Gwich’in, Food Sovereignty, and Environmental Justice in the Arctic Coastal Plain

Since the 1970s, oil and gas companies have been trying to stick their drills in the Arctic coastal plain. Resistance has been persistent and multi-faceted. Environmental conservationist organizations like Sierra Club have testified before Congress and organized letter-writing campaigns, filmmakers have documented what will be lost if drilling is allowed, and grassroots activists have done everything in their power to raise awareness about the importance of protecting the Arctic Refuge from corporate greed and destruction. There have been periods of moderate success–the very creation of the 19.6 million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 1980 was a partial win–and much longer periods of uncertainty and renewed threat. Many of the conservationists who’ve defended the Arctic heralded it as the “last great wilderness,” an ecosystem and landscape unmarred by corporate greed and violence, a place that needs to be preserved because of its “pristine” and “untouched” beauty. While well-intentioned, this narrative is, of course, problematic, because the absence of white settler colonial development is not the same thing as “pristine” or “untouched.” Entire communities of people call the arctic home. The Gwich’in and Inuit nations live on and have stewarded the northernmost reaches of this continent for some 24,000 years. At every imperialist and capitalist effort to destroy those lands with their greed, the Gwich’in and (some) Inuit have shown up to protest, testify, and speak out against those violences.

Gwich’in, Food Sovereignty, and Environmental Justice in the Arctic Coastal Plain

Researched and written by Averill Earls, PhD

Recorded and produced by Averill Earls and Sarah Handley-Cousins, PhD

Averill: Since the 1970s, oil and gas companies have been trying to stick their drills in the Arctic coastal plain. Resistance has been persistent and multi-faceted. Environmental conservationist organizations like Sierra Club have testified before Congress and organized letter-writing campaigns, filmmakers have documented what will be lost if drilling is allowed, and grassroots activists have done everything in their power to raise awareness about the importance of protecting the Arctic Refuge from corporate greed and destruction. There have been periods of moderate success–the very creation of the 19.6 million acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 1980 was a partial win–and much longer periods of uncertainty and renewed threat.

Sarah: (To absolutely no one’s surprise, the periods in which the federal government attempted to push for drilling and pipeline construction were in the eight years of Reagan’s presidency, both Bush presidencies, every time Republicans controlled one of the Congressional bodies, and of course, most recently, in the first and second terms of Trump. It’s not exclusively Republicans, of course. We all know there were Democrats on that island too. And there have been Republicans who’ve listened to the Gwich’in and constituents and reason and science, like Maryland Rep Wayne Gilchrest.^[1] But the moments when the ANWR has been closest to being drilled, like right now, have been spearheaded by Republicans. It’s so stupid and tired and predictable.)

Averill: Many of the conservationists who’ve defended the Arctic heralded it as the “last great wilderness,” an ecosystem and landscape unmarred by corporate greed and violence, a place that needs to be preserved because of its “pristine” and “untouched” beauty. While well-intentioned, this narrative is, of course, problematic, because the absence of white settler colonial development is not the same thing as “pristine” or “untouched.” Entire communities of people call the arctic home. The Gwich’in and Inuit nations live on and have stewarded the northernmost reaches of this continent for some 24,000 years. At every imperialist and capitalist effort to destroy those lands with their greed, the Gwich’in and (some) Inuit have shown up to protest, testify, and speak out against those violences.

I’m Averill Earls

And I’m Sarah Handley-Cousins

And we are your historians for this episode of Dig

Sarah: We are so thankful for all of our Patreon supporters – especially our Auger and Excavator level patrons: Alissa, Maria, Colin, Denise, Edward, Jessy, Judy, Karen, Lauren, Lisa, Megan, Susan, and Ben! Welcome and thank you to our newest excavator, Joseph! We can’t thank you enough. Listener, if you enjoy what we do here but aren’t yet a patron of this show, it’s easy: just go to patreon.com/digpodcast to learn more.

