SEASON 3 | EPISODE 4, Part 2
Do It in a Good Way, Part 2
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NICK: This series was supported by the Pulitzer Center
AMY: Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and we're in the middle of the fourth episode in our series about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We're focusing on Gwich'in voices this time. There's strong opposition to drilling in the refuge among the Gwich'in, and the primary reason for that is their relationship with one of the keystone species of the Arctic: the caribou. I wanted to give you a sense of what these animals are like, so here's a little bit of tape from my closest encounter with caribou….
AMY: OK, I'm coming up to the gate.
AMBI
AMY: ...except they're not actually caribou. They're reindeer. Same species, just different sub-species.
AMBI
AMY: I'm standing in a herd of reindeer (laughter).
AMY: If you listened to season two of Threshold you might remember Reiulf and Risten Aleksandersen – a Sámi family in northern Norway. This is the moment when I met their reindeer herd. A few of the animals are wearing bells around their necks.
AMY: They're running past me…. milling around.
AMY: Reindeer and caribou are tall, shaggy creatures that are in the same family as deer and elk. Both the males and females grow big, branched antlers. And they're incredibly well-adapted to life in the far north – they can smell lichen that sustains them through the cold, dark months of winter even when it's buried under many feet of snow, and they know how to dig down through the drifts to find it. They also grow two layers of thick hair to help them stay warm.
AMY: They're so beautiful, they're brown and grey. White and tan and cream and ivory.
AMY: The herd was swirling around me in a big circle. It felt like being in the eye of a reindeer hurricane. This is one of their defense mechanisms – kind of like how fish make whirlpools when a shark approaches. Although clearly, I was no shark. They didn't seem scared of me at all. Just curious and kind of wound up by my presence.
Reindeer and caribou are found across the circumpolar north – the Sámi, the Nenets, the Gwich'in, the Inuit and other indigenous Arctic cultures all have long relationships with them. Reindeer are usually semi-domesticated, like this herd I was in. Sámi families own their reindeer – they don't farm them, the way people farm cows or pigs, but they do exert some control over where they go, and when.
That's not how it is with the Gwich'in. The caribou in northern Alaska and Canada are completely wild. They go wherever they want, whenever they want. And the Gwich'in don't herd them, they hunt them.
FADE AMBI
And they learn from them.
DANA: Well I think a good place to start would be with our oral history.
AMY: This is Dana Tizya-Tramm.
DANA: We speak of following the Porcupine caribou herd to their calving grounds in the northeast coastal plain of Alaska. And it is said that our people followed them to learn their behaviors. And as we observe them, we identified this area is sacred as we recognize that to be the wellspring that drives ecosystems.
AMY: Dana is the chief of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation of the Yukon, in Canada. He's talking to me over the phone from his office in the village of Old Crow, which is north of the Arctic Circle, and very close to the border with Alaska. Dana was born in 1987 – the year before that pivotal Gwich'in Gathering – and he sees himself as carrying out the core instruction that came out of that event: protect the caribou.
DANA: So the story goes is that it is this place, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or as we call it, Iizhik gwats’an gwandaii goodlit -- the sacred place where life begins – and it is here that we traded half of our heart with half of the caribou's heart. So in this way that we would always be intrinsically tied with one another to care for one another and to know where each other are. This is so fundamental to who we are.
AMY: Many different Gwich'in people I spoke to referred to this story of sharing a heart with the caribou – it has different versions I think, but they're all an expression of unity with this animal. Mutual support, and a shared fate. Dana says this very old story is borne out by modern science. Caribou have evolved to be able to digest the relative few plants that can survive in the harsh Arctic environment – their bodies are able to draw nutrition out of lichen and tough cotton grass.
DANA: And the caribou carry these nutrients like a great ebb and flow from a heartbeat across our nation, giving life to the people and to the animals of this area. And they've been doing it for 2.1 million years, far more efficiently than anything that man has done.
