The Nunamiut—the inland group of Iñupiat—call Anaktuvuk Pass home.  About 250 miles southeast of Barrow, the village is located along the north-flowing Anaktuvuk River in the central portion of the Brooks Range.  These mountains, running east to west, form the southern boundary of the North Slope Borough.  The Iñupiat ancestry in this interior, mountainous region goes back at least 4,000 years and the immediate location around Anaktuvuk Pass (‘place of caribou droppings’) has been occupied for about 500 years.  There is an ancient relationship between the caribou, the Nunamiut and the mountain country.  The pass itself is a historic caribou migration route.  It was a collapse in their population, in the early twentieth century, that led to the near abandonment of this site.  Several families returned in the 1940’s and were the latest pioneers in the re-establishment of this traditional community.

Since the current village is located in the region that has become the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, it has an increasing reputation as a destination for those visitors seeking wilderness back-packing and camping adventures.  These visitors find some traces of the old, sod houses and summer tent sites that used to make up the village but the physical appearance of Anaktuvuk Pass today is one of modern public service buildings, schools, homes and public utilities.  Residents utilize a fully digital local telephone system, local dial-up Internet, a community teleconference center, cable television, public radio broadcast, and interactive video distance education system wide area data network, and several two-way radio technologies for their tele-communication needs Interconnection with the regional and global network is by satellite.  There is a year-round museum in Anaktuvuk Pass which focuses on the early natural, geological and cultural history of the area.  The locally managed museum also displays Nunamiut clothing, household goods and hunting implements used around the time of the first contact with Westerners.

There are about 300 people living in Anaktuvuk Pass today and nearly 140 in the work force.  Around 90 percent of the population is Iñupiat (‘Eskimo’) and the village economy is largely based on subsistence hunting of caribou-as it has been through the ages.  In the ‘cash economy,’ the private sector employs about one-third of the work force; the North Slope Borough employs over forty percent; and the North Slope Borough School District just over twenty percent.  Residents also produce the popular Anaktuvuk Pass caribou skin masks and carvings for sale.