Averill: As always we want to acknowledge that the work we do here on the podcast rests on the shoulders of other historians. Somewhat unusually for me, this episode is based almost entirely on the work of one author – Finis Dunway, author of Defending the Arctic Refuge. Dunway tells a history of the arctic refuge and the activists who’ve fought to protect it for the last 50 years through the life and work of Lenny Kohm, the co-creator of The Last Great Wilderness slideshow. In a fabulous bit of public-facing scholarship, Dunway also created a website that includes a mini archive of materials from his research, including the writings of Gwich’in activists, a digitization of the Last Great Wilderness slideshow, government reports, and so much more. I highly recommend you read his book, and check out the website. What we’ll cover today is just the tip of the iceberg, and more importantly, this is a living history: the Gwich’in and Inuit are still living in those northernmost climes, and they and the conservationists are still fighting to protect the Arctic Refuge – a renewed effort, since Trump’s retinue wasted no time in 2025 pushing both Executive Orders and legislation to sell off the lands of the ANWR to the highest bidder. I will also just pause to note that Dunway’s book uses Lenny Kohm as the center of his narrative. I feel kind of weird about this, because I wonder if maybe the book replicates some of the problematic behavior that Dunway points out in his book. That’s not to say that Dunway ignores the Gwich’in by any means. He interviewed and visited and lifted up–like Lenny–dozens of Gwich’in community members and spokespeople. Often the Gwich’in he spoke to said that without Lenny Kohm, the Arctic coastal plain would already be a desolate oil field. And maybe that’s true. But I wonder if in telling a compelling story about this eccentric, passionate photographer turned grassroots organizer (who died just before Dunway started researching the book), I wonder if Dunway has done exactly what Kohm worked so hard to undo. He put the white man at the center of the story, and made the Gwich’in characters in Kohm’s Arctic refuge story. My hope today is to use Dunway’s book to reframe this, and attempt to center the Gwich’in perspective instead. As background, so that you know what you’ll get more of when you read Dunway’s book: in 1987, Lenny Kohm, co-founder of the Sonoma Coalition for the Arctic Refuge, created a multi-media slideshow with the aim of educating American communities about the Arctic Refuge. He drove around the country for over 20 years, thousands of miles, almost always with at least one Gwich’in spokesperson, to bring The Last Great Wilderness (the slideshow) and the story of the Gwich’in to the towns and cities whose voters could sway the fight to protect the ANWR. For today, I want to focus on that Gwich’in story.

Sarah: According to the Gwich’in Tribal Council Department of Cultural Heritage, the Gwich’in are “one of the most northerly Indigenous peoples on the North American continent, living at the northwestern limits of the boreal forest. Only the Inuit live further north. [They]… are part of a larger family of Indigenous people known as Athapaskans, which include peoples such as the Slavey, Dogrib, Han and Tutchone but our language and way of life is distinct. At the time of contact with Euro-Canadians, [they]… lived in nine different bands with lands stretching from the interior of Alaska through the Yukon and into the Mackenzie Valley. [They]… still maintain close cultural and family ties with our Gwich’in relatives living in 15 communities in Alaska, Yukon, and Northwest Territories. Traditionally, [their] lands extended from the mountain headwaters of the Peel and Arctic Red Rivers in the south, to the Mackenzie Delta in the north, from the Anderson River in the east, to the Richardson Mountains in the west. The Gwich’in life and culture have traditionally been based on the Porcupine Caribou herd, the people’s main source of food, tools, and clothing. Fish and other animals supplement their diet. The Gwich’in practiced a nomadic lifestyle until the 1870’s, when fur traders came into the area to establish forts and trading posts that later became settlements. Many families still maintain summer and winter camps outside our communities. Hunting, fishing and trapping remain important both culturally and economically, with caribou, moose and whitefish being staples of our diet.”

Averill: For the Gwich’in, protecting the Arctic coastal plain is central to the very concept of what it means to be Gwich’in. In their creation story, first there were only animals, and eventually humans arose from the animals. The Gwich’in came from the caribou, and each – Gwich’in and caribou – carries a piece of the other’s heart. For at least 24,000 years (per archaeological data), humans have lived alongside the caribou herds of “Iizhik Gwat’san Gwandaii Goodlit,” or “the Sacred Place Where Life Begins.^[2] Luci Beach, a Gwich’in leader, said in 2000: “When we are asked where do the Gwich’in come from, our answer is simple: ‘Here.’ … We have always been here, and ‘always’ to us means we have always lived with the caribou—our culture arose from our coexistence with the caribou and our strength as a Nation lies in our continuing reliance on caribou.”^[3]

Sarah: Caribou is essential to Gwich’in life in the arctic. As Peter Kay, a Gwich’in elder born in 1915, recalled, “All of my life I provided for my family through hunting for caribou, trapping and living out on the land. I was not employed anywhere. I only work out on the land. For many years there was no job for anyone to have in the communities. The only work we knew was out on the land and that’s what we did. Every year I used to trap. Most of the time I would go up the Peel River. I also trapped in other parts of the country. I hunted for caribou and also for moose. I sold the pelts that I trapped to the Hudson’s Bay trading stores. Then I got the supplies that we needed.” Kay did not lament the lack of “jobs,” because the way of life his parents taught him made them, in his estimation, “rich.” He and his wife Mary Vittrekwa passed those traditions on to their thirteen children. And the community that he cared for as a young man in turn cared for him when he was too old to hunt or fish anymore. “Today I’m too old to work yet somebody is always bringing me fresh meat. Someone brings me some thing good, our traditional food to eat for my family to enjoy like dryfish, drymeat or fish. So my father and my step-mother taught me everything I need to know; to be good to other people and to try and do my best all the time.” Similarly, elder Mary Kendi remembered her mother making tons of dryfish. They’d build a stage with long poles propped on trees, and lay out lines of fish to dry out. They’d fill up gunny sacks with the dried fish, and they’d eat it on caribou hunts up the mountain.

