Good on them.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska - In Alaska’s native villages, the punishing winter cold is already coming through the walls of the lightly insulated plywood homes, many of the villagers are desperately poor, and heating-oil prices are among the highest in the nation.

And yet a few villages are refusing free heating oil from Venezuela, on the patriotic principle that no foreigner has the right to call their president “the devil.”

The heating oil is being offered by the petroleum company controlled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, President Bush’s nemesis. While scores of Alaska’s Eskimo and Indian villages say they have no choice but to accept, others would rather suffer.

“As a citizen of this country, you can have your own opinion of our president and our country. But I don’t want a foreigner coming in here and bashing us,” said Justine Gunderson, administrator for the tribal council in the Aleut village of Nelson Lagoon. “Even though we’re in economically dire straits, it was the right choice to make.”

[...]

The Aleutian Pribilof Islands Association, a native nonprofit organization that would have handled the heating oil donation on behalf of 291 households in Nelson Lagoon, Atka, St. Paul and St. George, rejected the offer because of the insults Chavez has hurled at Bush.

It does seem as though the author of this article, the AP’s Jeannette Lee, has her own ideas about who should give the natives some fuel:

Nelson Lagoon residents pay more than $5 a gallon for oil — or at least $300 a month per household — to heat their homes along the wind-swept coast of the Bering Sea, where temperatures can dip to minus-15. About one-quarter of the 70 villagers are looking for work, in part because Alaska’s salmon fishing industry has been hit hard by competition from fish farms.

The donation to Alaska’s native villages has focused attention on the rampant poverty and high fuel prices in a state that is otherwise awash in oil — and oil profits. In 2005, 86 percent of the Alaska’s general fund, or $2.8 billion, came from oil from the North Slope.

Stupid greedy oil companies freezing these poor natives to death!!!

/leftard

Seriously though, why should anyone supply the natives with free fuel?  High energy costs are a reality when you live in rural Alaska, an area that’s pretty much only reachable by boat or airplane and has exactly one major industry: commercial fishing.

If the natives can’t find jobs and can’t afford energy prices then they should move.  Period.  That’s now free economies work.