Across the Bering Strait: native-to-native business.

• Author: Novik, Natalie

At the "crossroads of continents," Natives from both sides of the Bering Strait are renewing a centuries-old trading partnership.

Elgar. Unpener. Nuvuqaqmit. These are unfamiliar names to the average Alaska businessman, and yet they are a sign that times are changing. These are among the first Native businesses recently created in Chukotka, the part of Northeast Russia which faces Alaska. They are still fledgling enterprises, but they reflect an ancient tradition of trade and barter among Natives between Alaska and Russia.

For thousands of years, the Chukchi, the Yupik, the Inupiat and the other Natives around the Bering Strait met at regular intervals, usually in the summer and the fall, in places like Kotzebue in Alaska, or on the Russian side in places like Aniuy, to trade and barter. These gatherings were well-attended until the beginning of this century, when the commercial and political influence of non-Natives discouraged the indigenous traders from traveling hundreds of miles to visit. Yet the memory of these encounters still lingers, and when the border between Alaska and Chukotka reopened in the early 1990s, one of the first groups of visitors was a large Native delegation from Chukotka coming by boat to the Kotzebue Trade Fair.

First Contacts

On the North American side of the Bering Strait, the Alaska Native corporations and associations are very conscious of the bond with their tribesmen in Chukotka. As exchanges developed, the sense that both indigenous groups share a common culture grew rapidly between 1990 and 1992. People found relatives they didn't know they had, and many traditions lost over the years were brought back to life through these new contacts.

In 1989, a visionary mayor in Lavrentiya, Yuri Tototto, convinced a pilot, Nikolai Selbakov, to fly a delegation from Chukotka to Kotzebue. Their visit was a revelation, and served as a basis for subsequent visits organized by NANA Regional Corp. and the Northwest Arctic Borough to Chukotka.

NANA signed a first agreement with the Lavrentiya town council in 1990, updated in 1993, to promote cultural exchanges. As a result, elders, dancers and craftspeople from Chukotka spend the summer in Kotzebue to pass on their knowledge to the younger generations of Inupiat.

The Barrow-based Arctic Slope Regional Corp., under the impulse of John McClellan, established contacts with the Chukotka government to assess possibilities for cooperation, and a program has been developed to...