Averill: Finis Dunway spends a good amount of time in Defending the Arctic Refuge relaying how essential caribou is to Gwich’in communities. He discusses the archaeological evidence of the remnants of caribou fences that can be found on the outskirts of modern-day Gwich’in villages. These were “elaborate structures designed to corral and harvest migrating caribou,” which have since largely fallen out of use because of the efficiency of firearms and new hunting techniques. Gwich’in children are still taught how to make the fences, cutting and hauling spruce logs, lashing them together with bark and hide, and making snares out of caribou skin rope.^[4] The traces of these traditional harvesting methods speak to a time when the Gwich’in were nomadic, following the herds. At the same time, the very materials used in fence construction and in many parts of Gwich’in life today – multi-use of caribou hide, from rope to sleeping mats to clothing – is a reminder that harvesting isn’t just about collecting a food source. It’s a staple resource for life and culture in the arctic. One of the images included in the Last Great Wilderness slideshow is of a group of Gwich’in wearing caribou skin clothing, including a child who holds a hand-drawn sign that urges,“Save Our Caribou.”^[5]

A Gwich’in family in 1899 | Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

Sarah: Over the last two hundred years, settler colonialism has imposed changes on life in the arctic for the Gwich’in and Inuit peoples. Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, Gwich’in and Inuit children were kidnapped and forced into Residential Boarding schools by both Canadian and American entities (government or religious) with a goal of “assimilating” them to white settler culture, language, and ways of life. In Inuvik, children were taken to Grollier Hall and Stringer Hall, named respectively after a Catholic missionary, Father P. Grollier, and an Anglican missionary, Isaac Stringer. At Stringer Hall, the school administrators eliminated traditional foods from the children’s diets. According to a Canadian truth and reconciliation report, “By the end of the first decade of operation, the diets were almost completely southern in nature. In 1970 this was a typical daily menu at Stringer Hall:

Breakfast puffed wheat, toast, jam, milk
Lunch grilled cheese sandwiches, canned tomatoes, plums, milk
Dinner roast beef, gravy, mashed potatoes, peas, ice cream, cookies (homemade), milk.”

Traditional foods were reintroduced again in the 1990s–mostly caribou, reindeer, and fish–but decades of stolen children were forced to subsist on settler foods. During a measles epidemic in the 1960s, one little boy was confined to the infirmary, and the nurse brought in an Inuit woman who spoke his language. He begged for a bit of caribou meat. There was none on the premises, but the translator, Mrs. Annie Anderson, found him a bit of frozen reindeer meat. He sucked on it, and according to one observer, “this was the turning point on the road to recovery. Just a little

taste of ‘home’ from one of his own, who knew and understood.”

Averill: Today, the Gwich’in’s relationship with and access to the life-sustaining caribou is under threat. Since the 1960s, when oil was first drilled off the coast of the coastal plain at Prudhoe Bay, oil and gas companies have been lobbying the US and Canadian governments to build giant pipelines through the caribou migration territories, and to drill into the earth where the caribou calve. If they are permitted to do so, the results will be ecologically disastrous for the caribou and the other wildlife of the Arctic coastal plain — and it will be disastrous for the food sovereignty of the Gwich’in who rely on the caribou to sustain themselves. The significance of caribou to the Gwich’in, and the negative impact that drilling and development would have on the caribou herds of North America, are not unknown to the governments of the US and Canada. Both have conducted numerous environmental, sociological, and cultural impact studies.

Sarah: In 1974, the first PM Trudeau (Pierre, father of Canada’s prettiest PM Justin) appointed Justice Thomas Berger to conduct an impact inquiry for the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry – a transcontinental pipeline that would stretch from Prudhoe Bay to Alberta, which would funnel natural gas to southern markets. Unlike most representatives of the settler colonial state, Berger took his job seriously, and went on a listening tour of “35 communities – from Sachs Harbour to Fort Smith, from Old Crow to Fort Franklin – to every city and town, village and settlement in

the Mackenzie Valley and the Western Arctic,” where he took testimony from over 1,000 people. Berger’s approach was surprising to the people he heard from. They were used to tricks and violence from the white settlers. As one Dene man said, “This is is the first time in the history of my people that an important person from your nation has come to listen and learn from us, and not just come to tell us what we should do, or trick us into saying yes to something that, in the end, is not good for us.”^[6] Berger’s resulting report in 1977, Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland “drew extensively on Indigenous testimony to argue that Canadian and American settlers needed to look beyond frontier mythology and listen to the people of Old Crow and other Arctic communities.”^[7]