AMY: But over the last twenty of those years, caribou herds across the polar north have faced precipitous declines. They've gone from nearly 5 million animals to just over 2 million, in two decades. Many herds in Alaska and Canada are at all-time low numbers since record-keeping began – and one of the primary reasons for that is climate change, according to the 2018 Arctic Report Card, put out by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
DANA: And especially in a time when their lands are greatly changing we need large areas of lands to help all of our animals survive.
AMY: For Dana and many other Gwich'in people, there's really no distinction between helping the animals survive and keeping their culture alive. They're completely interlinked, going way way back to when the first people migrated into North America from Asia, over the Bering Land Bridge at the end of the last Ice Age. In fact, there's growing consensus that the earliest evidence of human habitation on the continent is in Gwich'in territory, close to where Dana lives in the Yukon.
DANA: There's actually an archeological site, uh, just down river from our communities that implies evidence of our existence to about 24,000, 27,000 years ago.
AMY: It's a place called Bluefish Caves. It's named for the Bluefish River, which flows into the Porcupine River. Like Dana said, archaeologists have found implications of human presence in these caves dating back at least 24,000 years. One of the animals those people were almost certainly relying on to survive was the caribou.
DANA: So from these ancient beginnings, we have lived with our brother vadzaih, caribou, and they have taught us many of the access points, navigations of lands, but also the carrier of our cultures, our dances, even our drum songs. So even today, the six year olds in my community, when they draw pictures at school with their crayons, they're drawing pictures of their caribou camps, of working with caribou.
AMY: Listening to Dana was just another reminder for me of how much time we used to spend, as a species, watching and learning from animals. And how much that observation involved moving with them through the world. But today, humans aren't as free to migrate in response to climate, or season, or relationships with animals – our migration patterns are decided by our governments. The Porcupine caribou migrate back and forth across the U.S./Canada border, but the Gwich'in cannot. And when they want to advocate for the herd, they have to appeal to two different governments.
DANA: So this is a very compounding issue for a Canadian indigenous people as we work very hard to continue our way of life in a modern era.
AMY: It's hard enough for rural Alaskans to get heard in Washington – the challenges are ten times greater for the Gwich'in people who hold Canadian passports. And one of the arguments that gets repeated in the halls of government is that the Gwich'in are blowing this whole thing out of proportion – that oil development really isn't a threat to them, or the caribou. As evidence for this, people who support drilling point to the Central Arctic Herd – they're sort of like neighbors to the Porcupine herd, and they historically used the Prudhoe Bay area as a calving ground. Almost everyone I spoke with on the pro-oil side told me that the population of this herd has gone up in the years since drilling began at Prudhoe, and that this means the Porcupine herd could be just fine as well if the coastal plain of the refuge gets developed.
I wanted to make sure I really understood this claim, and the response to it, so producer Nick Mott and I dug deep into the data, and here's what we learned.
First – some numbers: the population of the Central Arctic Herd was around 5,000 animals when development at Prudhoe Bay began most sources says, that’s compared to more than 20,000 the last time they were counted in 2016. But just a few years before that, in 2013, the herd was up to more than 70,000 animals – and that leads us to an important point here. The size of a Caribou herd can vary wildly over even just a few years, and the factors influencing population size are complex – predators, food availability, disease, weather and climate can all play a role, in addition to human impacts, and other things.
Caribou use different strategies to respond to the various pressures they face in the wild, and one of most effective tools is movement. That's what happened with the Central Arctic Herd – as development grew at Prudhoe Bay, they shifted their calving grounds to other areas, and it appears that they found places where they could get enough to eat and had enough freedom from predators to keep their herd going. But the landscape is very different for the Porcupine herd. If they want to get away from development on the coastal plain, they don't have very many good options where they can find enough to eat, and where they won't easily be eaten by something else. And that's why we have to use great caution in comparing these two herds. That's actually the word scientists use in the environmental impact statement created by the government: caution. They give a whole list of reasons for why we can't use the Central Arctic Herd's response to oil development as a clear analog for how the porcupine herd might be impacted. It's like with people – you can't do a study on the people in Vancouver, and assume that it will apply to people in Seattle, too. There are similarities between the two cities, but there are important differences as well.
