SEASON 3 | EPISODE 2
To Secure the Blessings of Liberty
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NICK MOTT: This series was supported by the Pulitzer Center.
AMY: What do you like about living in Kaktovik?
TIM: Everything. The clean air, the quietness. Everybody knows everybody. Small town. When I leave, I can't wait to come back.
AMY: Tim Kamaka is an island guy. He's originally from Hawaii, and about 15 years ago, he moved to Barter Island, a small barrier island just off the northern coast of Alaska. Tim manages a hotel here, in the small town of Kaktovik. And lately, he says, business has been good.
TIM: The tourism business is huge, yep. We had 2,000 visitors come through last year.
AMY: For a town of…
TIM: 280. So it's huge.
AMY: And are they here, like, 99% to see polar bears?
TIM: Yeah, like 100%. They're here to see the bears.
AMY: Kaktovik is the only town inside the boundaries of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And it's also one of the best places in the world to see polar bears.
TIM: This is world-class polar bear viewing. You can't view them like this anywhere, like seriously anywhere, eye level like this. It's close.
AMY: Tim says when he first moved here, he was as excited as anyone else to see the bears.
TIM: Yeah, I guess I was pretty stoked. Like, wow, bears – we don't have those in Hawaii!
AMY: But after 15 years, things have changed.
AMY: How does it feel to you when you see a polar bear at this point?
TIM: It's just a regular, like a dog.
AMY: (laughter)
TIM: They're like, yeah, they're actually a nuisance. They're just our animals up here. That's it. I mean, that's just, we're literally in their backyard. Yeah. But, uh, when I see bears...they're cute. They're amazing.
AMY: But you're over it.
TIM: Yeah.
AMY: I loved this moment with Tim because it's such a great example of how proximity changes perspective – of how things can look so different depending if you're far away, or up close. Because polar bears inhabit a world that seems so remote to most people, it's almost impossible to imagine them as anything other than extraordinary. Fascinating, frightening, a source of wonder. But for Tim...
TIM: They're just here. Just literally like wild dogs. All over the place.
AMY: But there's a real dark side to this abundance of polar bears in Kaktovik. They're coming here because they're losing their preferred habitat, the sea ice. As the climate warms, more and more polar bears are using the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, including this island, as a true refuge. A place to find food, build dens and raise their cubs as the sea ice recedes. So there's this weird paradox – as the bears become increasingly threatened by climate change, they're actually more visible in some places. And that's something we wouldn't know if we didn't have the tools to look at this situation on a planetary scale. So proximity can change perspective in all sorts of ways. Sometimes we have to get really close to a situation to understand it. And sometimes, we have to pull way back in order to see all of the pieces.
MUSIC
AMY: Welcome to Threshold. I'm Amy Martin, and this is episode two in our series about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Congress approved oil drilling in the refuge at the end of 2017, and as we release this in the fall of 2019, the Trump administration is saying they'll start selling off drilling rights in the refuge this winter. Opponents are vowing to stop that from happening -- this battle is coming to a head.
But for the last 40 years, it's been a fight that has mostly played out at a distance. So over the next several episodes, I'm going to take you with me as I try to understand what driling means to the people who live closest to it. Two groups have deep roots in this area -- the Gwich'in, who live in the interior, and the Iñupiat up on the coast. And we're going to start here in Kaktovik, because it's the town closest to the action. Now that drilling has been approved by Congress, it could mean people here someday have oil rigs right next door. But it could also mean this small town is suddenly awash in cash. So, if drilling happens, and if it doesn't, the people of Kaktovik will be directly affected.
[INTRO THEME]
“Kaktovik is the only community, the only village within the boundaries of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge”
“Our lands have always been locked up, and no development has ever occurred on our lands, in regards to oil and gas development”
“Why would we want to have Prudhoe Bay, you see all the oil rigs and stuff and, it’s not fancy stuff”
“Bears weren’t really a problem until recently with climate change and the Arctic Ocean is opening up. There was ice there all the time and now it’s all gone.”
AMBI: Matthew's truck
AMY: So what are we looking at right now, where are you taking me?
MATTHEW: OK, so we're going down our old, towards our old runway.
AMY: Matthew Rexford is giving me a tour of Kaktovik, Alaska. He's 34 years old and he's lived in this village his whole life. Like most people in Kaktovik, Matthew is Iñupiat, one of the indigenous groups of the American Arctic. He's the tribal administrator here, among several other leadership roles.