Averill: Berger’s listening sessions, and the unabashed report he wrote, were essential to Canadian policy regarding the Arctic Refuge in the next several decades. His listening mattered – not just to policy makers, but to the people he listened to. “I remember sitting there,” Lorraine Netro told Dunway in 2017, “listening to our elders talk about the impacts and effects that such a pipeline would have on us as a people, on our lands, on our animals. And I remember feeling really scared. I listened to our elders speak in our language, and they were very strong about what they shared. And they wanted their voice to be heard. They wanted the decision to be based on their traditional knowledge that they were sharing with the people who were there.” During a break, she left the school building, where the hearing was being held, and went for a walk. “I sat outside and I really thought about what our elders say. And I wanted to speak, but I was afraid. I never spoke up in public before. And yet, I really wanted my voice to be heard as a young person. It scared me that the elders were concerned about the young people of the day, because that included me. What would that development mean for us in the future? And so I tried to muster up as much courage, and I walked back down. I decided I needed to talk and I needed to share my voice. So I did.”

Sarah: Berger was quite taken with Lorraine’s testimony and included an excerpt in his final report. “The young people, my generation now,” she said, “will need this land for our future, and also for the future of our children… If the pipeline goes through, what will become of our future?… All that they could do is remember how beautiful and rich this land used to be. I do not want to see this happen to our land, and to our people.”^[8]

Averill: Twenty-four thousand years of survival, of adaptation in one of the harshest climates on the planet, of careful harvesting of caribou, of gathering berries in the short summer, of hunting moose and muskrat, catching salmon and whitefish, of respecting the land and its gifts even when incorporating new technologies into their practices; unlike the white settlers who hunted the American buffalo to extinction, the Gwich’in have maintained the caribou fastidiously for thousands and thousands of years. And the colonizers who drew lines on a map and decided this land was theirs now, who kidnapped their children and tried to beat the Gwich’in out of them in residential schools, who’ve built (or attempted to build) extractive and destructive infrastructure for decades despite persistent Gwich’in resistance, now want to visit one final, killing blow, just to extract whatever finite fossil fuel is beneath those lands.

Sarah: It’s coming to a potentially un-reversible head now in the second Trump term. But of course it didn’t start with Trump. For most of the imperialist encroachments in the arctic, however, settlers were not particularly interested in living in or adapting to the harsh environment. That was, of course, until American dependence on fossil fuels sent every capitalist pig out sniffing for possible oil wells. In 1968, the Atlantic Richfield Company, or ARCO, “discovered” oil off of Prudhoe Bay. ARCO, British Petroleum, and other companies immediately pushed for the construction of a pipeline system. That pipeline was approved by Congress in 1973. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System took 3 years to build, running 800 miles from Prudhoe to Valdez on Prince William Sound, and it decimated every eco system it touched along those 800 miles.

Averill: The evidence of the destruction would, under Reagan and then the Bushes, be suppressed. Fortunately there have been some modest impediments standing in the way of the drills. The twentieth-century brought on global dependence on oil, but it also ushered in a robust “conservationist” movement among the privileged white settlers who wanted to see places like Alaska and the arctic circle preserved for white man to get away from the suffocating realities of concrete jungles, decimated ecosystems, and golf courses in the desert. The vast territory that the United States purchased (without input from the indigenous peoples living there) from Russia in the 19th century was, according to those conservationists, the last great wilderness – and deserved protection.

Sarah: The idea for a federally-protected Arctic Refuge (as a US and Canadian international park) was first proposed by George L. Collins and Lowell Sumner in a Sierra Club Bulletin in 1953.^[9] They framed it as preserving a “sample of the frontier”–a colonial vision of the place and its resources. Similarly, three years later, Olaus and Mardy Krear produced a short documentary, Letter from the Brooks Range, which captures the natural beauty of the arctic along the Sheenjek River, with home footage of everything nonhuman there was to see.^[10] Olaus turned his photos of the region into a traveling slideshow, which he took with him all around Alaska, trying to convince everyone–women’s clubs and Rotary Clubs, conservation groups and Chambers of Commerce–that the “last great wilderness” needed legislative protection.

Averill: This makes me think of that AMAZING 1990s movie starring Devon Sawa, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, and some guy named Scott Bairstow who I didn’t remember until I looked the movie up for this episode. It is, of course, based on the lives of the three Stouffer brothers, who went on to found the PBS documentary series Wild America. I vividly remember a scene from this movie, which I watched about a thousand times because I was obsessed with Devon Sawa, in which they get home from this crazy adventure in Alaska they had trying to film wildlife, and they cut it together, and then they screen it for their community in the school gym. This is what I imagined when I first started reading Dunway’s book – this kind of amateur, dramatic series of stills with music and a voice over, screened for a bunch of random community members in a middle America small town.

