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Spoiling and Sustainability: Technology, Water Insecurity, and Visibility in Arctic Alaska Laura Eichelberger

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Nutritional Epidemiology Branch, Division of Cancer Epidemiology & Genetics, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, USA Accepted author version posted online: 08 May 2014.Published online: 30 Sep 2014.

Click for updates To cite this article: Laura Eichelberger (2014) Spoiling and Sustainability: Technology, Water Insecurity, and Visibility in Arctic Alaska, Medical Anthropology: Cross-Cultural Studies in Health and Illness, 33:6, 478-496, DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2014.917374 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01459740.2014.917374

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Medical Anthropology, 33: 478–496, 2014 Copyright © 2014 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0145-9740 print/1545-5882 online DOI: 10.1080/01459740.2014.917374

Spoiling and Sustainability: Technology, Water Insecurity, and Visibility in Arctic Alaska

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Laura Eichelberger Nutritional Epidemiology Branch, Division of Cancer Epidemiology & Genetics, National Cancer Institute, Bethesda, Maryland, USA

One third of households in Alaska Native villages lack running water and sewer services. Historically, this public health need drove policies to improve access to treated water and sanitation. However, despite public health being a stated priority of water infrastructure development, current policies require demonstrated economic sustainability in ways that render suffering from water insecurity invisible. In this article, I situate the introduction of water treatment technologies within the history of domination coproduced with vulnerability. These processes are reflected in local narratives describing the relationships between technology, tradition, and suffering. By drawing attention to the role of the state in creating vulnerability, village leaders are trying to historicize and insert their health concerns into the sustainability conversation using narratives that both fit within and challenge the ideology of sustainability. These narratives are thus central to Iñupiat struggles for visibility. Keywords Iñupiat, sanitation, technology, vulnerability, water insecurity

Edna: It spoiled us. Edna scooped a pitcher full of river ice out of a 32-gallon bucket in her kitchen and started boiling water for mush. LE: How’s that? Edna: Because of laundry. 1969 we first start spoiling. They got water at the school and at the clinic. Before then, we got water from the river. . . . We never have plastic then. We dig hole for bathroom and you have to go outside no matter how cold. People had outhouses over the holes, or we built a snow shelter around it. Then people would go to camp and the sun would kill the germs. The problem is now people—not many go to camp. They’re not moving around so the germs stay. And you know at this age, you think, “How would I do my laundry without running water?” LAURA EICHELBERGER is now Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She is a former Cancer Prevention Fellow at the National Cancer Institute. She holds a PhD from the University of Arizona, and a MPH from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Her research examines the political-economic, ecologic, and social processes that shape access to clean water and sanitation over time, and the health outcomes of water insecurity, including cancer-causing infections. Address correspondence to Laura Eichelberger, Department of Anthropology, University of Texas at San Antonio, One UTSA Circle, San Antonio, TX 78249, USA. E-mail: [email protected]

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I was visiting Edna’s village, Ilavut,1 in May 2009 to document water shortages during a freeze-up of their piped water and wastewater system that had caused over half the village to lose services for almost six months. Many Iñupiat I interviewed across Northwest Alaska had described how technology had on the one hand “spoiled” them and on the other improved their lives. I wanted to learn more about how they made sense of these experiences: LE: What did you mean by spoiling?

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Edna: Seems like the young families have problems. When we’re at camp, seems like no big deal. But at home, seems like . . . [She mimed turning on a faucet.] Seems like a crime.

Approximately one third of households in remote Alaska Native villages lack running water and sewer services (Hennessy et al. 2008). The global energy crisis of the mid-2000s exacerbated this situation by dramatically increasing costs associated with water treatment and distribution (Eichelberger 2010). The problem has critical public health consequences: cross-contamination from sewage and a higher incidence of lower respiratory and skin infections (Chambers et al. 2009; Hennessy et al. 2008; Wenger et al. 2010). In communities where less than 10% of households have in-home piped water, children suffer some of the highest rates of invasive pneumococcal infection worldwide (Wenger et al. 2010) In recent years, the problem of and potential solutions to village water security have become framed by a state-level definition of sustainability focused on local economic factors, often over public health (Eichelberger 2012). Sustainability concerns are partially due to the tremendous amount of money historically spent on clean water infrastructure projects, funding decreases to many of the organizations involved in infrastructure development, and decreases in state subsidies to village governments. Many remote communities struggle to afford the utility’s operations amid poverty, increased energy costs, and the effects of climate change (including erosion and melting permafrost) that damage existing clean water and wastewater infrastructure (Berardi 1998; Brubaker, Berner, Bell, et al. 2011). These intersecting financial and ecological factors contribute to widespread water insecurity across Alaska Native villages, and underscore concerns about village sustainability at both state and local levels. Yet the ways in which sustainability is defined through policy, practice, and academic discourse as a localized problem renders many of these larger forces invisible, and obfuscates the historical role of the state in contributing to village water insecurity and vulnerability. Policies focus on whether villages demonstrate state-defined management procedures, including bill collections and forced disconnections. On an academic level, a prevailing analysis attributes decreased traditional knowledge and thus community vulnerability in a changing climate to modern water treatment and distribution systems (Alessa, Kliskey and Williams 2007; Alessa, Kliskey and Williams 2010; Bone, Alessa, Altaweel, et al. 2011) These concerns are shared at the local level. However, as I argue in this article, Iñupiaq narratives of being “spoiled” by technology do more than reflect concerns about the effect of modern technologies on local values and knowledge. These narratives represent attempts to historicize vulnerability and engage the state using a discourse familiar to state agents (Brosius 2006). Further, they reveal critiques of inequality and a “search for coherence” (Wolf 1999:67) in response to domination and the fragmenting processes of capitalism. In this article, I briefly situate the introduction of water treatment technologies within the history of domination co-produced with vulnerability that has shaped the daily life of the Iñupiat

