so I was able to do some additional research and training through Pipeline Safety Trust, which gave me access to a wide variety of individuals that were able to help me continue to ask questions when those emergency calls were not giving us any answers, and that helped me to come to an understanding that we had a blowout, because industry never told us we had a blowout. We had to figure it out for ourselves.

But in doing so I was strategically engaged; I was educating the community throughout the process by sharing my questions and the answers that I got because I had to be that spokesperson of the meetings.

And so when I got onto the calls for the community, I shared everything, not just what Conoco gave us, not just what Ben Stevens gave us. I made sure that I demonstrated that I asked others’ questions, and these were other questions that were given to me, and I asked them. But it was industry’s self-preservation statement that led to the community’s decision of families self-evacuating. And that was the hardest part.

There came a point when I had to call the Red Cross, and the Red Cross call was linked with the call center for the disaster. And I had to inform them that families were self-evacuating, and I didn't know how they would make it if they would get wet – worse because they were traveling into the industrial field, didn't know if they would increase their exposures or lead into adverse events that were associated with the emissions. And I also had to worry because every one of these families, I know a lot about them. So I in my mind I was doing my mental check off: infants and children, pregnant women, elders on medication, people with chronic diseases: check check check. Yes, this family. Thank you. I appreciate your effort, and I'm sorry that you feel you need to go, but I appreciate that you're leaving: one family with high risk, individuals gone, and I don't have to worry when I don't have enough vehicles or modes of transportation or equipment to safely transport people if the evacuation order goes.

JMK: Wow! That's that is a lot of responsibility.

RA: As a health aide, I had dealt with similar events.

When 9/11 happened, we knew something was happening a week before 9/11. When we went to traditional sites for our pre-whaling activities, taking boats to **? for the first time, we were met with guns. and so, when 9/11 happened, immediately we had no airplanes, which bring in a lot of supplies to our community. So things like medications, diapers, formula were immediately in low supply. And so we we've had to deal with different layers of emergency.

We were notified when Prudhoe Bay was threatened as a target by terrorists, and all they did was call me as the acting mayor, and say, “You're being put on alert.”

What does that mean?

So I had to do that foresight and planning. You know. What does it mean? Well, the worst-case scenario is something bad happens, and we need to take our community away from this area. So prepare for that. What do I take for the clinic to make sure that we can respond to anything for people along the way, and then I learned a lot more, after all of that, throughout this whole process, that led to me being better prepared for the CD1 gas leak. I wasn't here when the Repsol blowout happened, but I heard from a lot of people about the issues and concerns. One of the elders hugged me after four weeks of not being able to leave the village when the event happened. She had trouble breathing the whole time. She hugged me and held on to me crying, saying, “Now I understand your concerns for air quality. I couldn't breathe! They tried to help me. I couldn't breathe. I'm here in Anchorage. I can finally breathe. Now I understand.”

Or the little old lady who was in Point Hope, who says “my grandson has to take his hunting gear off because I can smell it when he comes from the snow machine. He can't come inside with his hunting gear on because I can't breathe. I can't go to the gas station. You speak for me.” Or that same community, the little ninth grader, who says “all of the women older than me have already died in my family. Why do you even try?”

JMK: Oh, my goodness! That's awful!

RA: Not as bad as the seven little dribblers who are now of reproductive age, when I first came back, asked me reproductive health questions.

JMK: I think I told you I met with Shanna Swan who wrote Countdown. I don't know if you know her. She is talking about the fact that globally, sperm count is going down. Men and women both are having trouble with reproduction, and so it stands to reason that you would worry about that where you have higher concentrations of exposures.

RA: That's exactly what I happened to say when we went through the community information exchange between Alaska and New Orleans – two communities that went through disasters related to oil spills. I told them that any of these plans that you put forward have to look at protecting our DNA. We're a small community of 500 people. You have to think about this process because we're a unique population, and our DNA should be protected.

JMK: That's interesting because I also have been talking to two activists in Cancer Alley in Louisiana and it's true – a lot of these communities that are most exposed have very similar concerns, very similar health problems.

