SEASON 3 | EPISODE 4, Part 1
Do It in a Good Way, Part 1
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NICK: This series was supported by the Pulitzer Center
BERNADETTE: I'm really happy to be Gwich'in. I'm proud to be Gwich'in. My people are some of the most amazing humans that ever walked this planet. They survived some of the harshest coldest winters, migrating. And you know they fought to survive so that I can be here.
AMY: This is Bernadette Demientieff, the executive director of the Gwich'in Steering Committee.
BERNADETTE: I'm actually Gwichyaa Zhee Gwich'in – there's different tribes. But we all speak united against any development in the Arctic refuge coastal plain.
AMY: Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and this is the fourth episode in our series about the future of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – and its another two-parter, by the way. This time, we're focusing on Gwich'in voices. The Gwich'in are part of the Athabaskan family of tribes. Their territory spans a huge region of northeast Alaska and northwest Canada.
Today, there are fifteen small villages scattered across this area, but historically, the Gwich'in didn't live in permanent settlements. They were semi-nomadic – they based their lives on the movements of the caribou herds. Bernadette pulls out a map to show me the shape of the Gwich'in homelands.
BERNADETTE: As you can see there's a line right here that's the border. So they stuck the border right in the middle of our ancestral homelands. So half of us are Canadian, half of us are American.
AMY: Bernadette grew up in Fort Yukon, Alaska – one of those 15 Gwich'in villages – and she now lives in Fairbanks. The organization she leads, the Gwich'in Steering Committee, has been working to protect the coastal plain since the 1980s. And the relationship between the Gwich'in and the caribou is the foundation of their opposition to drilling.
BERNADETTE: All our songs, all our stories, everything is based on the caribou herd. I mean we have a culture, a spiritual connection to these animals.
AMY: Bernadette says drilling on the coastal plain is a threat to the Gwich'in because it's a threat to the Porcupine caribou herd. The 1002 area, where drilling has been approved, is one of the places the herd depends on to raise their newborn calves.
BERNADETTE: That's sacred to my people. It's called Iizhik gwats’an gwandaii goodlit. And that's, “the sacred place where life begins.”
MUSIC
BERNADETTE: Every Gwich'in protects the Arctic refuge coastal plain that's our identity. Without that place we would cease to exist. That is how strong the message is to us.
INTRO MUSIC
AMY: I'm always uneasy saying all people of any group think or feel a certain way – especially a group that I'm not a part of. But I can tell you that it is really hard to find Gwich'in people who are supportive of oil development on the coastal plain. I think it is fair to say that they’re very united. So, this episode is not about diving into the pro vs. anti oil tension – that's not really what's going on here. Instead, we're going to be exploring the backstory – who are the Gwich'in? What is it like to have such a strong connection to a wild animal? What do we know about how oil development on the coastal plain would affect the caribou? And how are the Gwich'in responding now that oil development has been approved?
BERNADETTE: We have to stand up against any more destruction to our homelands. This is our home.
INTRO
“This, Mr. President, is what energy dominance is all about, so let’s go.”
“They think that’s progress. That’s not progress.”
“They all like to eat caribou.” “That’s kind of the connecting thread.” “That’s connecting thread, that caribou.”
“Every single herd of caribou in Canada is in major decline.”
“We are the caribou people. If it wasn’t for the caribou we won’t be here today.”
AMY: It's rainy and cold outside but I'm in a very snug log cabin -- this is Arctic Village – and when I look out the window here I'm just looking out over vast wilderness.
AMY: We're going to spend most of this episode in Arctic Village, a Gwich'in community of around 150 people in northeast Alaska. Snuggle in – that's a wood stove you can hear in the background. There are no roads into the village, you have to fly in, and the airport is a small patch of gravel. So far in this series we've been up on the northern edge of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Now we've hopped over the Brooks Range -- the mountains that bisect the refuge – and we're on the southern boundary. The refuge officially begins just across the river from Arctic Village. When I was there in August 2017, the Porcupine caribou herd was moving through the mountains outside of town.
AMY: I'm on the border of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I'm well above the Arctic Circle, there are people out hunting caribou all around me. It's pretty cool.
