Let's Take It Outside: S1E6 The Sacred Place

Transcript

The Sacred Place

Chris Hill: Alaska is a big state. At more than twice the size of Texas, it's home to over 700,000 people, seven distinct ecological zones, and some of the richest biodiversity in the country.

Michael Wald: Alaska, or the northern part – this is a really old map, there isn't even the Dalton Highway going north – anyway, the rivers are still the same.

Chris Hill: It's also one of the most resource-rich states in the country with a long history of extraction. From the gold rush to logging to oil and gas, it seems the state was founded on a boom-and-bust cycle that puts people and the planet at risk.

Michael Wald: We're here in Fairbanks, two o'clock. All of you guys and your personal gear, it's all going into the mail plane. And that mail plane is gonna take off at about two o'clock, and it's gonna fly over the Yukon, over Venetie nation and land in Arctic Village. Pretty simple, hopefully.

Chris Hill: I live in Haines. a small town in southeast Alaska. This summer, I took a boat, to a plane, to another plane to Fairbanks, Alaska. From there I met up with my Sierra Club colleagues for the final stretch of a voyage to the northern reaches of Alaska’s wilderness. 

Field tape of Chris Hill: There are seven of us in our group, including Dan Ritzman, Director of Conservation Campaigns at the Sierra Club, and Ben Jealous, our Executive Director.

[Field tape of plane]

Chris Hill: In today's episode, we're traveling to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A 19.5 million acre protected wilderness that stretches from the foothills of the Brooks Range all the way to the Arctic Ocean, it's the migratory destination for the Porcupine Caribou herd and hundreds of thousands of species of birds. It's also a flash point in the oil and gas drilling debate, with a section potentially opening up for oil and gas development later this year. On our way, we're making a stop to talk to the Gwich'in people in neighboring Arctic Village about the refuge and why they call it “the sacred place where life begins.” Let's take it outside.

[Plane landing in Arctic Village]

Chris Hill: Arctic Village is a small native village in the Brooks Range that borders the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It’s one of the 15 villages of the Gwich'in Nation. At 100 miles above the Arctic Circle, there are no roads going in or out. 

Field tape of Chris Hill: So we arrived in Arctic Village. It was pouring down rain. And once we got off the plane, the rain stopped, and we were able to load some ATVs and side-by-sides with our luggage. And we got to Sarah's house and was greeted by Sarah welcoming us to Arctic village and showing us where we'll stay for the night.

Chris Hill: There are about 155 people who live here. One of those people is Sarah James. Gwich'in elder and our host for the next couple of days.

Field Tape of Sarah James: It's wild game, so it cooks fast.

Chris Hill: Sarah welcomed us into her home overlooking the village. While sitting around the fire of her outdoor kitchen, she made us caribou burgers and fry bread. 

Field Tape of Sarah James: That’s Caribou fat. We use every part of the caribou or moose.

Chris Hill: Caribou is a staple of the Gwich'in diet. Every spring, over 200,000 caribou migrate upwards of 750 miles from the south side of the Brooks Range, over the mountains, and to the Coastal Plain to have their babies. This is the Porcupine caribou herd. It's the largest caribou herd on earth, and the longest land migration of any mammal. Many of these caribou pass right through Arctic Village on their annual trek. The existence of these caribou are intrinsically linked to the existence of the Gwich'in people. This is why Gwich'in call themselves caribou people and hold the refuge sacred.

Field Tape of Sarah James: Somebody had fry bread, the other one. Gwich’in fry bread they call it.

Chris Hill: Sarah has been a friend to us at the Sierra Club for years, and we've been fighting alongside her to protect the caribou and the refuge from the threat of oil and gas drilling since the ‘80s.

[More field tape/ambient sounds of Sarah cooking]

Chris Hill: At 78 years old, Sarah has spent most of her life in Arctic Village. Her parents lived a traditional subsistence way of life. Every summer, they took Sarah and her siblings out to fish, hunt, and gather. When Sarah was a teenager, the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent her away to boarding school where she learned English and her famous recipe for fry bread from a Navajo friend.

Field Tape of Sarah James: This is Gwich’in fry bread, and this is Navajo fry bread. And now it’s my bread.