RA: And yet they're getting compounded with so many different severe events, like the hurricanes that also had severe disasters, emissions, and exposures. Yet it's in different research studies and modes of understanding why, we're having tremendous numbers of health statistics occur, but it's being done by people who don't have to look into the eyes of the little children who live amongst these populations.

JMK: Absolutely. And you know all children are affected. My book is Poisoning Our Children. It's terrible that some children are more poisoned than others – no children should be poisoned – but all children are being poisoned to one extent or another.

It's just terrible.

RA: Exactly. And with this administration, the rapidity of the increased emissions happened with the swearing in. We went from the luxury of having a regulatory emission process that came out from the Biden administration prior to his ending of his term, to watching in November, when Trump got sworn in, the immediate rise of flaring.

JMK: I saw that. And I did see that I think it was in the New York Times. And thought of you all.

It's just it's reprehensible. I don't know how it happened that more than 50% of Americans voted for this administration. But you and I have very different perspectives, I suppose -- not from each other, but from the people who would vote for an administration like this.

RA: Exactly. It's really hard for us to get people to come in and join the stories about this. But there are key people that could contribute wonderful stories for you. But the reality is that our community is under extreme hyper aggression with media-silencing efforts. So every one of our work entities have created media policies and threaten employment if anyone tries to speak out and tell stories.

So that that has been a very deterrent process for the last three years. I won the first round of the Willow lawsuit, and so they doubled down on efforts to prevent people from joining me, as well as trying to build a volume against me. So we're in the rebound effect of that; we've got Iñupiaq leader CC Lampe, speaking in support of oil and gas development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. At the same time, I'm expressing severe concerns to the northeast corner of a lake that's going to have 3 million transects related to the Willow project. But now they want to build in another supersized runway and onshore, nearshore, offshore development in the same northeast corner, which our village wholeheartedly opposed the development of.

And yet the administration still approved it, and now are ramping up even more activity.

JMK: Well, I would love to talk to anybody who feels free to talk, but even if I just get to talk to you, and I hope to get permission to use some of the material from that webinar that Vi was talking about. I still think I have enough to really raise awareness. But if you can think of anybody, maybe whose family is not employed, and wouldn't be affected by those threats, of course I would be very happy to talk to anybody, especially if they think their family, their children have been affected.

I'm sure many have.

RA: Yeah, I am, too. I think there's a real corporate strategy to try to utilize their efforts to blur human health concerns and give those that are voting in wrong ways safeguard to feel good, that they're doing things like giving jobs. But we need to do this over-arching process where all of this is not the cost of children's health and promote that as the baseline for decision-making process for all land-use decisions into the future to prevent and recover what we've already lost.

JMK: I'm so sorry. My condolences to you for all you've endured. It's really very, very difficult.

RA: I understand that – I can imagine what you're going through. You're in a different venue, but you're in a national venue. So even though I have players that give me these different attacks, it's only when I'm in these venues, whereas you live in these bigger cities, where you come across these things in a more consistent manner. And so you're constantly in the process of educating and communicating and dealing with issues that we want to prevent.

JMK: Yes. It seems difficult to make a difference. I just I guess I feel that I cannot stop, right? You know we have to do what we can do.

And I'm going to write this damn book, and my title now is Poisoning Our Children: How the Petrochemical Industry Has Imperiled Every Life on Earth, and I've decided if they will let me, I'm really going to call it like I see it and call out the industry – because it's not okay. It's evil to ruin people's lives and to kill them. For money.

RA: Exactly, exactly, and it's evil to lead the country astray to allow more of it to be done.

JMK: I agree.

RA: I will do some outreach. I've got a couple that I wish would start to do things. They've really dealt with some really bad issues. But I got one to go to DC before she started dealing with things. And she's interested in doing something. But she's also dealing with the tragedy that I was speaking to, and so we can't push anything, but she did tell me she wants to do something. And I think that she's going to have to live in Anchorage after this severe event that we went through. So access might be a little easier in different ways. and it would also be easier in ways, because she's not going to be in the heart of where the stress of everything is occurring. So I will communicate with a couple of different ones and then see if we can get some interest. You communicate back with anything that you need.

