The Pillaging of the American Arctic

ELIM, Alaska—Roughly 120 miles south of the Arctic Circle, this Inupiaq village stands between mountains and the slate-gray waters of Norton Bay. Children yelp and skip through the streets, and residents race down open roads on ATVs. Elim is known as a checkpoint during the Iditarod, not a destination for tourists and cruise ships.

Recently, however, the village has become noteworthy for something beneath the surface: Just 30 miles up the Tubutulik River lies Alaska’s largest known uranium deposit at a 22,400-acre property called the Boulder Creek site. For the people of Elim, that geological wealth is not a promise but a threat to their way of life. The deposit sits near the Tubutulik’s headwaters, where locals harvest fish, forage for berries, and hunt for moose, as they have done for centuries.

Uranium, prized for its use in commercial nuclear reactors, naval submarines, and other defense applications, is one of many resources in Alaska that draw interest from the public and private sectors. It has taken on heightened importance in recent years as demand for low-carbon nuclear energy has spiked. Though the United States was once a leading uranium producer, today it supplies only a small share of its own needs and relies heavily on imports. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, which underscored vulnerabilities in the global nuclear fuel supply chain, both the Biden and Trump administrations have moved to bolster domestic uranium mining and enrichment capacity. Just last November, uranium was reinstated on the U.S. government’s official list of critical minerals.

But far from Washington, those national priorities are raising alarms in the communities closest to where new mining activity could occur. Even exploratory drilling, Elim residents warn, could contaminate the wildlife that sustains the village. “If they did away with subsistence, we’d starve,” said Emily Murray, vice president of the Norton Bay Watershed Council.

Amid President Donald Trump’s aggressive push to shore up the U.S. critical mineral supply—backed by new executive orders, overturned environmental protections, and a fast-tracked federal permitting regime—Elim has become a test case for just how far Washington is willing to go, and how much Native communities stand to lose.

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Alarmed by the potential risks, villagers organized protests, letters, and campaigns aimed at state officials. This effort included a group that Murray helped launch, Elim Students Against Uranium, and was supported by the local tribal council. Triex withdrew in 2008, but since 2024, the people of Elim have rallied again—this time against Panther Minerals, whose prospecting in the same area revived old fears about the safety of the watershed.

Residents again organized, wrote letters, and testified at hearings. Last March, for example, Elim high school student Cayli A. Moses wrote in a letter to Gov. Mike Dunleavy that the leaching solutions and water required for uranium extraction could contaminate groundwater, urging him to “realize the future long-term adverse effects of our land, environment, animals, and people.” She never received a response.

So when Panther Minerals abruptly withdrew from the property last July, the relief in the community was palpable—but short-lived. For Elim, Panther’s exit is a reprieve that could vanish with the next investor. The mining claims to the property remain active; David Hedderly-Smith, a geologist and prospector who owns the claims, did not respond to Foreign Policy’s requests for comment.

“It could be the largest uranium deposit, or, you know, cluster of deposits on American soil,” Hedderly-Smith told local media during the most recent exploration. “Elim could become the ‘Uranium Capital of America.’”

For now, it’s impossible to know how big the uranium deposit really is. But given the current U.S. fixation with critical minerals, there is little sense that pressure on Alaska’s mineral-rich lands will ease anytime soon. That, residents say, is what makes the moment feel so precarious.

For activists like Jasmine Jemewouk, who (along with the tribal council) opposed Panther drilling, the state’s handling of the permitting process for uranium exploration deepened community distrust. Jemewouk said that despite extensive public comments, joint resolutions from tribal and local governments, and formal requests for government-to-government consultation, state regulators proceeded to grant Panther the permit anyway.

“We were able to gather over 100 comments with the communities’ concern, and still the [Alaska] Department of Natural Resources moved forward with the permit,” Jemewouk said. “After that, it felt like despair—like they were going to move forward with it anyway, even with the whole region opposed.”

It is that sense—of being heard but not listened to—that now fuels Elim’s determination to defend its watershed as the next company, or the next administration, comes knocking.

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For decades, Alaska has been positioned as a key supplier of resources for national defense and energy needs. Though the two previous Democratic administrations placed a premium on Alaska’s conservation and wildlife protection, Trump has reversed many of those policies in his second term and accelerated efforts to extract Alaska’s resources.

