Point Hope (Inupiaq: Tikiġaq, IPA: [tikeʁɑq]) is a city in North Slope Borough, Alaska, United States.
Like many isolated communities in Alaska, the city has no road or rail connections to the outside world, and must be accessed by sea or by air at Point Hope Airport.
The descriptive Inuit name of the place, "Tikarakh" or "Tikiġaq", commonly spelled "Tiagara", means "forefinger".
This ancient village site was advantageous, because the protrusion of Point Hope into the sea brought the whales close to the shore.
Point Hope is one of the oldest continually occupied sites in North America.
While some of the earlier dwellings have been lost to erosion as the point shrinks, it still provides valuable information to archaeologists on how early Eskimos survived in their harsh environment.
Vasiliev and Shishmaryov named this landhead Mys Golovnina, after Vice Admiral Vasily Golovnin (1776–1831).
The project would have involved buried thermonuclear detonations some 30 miles (48 km) from the village to create a deep-water artificial harbor, which would only have been usable about three months out of the year.
Point Hope is located in the Point Hope landhead, at the northwestern end of the Lisburne Peninsula, on the Chukchi Sea coast, 40 miles (64 km) southwest of Cape Lisburne, Arctic Slope at 68°20′49″N 166°45′47″W / 68.34694°N 166.76306°W / 68.34694; -166.76306 (68.347052, -166.762917).
In December 2017, The New York Times profiled Point Hope, reporting that "a surprising, and bittersweet, side effect of global warming" would soon bring Point Hope "one of the fastest internet connections in America".
However, the melting of sea ice and thawing of permafrost as a result of global warming threaten the traditional lifestyles.