NOT NORMAL YET
2 YEARS AFTER VALDEZ SPILL, PORT GRAHAM IS STILL RECOVERING

By RICHARD MAUER
Daily News reporter

PORT GRAHAM- Two years ago today, Elenore McMullen woke up to news she could hardly believe. The radio station in Homer said a tanker had run aground in Prince William Sound shortly after midnight, and North Slope crude was pouring from its holds.

"I turned on the satellite television, and there was a picture of the Exxon Valdez aground and the oil spilling everywhere."

On her screen, she saw Fred Komkoff, a friend from a village near the spill, guiding a network correspondent on a skiff. She was stunned by the grief she saw in his eyes.

"I have all those friends that I know in Chenega and Tatitlek, and I knew how they would be affected," she said. "It was like slow torture every morning when I got up to see it slowly drift their way."

By the next week, the first slicks began rounding out of the Sound and into the Gulf of Alaska, and fingers of oil slipped up Cook Inlet. Soon, foamy, emulsified oil hit the beaches around Port Graham, which sits beside a tree- lined bay on the Cook Inlet side of the Kenai Peninsula. Nearby Windy Bay, on the gulf side of the peninsula, was doused with oil.

"At first it was pain and tears for my friends in the Sound, and then it was for us," McMullen said.

The oil is mostly gone now, as the beautiful pictures in oil company and tourism commercials attest. But damage remains. The other day, McMullen said, she went down to a beach that had been lightly oiled to look for mussels, but there were none.

"I don't know what caused them to die and not be there," she said.

SPILL LEGACY REMAINS Two years after the Exxon Valdez oil spill, life is still far from normal for villages that lie in its wake. Their fishing and economies remain disrupted, their ancient artifacts have been disturbed, their subsistence activities curtailed. And, they say, they find themselves having to fend for themselves as they seek justice and redress for damage they suffered from North America's worst oil spill.

"We felt extremely abandoned by the state and federal government," said McMullen, the village chief.

Port Graham and its village corporation were among eight villages and corporations that sought to block the recent settlement with Exxon by the state and federal governments. The Natives' suit in U.S. District Court in Washington was prompted by an overriding concern that they were being neglected by the government, said Port Graham Corp. President Pat Norman.

That concern was spurred in December, Norman said, when Gov. Wally Hickel began talking about settling the state's lawsuit against Exxon. The Natives wrote to him, seeking to wrap their claims in with the state.

The letters were never answered, Norman said. State officials promised meetings, then canceled at the last minute.

Attorney General Charlie Cole said there was no reason to involve the Natives because their claims weren't being discussed. "Simply because they ask to sit at the table gives them no right to sit at the table," he said. The Natives have ample opportunity in their own lawsuits against Exxon to get their claims redressed, he said.

That attitude has only heightened the villagers' sense of abandonment.

"The village people feel, rightly or wrongly, somewhat perilous against a giant like Exxon," said Anchorage lawyer Lloyd Miller, one of their lawyers. "They see the powerful engines of the state and federal government side by side with them for two years parting company. They felt that the state and federal government had an obligation to watch out for their interests."

Agnes Miller recalled that after the spill, Gov. Steve Cowper flew into Port Graham. The villagers feasted him with a potluck and a celebration.

McMullen said Cowper asked what the villagers would want if the state were able to settle with Exxon out of court. "He was including us in some way, even if only a little," she said.EXCLUDED FROM SETTLEMENTIn Port Graham last week, the villagers were still talking about the battles ahead.

"Every time I talk about the oil spill, I get shaking mad," said Walter Meganack Sr., at 76 the leading village elder and a former traditional chief.

"These villages are part of the state. How they can carve us out? I don't know what we can do but to fight. We always fight to survive, from the very beginning. I think we had to fight with the Russians when they first come, not in a war, but fight to survive. So we have to continue to try to fight, to make them listen."

McMullen, who also is a regional health official, said subsistence activities in Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet have been sharply curtailed since the spill. And a state study appears to back her up.

In a report that was delivered to a meeting of anthropologists this weekend, Jim Fall, regional subsistence supervisor for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, found that the harvest of traditional foods was down about 50 percent during the year of the spill in Port Graham and neighboring English Bay. In the Prince William Sound villages of Chenega Bay and Tatitlek, it was down more than 60 percent.

Port Graham residents say they still have trouble finding some types of foods, and don't trust others. Fall said that while there has been no formal study yet of subsistence harvests last year, he believes from interviewing residents that more hunting and fishing took place, but that it was not up to prespill levels.

"It's there on your mind," said Harrietta McGhan. "Before we never had to worry about this. Now, I never know what to expect."

A carefully wrapped package of oil-tainted seaweed that McMullen's 10-year- old nephew gave her last year still sits in her freezer. "I accepted it because it was given to me as a gift, but I never used it," she said.