AMBI
AMY: Alaska is home to 32 different caribou herds, and at over 200,000 animals, the Porcupine herd is one of the biggest. Their name comes from the Porcupine River, a tributary of the Yukon, which winds through their territory. And they have the longest land migration route of any mammal on the planet – it can be more than 1,500 miles round trip. In the early summer they nurture their young calves on the northern side of the Brooks Range, close to the coast. By mid-July, they've usually begun the trek back over to the southern side. If you haven't done so yet, you might want to listen to the short intermission we posted in between episodes three and four, to hear about what that journey looks and feels like.
AMY: It really is remarkably beautiful...looking up into the mountains on the edge of the wildlife refuge. If this were in the lower 48, this would be a major tourist destination.
AMY: Walking through Arctic Village feels more like walking on a country road than walking through town. Other than the main drag, where you can find the store, a church, and the school, the houses are pretty spread out. And it's obvious that people here still rely heavily on the animals of this region to sustain themselves. Fish are laid out on drying racks next to peoples' homes, entryways are decorated with antlers, and children have painted tributes to caribou all over the outside wall of the store. Everywhere I went, I found tiny bits of bone and teeth scattered on the ground. This place is so defined by hunting that the bodies of animals have become part of the soil itself. And it's also a place defined by quiet.
AMBI
AMY: This is Arctic Village on Saturday afternoon.
AMBI
AMY: And that's exactly how Sarah James likes it.
SARAH: My name is Sarah James and I live in Arctic Village, Alaska. It's called vashraii k'oo, that means a creek with a high bank.
AMY: Sarah is in her mid-70s and she wears her long grey hair in a pony tail down her back. As she leads me into her house, we walk by buckets on her porch holding thick bones that were clearly part of a living animal not too long ago.
SARAH: I've been cutting meat.
AMY: The bones are stripped clean but still stained red with fresh blood. She says they came from a moose recently shot by a young man in the village.
SARAH: And he shot his first bull moose, so he gets to distribute.
AMY: Following tradition, she says, he first gave some meat to everyone who helped him in the hunt. Then, word went out around the village for everyone to come and get a portion. But the sharing didn't stop there. Sarah divided the meat she'd been given into smaller portions, so she could hand more out to others. The first portion went to a visitor to the village.
SARAH: And then I sending one to my friend, she's not doing good with cancer, and I'm sending one to her. And then I send one to that one elder down here, and I found out they were not getting any kind of meat, so I send that down.
AMY: As we sit down to talk, all of Sarah's tools from this work are still out – knives, bowls, a blood-stained piece of cardboard laid on top of a low table. And a big rock, which she says she uses to break the bones. Using part of the Earth for cleaning the animals they hunt is a Gwich'in value she says.
SARAH: And that's another respect for our food.
AMY: Sarah has led a fascinating life. In the same room where she's been processing the moose meat, there's a photograph hanging on the wall, of her shaking hands with President Clinton. She offers me a cup of tea made from berries she's collected, and as the water heats up, she shows me a whole shelf full of books in the back of her house, that feature her and her work. As I got to know Sarah, part of me wanted to drop everything and make a whole podcast season just about her, if she would let me. I'm not doing that, but I am going to devote the whole first part of this episode to her story.
MUSIC
AMY: Sarah was born in 1944, the youngest of nine children, and she spent her early childhood living way out in the wilderness, often wearing clothes her mother made for her out of caribou hide.
SARAH: I was wearing caribou from head to toe. Ah, that's just us family out there, fifteen miles from nearest neighbor all around. Just our family. But I never lonesome or bored that I know of, yeah.
AMY: Fifteen miles from your nearest neighbor would be a long ways even if you lived on a road. But this was roadless wilderness, with bears and wolves and foxes and wolverines all around. Sarah says she was warm, well-fed, and loved, and she and her siblings had a lot of fun adventures.
SARAH: We live our life on the land. And I grew up off the land, and I learned more about respect, and how each animal lives, and how to respect them and all that.
AMY: It wasn't like they were completely cut off from the rest of the world – Sarah says sometimes her dad would trade some furs for western clothes for the kids, for instance. But however they could, her parents were trying to keep the family immersed in Gwich'in ways.
SARAH: You know, I grew up in a good way, and I know what's ours and what's not. I got taught very well by my family, my parents, my grandparents, and my sister and brothers.
AMY: And she says she didn't experience any sense of lacking anything in her young childhood. At least most of the year.
SARAH: The only time I got really hungry is during the birthing time and nursing time and training time for animal, that's starting maybe first week of June until 15th of July. 'Cause I remember my mom say on 15th of July we could trap for ground squirrel. And around that time we just about don't have anything to eat because we don't hunt anything in between that time, because that's birthing and nursing and training time.