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for over a century. I then consider how these processes are reflected in local narratives describing the relationships between technology, tradition, and suffering. By drawing attention to the role of the state in creating vulnerability, village leaders are trying to historicize and insert their health concerns into the sustainability conversation. In doing so, they construct narratives that both fit within and challenge the ideology of sustainability in order to connect the political and economic inequalities between urban and rural Alaska to the lived disparities of health and citizenship. These narratives are thus central to Inupiat struggles for visibility.

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BACKGROUND I define water insecurity as the conditions of long-term or periodic scarcity of clean water and wastewater services that lead to inadequate clean water access, poor sanitation, and water-wash diseases. Water insecurity has been defined in terms of quality, inadequate access to improved water sources, seasonal fluctuations in available sources, and the subsequent effects on daily practices, hygiene, and health (Ennis-McMillan 2001; Howard and Bartram 2003; Whiteford and Cortez-Lara 2005; Wutich and Ragsdale 2008). An estimated 80 percent of the world’s population is at risk for water insecurity, and this problem is expected to grow with the increasing demand for water and diminishing water resources due to climate change (Hope, Hansen, Mutembwa, et al. 2012). Water insecurity results from the intersection of ecological factors, inequalities of power, and economic disparities (see also Bakker 2004; Budds 2004; Johnston 1998; Johnston 2005; Whiteford and Cortez-Lara 2005). In the villages where I conducted fieldwork, water insecurity is characterized by an inability to purchase water, lack of infrastructure, and system freeze-ups and infrastructural damage due to storms, erosion, and melting permafrost. At policy and academic levels, understanding and addressing these problems largely focuses on local sustainability to the exclusion of external political-economic forces. At the policy level, sustainability with respect to safe water (treated water) is understood as an economic issue of efficiency, affordability, and a local willingness to pay and collect payment. In recent academic discourse, the introduction of water treatment technology is described as contributing to scarcity by increasing water consumption and decreasing traditional knowledge (Schweitzer, Alessa, Kliskey, et al. 2010). These authors have suggested that historical methods of obtaining and using water enabled minimal use while supporting conservation and protection of limited sources. They argue that the introduction of technology not only leads to unsustainable water consumption levels; it decreases this traditional knowledge on freshwater sources and conservation (Alessa, et al. 2007; Alessa, et al. 2010; Schweitzer, Alessa, Kliskey, et al. 2010). From this perspective, technology has been identified as a source of vulnerability as its introduction has led to technology-induced environmental distancing (TIED): the Iñupiat are no longer aware of the quality or changes in what are identified as “traditional” water resources since they no longer engage in daily water collection (Alessa, et al. 2010). Water and wastewater infrastructure is thought to have decreased traditional knowledge and practices, changed the way water is valued, and resulted in societal vulnerability. Based on this model, the solutions proposed focus on integrating local knowledge and community participation (Bone, et al. 2011). This argument reflects local desires for participation and concerns, confirmed by my own data, regarding the role of modern technologies in cultural change and vulnerability. However,

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it misses several crucial elements related to the history of health, development, and power in Iñupiaq villages. First, attributing vulnerability to modern technology misses the critical importance of improved water and sanitation systems to health. Second, it fails to recognize the role of large-scale political-economic forces external to these communities in the shaping of vulnerability in part through infrastructure. Most critically, such a thesis serves to reproduce the dominant ideology guiding development policies in Alaska that justify unequal safe water access, and vulnerability. Using an historical political ecologic analysis, in this article I explore how technology fits into issues of domination, vulnerability, and visibility. I suggest that the Iñupiat use narratives of being “spoiled” by technology to describe multiple causal factors in a language that encompasses the ideology of sustainability and local values of self-reliance. Unpacking this body of narratives and their contradictions reveals how the Iñupiat use the language of sustainability to critique and historicize political-economic inequalities, historical and contemporary processes of domination, and lived vulnerability. Theoretical Background and Methods Water is both natural and social, a hybrid nature that is inseparable from its waterscape: the large-scale power and economic relations, both local and external, shaping the social relations around its treatment, use, and signification (Bakker 2002; Budds and Hinojosa-Valencia 2012; Swyngedouw 2004). Water is a lens through which power relations become visible, for it is a vital resource around which these relations are rearticulated and reinvented (Giglioli and Swyngedouw 2008). Scholars have examined domination processes occurring through development, including water distribution systems. Scott (1998:187) describes development as “schemes” that transform nonstate spaces into state spaces “where the government can reconfigure the society and economy of those who are to be ‘developed.’” Development in this sense is a project of statecraft with the objective of creating standardized, sedentary, and legible or countable populations in order to facilitate their management (Mitchell 2002; Scott 1998). Von Schnitzler (2008) has demonstrated how water distribution technologies are bound up with the articulation of state power, including the creation of particular forms of citizenship. These technologies of citizenship delink claims to rights from claims to water, thus facilitating the creation of consumer-citizens whose access to water revolves around practices of payment rather than as a right of citizens. Ferguson (1990) examines domination as an instrument effect of development. A development project involves an established set of beliefs and expertise around a community and its ‘problem’, and through the course of its work establishes a bureaucratic structure that—though not its stated goal—results in the expansion of state powers locally. The “powerful constellations of control” (Ferguson 1990:20) that result appear authorless and subjectless, as do the perpetual failures of these projects for which the communities are now responsible. Infrastructural development thus becomes a physical system through which the systematic and indirect forces of structural violence operate (Anand 2012; Ferguson 2012; Rodgers and O’Neill 2012). Examining water treatment facilities as technologies of governance reveals how techniques of government are embodied in a multiplicity of organizations and actors that have as their principle objective human welfare, but who exercise power over others based on their claim to expertise (Ferguson 1990; Mitchell 2002; Li 2007). Technologies can, as Ullrich (2003:285) describes,