There's a whole lot more we could say about all of the complexities in the science here, but if we zoom out and just look at the big picture, two fundamental facts leaps out: caribou prefer habitat with no human disturbance, and...
DANA: Every single herd of caribou in Canada is in major decline.
AMY: Dana is right about that, and although the causes for those declines vary, there's one species behind them all: us. Caribou herds thrive in big, wild, cold landscapes, and as we log and mine and drill and build roads further and further north – and warm the climate – their overall population is going down. That is undoubtedly the long-term trend here. And for Dana, that's why it's essential to leave the places they have left undisturbed – places like the coastal plain of the refuge.
DANA: In a time of anthropogenic climate change, when is it going to be enough? And when are we going to start appreciating the natural systems, and the animals? Just because nature does not speak English does not mean that it's not speaking. And we strongly hope that the world sees this issue as a mirror and ourselves reflected in it. And it's talking to us about the imbalanced approach that we're taking to a balanced system.
AMY: I asked Dana how it felt to be on the Canadian side of the border in December 2017, when the bill passed that opened up the refuge to oil and gas development.
DANA: I remember that day very clearly. After a long day in the office, I went home and I watched the video of Donald Trump signing the bill. And as he put his signature to it, and he specifically mentioned opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I could see my elders, I could see my ancestors, and I could hear the voices of the youth because they are everything. It... it quite literally broke my heart. And I mourned for our way of life. And I wondered when will my people be seen as a people and when will our voice and perspective be respected?
DANA: But I went through my short time of mourning, which was probably a couple of days and began picking myself up. And nothing gives me more power than my community coming together, working together towards the positive of these issues.
DANA: I'm very fortunate to have the guidance of our elders, and along with the mandate of the advocacy and education of protection of these lands, it was also said in the next breath that this must be done in a good way. And even if others choose to be disrespectful, the Gwich'in nation will not be.
AMY: We'll have more after this short break.
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MIDROLL
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~
AMBI
AMY: Hey Gideon!
AMY: Welcome back to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and I'm back in Arctic Village, Alaska hoping to catch up with Gideon James, Sarah's brother, before he sets off in his canoe to check his fishing nets.
AMY: Hey Gideon!
AMY: I'd met Gideon the day before, and when he told me was going to check his nets at some point, I asked if I could come along. At 9 o'clock that night that Sarah came to tell me Gideon was heading out – this far north in the summer, it's light almost all night long – so I grabbed my sound gear and raced out to find him.
AMY: I may very well have literally missed the boat.
AMY: Almost, but not quite. I managed to catch Gideon just as he was about to put the canoe into the water.
GIDEON: Well hey! You gotta sit right there!
AMY: OK, that's good with me. I'm glad I get to go. Do you want me to push off?
GIDEON: Huh?
AMY: Do you want me to push us off?
GIDEON: That's alright, I can do it I think.
AMBI
GIDEON: You know how to swim?
AMY: (laughter) A little bit! Hopefully I won't need those skills.
AMY: Gideon is a couple of years older than Sarah, and other than struggling to hear well, he shows no signs of slowing down. He expertly maneuvers us out into the calm waters of the creek, and paddles us toward a net that he's strung up across it. We haven't gone very far, when he spots trouble – a muskrat.
GIDEON: Muskrat. A muskrat right there. He's fooling around with my net. He chew my net. I'm mad at him!
AMY: But soon, we've got other things to focus on.
AMY: There's one, that's a big one!
GIDEON: Big one down there.
AMY: Gideon paddles us up close to the net, and I look down into the clear water.