MATTHEW: This runway was installed around the cold war era, 1940s, 1950s and sixties. And the original Kaktovik community settlement was where this old runway used to be in front of us.
AMY: We're driving on a low-lying, narrow strip of land. Matthew says when the Air Force wanted a place to land their planes, they bulldozed the village that was here, and the local people had to rebuild in a new spot on the island. And that was just the first time.
MATTHEW: In the 1950s there was a second relocation of the community. And in the 1960s, there was the final relocation of the community to where Kaktovik is right now.
AMY: So the community's been moved three times?
MATTHEW: Three times.
AMY: Today, it takes less than ten minutes to drive around the circumference of this village of nearly 300 people. Many of the houses are built up on piers that lift them above the puddles and pools seeping up from the permafrost soil. And almost every home is surrounded by the signature gear of Arctic life – four wheelers and boats, sleds and snowmobiles, plus the occasional musk ox hide, whale bone, or set of caribou antlers. But there are some things in town that you definitely don't find in many Alaskan villages. A new assisted living home, a health clinic, and big buildings for power and water facilities.
AMY: How have you seen the village change in your 34 years?
MATTHEW: Oh, so, prior to, I'd say around the year 2000, our community didn't have a water sewage system installed as it is today, where we can flush a toilet. Prior to that we had honey buckets. And a lot of this infrastructure in our community – the gravel roads, the power and electricity, the water infrastructure, have been built from the tax revenues for the oil and gas infrastructure development and the pipeline.
AMY: So when you get to flush the toilet in Kaktovik you can thank the oil industry.
MATTHEW: Oh, yes, yes.
AMY: Many people living in small villages in Alaska are getting by without things that most Americans consider basic necessities. But oil money is changing that on the North Slope – this northern tier of Alaska where some of the country's biggest oil and gas deposits have been discovered. For example, millions of dollars have been poured into the Kaktovik school. It's designed for pre-K all the way through high school, and it's equipped with dozens of computers, musical instruments, a high-end shop, a big gym, and even a swimming pool. All of this is thanks to taxes and royalties from oil development. For Matthew, drilling for oil in the refuge means more of these improvements – more and better housing, health care, and community services.
MATTHEW: We, uh, we do see those benefits and the positive benefits. Our community is still growing and uh, would like to continue to grow in this special place.
AMY: Matthew and I have arrived at the southern edge of the island. Looking out into the ocean, we can see a grey-green strip of land in the distance.
AMY: The land over there, that's the, that's the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Is that right?
MATTHEW: Yes, that is correct.
AMY: And is that like the actual spot where you think there might be oil development, or do you think it'd be another spot on the coast, or does nobody know yet?
MATTHEW: Well, so yeah, that's still being discussed. They're currently trying to get a seismic exploration in place to determine where a lot of the oil and gas would be.
AMY: Although most of the land of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is owned by the federal government, more than 90 thousand acres of the coastal plain is Native land. But, because that Native land is part of the refuge, oil development has been prohibited there.
MATTHEW: Our lands have always been locked up and no development has ever occurred on our lands in regards to oil and gas development.
AMY: So when you say it's been locked up, like you're saying that for your whole life, nobody has been able to make any money from oil and gas development on Native lands?
MATTHEW: Yes, on the coastal plain, that is correct. It took an act of Congress to allow for the coastal plain to be opened up.
AMY: And then that happened that in December 2017, with the passage of the tax bill. And, what, how did that feel to you when you got the news it passed?
MATTHEW: Oh, it felt like a blessing. I mean, the opportunities for our people have been opened up and if any development does occur in and around our area we want to ensure that it is done right.
AMY: So the question here is how. How exactly could oil development be a blessing for Kaktovik? To answer that we have to spend a few minutes on something called the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, known by its acronym, ANCSA. This is a giant federal law that was passed in 1971, and it was intended to settle the question of which parts of Alaska would be owned by its original inhabitants. And it's important to keep in mind that Alaska Natives never consented to have any of their lands owned by the Unites States, or anyone else. That land was just taken. ANCSA was an awkward mechanism designed to give a small portion of it back. With conditions.
So one way to get inside of this thing is to think about what happened to indigenous people in the lower 48 after white people arrived. Open warfare, treaties made and broken, and eventually, the reservation system was created, with all of its flaws. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was, at least on the surface, an attempt to do things differently. Instead of reservations, the heart of ANCSA is something called the Native corporation.
