Cultural festival to open US-Russia border

When it comes to the Bering Strait, there is no shortage of individual adventurers trying to cross it by all means imaginable. But when news of the Bering Strait Festival reached Nome —with the promise to open up international borders between the United States and Russia for seven days — it captured the attention of Nome civic leaders. 

Next summer, the Russian Federal Agency for Tourism plans to host a multi-day cultural summit which proposes to bring together residents from both sides of the strait, including a 43-mile boat crossing between Uelen, situated in Russia’s Chukotsky District, to Wales, Alaska.

The first crossing, set for the week of August 2022, has raised many questions, including among Nome Port Commission members who listed the festival on its meeting agenda for its regularly scheduled meeting, Nov. 18. “I don’t think folks know much about it,” said Commissioner Gay Sheffield.  

Apparently, few do. 

The Nome Nugget reached out to officials across federal, state and local agencies, as well as the Native Village of Wales. The State Department was unaware of the festival, and Wales officials reported that they knew little about the event. 

Nikolay Korchunov is Russia’s senior arctic official with the Arctic Council, the intergovernmental forum among eight Arctic nations.  He told the Nugget by email that the Bering Strait Festival carries a theme of “Arctic tourism,” but offered few other details.

According to the event website, it promotes a seven-day “historic expedition,” where participants are invited to retrace the earliest journeys of those who have crossed the strait.  Organizers say a forum will center on Native communities and their kin relations that were disrupted by Cold War politics decades ago.  Cultural exchange gatherings are slated in between traditional sports competitions.  The main attraction, the boat race, is to set sail from a base camp in Uelen where, the website touts, “whale meat cooking over open fires, and the beat of walrus drums.”

“The first boat that will go across will be a skin boat. And that skin boat will be built by the hunters in Lorino (Chukotka) and supported by hunters from St. Lawrence Island from Savoonga,” said Mille Porsild, the festival’s head U.S. coordinator in a August interview with Alaska Public Radio.  

The Chukotka District of Russia is home to Chukchi and Yupik hunters who today maintain active use of skin boats for both hunting and racing. In a separate project, Porsild has partnered with Chukotka’s Sea Mammal Hunters Association to help revitalize a skin boat culture in Savoonga, a community that no longer uses the skin boat.  The three-year initiative falls under a program with the U.S. National Park Service’s Shared Beringian Heritage Program. The NPS says, however, that it is not involved with the Bering Strait Festival. 

Beyond these details, it remains largely unclear how international transit to support the festival will shake out.  Porsild was unable to respond to requests for an interview by press time. 

In October, Russia, which has the largest Arctic border and the bulk of the region’s population, made claim to much of the Arctic Ocean. It began asserting its position as early as 2007 when a Russian submarine planted a rust-proof titanium flag on the seabed in the North Pole.  Since 2019, the country has imposed a list of demands on other countries crossing the strait, including requiring advance notice.  Non-compliance threatens the use of military force. Last winter, for the first time ever, a Russian LNG tanker ship traversed the Bering Strait via the Northern Sea Route, delivering liquid natural gas to China. Several more tankers followed in stunning January and February sailings through the strait. But innocent passage north to south is different from crossing the borderline west to east.

At its narrowest point, the Bering Strait is only 55 miles wide between the U.S. and Russia mainland, but only three miles separate the island of Little Diomede from Big Diomede, claimed by Russia.

Robert Soolook, Jr. of Little Diomede can’t imagine cross-border travel at this time, even for a skin boat race. “A lot of red tape,” he said in describing the choppy political waters that have divided his Ingalikmiut community for decades. 

In 1948, Soviet troops aggressively separated families of the sister Diomede islands barely three miles apart, sending those who lived on the big island to mainland Russia, and detaining others from Little Diomede if they crossed from the United States.  

“We called it the ‘Ice Curtain,’” Soolook, Jr. said.  

But a border didn’t cut off kinship ties even when crossings were restricted and phone lines confiscated.  In a rare series of meetings from 1972 to 1977, leaders from both tribal communities in the U.S and Russia were allowed to meet each winter once the Bering Strait had turned to ice.  At first these talks took place on the ice between the two islands. Eventually, elders from Little Diomede were able to access Big Diomede even as Russian troops looked on. 

“The language and the dialects were the same,” recalled Soolook, who was no more than ten or twelve years old at the time he witnessed these happy talks. And they were observations that stayed with him. “We used to be one big family,” he said, describing the year his mother reunited with her relatives after 47 years apart. “Every time I think about that, it breaks my heart.” 

It’s unclear why the cross-border gatherings among the Diomede diaspora came to an abrupt end.  A similar reunion wouldn’t happen for another twenty years. That was the year Soolook met his kin on Russian soil in 1989 while on a cross-country dog sled expedition. He called himself “the lucky one.” 

Today, only a few military posts remain on Big Diomede, but Soolook still feels trapped. “I wish that border wasn’t there,” he said, discussing how geopolitics in the region continue to hamper their inherent rights to hunt and fish freely on lands that his ancestors have roamed. 

The Bering Strait Festival skin boat racecourse is slated to pass right by the Diomede islands, from Uelen to Wales. But like so many, Soolook has heard little about it, and so far, isn’t convinced it can be pulled off because of red tape. 

But that doesn’t mean Soolook is not behind the project.  

“There’s a whole generation here that doesn’t know about this history at all,” he said.