Biologists have argued for decades that areas of the petroleum reserve are more critical to wildlife than the actual wildlife refuge. But because it's also believed to hide large deposits of oil, natural gas, and coal, federal and state biologists have been warned to hold their tongues. While the battle over drilling in the refuge raged in the U.S. Congress, the Bush Administration leased vast tracts of the petroleum reserve and offshore waters to the highest bidder, a process that could transform millions of acres of wilderness into oil and gas fields, and the Beaufort Sea into a frosty Gulf of Mexico. Some of those leases include critical habitat for the geese, caribou, and bowhead whales that have sustained the Inupiat for thousands of years. With substantial communal lands on the slope, the 5,000 Inupiat scattered among seven remote villages and the town of Barrow stand to become the newest oil barons of the 21st century. But in the process they may lose what makes them Inupiat. Many are none too happy about it.

No village feels more keenly the trade-offs of oil development than Nuiqsut, a cluster of about a hundred homes overlooking the Colville River on the eastern edge of NPRA. The village began as a collection of tents in 1973 when two dozen families from Barrow moved to their traditional hunting and fishing allotments by the great river after passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. As is true of many of the tiny villages within the North Slope Borough, most of its residents now live in colorful cookie-cutter HUD houses and enjoy indoor plumbing, a diesel-fueled power plant to keep the lights and TVs on, a modern school, clinic, and fire trucks. Most are employed by the borough—benefits mostly funded by taxes on oil infrastructure.

For 20 years the industrial oil zone was out of sight, out of mind. But it's been slowly creeping toward Nuiqsut. The newest oil field, Alpine, which began operation in 2000, is located on native and state land in the river's braided delta eight miles downstream. ConocoPhillips originally touted it as a model of high-tech, low-impact oil development with no permanent roads and the use of directional drilling to tap 40,000 acres (16,000 hectares) beneath two drill sites that would disturb only 97 acres of tundra.

Then the drillers hit it big. Now five new satellite sites are under development. ConocoPhillips received an exemption from the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to plop one drill pad in the middle of Nuiqsut's subsistence hunting lands. The company wants to build a bridge over a branch of the Colville to another pad, right at one of the village's ancestral fishing spots. With NPRA leases coming on line, Nuiqsut is practically surrounded by drill rigs, ice roads, and seismic teams during the long winter drilling season when heavy equipment can move around the tundra. The activity provides jobs for some in the village, but locals claim it's also pushed the caribou away, forcing them to travel ten or twenty miles farther from home to find meat for the table. Though shareholders in the village corporation each received a dividend of about $3,000 from Alpine royalties last year, the consensus on the slope and in the village is that Nuiqsut got a raw deal.