Just ninety miles from the U.S. & Canadian border, Kaktovik is the easternmost community on the North Slope.  An active family visiting and trading pattern, underway for centuries, continues today between Kaktovik and the villages of Aklavik, Inuvik and Tuktoyaktuk across the border in Canada.  The probability of significant oil and gas reservoirs underlying the coastal zone between Kaktovik and the Prudhoe Bay to the west have focused the attention of numerous interest groups on this community and its neighborhood in recent years.

Kaktovik is located on Barter Island and shares it present location with one of the cold-war Distant Early Warning (DEW) sites which are located across Alaska, Canada and Greenland.  The twenty million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge extend to the south and into the Brooks Range.  IN recent years Kaktovik has become a destination for visitors seeking hiking, river floating and camping experiences in the refuge area.  The residents of Kaktovik have traditionally used the same north-south routes into the foothills and mountains of the Brooks Range for their subsistence hunting and fishing tasks.

Kaktovik, which is sometimes referred to as “Barter Island” in the press, is an active community with modern public facilities.  These include an elementary and high school complex, power generation plant, water and sewage treatment facilities, a public health clinic, police station, community teleconference center, post office, and a general store, shops and a small hotel.  The telecommunications facilities serving Kaktovik include a fully digital local exchange telephone service, local dial-up Internet, cellular telephone, cable-TV, public radio broadcast and the community-access public teleconferencing center.  Interconnection with the regional and global telecommunications network is via satellite circuits which currently present a limitation to the residents needing access to higher bandwidth services.  The North Slope Borough, in coordination with the NSB School District, leases private circuits and maintains a “long-distance” network in order to provide distance education, tele-health and support for governmental service administration in the community.  Physical transportation, as is the case in the other North Slope villages, is provided by scheduled and chartered aircraft.  These flights are from Barrow, Prudhoe Bay-Deadhorse and Fairbanks.

The current population of Kaktovik totals approximately 300 people and about eighty-three percent are Iñupiat (Eskimos).  The North Slope Borough is the principal employer with about forty-two percent of the workforce involved in production of electricity, water and sewage treatment, and maintenance of roads and public facilities.  In addition local residents are employed to provide, health, education, public safety, and administrative services.  The North Slope Borough School District accounts for about 25 percent of the workforce.  The Kaktovik Iñupiat Corporation and its subsidiary or affiliated companies is the other major employer in the community.  The subsistence hunting, fishing and whaling activities remain a significant component of the local economy.