The Birth of Petroleum Path Dependence: Oil Narratives and Development in the North

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on three moments in Alaskan history that were mediated through southern visual narratives in the 1970s: the discovery of oil; the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act; and the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. First, the article introduces the media context of the time and the news sources used in the visual discourse analysis that follows. It offers a description of the introduction of television nightly news and discusses the sources chosen for analysis: NBC Evening News and CBS Evening News. Second, the article discusses the print photojournalism of National Geographic magazine and the New York Times. Visuals published in these outlets from 1967 through to the completion of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in 1977 are then analyzed as discursive negotiations between Native paternalism, extermination, and self-determination for Native rights, and between environmentalism and development. The article argues that there were visual tensions between Native activists and negotiators and the strong legacies of American settler colonialism present in American reporting of 1970s Alaska. Finally, the article deconstructs the metanarrative of oil in Alaska during the 1973 oil crisis—namely, the essentiality of producing domestic oil during the 1973 oil crisis to secure the independence of the United States.

KEYWORDS:

• Alaska
• oil
• indigenous
• arctic
• pipeline

Acknowledgments

The author would like to acknowledge Dr. Michael Bravo and Dr. Callie Vandewiele for their comments on the paper, and thank Fulbright Canada for the opportunity to present this paper at the 2018 colloquium.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The voyage of the USS Manhattan was also reported on ABC Nightly News on September 11, 1969, with field correspondent Dick Shoemaker on board. The verbal discourse of the two-minute, ten-second report focused on the length of the trip, which normally takes 17 days one-way plowing through solid ice. Shoemaker described scientific tests being conducted on ice thickness, temperature, and strength to see how future tankers must be built. Visually, the report combined shots of the tanker and experiments, as well as the expanse of ice, water, and snow cover.

2. According to a 2015 opinion piece advocating for the inclusion, and elevation, of Native corporations into any sustainable economic plan, “There are approximately 120,000 shareholders who hold roughly 12% of the total land in Alaska. The concept driving ANCSA was that Native Corporations would utilize the money and land resources conveyed to them to engage in the capitalistic marketplace in order to provide profits to care for the social, cultural and economic benefit of their shareholders in perpetuity” (Godfrey 2016).

3. The Sierra Club, one of the oldest, largest, and most influential of the American conservation organizations, underwent a change in management in the 1970s, doubling its membership from 1972 to 1974 to 140,000, allowing for additional environmental pressure. The group understood the importance of constructing wilderness as a cultural, ethnocentric concept capable of evoking strong emotional responses from the American public. In the years leading up to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline debates, Executive Director Michael McCloskey observed that “wilderness was valued more as a mental image than a physical reality” (quoted in Coates 1991, 33). In turn, the Sierra Club promoted the Alaskan wilderness as a space of pristine, awe-inspiring landscapes worthy of protection through imagery, speeches, and printed discourse.

Additional information

Funding

No Relevant Funding

Notes on contributors

Victoria Herrmann

Victoria Herrmann is President and Managing Director of The Arctic Institute, a non-profit dedicated to Arctic security research. She teaches sustainability at American University and was previously a Mirzayan Fellow at the National Academies of Sciences and a Gates Scholar at Cambridge University’s Scott Polar Research Institute, where she received her PhD.