SEASON 3 | EPISODE THREE, PART 2 

Listen to the People, Part 2

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NICK: This series was supported by the Pulitzer Center 

DON YOUNG: I tell you, Mr. Chairman, I want to believe the people. Not the Gwich'in, ‘cause they're not the people. 

AMY: Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and we're just going to pick right up where we left off – no intro this time. We're listening to Don Young, Alaska's sole representative in the U.S. House, speaking at a Congressional hearing about drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This is March of 2019.

DON YOUNG: I'm talking about the Inuits that live there. That's their land. It's always been their land. And to totally ignore them and any mention of their occupancy is wrong in this, this report and including you in your written statement, it's wrong.

AMY: So...what's going on here? Well, the Gwich'in are an Alaska Native tribe who are pretty united against drilling. We're going to hear from Gwich'in people in our next episode. And this hearing was on a bill sponsored by House Democrats aimed at stopping drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The bill was mostly symbolic, it's now dead in the water in the Senate, but this hearing was pretty fascinating. Picture six people, kind of squished together at a table, shoulder to shoulder, preparing to speak. All of them are indigenous, and all of them have flown thousands of miles to be at this hearing. But Don Young's message to his colleagues is not to listen to some of his own constituents.

DON YOUNG: Not the Gwich'in. That's my tribe. My wife was Gwich'in, my daughter's Gwich'in. We have a few Gwich'in that make a living out of this by promoting something that's wrong, by saying we want to take away from their brothers. That's wrong. You've divided two tribes. Two tribes. Listen to the people that live there. If not, you're not representatives at all. That's all I ask you to do. Listen to them. Hear what they say. Not someone who's living in Fairbanks. Not someone that's not killed a caribou in 10 years and probably doesn't have a license. That's wrong. Think about that when you say, “we want to save the culture.” Save the culture of the people, not those that are foreigners or living away from the area. These are not the Natives directly affected. With that, I yield back.

AMY: There's a lot to unpack here. First, Gwich'in leaders released a statement after this hearing, saying Don Young does not represent their people, and asking him to stop claiming he's Gwich'in. Second, when Don Young says that the Gwich'in won't be affected by drilling, he’s presuming that he has the authority to decide for them what affects them. And he doesn't. Many Gwich'in people say they will be impacted by drilling, and again, we're going to hear more from them in our next episode.

But what fascinated me the most here is this whole bit about listening to the people. There are just so many layers waiting to get peeled back. There's the irony of Congressman Young shouting at his colleagues to listen to some people while simultaneously telling them not to listen to others. But at the same time, he is pointing to something real here. Some conservation groups and politicians who are opposed to oil development have kind of ignored the Iñupiat, often describing the Gwich'in as “the” indigenous people of the refuge, when in reality, they are one of the indigenous groups of this region. In fact at this very hearing, Democrats had invited eight witnesses to two different panels, and none of them were Iñupiat. But this same game is played from the other side too. Pro-oil groups and politicians try to lift up certain Native voices that back up their position – exhibit A, Don Young's testimony here. So, both pro- and anti-oil factions here are probably guilty of promoting select groups of Alaska Native people and ignoring others.

The antidote to all of this is obvious: go to the source. Let indigenous Alaskans speak for themselves. And when you do that – when you go to Kaktovik, and listen to the people who live closest to the drilling area – some of them say things like this:

CARLA: I really believe that there is enough oil fields open already. We've got oil fields all along the coast.

AMY: This is Carla SimsKayotuk [sims-kie-YOU-tuhk], and she lives in Kaktovik. Again, this the only village located inside the 1002 area, where drilling has been approved. 

CARLA: The first time I maybe understood what's going on was maybe in high school when they started having the seismic teams come through and I remember not liking it then.

AMY: Why didn't you like it? 

CARLA: I just, I just didn't like the possibility of what it meant could happen here. And just having an oil field around here. It just never appealed to me.

AMY: Carla grew up here, and she loves this place – Barter Island, where the village is located and the coastal plain.

CARLA: To me it's very beautiful. It's, it's probably the most beautiful place on Earth, is this area. There's so much life out there. The birds come here, they're from here, they lay their eggs there, they have their babies here, then they fly out for the winter. So this is their home. 

AMY: Carla has been on a whaling crew in the past, she says caribou are really important to her. In fact, everything about this part of the world seems to have deep meaning for her.

CARLA: When you go up in the springtime or in the winter and it's all white and everything. It's just, it's beautiful. I mean, like God created all of that. It's just, you can't deny the beauty of it all out there. And he placed us here for a reason.

AMY: Even though Carla never liked the idea of oil development in this place that’s so precious to her, she says she’s mostly kept her thoughts to herself. For awhile. 