Sarah: The wilderness advocates were ultimately successful in 1960. The House of Representative passed a bill to make the arctic refuge, but then the Senator from Alaska–who saw federal intervention as an overreach into his and other (white) Alaskans’ “right” to exploit the land and its resources–held it up in committees so it never reached the floor. Then Secretary of the Interior Fred Seaton issued an executive order to establish the 8.9-million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Range “for the purpose of preserving unique wildlife, wilderness and recreation values.”^[11] It was only 8.4 million acres – just a fraction of the land in the arctic circle, and an even smaller percentage of the state that became Alaska in 1959 – but it was better than nothing. For the wilderness advocates, it was a temporary success. An executive order could be rescinded by a successive president.

Averill: In 1964, the Wilderness Act created a formal legal definition for wilderness, and what it meant – specifically, that it was “untrampled by man,” who would only ever just be a visitor. Alaskan conservationist clubs and individuals in the 1960s wanted to see the Alaskan arctic designated a formal wilderness, and campaigned in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The battle was hard fought — oil companies discovered oil fields barely 100 miles away, and were hungry for more.^[12]

Sarah: But in 1976 pro-conservation and American angel Jimmy Carter was president, and the Alaskan wilderness advocates threw their weight behind HR 39, which called for “the Arctic Range to be doubled in size and for the full area, including the critical habitat of the coastal plain, to be protected as wilderness.”^[13] Led by wildlife/wilderness photographer Wilbur Mills and various Sierra Club members and Mountaineers, the grassroots conservationists put together yet another traveling slideshow to convince both the lawmakers on Capitol Hill and their voters of the importance of preserving the Alaskan wilderness.

Averill: If you’ll indulge our return for a moment to that iconic piece of 1990s film, Wild America, we should pause to say that the traveling slideshow – The Last Great Wilderness – was not like the campy little show that the teen heartthrobs of our youth put on for their community in Wild America. While Marty Stouffer’s popular documentary series, which ran from the late 1980s through the early 1990s, was his way of promoting conservation, his approach was similar to that of the Krears, Collins, Sumner, or Mills: they were what Dunway calls “Wilderness advocates [who] engaged in frontier fantasy”. For them, “the protection of wild places meant far more than that…they also hailed Arctic Alaska as a critical habitat for wildlife species and embraced the intangible values of wildness in an increasingly mechanized, industrialized world.”^[14] But the Stouffers didn’t consult the people who actually lived in and stewarded arctic North America, like the Gwich’in and Inuit. The obsession with preserving landscapes and wildlife as “untouched” perpetuates the mythology that fueled settler colonialism in the 1400s, 1800s, and today. These lands are not untouched, or uninhabited, or just postcards with static mountains and grazing caribou. They are homelands and traditional nomadic territories.

Sarah: Miraculously, HR 39 finally passed in 1980, though it looked very different from the expansive version originally proposed in the House. Still, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) “protected more than 100 million acres of the state’s public lands as national parks, forests, and wildlife refuges, including more than 50 million acres designated as wilderness.”^[15] With Ronald Reagan taking office just a few months later, it was the very best the conservationists (and Carter) could get with the oil lobby hammering them from the other side. Unfortunately, “ANILCA identified the 1.5-million-acre coastal plain as a special study area and authorized the Department of the Interior to conduct biological and geological assessments of the region. A future Congress would have the power to decide whether the Arctic coastal plain would receive wilderness status or be opened to fossil fuel development. Section 10-0-2 set in motion the long battle that has ensued ever since.”^[16]

Averill: Unsurprisingly (because fuck him) under the presidency of Ronald Regan, the 1980s brought renewed threat to the preservation of the Arctic Refuge, even in its diminished final 1980 form. Gwich’in representatives like Glenna Frost, Lorraine Netro, Bobbie Jo Greenland, and Luci Beach took turns traveling around the lower 48 with Lenny Kohm and the Last Great Wilderness slideshow, seeking legislative protection for the Arctic Refuge from resource extraction, though they approached their advocacy from a very different place. As Finis Dunaway put it, “Instead of trying to salvage a “sample of the pioneer frontier,” a central myth of settler colonialism, Lenny and Gwich’in spokespeople framed refuge protection in terms of Indigenous cultural survival.”^[17] On the Last Great Wilderness slideshow tour, Gwich’in speakers tried to convince Americans in towns and cities all over the United States to resist the sale of the Arctic Refuge to greedy oil companies. Frost, Netro, Greenland, Beach, and over fifty other delegates from the Gwich’in shared stories from their own lives and histories, and made the threat to the arctic a human rights issue.