Chris Hill: After high school, Sarah moved to San Francisco to train as a typist. It was here that she had her first brush with activism.

Sarah James: All that time, I used to hang around with people from San Francisco State – students, college students.

Chris Hill: Sarah got involved with student groups advocating for Native rights.

Sarah James: Well, anyway, we'd party every weekend or something like that, we’d hang around then, and come Monday, we’d all get separate – back to the college and me back to my lousy old job. And, well, one night one, one night, they decide to do it.

Chris Hill: It was November 20, 1969 when youth activists occupied Alcatraz Island.

Sarah James: One night, me and my roommate, we looked up at the TV. Here they were on the island. They got on the island, and I said, “I'm going.” And my roommate said, “I'll check with my job first,” she said. I said, “Not me. I'm gonna go,” I said.

Chris Hill: The group claimed ownership over the island under the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which says that all retired or out-of-use federal land must be returned to the Indigenous people who once occupied it.

Sarah James: Well, anyway, I went down to the dock – pier – and where they said they were. Shucks, I’d never been on a sailor boat before – a little sailor boat – and I'm not a swimmer. I was holding on for dear life all the way to the island. And when we got to the island, there was no dock because the dock had been taken away. And they had to put the plank down there and chain arms and get you ashore. I looked down there and I said, “Boy, I better not fall down there.”

Chris Hill: Sarah spent two months on Alcatraz before the death of her father called her home to Arctic Village. After her return, she got involved in her community. She joined Tribal council, worked in the village school, and advocated for her people's way of life. With her newfound experience with activism and skills in English and typing, she was poised to join the next fight for Native rights. The fight against Big Oil in the Arctic Refuge.

[Music transition]

Chris Hill: But let's back up to how the refuge came to be. In 1960, President Eisenhower established what was then called the Arctic National Wildlife Range. In 1980, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, also known as ANILCA, was signed into law by President Carter. The law expanded the range and renamed it the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. While looking at a map of Northern Alaska from the 1970s, Dan Ritzman explains how we got here.

Dan Ritzman: When we stood on the bank of the river in Arctic Village, when you look across the river, you're looking into the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. So Gwich'in lands on the one side, Arctic Refuge on the other side. In this original range they made, it was about eight million acres in size. ANILCA designated six and a half of that eight million acres as wilderness. And then, the most controversial part of that whole piece of legislation, hundreds of millions of acres of protection, was this million and a half acres on the Coastal Plain of the refuge.

Chris Hill: The northern coast of the Arctic Refuge is called the Coastal Plain. It neighbors Prudhoe Bay, an oil-rich area of northern Alaska that, at the time, was already being developed for drilling. It’s the Coastal Plain that would come to shape the next four decades of politics, policy, and activism surrounding the refuge. 

Dan Ritzman: Oil had been discovered in Prudhoe Bay. They're building the pipeline. Oil has their greedy eyes on all of northern Alaska, and they believe that if there's oil here, there's gonna be oil over here. So they wanted this left out of ANILCA and open to the oil and gas industry. And, of course, the Gwich'in people, Alaska Native people, conservationists, scientists, all wanted this to be part protected as wilderness like the rest of the original Wildlife range. Congress compromised on that, and they designated this as wilderness, and they put this section in a special provision in ANILCA. Which is section 10-02, and that's why you'll hear people call it the “ten-oh-two” area 

Chris Hill: Congress commissioned an environmental impact study from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that said if oil and gas drilling is allowed in the 10-02 area, the Porcupine caribou herd could be reduced by half. They also allowed seismic testing by the oil industry to determine how much oil is likely in the 10-02. The estimations came back at 10 billion barrels of oil. At the time, enough oil to last the United States six months.

Dan Ritzman: The Reagan administration says, “Screw it. Who cares if the caribou will be reduced by half? We're gonna push forward and start to try to pass a law in Congress that would open this area up to oil and gas development.”

Chris Hill: This brings us to 1988. Under threat of oil and gas development in the Coastal Plain, the Gwich'in people came together across 15 villages spread between Alaska and Canada for the first time in 150 years. Here's Sarah James again.