ANCSA created 13 regional Native corporations and over 200 smaller village corporations in Alaska, and designated 44 million acres and close to a billion dollars to be divided among them. Native Alaskans became shareholders in these new corporations. And the idea was that the corporations could sell the timber or gold or oil on their land, and then distribute the profits among the shareholders. Some people argued that this would help Native Alaskans to be more self-sufficient than, say, the reservation system.
But of course, Native Alaskans already knew how to be self-sufficient, they'd been surviving on their land for thousands of years, they had their own systems of trade, their own notions of wealth and well-being. Baked into ANCSA was the assumption that all of that had to change, that the only legitimate paradigm was to think of the land and its resources as commodities to be exploited and sold. It imposed a capitalist worldview on people who'd never defined themselves or their places in those terms before, and it said: this is the only way forward for your community.
So has ANCSA been good for Native people in Alaska? Has it been a pathway toward economic independence, or another form of colonization? Or maybe some of both? Well, tons of academics and authors have tried to answer that over the decades, and it's way more than we can tackle here. But we can say that the effects of ANCSA are still unfolding in many places, and one of them is Kaktovik. Many people in the village are shareholders in two Native corporations – the Kaktovik Iñupiat Corporation, or KIC, which owns land in and around the village, and the much larger Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, which owns land across Alaska's North Slope. Both of these corporations stand to benefit from oil development on the coastal plain, but because that land has been protected, they haven't been able to reap those rewards. Yet.
FENTON: Kaktovik is the only community, the only village within the boundaries of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We are the only village and community located within the coastal plain of ANWR.
AMY: This is Fenton Rexford, Matthew's uncle. He's also from Kaktovik, and he's speaking at a Congressional hearing in Washington, DC. This is from March of 2019.
FENTON: We are not an exhibit in a museum. Nor should the land that we have survived and thrived for centuries be locked away for the peace of mind from those from far-away places.
AMY: This hearing was about a bill aiming to declare the refuge off-limits for oil. It was introduced by House Democrats, and the goal was to undo the part of the 2017 tax law that opened up the refuge for drilling. It's since been passed by the House, but it has basically no chance of making it through the Senate. Fenton Rexford came to Washington to testify against it – like Matthew, he wants to the right to drill in his backyard. He began by trying to educate lawmakers on the history of his community.
FENTON: 1947, the US military, Cold War, arrived on Barter Island and Kaktovik to build a 5,000 foot runway and hangar. We were told to move our village. Our homes, our ice cellars, graves and cemeteries were bulldozed and filled in.
AMY: He lists a series of injustices, including the creation of the Arctic National Wildlife Range in 1960 – the predecessor to the current refuge.
FENTON: The range was established without our input, Kaktovik input, without consultation. Our rights to hunt were now restricted further. 1964 the military directed again the third time to move.
AMY: And then, in 1980, came the bill that doubled the size of the wildlife range, and added it to the national wildlife refuge system. As we talked about in our last episode, this looked like a huge conservation win to many people in the lower 48. But Fenton says it felt very different in Kaktovik.
FENTON: The interests of the outside conservation groups have trumped the interest of our people. We have spent over 40 years lobbying congress to allow oil and gas leasing within the coastal plain. Even leasing on our own Native lands requires an act of Congress. Since the federal government showed up 152 years ago, the outside groups have used the federal government as a tool to assert their own interest in our land.
MUSIC
FENTON: This school of thought amounts to nothing more than green colonialism – a political occupation of our land in the name of environment.
AMY: I watched Fenton's testimony online and then immediately started trying to get in touch with him. I wanted to dig into what he said at this hearing, to find out more about what he means by green colonialism, and how that connects to all the other forms of colonialism playing out here. I didn't have any luck reaching him, but a few months later, when I went to Kaktovik, I knocked on Fenton's door, and asked if we could talk. His answer was no, which, of course, is his prerogative. But I'm telling you all this because people promoting oil development in the refuge, including some in Kaktovik, often say that the media is not paying attention to pro-oil voices. So I want to be clear that I sincerely wanted to hear from people on all sides, including Fenton, and I did all I could to make that happen.
One of the key things I could glean from his testimony, though – and from my other research and reporting – is that the whole way the issue of oil development in the refuge gets framed feels wrong to some people here. For the general public, this fight is about the value of wildlife and pristine places versus the value of oil. But for many here in Kaktovik, the heart of this conflict is about something else entirely: their sovereignty, and all of the ways its been ignored.
We'll have more after this short break.