AMY: You've got at least two more, I think maybe three more.
AMY: He starts to pull the net up...
GIDEON: I feel like...I feel something!
AMY: And soon he's holding a huge northern pike in his hands.
GIDEON: I'll be goddamned it's monster!
AMY: It is a monster!
GIDEON: Huh? Monster!
AMY: Yeah, oh my God it's huge!
GIDEON: Holy….! (laughter) We get a monster in here!
AMY: Wow!
AMY: We spent about a half-hour pulling fish out of the net,
GIDEON: Holy cow, two together!
AMY: And then he paddled the canoe back to the bank, and we walked to his house, each of us carrying a big bucket full of fish.
AMBI
AMY: Gideon is a maker and a fixer – in one room of his house he's repairing a boat motor next to a table where he's making delicate jewelry. It seems like there's nothing he can't do. A hand-painted sign over his workbench says, “Think patient, don't rush, and understand your work.” And another hand-made sign, with a drawing of a drum, says, “Save Arctic refuge!” RWAV We sit down to talk, and although Gideon seemed pretty jolly when we were out in the canoe, when the conversation turns to drilling in the refuge, his tone changes.
GIDEON: We don't need to go, we don't need to go to the coastal plain. They think that's progress, that's not progress.
AMY: Gideon is opposed to drilling in the refuge for all kinds of reasons – he wants to protect the caribou, he's worried about climate change, and he does not see evidence for the argument that development is really improving the lives of Alaska Native people.
GIDEON: The issue is the corporation rip-off that's going to keep happening and our legislators are just, just a puppet to that.
AMY: He traces that disconnect back the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, or ANCSA – the 1971 land claims bill that we talked about a couple of episodes ago.
GIDEON: I study land claim bill. The way it was designed is a rip off.
AMY: When he first heard about ANCSA, Gideon says, he thought it was going to be good for his community and all indigenous Alaskans. Because that's the way the legislation was promoted in places like Arctic Village.
GIDEON: In the early '70s I believe all the stuff they say they're gonna do. There was promise of economic boom, and better school, and a better health program in Alaska which never became real.
AMY: Gideon says he started to have doubts about ANCSA in the 1980s, when he learned an important part of the origin story that wasn't clear to him from the start – and that was that a key motivator for the passage of the bill was the movement of oil.
GIDEON: The government, in order to get a corridor for the oil pipeline, they have to make a settlement with the Native first. This is what happened.
AMY: To track what Gideon's saying here you need to know that indigenous Alaskans had been advocating for some kind of land claim agreement for a long time before ANCSA was passed. But the people in power, who were almost exclusively white, pretty much ignored them – until oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay in the late 1960s. Suddenly a pipeline needed to be built. And Gideon's right – that is what finally spurred lawmakers to clarify Alaska Native land claims -- to clear the way for oil development. And to sweeten the deal, they made a lot of promises about how life was going to improve for Alaska Native people.
GIDEON: And here, after 40 years, those things are not true. Those things are not true today.
AMY: Gideon raised three boys, and he says one of them was an especially eager student.
GIDEON: When he graduate from high school he wants to go to university and he found out that he doesn't... he doesn't have the level. He doesn't have the standard.
GIDEON: It just killed the dream. I mean I hate to say it but that's what goes on all over. There's a lot of bright kids in this state.
GIDEON: You know our kids need to receive a good education, they need a good health program. They don't got it. They don't have it.
AMY: When Gideon says “that's what goes on all over,” I think he's talking about the big achievement gaps among Alaska students – for instance, in 2019, just 9% of Alaska Native and American Indian eighth-graders were scored as “proficient in reading” in national testing, compared to 33% of their white counterparts in the state. So for Gideon, the idea that drilling for more oil is going to lift up Native people in Alaska is almost insulting. They've had 40 years to do that, he says, and it hasn't happened. From his perspective, drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge looks like another bad idea in which outsiders reap the rewards and the Gwich'in feel the losses. And that's what climate change looks like to him too.