Sarah: Throughout the Reagan and Bush eras, the White House issued gag orders on federally-employed scientists to suppress the damning evidence of the environmental impact of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Lest we not forget, too, Bush ran as the “environmental president”–claiming, however, that drilling was fine for the environment (despite mountains of evidence to the contrary).^[18] The 1002 (ten-oh-two)–the Arctic Coastal Plain–was not included in the permanent preservation project of the rest of the 1980 legislation. It was left up to a future Congress to decide, after further study and data analysis, if or how the coastal plain could be developed. One such study by the Interior Department concluded in 1986. The initial report, in draft form, conclusively demonstrated that drilling would result in “‘a major population decline’ in the Porcupine herd…and major displacements of snow geese, musk ox, and other wildlife populations.”^[19] But the scientific evidence contravened the goal of the Reagan administration–namely, to lease those lands to the hungry oil and gas companies for drilling and another pipeline construction. So, by order of the administration, those warnings were scrubbed from the report before it got to Congress.

Averill: The report based its findings on studies of the impact of the Trans-Alaska pipeline, which was built over a decade earlier. The damage of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was “damning:” there was “twice as much wildlife habitat lost as expected; major declines in most bird species and mammal populations; and severe damage to marine and freshwater quality caused by erosion, oil spills, and the sprawling expansion of production facilities.”^[20] Over 200 million gallons of water per year were being drained from local lakes and river, even though the studies before the Trans-Alaska project began predicted that the fresh water would not be impacted. Thee agency’s field staffers concluded, “Fish and wildlife habitat losses resulting from the construction of the pipeline system and Prudhoe Bay oil fields were greatly underestimated in the environmental impact statement.”^[21] The evidence from the Prudhoe drilling and Trans-Alaskan Pipeline made it crystal clear that doing the same in the 1002 would decimate the ecosystem. And because the evidence was so damning, the Reagan administration effectively redacted the data to “downplay the dangers of development and urged Congress to open up the entire coastal plain.”^[22] When it was clear that Congress would never see the true extent of the environmental damage – or the full report – one of the scientists leaked it to the New York Times.

Sarah: As the suppressed scientific evidence came to light, Canadian Justice Thomas Berger called out the greed and shortsightedness of the US government: “Today the administration of President Ronald Reagan wants to open up the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife [Refuge] to oil and gas drilling activity. This is lunacy; it threatens the future of [the caribou herd]. For what? To provide what is in the long run a trivial volume of oil … to grease the North American industrial machine.”^[23]

Averill: In 1988, the Gwich’in created a Steering Committee “in response to proposals to drill for oil in the Sacred Place Where Life Begins, the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.” Norma Kassi, Glenna Frost, Lorraine Netro, Bobbie Jo Greenland, and Luci Beach were among the spokespeople sent by the Steering Committee to speak on behalf of the Gwich’in nation. They joined the grassroots activists like the Sonoma Coalition and Lenny Kohm, traveling thousands of miles from home to speak directly to audiences in gyms and auditoriums, from California to Michigan to Florida. But they also traveled to Washington DC to testify before Congress, and to the Alaska legislature to advocate at the state level. Luci Beach, for example, spoke in her capacity as Executive Director of the Steering Committee before the US Senate in 2000.^[24] It was essential that these individuals, sent by a larger committee that was convened by the broader Gwich’in Nation, speak both for themselves and their communities. Theirs was and always has been an uphill battle–in part because theirs isn’t the only indigenous perspective on what to do with the ANWR and 1002.

Sarah: Brenda Itta-Lee, an Iñupiaq and Alaskan politician, represented a different perspective on drilling in the Arctic. When speaking to Congress in 2000, she said “I appear today as a member of the board of directors of the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation…and I am sitting here representing 7500 Iñupiat Eskimos who live in the region everyone is talking about today… We are the ones that live there.”^[25] The Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, or ASRC, is one of 13 Alaska Native Regional Corporations created under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971 in settlement of aboriginal land claims. ASRC was incorporated in Alaska on June 22, 1972. As of 2017, ASCR was a for-profit corporation with nearly 11,000 Alaska Native shareholders primarily of Inuit descent. Itta-Lee was known for co-sponsoring the bill that created the Alaska Permanent Fund, which annually provides financial dividends to residents of the state of Alaska, funded by oil and mining revenues. From her perspective–and those she represented–financial stability was worth the environmental impact on the land and the other peoples living there.