"We used to do a lot of clamming," said Fred Toko. "They say it's OK to eat now, but I wouldn't know about that area below, in Windy Bay. That was the worst spot."

Ron Stanek, a subsistence specialist with the Fish and Game department, said the relatively small oil dousing that the Port Graham vicinity got shouldn't have killed many clams, mussels or bidarkis, the fist-sized mollusks also known as chitons and prized in the region.

Some were already in decline before the spill because of heavy freezes and increased predation from sea mammals, he said.

But Stanek said he isn't privy to the secret state-financed studies of resource loss that were conducted in connection with the Exxon lawsuit. Attorney General Cole said the scientific and economic research will be kept secret so it can't be used against the state in other litigation.

Jobs in the village also remain scarce. The oil spill wiped out the main source of cash for the village, the Port Graham Corp. cannery.

Norman, the corporation president, said the cannery didn't operate in 1989 because no one was allowed to fish. It didn't matter much then virtually everyone that year worked in the spill cleanup, making more money than they ever could canning salmon.

But in 1990, uncertainty about the quality of fish led the company that had leased the cannery to walk away, even though fishing later turned out to be good. Now this year, no one seems to want to take it over, Norman said, resulting in the loss of 70 seasonal jobs and a $150,000 annual write-off for the small corporation.

FEELING VIOLATED More infuriating to him, though, was the public disclosure by the government of previously unknown antiquity sites graves, cabins and villages on the 50,000 acres owned or claimed by the village corporation. The sites were discovered by archeologists sent out in advance of cleanup crews, and they later showed up on maps when the government was seeking bidders to evaluate how badly they were damaged.

"They're our people's sites. They need to be protected," Norman said. Officials tried to recall those maps, he said, but enough are now out in the public domain that he fears antiquities will be looted.

"That's part of our claim against Exxon," he said.

Ted Birkedal, regional archeologist for the National Park Service, said the maps were a mistake brought about by the secrecy imposed on damage studies by government lawyers. Villagers were not allowed to be consulted before the maps were released, he said. Though he didn't think the original maps were specific enough to give much help to looters, he acknowledged that the Natives had become acutely sensitive since the spill and "felt violated by everything."

That feeling flared again two weeks ago, when state officials from the Department of Community and Regional Affairs presented a tourism development plan to people from Port Graham and other villages in the region who were meeting in Anchorage.

Chuck Smythe, one of the state officials, said the money would come from the Exxon settlement and be used to increase access to Prince William Sound and the region around it, and for construction of lodges and other tourist facilities.

The talk frightened the villagers, who saw it as another threat.

"Our people don't have a whole lot of culture left, except what we have inside," said McMullen. "We lost our original religion; we don't make kayaks anymore. We do have our language, and we have our subsistence, but a lot of that is gone because of the oil spill. If people are impacting the Sound again, it's just going to be a lot more loss."

In an interview, Smythe said the idea came from Hickel, though the governor had not approved specific plans. He said the proposal was just a "conceptual discussion." His boss, Bob Knight, said they had come seeking ideas, not to force something on the villagers.

But Dick Rolland, director of The North Pacific Rim, the Native organization that sponsored the meeting, said it was easy to see why the villagers were upset by the state officials.

"They came in here with their flip chart already full. In general, we'd like them to come in with blank paper," Rolland said.

Cole said it was doubtful that the settlement money could be used for economic development.

Whether legal or not, Miller, the Natives' attorney, said it would be inappropriate.

"The restoration fund ought to be used on nature, on those parts of the environment that are of critical need for those people who live in the environment," Miller said. "There's a great fear, particularly as disclosed by DCRA, that these would be used in a totally different way to spur economic development in Prince William Sound."SEEKING RETRIBUTION For all the talk of restoration, there is also a sense in Port Graham that Exxon should be made to suffer, too, and people there are convinced that the settlement hasn't done that.

"It's made me real mad to see the hurt in our elders' eyes," Norman said. "People don't see that, but it's a direct impact. In any lawsuit you win, you get paid for pain and suffering. Exxon can't say, "Well, we've cleaned up the oil, what the hell else do you want from us?' There's got to be some kind of justice, because the damage isn't just to our resources, it's to us as a people. That was the biggest, craziest thing I heard, when (Exxon Chairman) Lawrence Rawl said the settlement would have no effect on their bottom line. It was pretty insulting."

"They hurt us a lot," said Fred Toko. "All that we lost, the fishing, and cannery. Sometimes I wish they were out on the beach, the big shots, to see it and work with it.

"It's true, we got a lot of things out of the oil spill cars and boats and Hondas. But that's not going to get our beaches and animals back. You ask yourself how it ever happened, why, and wonder if it's ever going to be back to normal. Sometimes it doesn't seem like it."

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