~
AMY: Welcome back to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and we're going to leave the village of Kaktovik for a few minutes here to try to answer one of the most important questions in this conflict over drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. How much oil are we talking about here? And where is it – on the federal land? On the Native land? In the waters offshore? For 40 years, everyone with an interest in this place has been asking these questions. And that has led a lot of us to this guy.
DAVE: My name is Dave Houseknecht. I'm a senior research geologist with the US Geologic Survey and I lead a team of scientists that work on the regional geology of northern Alaska.
AMY: There's probably not very many people who know with any more precision than you do how much oil is in the 1002 area. Is that correct?
DAVE: I think that's a fair statement in terms of scientists in the public domain.
AMY: Dave works out of the U.S. Geological Survey headquarters, just outside of Washington, DC. We're talking over the phone here. He's walked and driven and flown over different parts of the North Slope countless times, because he and his team are charged with the task of knowing how much oil and gas there is on the public land in northern Alaska and communicating that information to policy makers and the public. So I asked him...
AMY: How much oil is there in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge?
DAVE: Uh, well, no one knows.
AMY: This isn't what anyone wants to hear, and Dave knows it. I ask him to hone in on the federal land – how much oil in the refuge is owned by all of the American people?
DAVE: You know, when we do our estimates, we do them probabilistically. And so, you know, we estimate a mean number of about seven billion barrels under the federal part of land.
AMY: And sometimes I see the number 7.6 billion, are you just rounding to seven for this conversation, or has that point six fallen away?
DAVE: (laughter) No, it's still, it's still there. Uh, I'm just generalizing because if I said to you 7.6 billion, you know, to many people who hear that they automatically think of greater precision than represented by the uncertainty in the number.
AMY: Uncertainty. That's the key word here. Everyone wants Dave to give one, nice, clean number, telling us how much oil there is in the refuge. But he can't do that. What he can do is give us an average of the probable amount - that's where the seven-point-something billion barrels comes from. And just to help that number make some sense – seven billion barrels is about how much oil Americans currently consume in one year. It's only a small fraction of the total proven oil reserves in the United States – about two percent, if you include shale oil – but it's still worth a lot of money. Depending on the price of oil, it could be worth hundreds of billions of dollars. But again, that's just the federal land in the refuge. Dave says if you include the estimated oil on Native-owned land and in the waters just offshore, which are owned by the state, the mean estimate goes up to about 10.4 billion barrels. So an additional 2.7-ish billion barrels of oil, some owned by Native corporations, some by the state of Alaska. Dave says he's not allowed to break down those numbers any further – to tell me how much of that 2.7 billion is estimated to be on Native land, so at this point we really can't begin to quantify in any realistic way how much people in Kaktovik would actually make from oil development. There's just a whole lot of mystery surrounding the question of how much oil is on the coastal plain, and where that oil might be.
DAVE: The range of uncertainty is quite large, just because there is very little subsurface data that we can use to make these estimates.
AMY: I should back up here and say that there are basically two main ways to get that subsurface data, to help figure out where oil is hiding underground: you do seismic tests or you drill exploration wells. Usually it's a combination of both, and seismic testing often comes first. That process involves sending shockwaves down from the surface using dynamite or big thumper trucks. But because the refuge has been a protected area, any kind of exploration, including seismic testing, has required an act of Congress. The last time seismic tests were done in the refuge was in the 1980s.
DAVE: And what was done was a two dimensional seismic survey, which was conducted during the winters of 1984 and 85. So those data are very old.
AMY: Dave says seismic surveys can give a good overview of the oil deposits in an area, but nothing can replace the certainty that comes from drilling a hole in the ground and seeing if oil comes out. And that's where the plot thickens a bit here. Because there has been a well drilled on the coastal plain. Just one. In the mid-1980s.
DAVE: The USGS has never seen the data from that well. It is the only actual drilling result that exists on the refuge coastal plain.
AMY: It's known as the KIC well because it was drilled on land owned by Kaktovik Iñupiat Corporation – the local Native corporation created by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.
DAVE: That data, because the well was drilled on Native lands, remains proprietary.
AMY: Proprietary, and guarded with James Bond-like secrecy. For years, the information was held by Alaska's state oil well regulators in a locked box, inside a safe, which was kept in a locked room, in a secured area of the agency in Anchorage. And recently, when there was a fear that the location had been leaked, a top Alaskan oil and gas official said the data was moved to an even more secret location under cover of darkness. That's how much some people want to know the answer to the question of how much oil there is in the 1002 area – and where that oil might be located.