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conquer a society from within by requiring a specific social infrastructure, social relations, and desires in order to operate properly. Further, the locus of technological knowledge can create dependence on outside entities in ways that curtail local agency (Whiteford and Cortez-Lara 2005) and alienate communities from controlling and attaching local meaning to the environment in which they live (Johnston 2005). This analytical perspective focuses on the power relations involved in the production of knowledge and practice. Here, I follow Wolf (1999), who argues that anthropologists should recognize that people engage in a “search for coherence” (Wolf 1999:67), as opposed to existing in a coherent “traditional culture” in response to the fragmenting processes of capitalism and domination in indigenous societies. The term “traditional” may reflect idealized versions of history that describe discontent and suffering in the present, rather than what life was like in the past (Roseberry 1989; Sider 2006). Dombrowki (2001:65) has noted that Alaska Native uses of the term tradition reflect issues of domination and resistance “rather than, or in addition to, questions of age and continuity.” Using these perspectives, I explore the connections between power, experience, and signification. The following analysis is based on 18 months of fieldwork in five villages in Northwest Alaska. In addition to direct observation, I conducted 101 semi-structured interviews with heads of household, regional and village leaders, and individuals working in environmental health and development. I also conducted archival research on the history of Iñupiaq health and village development. In this article, I examine Iñupiaq descriptions of the tensions between preserving traditional knowledge and desires for modern technologies by considering how power shapes experiences of water insecurity and the differing meanings attached to those experiences. To do so, I will first briefly describe the co-production of power, health, and vulnerability in Iñupiaq villages. I then examine how the Iñupiat explain this history, their current struggles around water and sustainability, and the uncertainty of the future.

DOMINATION AND VILLAGE WATER INSECURITY Northwestern Alaska spans a vast area of sea coastline, rivers, tundra, taiga, with the Brooks Mountain Range in the north and the Seward Peninsula in the south. It is not unusual for winter temperatures to remain below -40◦ Fahrenheit for weeks at a time, and can fall below -60◦ F. Historically, mutual interdependency was central to the once semi-nomadic Iñupiaq social relations, what many Iñupiat today would describe as their traditional value of sharing. Sharing of food and resources enabled survival in a harsh climate and may have mitigated conflicts (Chance 1990; Oswalt 1967; Spencer 1984). Elders reported that in the early days of villages sharing extended to water access, with kin hauling water for one another. For those who still engage in a semi-subsistence livelihood, these social relations reproduce sharing networks and prestige for the poor and disabled (Dombrowski 2001), and continue to be important in mitigating water insecurity (Eichelberger 2010). What today we would call water insecurity likely existed prior to colonization. Early written accounts and paleopathological evidence indicate that Alaska Natives experienced infectious and parasitical diseases prior to colonization (Fortuine 1992). Iñupiaq winter home conditions were likely conducive to the spread of infectious disease due to poor ventilation and human waste

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in the subterranean entrance passage. Children likely experienced a high incidence of diarrheal disease, particularly in the summer months (Fortuine 1992), a pattern that continues in many villages today. The traditional life, therefore, was not without disease and suffering. However, colonization initiated processes that increased mortality from infectious disease across Alaska’s indigenous populations, and contributed to the acute problems of clean water access and sanitation. Beginning in the 1770s, Russian and later American whalers, fur traders, miners, and military personnel (among others) introduced infectious diseases to which Alaska Native populations had no immunity (Fortuine 1992). Epidemics decimated the Iñupiaq population between the mid-1800s and the 1918 influenza pandemic (Chance 1990). Devastating epidemics and the introduction of whisky combined to create famines documented by US military officers: At Cape Siepermo, [. . .] we found the village deserted, not a sign of life remaining. I counted fiftyfour dead bodies; and, as these were nearly all full-grown males, there can be no doubt that many more died . . . Most of those seen were just outside the village, with their sleds beside them, evidently having been dragged out by the survivors, as they died, until they, becoming too weak for further exertion, went into their houses, and, covering themselves with skins, laid down and died . . . I estimate the number of dead at this place at one hundred and fifty. (Calvin Leighton Hooper, Captain of the Marine Steamer Corwin St. Lawrence Island, 1880:10)

