Anchorage Daily News

When my wife and I look out our window in King Cove, we see tundra, water and all the life they support. There are boats and buoys and berry pails, and from them float songs of Aleut history and promises for the future. For more than 80 years, my wife and I have walked and hunted the land and fished the waters off King Cove. Before finding each other and making our home in King Cove, we were born into villages that eventually disappeared because of their isolation.

Our bill in Congress, asking for a road connection between King Cove and Cold Bay through the Izembek Refuge, has been called by reporters a "dead end." When we heard media reports asserting that we are set upon destroying the "heart of the refuge," and that nothing short of "havoc" for wildlife would result if we get a road, we knew it was time to speak.

This refuge that everyone is talking about is our backyard. We must have been doing something right all these centuries, for there to even be an Izembek Refuge to fuss over. Long before there were degrees in biology or land management plans, our ancestors made sure every type of duck and goose stayed plentiful and left the eel grass beds to thrive. We continue those ways. The flocks remain huge. The eel grass beds remain rich. No one disputes these facts.

Decades ago, Congress set aside more than 300,000 acres of the Izembek Refuge as "wilderness" and never asked us for our opinion. If we had been included in that public process 25 years ago, we would have asked for this narrow transportation corridor to an airport, an airport I helped build. If that had occurred, we would have been driving to Cold Bay years ago. However, nobody asked.

Now we implore Congress to do what it should do: Correct a wrong and let us have a road.

Last month, members of the House Natural Resources Committee voted overwhelmingly for this bill. These members of Congress heard us when we told them we would never pursue a one-lane, seven-mile gravel road through the wilderness without ensuring a minimal footprint design, construction to the highest engineering standards and design use involving the utmost respect to our wildlife neighbors. For those who live in a city, it is easy to forget what we remember: Our survival and, that of every species for whom environmentalists claim such deep concern, is bound together. For us, conservation is not a concept. It is our life.

Every fall, sport hunters fly thousands of miles to the all-weather airport in Cold Bay; they rest comfortably in one of its nine lodges. Then they drive on pre-existing roads to the refuge shore, where their skiffs are launched into Izembek Lagoon to get a better shot at ducks and geese feeding on eel grass. But our proposed road, which will hug the northern shore of the much smaller Kinzarof Lagoon, not the Izembek shore, is declared harmful to waterfowl.

Decisions involve risk. Definitions of harm, location of "sensitive" areas, and length of settlement are issues worth fighting about. Whom will you believe in this road debate? Who has the better track record for sustaining life in all its forms -- we Aleuts who bring our land, our hearts and our history and simply ask for a show of good faith, or the environmentalists, who declare that no amount of land exchange is enough and no road ever acceptable?

Where is the heart of the Izembek Refuge? We invite you to come and listen. It beats in time with every living thing who claims Izembek as home: Some wear fur, some wear feathers, and others wear Carhartts, but our heart is the same heart.

Herman "Buddy" Bendixen, 82, is an Aleut elder and resident of King Cove. He received assistance in presenting the views expressed here from Barbara Hendricksen of Eagle River.

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