Averill: More recently the President and CEO of the VOICE (Voice of the Arctic Inupiat), Nagruk Harcharek, echoed Itta-Lee’s insistence that leasing lands to the oil and gas companies would bring in essential revenue for the Inuit communities, who relied on taxing those corporations. For VOICE, Itta-Lee, and Harcharek, the traditional homelands of the Inuit were already stolen by the US and Canadian governments. In September 2025, Harcharek praised Trump’s government for rolling back the stopgaps that Biden put into place. For the communities that Harcharek represents, whaling is the subsistence practice upon which they rely. VOICE and Harcharek represent eight communities along Alaska’s North Slope. Drilling and pipeline construction, which largely impacts land species and ecosystems, will not negatively impact the North Slope Iñupiat communities. That it will effectively destroy the Gwich’in’s livelihood, culture, and subsistence harvesting practices doesn’t figure into Harcharek’s September written testimony for Congress. Harcharek claims (contrary to the scientific impact studies and the assertions of the Gwich’in) that caribou harvesters and pipeline development can coexist. Since Trump announced in fall 2025 that the US would start leasing the 1002 region of ANWR, scientists and Gwich’in have lodged their protests, while member communities of the North Slope Inuit have been celebrating, anticipating a new stream of oil and gas taxation revenue into their communities. Unsurprisingly, Republicans and pro-drilling politicians have paraded out Iñupiaq like Itta-Lee and Harcharek for decades as proof that they are “listening” to the indigenous communities of the region.

Sarah: (Just to sprinkle a little complexity into this, Brenda Itta-Lee was not like some pro-imperialist stooge. She was the second of eleven children raised in a traditional Iñupiat home, and spoke Iñupiat until she went to school – where she was shamed into speaking English by the teachers and students. She moved to Washington DC in the 1960s intent on being an advocate for her people. In 1971, the Atlantic Richfield Company – the same company that struck oil in Prudhoe Bay – hired her to do community relations work. After serving in the Alaska legislature, she was the first Iñupiaq woman elected to the US House of Representatives. And through all of that she worked on Native land claim settlements, was a leader in the Native rights movement, and a women’s rights advocate. But she believed that money, and the infrastructure that money bought, was the best that the Inupiat could expect of the settler colonial world. She wanted to lift up her community through education, a basic universal income (through the Alaska Permanent Fund), and a blended standard of living that maintains subsistence whaling with modern conveniences. Dunway mentions Itta-Lee in one sentence, perhaps dismissing this perspective’s legitimacy out of hand because it so fundamentally dismisses the legitimacy of the Gwich’in perspective. But I also get it. I get wanting better for my community. I get what it’s like to live in a racist capitalist nightmare; if you try to fight it, you could starve or drown in medical debt or die. The US and Canadian governments have stolen so much from the Inupiat and Gwich’in. For the Gwich’in, being able to protect the caribou and preserve their way of life is their way of taking back some of that control. For the Inupiat, benefitting from the existing system, having a say in the exploitation of their ancestral homelands, is their way of taking back some control. And that’s fucking complicated.)

Averill: As you can imagine, pro-oil politicians loved hearing from Itta-Lee and currently love to hear from Harcharek. But not all those who might seem pre-disposed to that political position – exploitation and extraction over conservation – were unmoved by the Gwich’in stories. In 1991, Glenna Frost, accompanied by Lenny Kohm and three white environmental staffers, met with Maryland Republican and House Representative Wayne Gilchrest. After the Sierra Club conservationists gave their spiel, Gilchrest responded: “‘Well, you’re definitely passionate, and it’s definitely a very compelling argument, but just last week there were two [Iñupiat] women here who also gave very compelling and passionate pleas [in favor of] drilling.” Gilchrest looked at Glenna and said, “‘So I am curious if those women were sitting here right now, what would you ask them?’”^[26]

Sarah: Today, Glenna Tetchli Frost is part of the Education department of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation. She’s a talented skier, and one of seven children. In 1991, the Steering Committee sent her on the Last Great Wilderness slideshow tour, and then to Capitol Hill. She’d been on the road for weeks, talking to people about why protecting the ANWR was important to her people. But Gilchrest asked her to offer insight into how to question the Iñupiat perspective, which so obviously aligned with the oil/gas lobby and the politicians in the oil/gas pocket. It took her some time to gather her thoughts, but then, according to Lenny Kohm, Glenna said, “Well, what will she say to her grandchildren or her great-grandchildren when they come to her someday and say, ‘Grandma, who are we? What happened to our land and animals? Who are we?’ What would she say to them?” Gilchrest was visibly moved. After an intense silence, he looked directly at Glenna and said, “‘As long as I am in this Congress, I won’t let anything happen to where you live or the people you love.’”^[27]

Averill: In an interview with Finis Dunway, Glenna Frost recalled that “We hugged for a while…He had tears. Everyone in the room had tears.” She left the office building and went outside. “I honestly felt like I was walking on air… I just wanted to go somewhere and be alone and just connect to the earth. But everything is concrete, right, so that was hard. I just wanted that connection.”^[28]