Against this background of suffering, missionaries, backed by the US Department of Education, created permanent villages in which they persuaded the Iñupiat to settle, in part by offering medical care and in part by threatening to take away their children (Ducker 1996). Although villages facilitated the provision of healthcare, the permanence of residence dramatically altered Iñupiat subsistence activities and produced the need for waste and water management not previously experienced (Berardi 1999; Chance 1990). In later decades, it became apparent that village ecological conditions were largely unsuitable for providing adequate sanitation services using modern technologies for growing populations (Berardi 1999). Interventions to improve health, whether originating by missionaries or public health officers, largely focused on behavioral and cultural changes. Many resulted in a series of unanticipated ecological and economic consequences. One example that illustrates the nexus of vulnerabilities and state interventions is the abandonment of sod igloos. Concerned about sanitation, in the early 1900s missionaries encouraged the Iñupiat to abandon their semi-subterranean homes and adopt frame houses. Sod homes could be heated using very little energy and kept comfortable even during the extremely cold winters. In contrast, the frame houses were poorly insulated and very difficult to heat (Blackman 1992; Lantis 1963:24). In Barrow, residents searching for sufficient wood in which to heat their drafty homes quickly depleted the shores of driftwood (Blackman 1992). Attempts to seal the houses and avoid drafts resulted in poor ventilation (Blackman 1992), while insufficient water supplies created unsanitary living conditions (Lantis 1962). These conditions, combined with the overcrowding of the dwellings and contaminated water sources, facilitated the spread of infectious epidemics (Blackman 1992; Oswalt 1967). At particular risk were children, especially infants, who suffered high mortality (Alaska Department of Health 1957). At the same time, many Iñupiat embraced the new homes, which provided more space than sod igloos:

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Peter: “We were the last family to live in a sod house . . . One year, there were fires all around Qimmiurat. Everyone’s house fill with smoke. But you come into my sod house and,” he breathed in and sighed, “fresh air.” LE: “Why did you decide to move out of the sod house?”

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Peter: “In the sod house, we had mouses running around everywhere, on the ceiling . . . and who wouldn’t want a bigger place? Because it was so small . . . everyone else had one. You go visit them, you want one. More space.”

Throughout the twentieth century, federal, territorial, and later state agencies increasingly focused on creating economic and sanitary citizens (Briggs and Mantini-Briggs 2003): responsible for their own health and hygiene, armed with education and technology, and organized around the wage labor and economic development. Experiences of vulnerability were thus intricately bound up in the expansion of government institutions in the daily lives of Alaska Natives. Beginning in at least the 1940s, health officials framed Alaska Native health as an issue of citizenship and redress for the ills of colonization. Dr. Carl E. Buck of the American Public Health Association and George Hays, Liaison Officer and Senior Surgeon (R) of the US Public Health Service argued that Alaska Natives, as citizens, were due assistance in the areas of health and sanitation because of the detrimental effects of contact (Buck and Hays 1943:9): “[I]f Natives are to be considered as citizens, which they are, thought must be given to the evils and misfortunes that civilization has brought to them and provide them with at least such assistance and leadership as will give them an opportunity to help themselves.” This line of thinking was implemented through state interventions in the form of education, establishing local expertise, and introducing modern technologies of water treatment and distribution. In 1954 the Village Sanitation Aide Program (VSAP) was designed to address the issue of ‘primitive knowledge’ regarding the safe handling of water and disposal of human waste, while also installing safe water points throughout the participating villages (Morley 1954; Rogers 1956). The program introduced local expertise by training Alaska Native men (not women) who had graduated from the sixth grade and could both speak and write in English to serve as paid village sanitarians in an effort to encourage local capacity and responsibility for sanitation and health (Morley 1954). This is perhaps the earliest example of systemic monetary exchange around water that involved local actors and government agencies. VSAP also included house inspections and surveys of water supplies (Alaska Department of Health 1954). This placed men in the position of evaluating the health and sanitation of households, largely the responsibility of women. Today, in villages without in-home piped systems, male water plant operators largely control women’s access to laundry services as well as domestic water. In 1972, VSAP was replaced by the Village Safe Water (VSW) Act, which established a staterun program “to provide safe water and hygienic sewage disposal facilities in villages in the state” that would “be available for use by the public and . . . designed to assure year-round use” (State of Alaska 1972). The legislation made the commissioner of the newly-created Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation (ADEC) responsible for ensuring that each village had at least one such facility. Although these programs improved village health (U.S. Congress 1994), they also served as mechanisms of domination. Both programs restructured social relations and established male expertise and state authority over water and sanitation. Further, the missions of VSAP and

