Season 3: Episode 4

Do It in a Good Way

The Gwich’in have lived and hunted in the Refuge long before it was carved out as federal, protected land. Their territory spans a huge swath of northeastern Alaska and northwestern Canada, and their health and culture depends on the Porcupine caribou herd—a group of animals 200,000 strong that calve on the area of the coastal plain slated for drilling.

In this two-part episode, we spend time in Arctic Village, a community just over the southern border of the Refuge, and hear from the Gwich’in about what’s at stake for them as development looms in the 1002 area.

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THE GWICH’IN

The Gwich’in people are part of the larger Athabascan family of tribes, whose land base covers a large swath of interior Alaska. While the Athabascans share membership in a regional band, local bands are of deep social importance too. For example, Sarah James, who we met in this episode, is a member and spokesperson for the Neets’aii Gwich’in, where she is also an elder.

This map shows the Athabascan, as well as several other Alaskan Native Culture Areas. To read more about Bluefish Caves and the archaeological history of the area, visit this article. 

ADDITIONAL MAPS

• Map and additional info about Arctic Village

• Arctic Village on Google Maps

ORGANIZING TO PROTECT THE CARIBOU

After years of advocacy, the Gwich’in, along with Iñupiaq people and other allies, succeeded in getting the U.S. and Canada to sign an international treaty designed to protect the Porcupine caribou herd. 

That treaty also established the Porcupine Caribou Management Board, who went on to organize the 1988 gathering we covered in Part I. From June 5-10 of that year, people from all over the Gwich’n community, as well as other folks in support of caribou conservation, met up in Arctic Village to connect and strategize. You can view footage from the gathering here, in a video produced by Northern Native Broadcasting, Yukon. This is the resolution that came out of that gathering.

Bernadette Demientieff, who we also heard from in this episode, is a member of the Gwich’yaa Gwich’in. She is also the Executive Director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, formed in 1988 in response to proposals to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The steering committee's 2012 formal resolution can be viewed here. 

CARIBOU

Here you can read more about human threats to caribou populations. This article is a deeper dive on the science that has resulted from 38 years of caribou monitoring. 

You can learn more about the caribou migration through the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society’s Join the Migration project.

THE AMERICAN INDIAN MOVEMENT 

The US government’s policies of “termination” and “relocation” consolidated many young Native people in major cities in the 1960’s. The consequences of these programs cannot be overstated (see Tommy Orange’s award-winning There There as a great starting point), but one of them was the rise of the American Indian Movement (AIM) and the Red Power movement, which took off in cities like Minneapolis and San Francisco. Primary sources on AIM can be viewed through the Digital Public Library of America, and for more reading on the powerful role of these two parallel movements, we recommend In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, and anything by Vine Deloria. 

One of the biggest events to come out of this moment in Native American activism was the occupation of Alcatraz Island. SF Chronicle recently did a story on unpublished photos from the 19-month-long protest, and the National Parks Service has a brief history as well. For a more thorough history, we recommend Troy R. Johnson’s The Occupation of Alcatraz Island. 

You can watch Richard Oakes reading the protesters’ initial proclamation here or read it in full. 

The Red Nation is also a good resource for the ongoing struggle for Native rights. 

Credits

Do It in a Good Way: Part 1

Transcript

INTRODUCTION

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.

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.

THRESHOLD INTRO MUSIC

“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.”

Segment A

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.

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.

AMY: This is Arctic Village on Saturday afternoon.

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.

MUSIC: “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.

Break

Segment B

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 Francisco, 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.

Credits

NICK: Our reporting was funded by the Pulitzer Center, Montana Public Radio, the Park Foundation, the High Stakes Foundation, NewsMatch, 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. You can join our community and find pictures from our trip to the refuge at threshold podcast dot org.

AMY: The team behind Threshold includes Angela Swatek, Brook Artziniega, Caysi Simpson, Eva Kalea, Lynn Lieu and Nick Mott. Special thanks to board members Hana Carey, Dan Carreno, Kara Cromwell, Katie deFusco, Matt Herlihy, Rachel Klein, Caroline Kurtz, and to Michelle Woods, Michael Connor and Frank Allen. Our music is by the ever-fabulous Travis Yost.

Do It in a Good Way: Part 2

Transcript

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.

SOUND: gate, bell

AMY:...except they're not actually caribou. They're reindeer. Same species, just different subspecies.

SOUND: swirling of hoof beats

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. 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. 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.

AMY: 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 this area is where they had chosen their calving grounds in northeast Alaska. 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; 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. 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's 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 our 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 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 – the numbers: the population of the Central Arctic Herd was around 5,000 animals when development at Prudhoe Bay began most sources says, 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 got 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 too.

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... 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? 

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. 

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.

Break

SOUND: walking through Arctic Village

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: 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'lock 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.

SOUND: water sounds

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. 

SOUND: footsteps and swinging buckets

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 to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, or ANCSA – the 1971 land claims bill that we talked about earlier in this series.

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 very 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. 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. 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 at this point. 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 the permafrosts are melting...you know they're melting! 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 is 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 they some other birds 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. We got everything we need. Land and water, and we still got lots of animals to eat. So I feel like 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 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.

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 things are connected. 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 with this administration. 

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: 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. You can't just come into our home and just tell us you know –  I'm sorry to 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: 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 in our final episode of this series, next time on Threshold.

Credits

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 you, our listeners. Our work depends on people who believe in it and choose to support it. People like you. Join our community at threshold podcast dot org.

AMY: The team behind this episode of Threshold is Nick Mott, Eva Kalea, Michelle Woods, Caysi Simpson, Brook Artziniega [ART-sin-YAY-guh], Tej Reddy, Lynn Lieu and Megan Myscofski [my-SKOFF-ski]. Special thanks to Frank Allen, Hana Carey, Dan Carreno, Michael Connor, Kara Cromwell, Katie deFusco [duh-FUHS-koh], Matt Herlihy and Rachel Klein. Our music is by Travis Yost.

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