AMY: Sarah she feels really lucky to have been raised out on the land this way – especially because so much was changing all around the family. When her parents were young, diseases like flu, chicken pox and TB, brought into the area by Europeans, had swept through the community, and killed many Gwich'in people. And many other forms of colonization had begun to intrude as well – western religion and education, and increasing pressure on the Gwich'in to stop following the caribou herds, and instead settle into permanent villages. But this concept of living all year round in one place seemed really strange.
SARAH: What we know is hunting and fishing and we had to be out there to do it. And it's hard to stay in one place.
AMY: But that was definitely the agenda of the U.S. government. At some point in Sarah's childhood, the Bureau of Indian Affairs began to threaten her parents that their children would be taken away if they didn't send them to school. So, when she was 13, Sarah was shipped off to boarding school in Oregon.
SARAH: And that was strange. Oh, I hurt my parents – I mean they have to let us go to get education that was pounded into their head. So they're glad that we were in school but they need our help at home too, and they miss us too. I heard they used to be very sad sight in Christmas time when all their kids are not there. You know, I couldn't imagine how it is because I only have one one boy and he's about 44 right now, but you know I go crazy when I don't know if he's OK or not, you know?
MUSIC
AMY: Sarah graduated from high school, but she says she received her most valuable education at home.
SARAH: I feel that I learned more from living off the land. At least I learn respect and I learn who I am, and what's out there, and how to share, how to preserve, how to, you know, ration stuff. And I think that's why even today I, I kind of survive with what I got and I'm thankful – you know I don't have very much but I'm thankful for it.
AMY: After high school, Sarah's parents wanted her to get more formal education. But she was nervous, because it seemed like she was going to have to transform herself into a completely different person. Starting with her clothes.
SARAH: Usually these small college are in a white community and...nice community, like nice dress, and I don't...I don't have money for clothing. So I kind of felt...but I would never make it there. I would never have nylons. And I hate nylons.
AMY: Me too.
SARAH: So, and then I had to be among, totally different group of people, and different community, all that. I just couldn't do it.
AMY: But Sarah heard about another program, called “relocation.” Several years before, Congress had passed a law called the Indian Relocation Act. This was one piece of an overall assimilation agenda which was ascendent in the 1950s and 60s. Sarah was told the federal government would pay for some vocational training, and later help her get a job, if she was willing to move to a city. This was the express purpose of the law – to urbanize the American Indian. Sarah looked over her options, and one place leapt out.
SARAH: And that was a San Francisco. I saw San Francisco, that the hippie movement – they wear anything. Nobody have to pay attention to my clothing. I could dress the way I want to. And that peace and love and flower and all that sounds good. So I said San Francisco. (laughter)
AMY: That's awesome, I love it!
SARAH: I was scared to death! Too big, man!
AMY: She enrolled in business college where she would learn typing, data entry, and other clerical skills. And she arrived in San Francisco in 1967.
SONG: “If you're going to San Francisco, be sure to wear some flowers in your hair…”
AMY: The summer of ' 67 was dubbed the Summer of Love. Tens of thousands of young people journeyed to San Francisco that year, heeding Timothy Leary's call to “turn on, tune in and drop out.” John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas wrote this song for his friend Scott McKenzie, which became an anthem of the times.
SONG: “All those who come to San Francisco, summertime will be a love-in there...”
AMY: Looking at pictures from the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood at this time, or other places where the hippies were gathering, it's clear that the white people were appropriating elements of Native American culture, or their ideas of Native culture – they were putting on headbands, painting their faces, even wearing buckskin. And here was Sarah James, who actually grew up wearing clothing made out of caribou hide.
AMY: Did you spend a lot of time on Haight-Ashbury then?
SARAH: I went down to hang out. Yeah. Because you feel comfortable there, yeah.
AMY: At least there were no nylons required. Sarah met up with a friend from boarding school who was in the area training to be a nurse, and they began to navigate this new world together. And there was a lot more going on than love-ins and acid trips. Protests against the Vietnam War were heating up. The Civil Rights movement was in full swing. And Native Americans around the country began to voice their frustrations and demand change too. In fact, this is one of the great ironies of the Indian Relocation Act. The goal was to assimilate Native people, and cut them off from their cultures. But as young indigenous people were increasingly concentrated in cities, they began to share their experiences and ideas, which led to a new wave of Indian pride and indigenous activism. In 1968, the American Indian Movement, or AIM, was founded in Minneapolis, and in San Francisco, young Native people were starting use the phrase “Red Power.” Sarah says the Mission District became the gathering spot.