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VSW were intertwined with the larger politics of citizenship, self-determination, and dependency (Eichelberger 2012). Just one year prior to the passage of the VSW Act, the US Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA). ANCSA extinguished Alaska Native land claims and created Native corporations for local resource development with the objective of fostering self-reliance (Case and Voluck 2002; Mitchell 2001). Reflecting this larger political context, the VSW legislation placed responsibility for facility operations and maintenance on the village governing body. It stipulated that construction would not occur without “satisfactory assurances from the village governing body that it will, upon completion of a facility, accept ownership and responsibility” (State of Alaska 1972). Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, village infrastructural development occurred in tandem with the growth of Alaska’s economy in ways that worked against self-reliance. ANCSA enabled the development of the rich Prudhoe Bay oil reserves, the revenues from which funded development projects and subsidized government services in both urban areas and villages (Leask 1983; McBeath and Morehouse 1994; Mitchell 2001). Without state aid, such projects and services would have been unaffordable in these small communities with limited tax bases (Knapp and Huskey 1988; Leask 1983). The influx of capital investment during this period, combined with the decreased mortality rates from treated water, led to an increase in village populations (U.S. Congress 1994). This increased the need for water and sanitation services, but the remoteness of villages and environmental conditions made the costs of such services very high (Berardi 1998). By the mid-1980s, ANCSA’s objective of self-reliance was faltering, as was the world price of oil upon which Alaska’s economy depended. The State of Alaska began to reconsider subsidizing village governments (Dombrowski 2001; Flanders 1989; Knapp and Huskey 1988) by calling into question the costs and benefits of rural public services. This departure from the focus on public health rendered rural water and sanitation as an issue of inappropriate expectations, not a right of citizens (see Knapp and Huskey 1988; Kruse and Foster 1986). The idea that village desires for clean water services are inappropriate expectations continues today (Eichelberger 2012).

SUSTAINABILITY AND WATER INSECURITY Economic sustainability through local responsibility has increasingly taken precedence over public health through the design and implementation of policies. In 2003, facing low oil prices and a possible deficit, then-Governor Frank Murkowski vetoed State of Alaska (SOA) aid for local governments, resulting in the reduction of federal matching grants. Shortly after, the sudden rise in the global price of oil dramatically increased the costs of village infrastructure operations and maintenance, plunging many village utilities into deep debt. Although the rise in the global price of oil beginning in 2003 increased SOA revenues, the emphasis on local economic responsibility for water and sanitation facilities remained. In 2005, Murkowski signed Administrative Order 224 (AO 224) (Murkowski 2005), which required that any project funded by the SOA must meet sustainability standards focused on local cost recovery mechanisms (through user fees), low-cost infrastructure projects, and demonstrations of financial commitments (both past and present). Although the Governor acknowledged the needs of rural Alaskans in his order, in practice sustainability requirements serve to justify inequalities of development and health between rural (predominately Native) and urban (predominately non-Native) Alaskans. Where once the need

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to improve health and supply clean water to citizens served as ideological bases for water and wastewater projects, today quantitative measures of local economy take higher priority in the allocation of project funding. As I have described elsewhere (Eichelberger 2012), village populations are too small to achieve statistical significance in epidemiologic studies that might quantify their health concerns. In contrast, economic criteria are easier to track and attribute to specific villages. Since individual villages compete with each other for limited funding, these villagespecific economic measurements end up carrying more weight in these assessments than health criteria, even if the public health importance of clean water and sanitation are widely recognized. Constrained by limited funding, shrinking budgets, and rising costs, organizations whose missions are to protect public health through safe water infrastructure development now require villages to demonstrate sustainability before they allocate funds. By 2009, agencies began requiring that communities demonstrate an 80 percent collection rate on water user fees that during my fieldwork were as high as $150 per month. This collection rate is financially impossible in many remote Alaska Native communities where unemployment is high, permanent employment options are limited, and gasoline can cost as much as $10 per gallon. To achieve the 80 percent rate, some villages disconnect households behind on their bills, but this results in a lower customer base, leading again to the need to raise user fees. This commodification of water and well-being contradicts the Iñupiaq traditional value of sharing resources. Community members and leaders therefore hotly contest these mechanisms of accountability at the same time that the issue of local sustainability is locally important. However, achieving a good sustainability assessment in order to secure development funding involves participating in these processes of domination occurring through safe water infrastructure. These practices contribute to the restructuring of Iñupiaq social relations from sharing to accounting, through which water becomes signified as a commodity not a public health and human right, and sharing is rendered inappropriate (Eichelberger 2012).

SPOILED BY TECHNOLOGY? As already observed, many Iñupiat describe water insecurity, and the broader problem of sustainability itself, in terms of being “spoiled” by technology. At first glance, spoiling narratives appear to describe how modern technology has decreased traditional knowledge and led to laziness, and thus contributed to the problem of sustainability. However, a closer examination of the different uses of spoiling narratives and their contradictions reveals that they also represent an historicized critique of economic differentiation, historical state-village relations, and the inequalities of power embodied in water insecurity and health disparities. On the one hand, Iñupiaq spoiling narratives appear to attribute suffering and vulnerability to the detrimental effects of modern technology on their culture. This is illustrated by the account from one of the tribal administrators, who connects technology and cultural changes to health disparities: The traditional way of life has certain rules. You have chores before you can play. We had to go to bed early and get up early to make use of the daylight. To tell you the truth, the utilities made us lazy . . . . We used to be physical people. We had a health diet. Now elders tell me they can sit all day with the remote like this.