GIDEON: One of the things that's happening is we look out the window right now you see bunch of the leaves growing up. It never grew that fast.
AMY: It's called “Arctic greening” and scientists have been tracking it for decades. As the climate warms, vegetation is growing taller and thicker in many parts of the far north – that's partly why there have been more wildfires in the Arctic in recent years.
GIDEON: It never used to be like that. And permafrosts, they’re melting...you know they're melting!
GIDEON: You and I know that climate change is happening. We can't just sit down and talk about it. We need to do something about it. We need to do something about it.
TRIMBLE: Very sad thing to see when I grow up here. There's a lot of birds. Ducks, ptarmigan, and you know swallow? You can see a thousand of them around here and you can hear birds every day.
AMY: This is Trimble Gilbert.
TRIMBLE: Now it's going away. Very sad. There's some few birds around here. But they're pretty quiet. Even robin. Springtime robin, when they sing with a clear voice, and they, their voice even not clear and the way they used to sing. Their voices change is like my voice changed, same thing.
AMY: Trimble and his wife welcomed me into their cozy home in Arctic Village, and as he and I talked in a back room, I could hear their children and grandchildren stopping by and helping out in the kitchen. Trimble's first language is Gwich'in – he says he learned English in his 20s – and he's dedicated a lot of his life to passing on Gwich'in language and culture to the next generation.
TRIMBLE: I'm a traditional chief here, and I'm also a minister. I'm elder, and I can say anything I want.
AMY: Even in his mid-80s, Trimble radiates strength. And also, gentleness. It's immediately clear, talking with him, that his thoughts are sourced from a deep place.
TRIMBLE: Lot of people, they want more to hear about the love and kindness. They all looking for the good leaders, the ones who really talk with good words given out to the nations. That's what I want to hear.
AMY: Like Sarah and Gideon, Trimble grew up mostly out on the land, learning all the skills he needed to survive here from his family and community.
TRIMBLE: I don't think we are poor (inaudible). We got everything we need. Land and water, and we still got lot of animals to eat. So I feel like I’m, we are very rich.
AMY: And the foundation of that wealth was and is the caribou.
TRIMBLE: I grew up with traditional food, and I feel strong. A lot of people told me that too. When they ate their own food, and a lot more energies for the day. Like food is just like medicine for the Athabaskan up here. So we know our history about that and we want to save whatever we got here, like Porcupine herd.
AMY: I talked to Trimble for more than an hour, and he brought up food and health over and over. He's very concerned about these things because he's witnessed what happens when non-native food replaces traditional diets. Numerous studies on indigenous communities in the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic point to the transition away from traditional food as a source of skyrocketing rates of diabetes, anemia, mental health struggles and other issues. Trimble remembers what it was like when everyone ate food they hunted and gathered together as a community, from the land and water around them.
TRIMBLE: I'm talking about very healthy and strong people. Kids and all. I remember that.
AMY: For the very first season of our show, I reported on the story of the American bison – of how abundant they once were, and how central they were and still are to many indigenous cultures. As Trimble talked, I remembered hearing Native Americans I interviewed about bison telling me they'd heard their grandparents and great-grandparents saying things almost exactly like what Trimble was saying about the caribou.
TRIMBLE: They are healthy animal. And that's one of our new main nutritions for the people, for thousands of year. Like I told you about when I was kid, people are healthy people? That's a healthy food.
AMY: The near-destruction of the bison was part of the genocide of Native American people. And not by accident. Starvation is not only a physical thing. Cultures can be starved out too.
TRIMBLE: Without that caribou then I don't know how we're going to survive. It's going to be hard for us.
AMY: In March of 2019, Dana Tizya-Tram also made the connection to the buffalo when he spoke at a committee hearing in the U.S. Congress.