CARLA: I was always quiet about, about my personal views until I heard a radio broadcast with one of the past mayors of the North Slope and they were talking about developing in the Teshekpuk Lake area –  

AMY: The top elected office of the North Slope Borough is mayor. Teshekpuk Lake is an area close to where this former mayor was living.

CARLA: And he was like, it's not going to happen in my backyard and, and everything. I was like, wow, wait a minute, let me turn this up and listen to this. And I was just like, wow, it's okay for you guys to push to open up ANWR which is where I live and but yet you don't want it in your backyard. No, I'm sorry, I'm not going to be quiet anymore. I'm going to start voicing my concerns and my opinions and I haven't stopped since then (laughter).

AMY: Like Nora Jane Burns, one of Carla's biggest concerns is how oil development might sprawl across the coastal plain. The law that authorized drilling says production and support facilities would be limited to 2,000 acres, which sounds like a small portion of the one-and-a-half-million acres of the coastal plain. But Carla says...

CARLA: I, I don't trust what they say. I just don't believe it. Yeah. They'll find loopholes. They'll find ways to, to get around it. 

AMY: And she has reasons to be suspicious. Pro-oil people like to say that 2,000 acres is a smaller footprint than many airports. But that's not a fair comparison, because the 2,000 acres of development on the coastal plain doesn't have to be continuous – it doesn't have to be one chunk of land, with everything else left untouched. Only certain things are counted toward the 2,000 acres. For instance, fence posts, which touch the ground, would be counted, but not the fences themselves connecting the posts. Same with pipelines. The pads for the support structures that hold up the pipeline would be counted, but not the actual pipes, because they don't rest directly on the ground. So this 2,000 acres gets broken down into these little tiny pieces which can be spread out over a huge area – five feet here, ten feet there, maybe two acres over there. Instead of an airport, a more accurate visual might be a toddler's playroom with Legos strewn across the floor. Sure, if you add up how much space each individual Lego is taking up it might sound like a small percentage of the room. But that doesn't really matter, because you can't walk across the floor without stepping on one of those sharp little pieces.

And to Carla all of these technicalities can obscure the obvious: she says if people want to  know what oil development in the refuge would be like, all they have to do is look around.

CARLA: You just look to our neighbors and family over in Nuiqsut area and they told them it was just going to be just this little spot. There are now almost completely 360 surrounded by oil development and the structures and infrastructure and stuff over there.

AMY: Nuiqsut is an Iñupiaq village on the other side of the Prudhoe Bay oil field. Huge oil and gas deposits have been found near this community, and like Carla said, it's basically surrounded by industry now. And that is not the future that she wants for Kaktovik.

CARLA: Do I want it in my backyard? No, I don't want it in my backyard, like no one else wants it in their backyard. Um, do I think another oil field needs to be opened? No, I think there's plenty of oil fields opened already. We don't need to be opening any more. Complete what's out there already and, and try and find other sources, um, to power everything.

AMY: Carla is a shareholder in the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation – the biggest Native corporation in this area. And she says she stands up at shareholder meetings and tries to remind people that their most important job is to protect the land, water and animals they depend on.

AMY: So what kind of response do you get when you say that kind of stuff?

CARLA: Um. What do they say? They tell me that they need the revenue to continue to have the things that we have, the running water, the schools, fire department, the health care, um, that's the way for revenue to keep the Slope going. And I'm like, well, I think our people are smart enough to where they can find other ways to earn that revenue and to keep growing economically. I think. I think we're smart enough to find other ways to, to survive. 

AMY: An organization called Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat has been very active in supporting oil development in the refuge. Their website says the purpose of the group is to establish a unified voice for the Iñupiaq people of this region. Carla says this bothers her, because there isn’t just one voice here. But at public hearings on oil development, members of this group sometimes hold signs saying “we stand with Kaktovik," which gives the impression that the whole village supports drilling. 

CARLA: They're taking our voice and speaking for us. And so I find it really ironic that they get really angry when they say the Gwich'in are speaking and they shouldn't be speaking. And it's like, hey, you're, you're taking my voice away and trying to say you're speaking for me when I don't think you should be speaking for me.

AMY: This is the dark side of any call for unity – it can be a mask for other intentions, like silencing dissent.

CARLA: You can have conflict but not be mean and, and everything about it. I think you can voice your concerns and still try to work together to come to an agreement or something. Um, but avoiding saying something just to avoid conflict is, is also not healthy. 

AMY: Yeah and do you think that's a cultural value too?

CARLA: It should be. (laughter) You should always be honest, so, yeah.

AMY: So how do we differentiate between a healthy unity and a coercive one? That's a problem people in every culture struggle with. It's behind the protests that have wracked Hong Kong this fall, it's being hotly debated within the Democratic party in the run-up to the 2020 election. And it's a question we all face as individuals, too. How do we have conflict without breaking up families, or friendships? How can we be real with each other about who we are and what we think, but still have atauchikun – a foundation of togetherness?