In April 2019, there was another plot twist: the New York Times reported that an attorney who'd seen the data from the well decades ago was ready to talk, to share what he knew. And – drum roll please – he said the KIC well was – quote ”worthless.” A dry hole. Dave Houseknecht says that if that's true, and he doesn't know if it is or not, it's certainly interesting. But he also says it doesn't mean there's no oil to be had on the coastal plain. With more and better seismic data, they might be able to pinpoint different places to drill. And there may well be more seismic tests as soon as this winter. If that happens, everyone's going to want to know if Dave's estimated numbers grow or shrink.
AMY: So...are you completely agnostic, or do you have any kind of – you know this data better than anyone – do you have any kind of hunch of, like, I bet it's going to trend up or trend down once we really find out?
DAVE: No, I really don't. And even if I did I wouldn't tell you because, um, you know, part of my job is to present briefings that inform policymakers in Washington DC and if I even hinted that I lean one way or another, on either the size of the undiscovered resource or whether or not a certain area should be open for exploration or remain closed to exploration, you know, I would soon lose all credibility. And so, um, you know, I... being agnostic is a good thing for my job.
AMY: Dave gets pressured to make predictions like this from all sides, and it's his job to stay neutral – to inform policy, not to try to influence it. So he's trying hard to stay in his lane, and I respect that. But I also had to put him on the spot a little bit, because there's a deeper question here. The purpose of his job is to help the government figure out where to find oil and gas on our public lands, and as the planet heats up, a lot of people think we should stop doing that. I actually interviewed Dave twice, once over the phone and once in his office in DC. This is from the last few minutes of our in-person conversation.
AMY: Given the fact that the world is warming, and that the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and that that has major implications for people all over the planet, do we have a moral obligation as a species to stop looking for more oil, and to direct our energies toward something else?
DAVE: (long pause) Well, that's interesting. Ahm. I'm not going to give you my opinion about that. But I think the, um, the consensus of even geoscientists is that we're moving in that direction, and we need to move that way more rapidly.
AMY: In Kaktovik, the signs of climate change are everywhere. Locals say the permafrost is thawing, the storms are more intense, and of course, there's the polar bears that are increasingly hanging out here on the coast rather than riding the sea ice as it retreats north into the deep central Arctic Ocean, where they have a much harder time finding food. I wanted to know how Matthew Rexford thinks about this issue.
AMY: What do you think about climate change? Do you believe that it's happening and what's your take on it?
MATTHEW: Oh, yes. Uh, it's happening. It's always happened in our history. For the most part, uh, it's, it's sort of, uh, sort of nice. I mean, a warmer weather here in the Arctic is, uh, folks see benefits to that.
AMY: Why do you think climate change is happening?
MATTHEW: Ooh, that's a loaded question. There can be a number of factors, the celestial relationship of the Sun to the Earth, it can be the Sun, it can be a number of factors. Sure mass, um, consumption of oil and gas throughout the world, um, may play a part of that as well.
AMY: But you don't think that's the main reason? You just think it's a factor in the mix?
MATTHEW: Oh, yes. Yes. I'm, I've, I believe there's a number of factors that's causing it.
AMY: So when people say we shouldn't drill in ANWR because of the increased emissions from oil and gas development, does that argument have any impact on you? Do you feel like they're just misinformed or what's your response to that?
MATTHEW: Um, uh, I'd have to look at the science more. Uh, but yeah, even with, uh, uh, science, uh, that can fail, uh, yeah, it's pretty tough to say right now.
AMY: Matthew is right that all kinds of factors influence the Earth's climate. But the basic science of climate change is actually not in dispute. For hundreds of thousands of years, whenever there's been more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the world has warmed up. The science is crystal clear on this point. And it's also clear that through the burning of fossil fuels human beings are pumping out planet-warming gases at a speed that's almost unmatched in the Earth's climate record. As one leading climate scientist told me – quote -- “we have got this nailed down – climate change is real and it is us.” And the Arctic is in a particularly precarious position as this happens. It's warming at least twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and it's also home to some of the largest untapped oil and gas reserves left on Earth.
AMY: How do you feel about the oil development? Are you for it or are you against it?
ATHENA: Well, I'm, I'm for it because, uh, it's a big opportunity that we'd be able to profit off of in the future.
AMY: Athena Thompson didn't grow up in Kaktovik, but she spent her summers here, visiting her grandparents. She has lots of memories of following her grandfather around in the summers, as he hunted for the animals that people here have always depended on for food and clothing.