SARAH: On a weekend we get to go down 16th and Mission Street that's where we hang out because they play band that one place.
AMY: Sarah says Native people would come in from across the region seeking each other out for companionship and political conversation.
SARAH: And then I start hanging around with San Francisco State College students and they were talking about Native American rights and right away it took my interest, I kept hanging around with them. They just started American Indian Law, and they were taking that class. And we just discuss it on the weekend, we hang around, they go back to their college. I go back to my apartment and….well anyway one day they decided to take over the Alcatraz. Take the island back.
AMY: And you were part of that?
SARAH: Yeah.
AMY: This is the point in the interview when I was like – wait, what? I sat down with Sarah to talk about drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and here I was learning she was a participant in one of the most important direct actions in 20th century Native American history. This is Richard Oakes, one of the leaders of the Alcatraz occupation, recorded by a local news channel.
RICHARD OAKES: We, the Native Americans, reclaim this land known as Alcatraz Island in the name of all American Indians by right of discovery.
AMY: Alcatraz is a small island in the San Francisco Bay that indigenous people had lived on or used for more than ten thousand years, most recently the Ohlone.
REPORTER: What's this nation you want to establish out here?
RICHARD OAKES: An American Indian nation, comprising of all the tribes, including the Alaskans.
AMY: In the 1800s, the U.S. government took over the island, turning it into a military fortress, and later a prison. Some of those prisoners were Native Americans, like the 19 Hopi people who were locked up on Alcatraz in 1895 for resisting the forced education of their children. The prison was shut down in 1963, and six years later, the students that Sarah was hanging out with in the Mission decided to take the island back.
REPORTER: Do you think you have the legal right to claim the island, and why?
RICHARD OAKES: Well you're talking about two different societies now. In my society, or any Indian society, yes we do.
AMY: This was November 1969. Sarah was working at an insurance company at this point, and sharing an apartment with that same friend from boarding school.
SARAH: Middle of the night at 2 o'clock. Mmm. They came to our place, our apartment but I don't know for some reason that week, we moved. They didn't know we move and they came to our place where we weren't there so they went on without us.
AMY: Would you have gone if you had been there?
SARAH: Oh yeah, I probably would just go.
AMY: Sarah missed that knock on her door in the middle of the night, but when she and her friend woke up the next morning...
SARAH: Then we got up and look at the TV – there were, up there on the island. Hey, they did it! They really did it! Right away, I say, I'm going. So I start packing. So I pack and I went down. They were there at that dock were they said they're going to be.
AMY: They were there waiting to take people who wanted to join?
SARAH: Yeah.
AMY: Oh my gosh.
SARAH: But it was a real small, rocking sailboat. I've never been in a sailboat in my life, and I'm not the best swimmer. Got on there. I barely holding on. It was packed full inside and outside, and I was outside holding on, aggh! All the way over there!
AMY: The occupation of Alcatraz lasted for 19 months, until June 1971, and it's now considered one of the pivotal moments in the story of Native Americans pushing back against white domination in the United States. At the beginning of the occupation, the students issued a proclamation, saying they would pay the U.S. government 24 dollars in glass beads and red cloth for the island – which was more, they pointed out, than what the colonists had paid for the purchase of Manhattan 300 years earlier. I'm going to play a little bit more of Richard Oakes reading the proclamation, and to understand the power of what he's saying here, you need to know that the Bureau of Indian Affairs, part of the Department of the Interior, was the face of the violent paternalism that these students were calling out.
RICHARD OAKES: We will give to the inhabitants of this island a portion of that land for their own, to be held in trust by the American Indian Government, to be administered by the Bureau of Caucasian Affairs for as long as the sun shall rise and the rivers go down to the sea. We will further guide the inhabitants in the proper way of living. We will offer them our religion, our education, our life-ways, in order to help them achieve our level of civilization and thus raise them and all their white brothers up from their savage and unhappy state. We offer this treaty in good faith and wish to be fair and honorable in our dealings with all white men.
