RuralAlaska2024OTZTelephoneCooperative

Point Hope

community center, community teleconference center, laundromat, post office, a general store, and a small hotel with a café and bakery. Point Hope is the second largest city on the North Slope with a population of 830 in 2020. About 91 percent are Iñupiat (Eskimos). With about 293 people in the village workforce, the North Slope Borough employs more than 18 percent of the working population and the School District employs 26 percent. Close to 40 percent of the labor force works in the private sector. Point Hope is well known throughout Alaska and elsewhere for the quality and variety of its traditional craft products made from ivory, baleen, whalebone, furs and other natural resources. As noted above, the subsistence hunting, fishing, and whaling activities remain a significant component of the local household and community economy. The telecommunications facilities serving Point Hope include a fully digital local exchange telephone service, cellular telephone, Internet, widely-used citizens band (CB) radio, cable TV, KBRW public radio broadcast, and the community-access public teleconferencing center. Interconnection with the public, switched telecommunications network is via satellite circuits, which currently present a limitation to the residents needing access to higher bandwidth services, especially the Internet. The North Slope Borough, in coordination with the NSB School District, leases private satellite circuits and maintains a long-distance network in order to provide distance education, telehealth and support for governmental service administration in the community. Transportation to Point Hope is provided by scheduled and chartered aircraft. These flights are from Utqiaġvik and Kotzebue.

At the far western end of the Arctic Slope region, 248 air miles southwest of Utqiaġvik, lies one of the longest continuously occupied community sites in North America. Archeologists have for years intensively investigated the sequence of occupied sites related to the changing beachfronts of the Point Hope peninsula. Several thousand years of continuous use and occupancy have been well established. Despite being the largest of the North Slope villages outside of Utqiaġvik, Point Hope residents maintain an active subsistence lifestyle. In addition to the inland and coastal fish, animals and birds that are harvested, Point Hope is also a traditional whaling community and the first village to seek the bowhead whales as they round the point and enter the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas on their annual, spring migration north and east into the Arctic Ocean. Visitors today can walk through areas adjacent to the modern village that contain remains of sod-houses, house-pits, and other artifacts of the earlier occupants. The present community site, following the recent move from the ocean storm-threatened location further out on the triangular peninsula, is an active community with modern public facilities. The infrastructure of Point Hope includes an elementary and high school complex, power generation plant, water and sewage treatment facilities, a public health clinic, fire station/search and rescue base, police station, a geodesic dome "kalgi" or