Nuiqsut leader Napageak dies at 71

Petroleum News Staff

Elder Thomas Oyagak Napageak of Nuiqsut died May 6 in Anchorage at age 71.

Mr. Napageak was a major player in the development of the Alpine oil field and was a former president of Kuukpik Corp., the Native village corporation. He also led the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission and was both mayor of Nuiqsut and president of the Native Village of Nuiqsut.

In 1994, when Alpine was discovered, Mr. Napageak was a member of the negotiating team representing Nuiqsut and Kuukpik as they hammered out development terms for the field.

As Kuukpik’s Native hire and training coordinator and later as president of Nanuq Inc., Kuukpik’s oil field service subsidiary, he pressed the oil industry to hire and train Alaska Natives at Alpine and elsewhere.

Earlier, he was the leader of a resettlement drive for the community in 1973, when he helped lead a cat train into the village site. The area had been essentially depopulated in the 1930s and 1940s because the territorial magistrate decreed that local children had to attend school, and the only school in the region was in Barrow.

When the village was resettled, Mr. Napageak was chosen as the first mayor, guiding a community that was just a tent city through two winters, with residents gathering driftwood from the Colville River to heat the wall tents.

As a skilled whaling captain, he was first elected to the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission in 1977 and served as chairman of the AEWC from 1998 to his death. He harvested a bowhead whale for Nuiqsut virtually every year from 1972 to 2003 and several times harvested two whales in a single season.

Services for Mr. Napageak were held in Anchorage, Barrow and Nuiqsut.