Welcome to Little Diomede Island, a barren island outpost of the
Last Frontier, a few miles off the coast of Alaska in the cold and hostile
Bering Strait. The island is home to about two hundred Inupiat
Eskimos, descendants of settlers who spread east from the nearby
Siberian coast perhaps 2,000 or 3,000 years ago. If the island itself
seems uninviting, the attractiveness of the area to both those early set-
tlers and today’s inhabitants is easy to see: The waters of the region
support a relative bounty of marine life, and the Bering Strait acts as a
bottleneck through which migrating marine mammals must pass on
their journey from their warm-water breeding areas to their summer
feeding grounds in the Arctic. For a culture focused on hunting
whales, walruses, and seals, that made—and makes—Little Diomede
desirable real estate.
Life on Little Diomede—and for Inupiat and Yupik Eskimos else-
where in the Bering Strait and beyond—was frequently challenging and
harsh, with periods of bounty countered by the brutality of the environ-
ment. Perhaps predictably, however, that way of life encountered its
biggest challenge with the arrival of Americans and Europeans, begin-
ning in earnest in the nineteenth century. American whalers and seal-
ers devastated the populations of whales and walruses on which the
Inupiat depended, and introduced diseases and alcohol. Missionaries
demonized traditional spiritual and religious beliefs and practices;
speaking Inupiaq instead of English was sometimes prohibited.
The Cold War inflicted particular injustice on the people of Little
Diomede: Just a mile or two east of the International Date Line, Little
Diomede is in American territory, part of the state of Alaska; neigh-
boring Big Diomede is on the other side of the date line and under
Russian—formerly Soviet—control. Before such boundaries, interac-
tions between the two islands were close and constant, with both isles
boasting members of the same families; then the Iron Curtain bisected
the Bering Strait, and the people of Big Diomede were forcibly assimi-
lated into mainland Soviet society.
Today, Little Diomede faces a new threat, one pithily summed up
by resident Anthony Soolook, Jr., as he and I stand on deck and look
across the water at his home in the near-distance, and at countless
boulders that loom ominously above the little village. Anthony points
96 Kieran Mulvaney