The Iñupiat community of Point Hope have been coming to terms with the discovery of contamination within their hunting grounds for more than three decades. This contamination, which came from a set of tests called the Tracer Studies, has been under speculation as to whether it caused cancer within the region of Point Hope. In 1962, the Tracer Studies were performed in Ogotoruk Creek, where scientists dumped radionuclides in soil and water supplies to determine the health risk of contaminants. These tests were done without the Iñupiat communities’ knowledge and consent, who continued to hunt for caribou in Ogotoruk Creek for decades after the tests had been performed. “Beyond Expertise: Rethinking Authority and the Environmental Histories of the Tracer Studies at Point Hope” is the first discussion directly addressing scientific expertise in conversation with the Tracer Studies. It highlights how the predecessors of the Tracer Studies, the Department of Energy (DOE), failed to democratically respond to the Iñupiat communities’ concerns and tended to have an air of subversive authority regarding expertise. The main aim of this dissertation is to understand the conversations between the scientific voice versus the community voice. It becomes crucial to the toxic history discipline as we engage in voices of the Iñupiat who are often left out of the narrative and put them into conversation with the DOE scientists. I aim to put the voices of the Iñupiat at the front of this dissertation, focusing in the latter chapters on their speculations in the aftermath of remediation. I will follow similar toxic history layouts for my chapters by looking at discovery, recognition, and the remediation of contaminants within the environment respectively. This method will allow for a well-revised discussion surrounding the Tracer Studies as it will unveil the Iñupiat and scientific responses and put them into conversation with each other, which is something excessively limited within the discipline.
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