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She slumped in her chair and mimed changing channels.

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We sit a lot. We have sugar in our diet. Now that I think about it, modern technology is making us sick . . . Electricity, water, sewer, TV . . . You don’t have to do anything physical.

In many narratives, modern technology in general is the culprit behind a host of social and community problems. One elder woman attributed the intertwining concerns of decreasing sharing and traditional knowledge, alcoholism, poor diet, and dependency on government programs to the introduction of modern utilities. “Everyone used to share and help each other. The whole village,” Anna drew a circle in the air, “like a family. Now you can’t get wood without paying for it. But that was before we had to pay for the lights, the stove oil, and the water.” She gestured at each. “Now we need money . . . Girls now don’t know how to do anything because they don’t have to. They don’t need wood to heat house, they can . . .” she mimed flipping on a switch for electricity, and turning a faucet on for water. “We tried teach them the old ways, but they don’t want to learn them. We try teach them to sew, but they don’t want to. And the boys, they don’t go get wood or nothing . . . There’s no one who helps. I’m afraid if we don’t keep getting energy assistance what will happen because the kids don’t know how to do anything anymore.” Despite her focus on the local, a closer look at such narratives illustrates that the Iñupiat are attributing intertwining insecurities at multiple levels: local, state, and larger economic forces. Anna places responsibility for issues related to sustainability and dependency on technology, laziness, and loss of traditional knowledge among the youth, but she also recognizes the role of capitalism through bills. Such multiple layers characterize how the Iñupiat describe and assign meaning to the issues of sustainability and water insecurity. As a whole, these narratives comment on larger forces affecting their communities and ongoing struggles to make sense of these forces and the changes they bring. They also are characterized by many contradictions that illustrate the tensions between the benefits and costs of modern technologies. Anna also described to me how modern technologies had improved their lives: “Eskimos had a hard time before the white man. No guns . . . Before white people came, we had to make tools by hand. We have no guns to hunt, and no nylon nets. We make nets out of willow bark.” “Were they brittle?” I asked. “Not if you keep them wet. Back then, dogs were more important. Now we have sno-gos,” Anna said, referring to snowmobiles. She described the life today as much easier. “When they complain about naluagmiu [white people], I hope they remember that.” “So, if life is easier now because of naluagmiu, why are there still problems?” I asked with some trepidation, since Iñupiaq elders often do not like to discuss community problems. “Because no one want to work.” Anna described how in the “old days” they had to make tools out of jade, and fish all summer to feed the dogs, but now the government supports them. I asked her if the Iñupiat could return to living like they did in the past. “Who will do the work?” was her answer. She said that without government support, elders would have to live with their children like they did in the past. “Because we can’t do nothing.” Anna looked around her, smiled at me and said, “Now we have own house.” This is a central contradiction with which the Iñupiat struggle: marked improvements to health and well-being tied to modern technologies, but a dependence on the state to help maintain those technologies, coupled with concerns that modern technology has decreased the knowledge and values upon which their survival was historically based. This dependence is an instrument effect (Ferguson 1990) of development, enabling state control over local social relations through practices involved in safe water infrastructure (Eichelberger 2012).

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The varying ways the Iñupiat talk about spoiling reflects their recognition of how the concomitant processes of domination and economic differentiation have become internalized within their communities. To historicize their experiences of vulnerability, the Iñupiat evoke the concepts of tradition, culture, and “spoiling.” These narratives, their contradictions and differing uses should therefore be considered as a whole. They form a larger search for coherence within local knowledge production and signification of experiences of suffering and uncertainty. Here, Dombrowski’s (2001) observation that notions of tradition are inextricably linked to questions of domination becomes clear. Some spoiling narratives describe how one’s ability to access water is determined by economic factors. This is evident in the following account by a female head of household, in her early thirties, who attributed the disease resulting from cross-contamination to both this laziness at the same time that she recognized the hardships faced in obtaining water without a vehicle. I was raised the subsistence way, so I’m not too lazy, and I’m raising my kids the same way. We’re all alike in a way but we’re all different . . . When you’re not lazy, you’re good. But when you wait to dump your slop and honey buckets, that’s when you get sickly. Some people don’t have no rides at all in Qimmiurat. No Honda (4-wheeler, all terrain vehicle), no rides . . . Sometimes it’s hard for them to get water. Sometimes they don’t use as much . . . .they use it for cooking, maybe. I’m not saying we’re better, but it’s hard when you don’t have a vehicle. If a person don’t have a lot of time, they can only get about five gallons without a vehicle.

Village residents recognize how the politics of sustainability and safe water funding are shaped by stigma in ways that perpetuate inequalities between rural, predominately Native, and urban non-Native communities. Many village leaders believe that this marginalization is reproduced by inequalities in decision-making, specifically the ways in which decisions are made without substantial local input, as noted by this mayor: They’re always meeting without us. If I went to Anchorage and told them there that they had to live in flush haul and dump their own sewage, they’d go crazy . . . But that’s the difference between us and them. We don’t matter. [They think] we’re just a bunch of ‘dumb Eskimos.’