The importance of the European Union, and the research that's being done over there related to substances and the human health effects versus the MSDS that we deal with in the United States are a big factor in breaking that blurriness that these elected officials get away with.

JMK: Yes. The EU’s chemical regulation is entirely different from ours, isn't it? And they have much better protections.

RA: As well as when we're trying to assess what's going on, we have to go look at what they put out, not our MSDS.

We have to look at other places for information because they're not going to give us what the true real factors are – just like they did with the Exxon Valdez, just like they did with the New Orleans, with the Deep Water Horizon. They manipulated research and monitoring in many different ways. But we've got great people like Wilma Subra, who created the Suma canisters in the first place, so that we can get some assessments in different ways. But also, she was instrumental in educating people like me about endocrine disruptors which has expanded my understanding and communications to people like you.

JMK: Well, and I really hope to include your community and Vi’s community in the chapter I'm writing about endocrine disrupting chemicals and autoimmune disease, particularly just because, you know, my daughter is in the chapter about cancer. I have someone on autism, and it just seems like so many of the chemicals you are exposed to, and a lot of the health effects you're seeing are a good match for that chapter. I would really love to be matched up with these people as much as you can do that.

RA: All right, we'll see what we can do. We'll keep trying don't know if we're going to succeed at this time, because of these heightened efforts of the opposition. But we'll definitely keep trying. And then as you work through your process, just reach out. EJ is my coworker. I'm trying to give her more leeway on doing the administrative capacity like, she works with me on our grant reports, our grant applications and process, and then I'm trying to have her expand in the process because we need to create a membership that supports the kind of things that we're putting forward.

But definitely reach out to EJ; she's really good about making sure I get any information. I'm trying to build her ability to do a lot of this basic work. I get into the more specific issues like human-health effects related to oil and gas. But I don't want to do all of the other layers of work that we also have to do. So definitely engage EJ in that process; as I think about strategies for us definitely, that's where I'm located at trying to create policies and issues where things go. But I also have to break down into layers immediately in many different fights because I've got to deal with my own regional corporation, who has their strategy against me.

JMK: I'm sorry you're subject to that bullying. That's really distressing and difficult, because it must be infuriating.

RA: It is unreal. It's been decades, you know, so you've had to. I've had to learn to temper it. I used to get really, really upset. But I can't do that and be effective in these meetings. I have to temper my anger and get back into the core issue because they're raising my anger, so I won't be effective. And they've done that a few times. So I've got that strategy behind every time they try to raise it, get back on topic.

But it is really hard, because all of my family have suffered because I take various stances on these issues, and there are repercussions with employment, scholarships, housing, anything.

JMK: That is terrible.

Yeah, I feel that way about the administration generally, and also the corporate people who just want that out of me. Don't give it to them right.

RA: Exactly.

JMK: I have to say, with the book, one of the major messages I'm trying to share is that yes, this such a distressing issue. But I have met the most amazing people. People like you people like the other people at APHA, and scientists and healthcare providers and activists all working really, really hard. And there are lots of really good people in this community that we have that really expands the nation, expands the world. There are a lot of good people. We just thank you.

RA: Exactly, exactly. And that's why we keep engaged in these processes. That's why we win when the administration changes. We may not get all the strongest wins. But we're going to see those wonderful wins because we've had to have these horrendous attacks.

JMK: By the way, EJ, your baby is so adorable.

EJR: Oh, thank you! This is Maverick.

JMK: Maverick—hi! Good to meet you. Oh, my!

RA: This is Ariel!

JMK: Hi, Ariel. I'm Jean-Marie.

RA: Bye EJ! You don't have your camera on. She's trying to look at Maverick too.

JMK: How cute!

RA: Oh, cute! All right, Jean-Marie, do you have anything else?

JMK: I have lots of things we could talk about. But you go be with your kiddos, and thank you so much for everything you've given me. I'll be back in touch if I have any other questions.

I appreciate being in solidarity with you all.

RA: Thank you.

JMK: Thank you! Bye, EJ.