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raging tempests of the Chukchi Sea.
    The whales gravitated to the sandspit, which served as a natural windbreak, allowing them to feed more comfortably in its shelter. But when the calm Beaufort Sea water started to freeze, the whales did not realize that the waters just across the spit—which were much rougher—were still ice-free. If the whales had been any farther from shore they would never have been discovered because they wouldn’t have been stranded.
    That night, over beers, some of Malik’s whaling friends asked him what he thought about harvesting the three gray whales. Malik shrugged with disinterest. He didn’t see the point of killing them so long as there was a chance they could swim free. If they couldn’t escape, then all bets were off. He took no pleasure in seeing animals suffer, but then again, he took even less pleasure seeing his fellow human beings suffer. Why should Barrowans be deprived of benefiting from the whales if there really was no way to help them?
    Malik thought there must be some way to help the whales overcome their fear enough to get them to start swimming. Because they were young, they had probably never seen slush before and simply assumed it was ice. While the whales acted like they were trapped, as of Saturday afternoon, October 8, they were not. Later that night, reports of the stranded whales started to trickle through town. The newer, younger whaling crews clamored for permission to harvest the whales.
    However, they weren’t allowed to do anything until Craig George and Geoff Carroll had the chance to study them, but the two biologists were hunting caribou in the tundra, and weren’t scheduled to return until Monday. Craig and Geoff helped start the local government’s Department of Wildlife Management in the early 1970s. The job offered these two adventurers a chance to study whales in a way other biologists could only dream of. Their management responsibilities were not just to protect local wildlife, but also to help locals hunt and kill it. In particular, the most important part of their job was to help the Eskimos hunt and kill bowhead whales.
    The two conducted an annual census of the bowhead whale population for the North Slope Borough (NSB), Alaska’s equivalent of a county. What they found would be the basis for negotiating next year’s quota with the International Whaling Commission. Geoff and Craig exemplified a remarkable fact of modern Eskimo life. The Inupiat Eskimo lived primitive lives by conventional American standards, but they were smart enough to hire the best modern expertise their money and influence could buy. The Eskimos had no shortage of help to manage their stormy entrance with the modern world—which is what made so much of it so stormy.
    Herein lay another hard to break media myth about native peoples in the United States, Alaska in particular—that their hard-bitten plight was the consequence of government disregard. In fact, on a per capita basis no other group of Americans received even close to the level of federal and state assistance annually disbursed to native peoples. By the 1980s, federal and state aid to these peoples was massive enough to transform entire communities into little more than state wards. The government micromanaged the land they lived on and the houses they lived in. The government not only paid for, but directly delivered, their health care, which goes a long toward explaining why it was the worst in the country. Dozens of federal departments and agencies had their own designated “native American” programs, nearly all of which were available to Alaskans. And that’s just the feds. By 1988, the state of Alaska had its own fully developed but largely redundant assistance bureaucracy.
    The consequences for native peoples in places like Barrow were somewhat incongruous. What but government could produce poverty in people with relatively high per capita incomes? What