Shortly after taking office last January, Trump issued an executive order aimed at unlocking Alaska’s mineral wealth by aggressively speeding up the approval process for mining projects, including those on Native American lands. Protections for 13.3 million acres in the Central Yukon region were overturned in December, and FAST-41, a program designed to streamline permitting for projects deemed critical to national defense, has raised the stakes for communities near extractive operations.

Projects previously blocked or delayed have been revived, such as the controversial Ambler Access Project, which would create a road cutting through the pristine Brooks Range in northern Alaska to access copper, zinc, and cobalt deposits despite significant local opposition.

However, many of the Trump administration’s ambitions clash with the harsh reality of extracting resources in the far north. The region’s extreme winters and high costs for transportation, labor, and construction often outweigh the potential revenue, with mines often not reaching profitability before 20 years of operation.

“It’s often argued that Alaska is key to securing U.S. energy security, and I’m not sure that those numbers bear that out at all,” said Troy J. Bouffard, the director of the Center for Arctic Security Resilience at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. “All the excitement behind critical minerals … We’re not set to do this at all.”

Ironically, Alaska is uniquely suited for natural resource development, just not in the ways that the Trump administration is after. Offshore wind, hydroelectric power, and geothermal energy—resources that the administration has balked at elsewhere—are all abundant, cost-effective, and reliable in the high north.

Federal officials working on Arctic issues, who requested anonymity due to potential retaliation, told Foreign Policy that there has been meaningful progress toward local investments in renewable energy and climate adaptation measures during Trump’s second term. Many of these officials said that Trump’s approach to Alaska was seen as reckless and irrational when it came to fossil fuels and precious minerals—more akin to piracy than pragmatism.

Locals worry that Trump’s approach to resource extraction won’t help sustain the land and the people who rely on it. Money brought to Alaska through these business arrangements rarely makes a lasting impact on public services, instead benefitting refineries and defense contractors outside the state.

“This supposed idea that we can solve our problems by extracting more: You can look at our history and we haven’t done that,” said John Gaedeke, who owns a lodge in the Brooks Range. “Our population is declining. The money we spend on education is declining. And yet we’ve experienced one of the largest oil booms in the country’s history. We can’t extract our way out of poverty here.”

Critics say that history makes the current moment especially alarming. Hal Shepherd, a lawyer hired to support Elim’s mining appeal efforts, fears for a gloomy future for the village and similar communities as the Trump administration pushes to extract more from Alaska. “I’m afraid that if some big, larger company with more resources [comes in], then they’ll be in trouble,” he said. “It’s coming down the track pretty fast.”

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As the Arctic becomes a strategic frontier in a warming world, its melting sea ice opening new shipping lanes and its minerals eyed by competing world powers, Washington’s focus on security and supply chains has overshadowed the needs of the people who live in the region. Those ambitions often benefit military and corporate interests, while the risks fall on Native communities whose cultures depend on the health of their lands.

In Elim, those risks aren’t abstract. When residents learned about the devastating impacts of previous uranium mining on Navajo lands in New Mexico, the threat of a similar fate became more real. Local resident Beverly Nakarak recalls learning as a teenager that a “whole village got sick, got cancer.” (Since the heyday of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation during the Cold War, the community has faced significantly higher rates of cancer, renal failure, and other lung diseases.) “They [the mining company] didn’t care that the people were going to get cancer and die off,” Nakarak said.

For families like Nakarak’s who rely on the Tubutulik watershed for sustenance, the stakes are personal. Nakarak, who works as a health aide, says that people in her community once tended to live to very old ages, often past 100. Now, as both their diets and their environment have been increasingly disrupted, she says they’ve begun to fall ill decades earlier.

Given this, many in Elim fear that another wave of industrial contamination could endanger the health and well-being of future generations. “If it wasn’t going to contaminate our land, go for it,” said Wayne Moses, a tribal representative. “But I just got another grandkid, and that kid needs to enjoy what we have right now.”

This project was supported by a grant from Columbia University’s Ira A. Lipman Center for Journalism and Civil and Human Rights in conjunction with Arnold Ventures.