AMY: The whole proclamation is definitely worth a read. It's a pretty brilliant political essay, in which these young indigenous people turned the tables on white society in a way that couldn't be ignored. And Sarah James was there. But she didn't stay for long, because in January 1970, her father died suddenly, and she left for Alaska immediately.
SARAH: And I never went back because there's no phone, no electricity here, and no way to go back. All that kind of stuff.
AMY: So here's Sarah James in 1970. Twenty-six years old, raised in the Alaska wilderness, and swept up into events that were making headlines all around the world. And now, she's suddenly back in Arctic Village. The census that year recorded a population of 85 people. I imagine that she might have felt like this was sort of the end of something. But as it turned out, all of this had been training for what was coming next.
We'll have more after this short break.
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MIDROLL
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AMY: Welcome back to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and I'm in Arctic Village, Alaska, listening to the story of Gwich'in leader Sarah James. After a childhood in the Alaska wilderness, adolescence in an Oregon boarding school, and on-the-ground activist training in San Fransciso, Sarah had returned home to a state about to be transformed by oil. Up on the coast, the Prudhoe Bay oilfield had been discovered, and by the late 1970s, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was built. Oil was flowing south to the port of Valdez day and night. In the 1980s, Sarah started hearing that drilling operations might be expanded to the east of Prudhoe, into the calving grounds of the Porcupine caribou herd.
SARAH: And so I went to my brother that time, and I told my brother. How can they keep telling their going to do gas and oil both development up there? And he said, yeah oil company are huge, they're very huge. We can't stop it, you know, just us. It's too huge, I don't think we'll get anywhere with it. Well, we shall see about it. I told him that, you know, and he said, there might be a way, let's work on that he said. So I laugh.
AMY: And she got to work.
SARAH: I was one of the tribal council then. And the tribal council chose me to deal with environment issues.
AMY: So Sarah started going to meetings throughout the region, learning about what was going on up on the coast, and how it might affect the caribou. She says she definitely wasn't working alone – lots of folks were involved, including Iñupiaq people, who were also concerned about protecting the caribou, and their own communities. In 1987 they succeeded in getting the U.S. and Canada to sign an international treaty designed to protect the Porcupine caribou herd. And the language of the treaty made it clear that the animals needed to be protected both for their own sake, and for the sake of the people who depended on them, both nutritionally and culturally. The treaty also established the Porcupine Caribou Management Board, which still exists today, and is supposed to be consulted on development projects that could impact the herd. But the Gwich'in knew the allure of the oil was going to continue to turn the heads of the big companies. And the treaty lacked an enforcement mechanism – by itself, it wasn't enough to prevent drilling on the coastal plain. So members of the new management board started going out to villages and talking to people.
SARAH: They went to each village and talked to elders, what we should do. And that one elder Mary Kay, she said, “well when we deal with that back in the day, like, back before our first visitor, when there's a threat to our nation – and this is a threat to our nation – they come together as a nation, and then they make decision within less than four days. And then that's how they deal with the issue back in those days, bow and arrow days. And we should do that. We should call the Gwich'in Nation back together, and take it on from then.”
AMY: Sarah says this idea of bringing the whole Gwich'in Nation together to figure out how to respond to the threat of oil development quickly gained traction among the Gwich'in.
SARAH: So they call Gwich'in gather here and Arctic Village, June 5 to 10, 1988. People start coming, and I think we have 15 chief U.S. and Canada, and 15 elders, and one youth from each village.
AMY: That was kind of the official delegation. But Sarah says Gwich'in people from across their home territory started arriving. Getting the whole Gwich'in community together in one place at one time was no small feat. These are tiny villages scattered across really rugged, wild territory, with no roads connecting them – and divided by a national border. One family chartered a plane. Others piled people into boats, and took them up rivers.
SARAH: It's difficult to travel that river from here to Yukon. But then they did.
AMY: Sarah says back in what she calls “bow and arrow days,” the semi-nomadic life of the Gwich'in meant that all of the different subgroups met and mingled frequently. The colonization process had changed that, and the various Gwich'in bands had become much more separate from each other. At the 1988 gathering, Sarah says they were reminded that they shared a common language, and history. And common concerns for their future.
SARAH: They came up, and it's just like a rebirth of a nation, the whole… everybody getting to know each other, there's some graveyard of their relatives here they want to visit.
AMY: One Native-owned media organization was allowed to film parts of the event, and we've put a link to that video up on our website.
