(CNN) - The Shell Oil Company is trying to drill where no man's drilled before. But with high reward, comes high risk.
"We've been hunting whale for thousands of years," says Steve Oomittuk. Steve Oomittuk is the mayor. He and his town are holding out against seemingly the inevitable, oil exploration off their shores, their garden as he calls it.
65% of their diet comes from what they can hunt and gather. Their primary source of life, whales. "It feeds us, it clothes us. It shelters us. It's our spirituality. It gives us identity of who we are as a people," says Oomittuk.
His people, Inupiat Eskimos, they've hunted just about everything at sea and on land scratching out an existence here for 2000 years. But it's not just walruses, seals and whales that the people of point hope rely on for food. It's birds, Ooghbaa or Murr, that come here by the hundreds of thousands. They lay incredibly beautiful decorative eggs. Each one looks like an Easter egg.
The eggs, a yearly favorite, they only have about week to collect them before the chicks inside mature. To collect them, men brave steep cliffs and flimsy ropes. It's a delicate and tenuous cycle. "We live a cycle of life where we hunt different animals at different times. We know where they are going to be," says Oomittuk.
This is the fear that if oil spills, even far offshore, the currents will bring it home, possibly taking out one link of the chain and upturning everything. "Look at Exxon Valdez, look at the Gulf of Mexico. They said nothing would happen. Anything can happen," says Oomittuk.
For the outside world, there is little trust. In the 1800s international whalers hunted the animals to near extinction. In the 1950s, Operation Chariot was a plan to make a deepwater port here by exploding 6 nuclear bombs. As part of it, locals were fed radioactive iodine to study its effects. They were told it was medicine. Distrust here measured in centuries.
Oomittuk, sitting at a now abandoned traditional home made of whale bones says shell is moving too fast, he wants more study. "It's kinda scary to see what's gonna happen this summer." A global struggle for oil. A tiny place and it's way of life caught in the middle.