The mayor’s account notes the disjuncture between the ideology of sustainability that emphasizes local responsibility, and the implementation of sustainability policies that are based on external expertise such that local experiences and concerns are erased. Into this space, many Iñupiat are trying to re-insert the issues of health and equality into policy discussions. This is often phrased as an issue of being denied modernity, equality, and citizenship, and residents frequently compare their communities to those in urban Alaska, and even worldwide. One regional leader described these inequalities by comparing rural Alaska to the Third World: “Everyone deserves a hot bath and a good, cold drink of water. Our forefathers fought hard for this country and we deserve better. The federal government wants to keep us in Third World conditions . . . It’s like a Third World country here.” Many Iñupiat recognize how this denial of modernity and citizenship is related to larger issues to domination, and struggles to make their health concerns and experiences visible. Audrey, a city administrator and single mother living in a house without running water, frequently spoke of the inequalities between urban and rural Alaska by invoking the history of Iñupiat-state relations. She had fought for over ten years for sufficient funding to complete an in-home piped water project in her village. Audrey frequently described her frustration at the delays the project faced, and the

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economic logic presented to her and other village leaders to justify the continued lack of in-home safe water infrastructure:

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People from outside have come to Qimmiurat with lots of negative thoughts that we can’t afford the water/sewer in the future. I tell them that we’re already paying a lot to keeping our environment clean, and because we have to go to the doctor and other stuff . . . We’ve beat that subject to death with Village Safe Water. They keep telling us that it’s not worth the investment because people aren’t going to be able to afford the water/sewer when the project is done.

Later in the year, my conversation with Audrey described her frustration in terms of a debt owed by the state to the Iñupiat: “I want to know what our lands are worth. Because we traded our lands to the government for healthcare and services. I want my money’s worth. For our people. Decent services. Not this bad service they give us.” Traditional knowledge and values are important sources for making sense of this history of domination, unequal development, and an uncertain future. Many asserted that the traditional Iñupiaq lifestyle and values would help them survive through the rising costs of fuel and living, as well as the effects of climate change. One tribal official described how for a long time the state dismissed local knowledge, but that now it is becoming more valuable amid rising energy costs. “They’re coming to us because we can teach them about how to conserve and live without fuel.” Here, the traditional appears as something the Iñupiat have and the state lacks; something that for the Iñupiat demonstrates their self-reliance and sustainability if they could live outside of state control. For many Iñupiat, the potential loss of this traditional knowledge thus threatens their survival as well as their culture. Many described the processes of domination and economic differentiation that have worked through the introduction of modern technologies, and the sense of powerlessness to stop these processes: Anna: “Before, there was no payments.” Ruth: “There were no bills. The lights, the toilet . . . it spoiled us, but we can’t go back and unravel it. If there’s no fuel, there will be no electricity, there will be nothing. It will be hard time. We’ll go back to cutting wood and hauling water. The kids will take over.” Anna: “The kids? The boys don’t know how to cut wood without a chainsaw. They have to learn to saw. Now they don’t want to cut if they don’t have chainsaw.”

CONCLUSION Spoiling narratives, and their references to traditional knowledge and practice, are thus inextricably linked to historical domination, economic differentiation, and lived inequalities. What is called traditional knowledge, like culture, is not a static body of shared knowledge (Wolf 1999:66). Rather, these cultural forms emerge out of social relations of production that transform nature, and the forms of power that structure these interactions and the meanings attached to them (Wolf 2002). Tradition, therefore, should not be considered an issue of continuity, but as an idea inextricably linked to domination and resistance (Dombrowski 2001). This is a crucial perspective for understanding the different ways the Iñupiat use the term ‘traditional’ within the