FILM SOUND: speaking in Gwich'in, laughter
AMY: There were non-Gwich'in people who came to the gathering, too. Government officials, representatives from conservation groups. And Sarah says they brought their non-Gwich'in ways of doing things with them.
SARAH: They come up with a agenda. But when they start the meeting those elders took over the meetings and said we don't need these agenda, so they tore up the agenda and said, “we'll take it from here.”
AMY: Whatever plan the outside groups may have had, the elders said – no thank you. This is our gathering, and we'll do it our way.
SARAH: And then somebody presented a talking stick, it's just a stick with the eagle head on. And then they said, “we'll talk with a stick.” And we had to be in the center of the whole community hall. So that's how they ran their meeting.
AMY: And almost everything happened in Gwich'in.
MAN AT GATHERING (37:05 in vid): (speaking in Gwich'in)
AMY: The video doesn't give names for individual speakers, but it does provide translations. And this man is saying, “Oil burns when the trucks and cats work and the wells are drilled. The oil spreads all over the caribous' food.”
MAN AT GATHERING (33:32 in vid): (speaking in Gwich'in)
AMY: He says, “what will become of our children when the caribou go?”
MUSIC FROM GATHERING
AMY: The story of the outside groups creating an agenda, and the elders promptly tossing it out – I think this is an important detail. As we talked about last time, one of the meta-battles surrounding the fight over drilling in the refuge is who controls the narrative. Are pro-oil groups using some Iñupiaq people to advance their agenda? Are conservation groups doing the same with the Gwich'in? But both of those lines of thought give all the agency to white people. In Sarah's narrative, the Gwich'in are the protagonists. They know what they want and they make it happen. She's not describing some hapless group of people who can easily be manipulated by outsiders.
WOMAN AT GATHERING: And together here we're gonna fight in a good way to teach many white people who do not understand our ways. We've got to teach them.
AMY: Sarah says it quickly became clear that there was no disagreement among the Gwich'in about the goal. What they were trying to figure out was a strategy.
SARAH: They know that they're against oil and gas development, but how we going to do it you know? What to do, where we're going to go, how we going to do it? And then they say, the only way we're going to win is unless we do it in a good way, educate the world in a good way and make friends, because we can't do it ourselves, it's too huge.
AMY: So they wrote a resolution – a short, clear message saying who they were and what they wanted. You can read it on our website: it says the Gwich'in have a right to continue their way of life, and that their culture depends on the caribou. Therefore, oil and gas development should be prohibited in the 1002 area.
MAN AT GATHERING: We have it in writing, with our signatures on it. I think they'll know at least that we have one nation of Gwich'in people that are saying no, and we mean no. And maybe it may help a little in their decision-making.
MUSIC
SARAH: We are the caribou people. If it wasn't for the caribou we wouldn't be here today. To take away of who you are, and be proud of who you are. That's genocide.
MUSIC
AMY: At the 1988 gathering, the Gwich'in chose eight ambassadors to help get that message out to the world. Sarah was one of them. And this was a permanent appointment – this was now her assigned role in the community for the rest of her life. So she picked up that mantle, and has never set it down. She's given speeches all over the country, she's traveled to Washington, DC countless times to meet with lawmakers and to testify at Congressional committee hearings. And every two years since 1988, the Gwich'in have held another gathering, and every two years they have reaffirmed their opposition to drilling on the coastal plain.
SARAH: They never break what they make that decision on at that time and never have and never will.
AMY: So that's the message Sarah has been repeating, all of this time.
SARAH: Look like we made the right decision back in 1988. We overcame many many battles because all American out there along with us spoke loud and clear they don't want a gas and oil development. And I believe it's going to stay that way. I believe we're going to win.
AMY: I recorded this conversation in August of 2017. In December of that year, President Trump signed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and the coastal plain was open for oil and gas drilling.
BERNADETTE: I feel like my home is being attacked, I feel like my children are being attacked.
AMY: Again, this is Bernadette Demientiff.
BERNADETTE: To me, this is how I look at it – like, I would walk into your house, sit at your table and just start going through your cupboards, and going and kicking back on your couch kicking my feet. That's how I feel when they're coming in here and just wanting to rip everything apart.
BERNADETTE: And you know I get angry, but then I have to always remember I have to go back to what our elders say and do it in a good way.
AMY: Stay with us for part two.