Sarah James: Because oil was gonna do the drilling for oil and gas up in that Porcupine caribou calving ground – and that was the concern – that was the threat to our nation. When there's a threat to the nation, they come together as they call it [speaking Gwich’in] that means, “Gwich’in gather” and that's what they did.

Chris Hill: Sarah remembers the reunion of her people.

Sarah James: It was like a rebirth of a nation because we never came together for any reason for many years – 150 years since they put the border in. And fifteen – fifteen – Gwich'in chiefs, Gwich'in elders, and youth leaders came together.

Chris Hill: Gwich'in leaders passed a resolution in favor of wilderness protections and against oil and gas drilling in the 10-02 area. But taking on the U.S. federal government was a daunting task.

Sarah James: They were crying because they’d never seen each other. They were crying because of the caribou. And they were crying because, they don't know what's gonna happen. Nobody knows us. Nobody even knows where Arctic Village is at. They only know “igloo,” “Eskimo,” and “polar bear.” And they don't know about Gwich'in. How would we win?

Chris Hill: It turns out, the key to winning was education and storytelling. Gwich'in leaders assembled a steering committee of four Gwich'in citizens to travel the lower 48 to tell the Gwich'in story and to teach people about the caribou they sought to protect. Sarah was one of the original four members.

Sarah James: I was one of them that got chosen at that time. I mean, I was on Tribal council for a long time, but I was, at that time – I wasn't anywhere. I was just a helper.

Chris Hill: The steering committee traveled the country, and encouraged people to call their representatives in Congress to oppose drilling in the 10-02. Combined with the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 that spilled 50 million gallons of oil into the Prince William Sound, public support for drilling in the Arctic collapsed. And the refuge was saved for the timebeing.

Sarah James: For me, right now, all I do is education to save our caribou, because it's my way and makes me who I am, and it makes sense.

Chris Hill: Since the ‘80s, the Tribe has staved off dozens of attempts to open up the 10-02 area to oil and gas drilling. Sarah credits a lot of the success to the friends they've made along the way. Organizations like the Sierra Club, senators, presidents, and even bank executives who have promised to refuse to fund drilling in the refuge. Ultimately, the Gwich'in people, and us at the Sierra Club, are looking for permanent protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Today, Sarah works closely with young people in Arctic Village, mentoring the next generation of educators to continue this fight. 

Field Tape of Chris Hill: What's your name?

Field Tape of Karlas Norman: My name is Karlas Norman. I'm from Arctic Village. 

Chris Hill: Karlas is a former Arctic Village councilmember and has lived here his whole life. Like Sarah, he travels the country advocating for the refuge.

Field Tape of Chris Hill: So we met in D.C.

Field Tape of Karlas Norman: Yes, we did, with your mom.

Field Tape of Chris Hill: With my mom. [Laughs] And that was one of those trips where you were needed. And you talked to folks on the Hill and in Congress. How did that feel?

Field Tape of Karlas Norman: Jeeze, like, special. I mean, to be chosen to – it should be thought of and be known that I was actually good at talking with people? It felt really great because I know I am – I mean, I got something to say, you know?

Chris Hill: While sitting together in Sarah’s front yard, he explains what life is like here.

Field Tape of Chris Hill: You grew up here. Right?

Field Tape of Karlas Norman: Yeah, I've been here all my life. It's an amazing place. The people are more driven to community events, cultural way of life, and subsistence way of life – it’s just what we're used to.

Field Tape of Chris Hill: So you said subsistence. So what does that mean to somebody who lives in a city?

Field Tape of Karlas Norman: Well, subsistence way of city life would be, instead of hunting, you would actually go and do your job, right? And then make your pay for the week. Go hit up the store, and that would be your subsistence, right? You pay your water bill. You would pay your electricity bill. But us here, we actually don't depend on a job. We depend on the wildlife, we are using our traditional ways of making traps and all the bow and arrows, just figuring out ways to – not only large game, but small game too. You know, we can not only live off the caribou. We live off of plants. So we eat roots on certain plants. We drink right out of the river, the creeks. Everything's clean here, and that's just the difference of the subsistence way of living, compared to a city.

Chris Hill: The Gwich'in subsistence way of life is something that has been hard fought for in the generations since colonization. But people like Karlas and Sarah are determined to keep cultural traditions alive for future generations.

