In a past life I was fortunate enough to have two memorable professional encounters with Native Americans: working with the Gwich'in in Alaska to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) from oil drilling; and serving as the environmental director for the Eight Northern Indian Pueblos Council of New Mexico. In both instances I was able to understand that our First Nations have a profound, integrated relationship with nature, and that they are still being abused by the federal government. This abuse is now being acted out in Alaska against the Gwich'in in relationship to ANWR and the Trump Administration's threat to the caribou, and the Yup'ik and Dena'ina in Bristol Bay in relationship to the Administration's threat to the salmon. Part 1 of this series focuses on the Gwich'in, Part 2 on the Yup'ik and Dena'ina.
For most Americans ANWR, the wilderness, is an abstraction which those of us who understand the importance of preserving wilderness want to protect from industrial development. However, until you actually see a muskoxen herd circle in defense of its young or the masses of caribou which make up the Porcupine Herd, the largest in the world (between 120,000 and 200,000), it's hard to visualize the vastness and splendor of this last American truly functioning wilderness (19,286,722 acres). And, in advocating to preserve ANWR most of us do not focus on the fact that oil development in that wilderness would bring about yet another Native American genocide.
For millennia (at least 20,000 years), the Gwich'in have occupied the southern slopes of the Brooks Range in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Gwich'in means "people of the caribou." They rely on ANWR's vast herds of caribou for a major part of their economic and spiritual sustenance. They believe that every caribou has a bit of human heart; and every human has a bit of caribou heart. They, like the plains Indians before them who experienced genocide brought about in large part by the destruction of the buffalo herds, are now facing the same existential threat from the Trump Administration's unnecessary desire to open some 400,000 acres in ANWR to oil drilling this year.