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narratives of being spoiled by technology, and how forces of domination have shaped their social relations, human-environmental relations, and knowledge production. Narratives such as these indicate that people may internalize that they are the authors of their own problems, not the larger structures of domination (Sider 1988). Accounts of laziness within spoiling narratives describe local tensions, such as generational ones between elders and youth, in ways that reflect local desires for self-reliance and sustainability. In this way, Iñupiaq culture provides sources of meaning to make sense of experiences of suffering and uncertainty, without resolving these problems. Instead, such narratives appear to reproduce the idea that sustainability is a local problem with local roots and local solutions. Yet, when spoiling is considered as a body of narratives full of contradictions and varied uses, we can see that the Iñupiat recognize how the processes of domination and economic differentiation have become internalized within their communities and contribute to this problem labeled “sustainability.” Spoiling narratives represent an attempt to historicize and translate (Brosius 2006) these concerns and critiques using a language familiar to both the state and the Iñupiat: that of sustainability and self-reliance. Further, they are part of struggles against what I refer to as epidemiologic invisibility. The Inupiat are trying to make their health concerns literally count in sustainability assessments that end up prioritizing economic factors over health ones. Unable to quantify their experiences of water insecurity and disease, the Iñupiat are historicizing their suffering in order to draw attention to the state’s role in creating these vulnerabilities. Spoiling narratives thus reflect how vulnerability and domination are co-produced, affecting knowledge production, social relations, and health. Through water insecurity and the responses to it (both state and local), we can see how Iñupiaq communities have long been a terrain in which the state struggles to achieve hegemony. Domination occurs partially as an instrument effect of interventions in the areas of public health and development. As Russians and Americans colonized Alaska, bacterial and viral pathogens colonized Alaska Native bodies. The state eventually responded with a series of projects that improved health, but which also involved state-making and unanticipated new vulnerabilities. Experiences of vulnerability and domination are critical for understanding local concerns that technology diminishes traditional knowledge and values. The introduction of safe water infrastructure occurred within a larger transition away from a subsistence economy that required mutual interdependency when, as Anna and her friend Ruth recalled, “There were no bills.” As these and other elders see it, a lack of sharing, a need for money, and “no one who helps” characterize the present. Diminished sharing has material consequences (Dombrowski 2001; Morseth 1997). Indeed, sharing is central to water access for those with the least access: the disabled, the elderly, and households headed by single mothers with young children (Eichelberger 2010). Yet discussions of traditional knowledge and values need to be placed in their larger historical, political-economic contexts (Asad 2002; Wolf 1997). The TIED thesis (Alessa, et al. 2007; Alessa, et al. 2010), for example, accurately captures local concerns about technology and cultural change, but fails to recognize how local knowledge and encounters with technology have been shaped by larger political-economic forces and ongoing struggles for hegemony. The Iñupiat use discussions of traditional knowledge and values to historicize the problems of water insecurity and sustainability in the context of this struggle, reflecting desires to preserve non-state spaces.

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Notions of ‘tradition’ figure prominently in struggles for recognition beyond health concerns. Indeed, other scholars have described struggles around defining and integrating ‘traditional’ knowledge and practices into state regulations (Dombrowski 2002; Loring and Gerlach 2010; Morrow and Hensel 1992). State recognition of ‘tradition’ affects whether particular subsistence or land use practices are allowed or disallowed. In this article, I add to that discussion by contributing further evidence that tradition is often leveraged as part of a political discourse emerging from and as part of struggles with the state. The emphasis on the local and the traditional in water governance is not limited to Alaska. Globally, ‘tradition’ in water management and development thinking has shifted from a hindrance to modernity to something that is necessary for sustainability (Gupta 2011). ‘Traditional knowledge’ has become intertwined with emphases on community participation within a global water management trend that has increasingly transferred what once were considered the responsibilities of ‘government’ to local actors and non-governmental bodies (Norman, Bakker and Cook 2012). Yet what is considered traditional is not necessarily scientifically accurate or effective to achieve water security, nor does the integration of local knowledge and community participation assure equity (Cleaver 2001; Gupta 2011; Kothari 2001). ‘Traditional’ methods of obtaining water are time-consuming and yield insufficient water for domestic uses, including hygiene (Eichelberger 2010; Gupta 2011). Further, advocating increased community participation through utilizing traditional knowledge often occurs without acknowledging how inequalities of power affect participation and knowledge (Morrow and Hensel 1992; Nadasdy 2000). Attributing vulnerabilities including water insecurity to a loss of traditional knowledge contributes to the silences around village public health needs and what many Iñupiat recognize as a denial of modernity and erasure of health disparities. It confuses cultural causality with processes that shape and perpetuate vulnerability (Farmer 1999; Farmer 2004). The struggles around safe water technologies, initially introduced by the state with promises of improved health, modernity, and citizenship, now stand as a reminder to the Iñupiat of their domination and marginalization. Narratives of traditional practices and knowledge stand in contrast to this. They describe the desire and struggle for knowledge production, social relations, and social reproduction outside of state control. The concept of tradition is highly significant for the Iñupiat, but the discourse of its loss emerges from these processes of domination occurring in part through water treatment technologies. The issue of sustainability and local emphasis on traditional knowledge, values, and practices must be therefore understood in relation to this history of domination, inequalities of power, and their material effects in terms of community health and well-being. Such processes of domination occurring through safe water infrastructure, as well as arguments for increased community participation and traditional knowledge, are not limited to Alaska. Any effort to integrate local knowledge and community participation, in Alaska or elsewhere, must consider the political ecology of water insecurity in that locale. Further, these efforts must be centered on the primary objective of achieving sustainable safe water access and health. This is particularly critical as the effects of climate change threaten the availability of water worldwide. Local concerns about losing traditions, and desires for increased integration of local knowledge and participation are real. Yet we cannot hope to address issues of community vulnerability without understanding where that vulnerability originates, how it is perpetuated, and how the ‘local’ is fundamentally shaped by the state.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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The University of Arizona Human Subjects Program approved all methods prior to initiation of field research. I am indebted to the generosity of the people of the Northwest Arctic, who shared their time, stories, and seal oil with me. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant 0713935, the Community Forestry and Environmental Research Partnerships Dissertation Fellowship, the University of Arizona School of Anthropology, and the University of Arizona Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute.

NOTE 1. Ilavut, and all village names in this article, are pseudonyms to protect participant confidentiality.

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Spoiling and sustainability: technology, water insecurity, and visibility in Arctic Alaska.

One third of households in Alaska Native villages lack running water and sewer services. Historically, this public health need drove policies to impro...
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