ATHENA: He likes to go fishing. He likes to put his net out. He always likes to catch foxes or whatever he can get. I actually caught my first ptarmigan with him. So that was exciting.
AMY: Athena now lives in Kaktovik year-round with her partner, Tim Kamaka, the hotel manager who we met at the beginning of this episode. Athena and Tim do almost everything at the hotel together with just one other employee – cooking, cleaning, managing the reservations. Most of the year, that's pretty do-able, but over the last ten years or so, polar bear viewing has exploded in Kaktovik, and things get really nuts here over the course of about eight weeks in the fall. That's when those 2,000 tourists Tim mentioned descend on this small village almost all at once. He and Athena are run ragged.
TIM: Slammed, yeah. Seven days a week. 12 to 14 hour days.
AMY: Would you say it's been overall more positive or more negative to have all the tourists coming in?
ATHENA: It's positive in, I guess, business-wise, and people wanting to make money. For the locals, I guess it would be kind of negative because they're not used of it too much. I guess. They're not used to having people walk around and take pictures of their homes and that kind of stuff.
AMY: Athena says some tourists are really clueless, and treat the people in the village kind of like they treat the bears – like something exotic to be pointed at, and photographed. And even if every single tourist is polite and respectful, the influx of polar bears and people who want to see them is changing Kaktovik. And change can be hard. I ask Athena if she thinks oil development might change the village too.
ATHENA: Hmm. I don't think it'll change too much. Too dramatic. I don't think so, but I don't know. Who knows?
AMY: Tim says he thinks oil development might bring more jobs, better internet service and just more options for people in Kaktovik, in all kinds of ways. There are no roads into or out of the village -- barges bring in groceries and other supplies, and people here depend on airplanes the way many Americans depend on cars. But flights are really expensive, and sometimes they get booked up, especially during the tourist season, which can be a huge problem if you have a medical emergency, or some other urgent need to get somewhere.
TIM: With the oil development, they would have more air carriers up here, so there will be more competition.
AMY: More flights, more roads, more activity in and around this village – Tim thinks all of this would be really good for the people of Kaktovik. People he knows and cares about.
TIM: It's got really good people here. I've been to many villages around Alaska and this is by far one of the best group I've been around. I don't know, I just like that small town, especially that island feeling. You know, close to the water still. It might be frozen, but it's still water.
AMY: Are you worried that that vibe would change with oil development?
TIM: It could. It could, it could change for good too, you know, not just for the bad.
AMY: Now that Congress has approved oil development in the refuge, the people of Kaktovik might be about to find if Tim's right. And looking at other communities close to oil fields – small towns in North Dakota, Texas, or even other Iñupiaq villages on the North Slope, it seems likely that drilling won't just mean one thing for Kaktovik. It will probably provide new opportunities and cause new problems, simultaneously. The difficulty is knowing in advance what the proportions are going to be – which way most of the cards are going to fall. One poll in Kaktovik in 2016 found that just over half of the people surveyed supported oil development. But that means there are a lot of residents who don't want it, too.
ROBERT: You can't shut me up – I fought for the right of freedom of speech. Democracy. I can say anything I want.
AMY: Robert Thompson is Athena Thompson's grandfather – he was the one she was following around the tundra, learning about hunting. But Robert disagrees with his grandaughter, and many of his neighbors. He doesn't see oil development as a path to the future or an expression of his indigenous rights. He sees his culture being co-opted by money.
ROBERT: I'll ask the question: what do you want to do, make a lot of money or preserve the culture? They know it's not right to be that way.
AMY: We're going to stay in Kaktovik for a while. Join us next time on Threshold.
NICK: Our reporting was funded by the Pulitzer Center, Montana Public Radio, the Park Foundation, the High Stakes Foundation, the William H and Mary Wattis Harris Foundation, and by our listeners. Our work depends on people who believe in it and choose to support it. People like you. Join our community and find pictures from our trip to the refuge at thresholdpodcast.org
AMY: The team behind this episode of Threshold is Nick Mott, Eva Kalea, Michelle Woods, Caysi Simpson, Brook Artziniega, and Megan Myscofski. Special thanks to Deenaalee Hodgdon, Frank Allen, Hana Carey, Dan Carreno, Michael Connor, Kara Cromwell, Katie deFusco, Matt Herlihy and Rachel Klein. Our music is by Travis Yost.