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AMY: In December, 2017 when um, the tax bill got passed that allowed for drilling in the, in the refuge –

CARLA: That was a sad day. 

AMY: Was it?

CARLA: Yes. I thought it was a very sad day. 

AMY: Carla said she remembers posting something on Facebook, expressing her sadness, and now, almost two years later, her grief about this decision is still very close to the surface...

CARLA:  I just think it's, it's going to change the whole dynamics of our area. The ambiance, the social structure, our places where we can hunt and subsist and probably even camp. It's going to have an impact. 

AMY: Some of the land owned by the Kaktovik Iñupiat Corporation, or KIC, is right here on Barter Island, where the village lies. 

CARLA: And that's just, that's just like right out here. I mean like not even a mile from, from this house. You're going to see it. I mean, I don't, I don't understand how people think we're not going to be impacted. The pipeline is going to be up on the tundra. That's right along the coast. I mean KIC lands are right there on the mainland, right, right close to shore. And that's where we do all our hunting, all our camping during the summertime and springtime. And it's, it's gonna change. So. 

AMY: It’s really personal for you. 

CARLA: It is a, that's all where we go camping, where my family goes camping and, and everything. And I use that time to get away from.. I know we're in a small community, but there's a lot that we have to deal with here. And so I use that camping time to, to get out and, and just renew myself and….and so it's going to be hard. I just... I hope that I'm wrong, that we're not going to be impacted the way I think we will be. But, um, we'll see. I feel for the coming generations that's going to have to deal with it all. So. Sorry. I’m going to grab some tissues.

AMY: Carla and I kept talking for quite a while, and eventually I packed up my gear and was about to head out, when she told me this: as much as she is opposed to oil development, what she wants the most is for Iñupiaq land to be in Iñupiaq hands. That's her top priority. Sovereignty. Even more than stopping development, she wants her community to have control over their land. 

We'll have more after this short break.

~

AMY: Wow. This is the closest we've gotten for sure. 

AMY: Welcome back to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and producer Nick Mott and I are with polar bear guide Robert Thompson again. We've just come upon a mother and cub, out for an afternoon stroll.

AMY: So mom and baby are walking right in front of us and... cuteness explosion.

AMY: Everything around us is grey – grey sky, grey ocean, grey sand – except these two creamy white creatures exploring the beach.

AMY: It's like an ivory, slightly yellowish white, and she looks big and healthy. And baby's nose is a lot flatter and rounder, rounder face, and just tooling right behind her mom. And, you can definitely see the hunter in them and she's looking right at us right now. She looks incredibly powerful. Just really happy to be in a vehicle right now. 

AMY: Robert says oil development in the refuge poses a direct threat to mothers and cubs like this pair, even before any wells are drilled. As we talked earlier in this series, seismic testing is usually the first step in oil exploration. The way it works is that a big truck, commonly called a thumper truck, drives across the exploration area, stopping intermittently to lower a metal plate, which sends a vibration deep underground. Decades ago, these heavy trucks did damage to the tundra that's still visible today – tire tracks that tore up the fragile Arctic soil. To mitigate that, seismic exploration in this area is now limited to the winter months, when the ground is frozen. But this attempt to address one problem created another, because winter is when polar bears make dens under the snow. Females give birth to their cubs in these dens and nurture them there for many months, without eating or drinking anything themselves. Then they emerge with their cubs in March or April, extremely hungry and with new mouths to feed.

AMY: They were playing with some stuff before kind of tossing it around in the air...and then the baby's like a quarter of her height, moving behind her, kind of copying her movements. 

AMY: The thumper trucks used in seismic surveys can be equipped with infrared technology designed to detect polar bear dens. But Robert says the bears could still be disrupted at a very vulnerable stage in their life cycle, or even get missed by the infrared, and crushed in their dens. And right now, he says, the last thing polar bears need is another threat.

ROBERT: I'm an Eskimo person from North Slope being rained on in February. I don't need any more scientific evidence – we're being affected. We're losing species, we will never hunt muskox again, we had muskox here, and the polar bear on the way out. And other species are moving in and the ocean currents are changing, and the whole fishing situation is changing. And usually it's not for the better.

AMY: Robert's not a shareholder in the two Alaska Native corporations that have the most to gain from development here, but he is a shareholder in a different one. And because all the Alaska Native regional corporations share some of their profits, he does still stand to benefit financially from drilling.

AMY: I mean is there a part of you that's like, well that money would be really nice, maybe it's worth it. Have you ever been tempted? 

ROBERT: No, no. Never. 

AMY: Why not?

