“Blue-Eyed Arabs” & the Silver Snake: Alaskan petrocultures and the Trans-Alaska pipeline system

Abstract

Following fierce construction controversies in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System became a familiar cultural hallmark and the most iconic pipeline in the world. This article argues that the realization of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System changed Alaska’s culture and global imaginaries of Alaska. TAPS forged overlapping and evolving petrocultures; rather than a uniform and static oil culture, the pipeline’s social valence ebbed and flowed with the passage of time and the transit of Arctic oil from Prudhoe Bay through Prince William Sound. The pipeline became a gauge not only for the State’s revenues, but also for the economic and cultural consciousness of its people. Yet there was always a subset of Alaskans who warned of the deleterious effects of the pipeline on Alaska’s environment, polity, culture and ancestral lifeways.