DANA: I notice in the paintings on your walls, you have a buffalo people. Well I'm proud to sit in front of you today as a caribou people. As Gwich'in.
AMY: This is the same person we heard in the first half of this episode, the chief of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation of the Yukon, in Canada.
DANA: We have lived in balance with the Porcupine caribou herd since before any mark of modern history. And now, development threatens to destabilize all of this. I am here today to testify that this development on the coastal plain amounts to the cultural genocide of the entire Gwich'in nation.
AMY: And there's another aspect of the American bison story that seems relevant here. Long before the bison were nearly exterminated, white people began to eulogize them. In fact, they referred to both the American bison and the American Indian as “lost,” or “vanishing,” or “disappearing” when there were still hundreds of thousands of wild buffalo out on the landscape, and many tribes still hunting them in traditional ways. Looking back at this time from our present moment, you can see that there was this window when people in power had an awareness of what was being lost, and had the opportunity to act – to try to stop the destruction of the bison and the brutal violence against Native people. But for the most part, they didn't take that opportunity.
TRIMBLE: We asking for help. We want to continue to keep this land the way it is, this small area.
AMY: Again, Trimble Gilbert.
TRIMBLE: People should understand and they should support Athabaskan people. They are right to stand for their country.
BERNADETTE: My identity is not up for negotiation. My identity is important to me. It may not be important to people but it's important to me and I matter, my children matter, and my people matter.
AMY: I'm back in Fairbanks, talking to Bernadette Demientieff, the executive director of the Gwich'in Steering Committee.
BERNADETTE: None of this belongs to us. None of this belongs to us. We're passing through and we need to take care of stuff that's given to us. And that is what our elders told us at the gathering they only told us to go out and educate the world and do it in a good way.
AMY: You probably noticed that a lot of the Gwich'in people I spoke with used that phrase, that they're trying to do things in a good way. When I asked Sarah James what she meant by it, she answered by giving examples. Like with the moose meat she said. Doing it “in a good way” means you keep expanding the circle of giving outward. You pay attention to the needs of the people around you, and you share what you have. And it's about more than that too. The more Gwich'in people I talked to, and the more I heard this phrase, I realized that doing things “in a good way” is a really deep concept – I'm sure I don't fully understand it. But from what I can gather, it's also about what you value, what your priorities are. It's about showing respect to others and also respecting yourself, and how those things are interconnected. As the public face of the Gwich'in Steering Committee, Bernadette has to live this ethos everywhere she goes – including Capitol Hill. I asked her how she does it.
BERNADETTE: And you know it's not always easy to do it in a good way, especially now.
AMY: Bernadette told me she met with Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, to try to get her to understand the Gwich'in perspective on drilling in the refuge.
BERNADETTE: And you know, I respect her and I know she has to bring some jobs to Alaska but it shouldn't be at the price of wiping out a tribe. We need to be respected. Like, you can't just come into our home and just tell us you know – I'm sorry but you're not going to be able to have these animals here no more. You can't just coming to somebody's home and do that. And this is our home. We've been here for over twenty thousand years. And you know my children this is their birthright. And you know I will stand up 'till my last breath defending my way of life, defending my children's future and defending my people.
AMY: Again, here’s Sarah James.
SARAH: There's too much greed in this world. And the Earth can't take it. Some people got too much and some people don't have nothing. And if we just gave the Earth to live I think we all gonna live good. And there'll be more peace. We need to work on that all together in order to survive.
AMY: Join us for our final episode of this series, 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 at thresholdpodcast.org.
AMY: The team behind this episode of Threshold is Nick Mott, Eva Kalea, Michelle Woods, Caysi Simpson, Brook Artziniega, Tej Reddy, Lynn Lieu and Megan Myscofski. Special thanks to Frank Allen, Hana Carey, Dan Carreno, Michael Connor, Kara Cromwell, Katie deFusco, Matt Herlihy and Rachel Klein. Our music is by Travis Yost.