Karlas Norman: You know, the 10-02, and our caribou, our main source of food goes up there and produces more of our source of food. And oil? Natural gas? Money, everything? Why risk our way of life for a dollar? Maybe a dollar – how long is that dollar gonna last? Land’s gonna be here after you're gone, so why pollute it? Why not think about your kids' kids' kids' kids?

[Music Transition]

Chris Hill: We stayed in Arctic Village for two days, talking with Gwich'in locals and even taking in a rainy-day baseball game.

[Field tape from the baseball game]

Chris Hill: But it's time to move on, see the refuge for ourselves, and hopefully spot some Porcupine caribou.

[Field tape saying goodbye to Sarah James]

Chris Hill: So we head back to the small airfield, say goodbye to our friends, and board our next flight into the refuge. 

[Music Transition]

Chris Hill: After almost an hour on a bush plane, we land on the banks of the Chandalar River's east fork. It's surreal to be here at last. Mountains in every direction, with lush, green, valley landscape underfoot. We've already accomplished our goal of seeing the Porcupine caribou. We saw hundreds from the plane.

[Field tape unloading the plane]

Chris Hill: We unload our gear, and the pilot turns around and leaves us in absolute silence.

[Field tape from refuge]

Chris Hill: We spend five days in the refuge – a long time for a place where the sun never sets – and there are no other humans outside of our group.

Field Tape of Chris Hill:  It's raining. A little bit. It's day three, I think, camping. I just woke up. Birds are chirping. See what today has in store. 

Chris Hill: We spend our days watching caribou and reflecting on why we do this work.

Field Tape of Chris Hill: We just found some caribou. So this is the caribou that Sarah James was talking to us about in Arctic Village. It's so special to see them here in the refuge, and this is a Porcupine caribou herd, and they're on their migration route right now.

Chris Hill: I think a lot about Sarah, Karlas, and the Gwich'in people. Every year, over 35,000 caribou are born here. That's the future of the Porcupine caribou herd, and the future of the Gwich'in people. More than caribou, thousands of species of birds from every state in the country and six continents migrate here to have their young. That’s why the Gwich'in call it “the sacred place where life begins.”

Field Tape of Chris Hill: They're all over There's gotta be thousands of caribou out here, and they just keep strolling on by, eating and walking and – it's really, really awesome.   

Chris Hill: As far away as the Arctic Refuge is to most, we all have a stake in this fight. Leading scientists tell us that we need to protect thirty percent of our lands and waters by 2030 to build resiliency to the threats of climate change. So places like this are absolutely essential. The fight to protect the Gwich'in’s way of life is deeply connected to the fight to protect all life on this planet. On a rainy afternoon in the Refuge, Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous sums it up perfectly.

Ben Jealous: At the end of the day, our priorities have to be aligned with the urgent priorities of working people. In the Arctic Village, you saw that right away. These are people. They subsist on a herd of about 130,000 caribou. And, yes, if we preserve it, we'll help stop the oil and gas industry from destroying the planet for everybody.

Chris Hill: The current status of the 10-02 area is still tenuous. In 2017, the Trump Administration passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which mandated two lease sales in the 10-02 area by the end of 2024. Alongside the Gwich'in people, the Sierra Club successfully pressured the six biggest banks in the U.S. to promise they wouldn't finance oil and gas development in the refuge. And when the first lease sale happened in 2021, it was a bust, with no bids from major oil companies. This past September, the Biden Administration canceled the lease sales that did go through, saving the refuge from development for the timebeing. But the administration is legally required to hold another lease sale before the end of the year. So the fight continues until we can secure permanent protections for the entire refuge.

[Field tape from the refuge]

Chris Hill: Until then, we'll keep supporting Sarah, Karlass, and the Gwich'in people as they fight for their home, and the planet.

Music transition

Chris Hill: This episode was produced by Tina Mullen, edited by Isaac Kestenbaum of Future Projects, and hosted by me, Chris Hill. Our field producer was Colin Arisman. Ian Brickey is our executive producer. Mixing and sound design by Nic Nevis. Special thanks to Michael Wald and Mike Scott. 

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To learn more about the fight to save the Arctic Refuge and to join our calls for permanent protections, visit the link in our show notes.