ROBERT: I'm happy without that money. I probably wouldn't be happy – there are stories of people who won lotteries and everything, it almost to a person, they, they run through it and, or their life falls apart. No, I've been poor before. I can be poor very well. I don't need that money. Plus I'm involved in ecotourism and I like that and it's enjoyable and it's not harming the environment and it's fun. So why should I sit there getting dividends? I don't need it. I wouldn't miss it and I'd rather have the land like it is.

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AMY: I have to look through the binoculars again. Wow. It's really cool to see her through the binocs, she's beautiful, her face is kind of dirty...greenish brown.

NICK: Aww, sharing.

AMY: She's licking his face. She licked his face a minute. Sweet. (laughter)

ROBERT: I hope people listen to this and realize, hey, it's amazing to see these bears, but they’re probably on the way out because of climate change. You got to look at reality, and I don't know if we can do enough to mitigate it. But we shouldn't do anything to take what they have left away. Who knows, it might turn around. Some miracle will happen.

AMY: In our first episode from Kaktovik, we heard from Fenton Rexford, one of the people in the village who supports drilling in the refuge. He was speaking at that same hearing where we heard the tape from Congressman Don Young earlier – in fact, Fenton was invited to that hearing by the congressman. I want to replay part of what Fenton had to say.

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. This school of thought amounts to nothing more than green colonialism – a political occupation of our land in the name of environment, while others exploit the idea of wilderness for economic gain.

AMY: Fenton and Robert know each other of course. Everybody knows everybody in Kaktovik. They're of the same generation, I'm guessing they have a lot in common. But they see this issue of drilling in the refuge so differently – Robert sees drilling as a direct assault on Iñupiaq culture, and Fenton sees it as an expression of Iñupiaq sovereignty. That's big stuff to disagree on. And yet, somehow, the people in this small village are making it work as a community. I was there for less than a week, I can't begin to say I understand this whole situation, or how they're getting through it. But it seems like some combination of airing out of differences from time to time, and mostly focusing on what they have in common instead of what divides them. Nora Jane Burns, the former mayor of Kaktovik who we met in part one of this episode, extends that attitude beyond the village. She's a big advocate for dialogue with their closest neighbors, the Gwich'in. 

NORA JANE: I know they always try to say that those folks are not from here, but, but when you look at the map there, Arctic Village is really close borderline to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So maybe work with them and come up with some kind of solution. There's always a possibility of solutions of how they can work together. Yeah, working together would be the best way, and everybody win, win.

AMY: Iñupiaq territory is on the northern part of the refuge, Gwich'in territory is to the south, on the other side of the Brooks Range. And the Porcupine caribou herd, which both tribes have deep ties to, moves between these two regions – they migrate from Gwich'in to Iñupiaq lands and back again. Nora Jane says a quick glance at social media provides all the evidence you need for how much these animals unite people here, regardless of their tribe or their opinion on oil development.

NORA JANE: 'Cause they all everybody, they all, you'll see posting, oh, I had caribou with this, I had caribou this. They all like to eat caribou.

AMY: That's kind of the connective thread.

NORA JANE: That's connecting thread. That caribou. So that's what I, I like to see them is just to at least sit down and just listen to them, listen to their concerns. Because if you flip it, if it was flipped, if their country had lot of oil and we didn't have anything and we know our animals migrate to their land, I think I would be concerned too. They're people like us, they eat the same animal we eat. 

AMY: At that hearing in Washington, D.C., Congressman Young accused his colleagues of dividing the Gwich’in and the Iñupiat.

DON YOUNG: You've divided two tribes. Two tribes.

AMY: But who, or what, has divided them? And how divided are they, really? Maybe it's appealing to make a nice simple story in which one tribe wants oil development, and the other doesn't. Then all you have to do is pick which side you're rooting for. But that narrative only works if you ignore Carla SimsKayotuk, and Robert Thompson, and Nora Jane Burns, and Vebjørn Aishana Reitan, who we met in our first episode. And many others. 

SARAH: Working together would be the best way and everybody, win-win. 

AMY: I didn't hear anyone in Kaktovik or in Arctic Village, where we're going next time, describe this situation in these binary terms – as a fight between one group that wants oil development and another that doesn't. Instead, I heard Iñupiaq people and Gwich'in people talking about the pride and pleasure they take in their cultures – their food, their languages, their ways of being in the world. I heard them describing the painful effects of colonization and racism and ignorance and arrogance from outsiders, and how they're dealing with those things, as individuals and in their communities. And I heard people with very different opinions on oil development express a strong common value: a determination to survive.

SARAH: We’re not going anywhere, we’re here to stay. God, or Creator, put us where we are today as Gwich’in people. To take care of this part of the world and we did good, and we like it, and we’re going to stay. We’re not going anywhere, we’re here to stay. 

AMY: This is Sarah James, a Gwich'in leader from Arctic Village, Alaska. We'll meet her next time on Threshold.

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