Sarah: Like Frost, Norma Kassi dedicated her life to advocating for her people and the Porcupine River caribou herd. She was selected by the Elders of the Gwich’in Nation to act as a spokesperson on behalf of the Gwich’in people for the preservation of the Porcupine Caribou Herd. In 1991, when Glenna Frost was convincing Gilchrest to join the fight for the Gwich’in and ANWR, Kassi was awarded the National Wildlife Federation’s Conservation and Achievement Award. Four years later, Norma Kassi was the designated Gwich’in speaker for the Last Great Wilderness slideshow. Rather than speak for her, we’re going to play you a brief clip of Kassi speaking to an auditorium on the 1995 Last Great Wilderness tour. We will edit it down to keep it shorter, but you can find a link to the full talk (about 15 minutes) on our blog, digpodcast.org

A male porcupine caribou in Alaska | Public Domain / Wikimedia Commons

EXCERPT FROM THE 1995 TOUR

Norma Kassi: Every time I have a look at this slide show that we just seen, I become very heavy in my heart, because a lot of the old people, the elders that you see in there, have gone on already, and we’ve taken those pictures just a few years ago… I’ve been taught many important values and traditions of my people, and some of it I’ll share with you today. …

(7:50ish) I’d like to show you what we use from the caribou. You can’t wear these things down here. It’s too hot for us. This is a beautiful vest made of caribou hides and years ago, the beautiful floral designs are flowers that grow in the Arctic, and we put on to our hides and our clothing for ceremonial purposes and wear for special times. And before that, caribou clothing were made all the time. And that’s a traditional vest made of caribou hide. These are called crow boots. They’re beautiful moccasins that were made especially for Vincent so that he will be strong when carrying his messages to people such as yourself. These are little moccasins that we wear in the wintertime and for our children. And it’s made of caribou hide and Canvas from trade items that came out to our people initially. These are called Kai Chan, which means moccasins that are made from the caribou Lake skins. And this is what we wear in the cold winter time in the Arctic. This is what we make our hides with. These were used to be made of stone until we were introduced to metal or bone that are made from caribou bones to scrape into tan or hides to make it beautiful, like you seen there on the mosquitoes in the mess. This is the rope that we used to use, and we still do today, that’s made from the skins of the caribou. These are small pair of snow shoes for small people, for young people that we make. And this is made from caribou skin. And this is spruce from our lands. And our people make these so that we can travel far on and wide on the snow. And these are caribou corns that are. That were particularly blessed in a sweat lodge, so that they can bring power for Vincent when he travels. We have to make a lot of games amongst our culture, and this is also connected to the caribou. What you have to do with this is you have to get these two buttons onto the side, and that shows tremendous skill and patience. Peel off one at a time, and we make thread with it, and that’s how we sew our clothes. And our people have given their lives for the survival of others. When we squish out a spider crawling across our kitchen floor, we experience consequences. We may experience consequences of change in weather. We may experience consequences that are even stronger than that. If we mistreated animals that are powerful and that are our kin, we’ve experienced grave consequences amongst our nations. These are people who have disobeyed the natural laws. I’ve heard stories from down here that one time the forests were so vast that squirrels could travel across the continent from the east to the west of the United States on top of the trees without touching the ground. Isn’t that amazing? And those are stories that are told by the Utes and the Cheyenne and the Shoshone people. We live in the Arctic, where all the geese and the Ducks of every species migrate from the lower US and come up to our lands to bear their young, as you’ve seen in this life. I remember times when they would return. Times of so much joy. Our land would just become alive and the skies would just darken with birds. We tried to sing their songs, our people sing their songs. …

(12:36) There were massive herds of buffalo that we need to remember that roamed in this land here, as do the caribou in the Arctic. The fish were so abundant, the streams were so full. But down here, in my lifetime, they did end and with it went many indigenous cultures, not only on this continent, but all over the world. Our people are dying fast as our resources and our food sources, our medicine plants, diminish, so do our people. We have the highest rates of cancer and diabetes amongst our nations, and as we heard yesterday, suicides. Yet man continues to dominate and feels the need to dominate where he couldn’t dominate. He destroyed to points of total depletion of animal life, fish life and human life, and so the lessons we should learn continue. We’re not asking for pity, nor are we asking for patriotism. We seek understanding and acceptance for our knowledge of what we can share, we need to be listened to. We need to be partners in all decision making for our future, because they will never get rid of us. We’ll always be here.

Averill: Like the elders interviewed by the Gwich’in culture and heritage office, Norma Kassi taught audiences around the world about her peoples’ relationship with the caribou. She reminds us that the threat to her people, to the Porcupine Herd, is a threat that has been realized elsewhere in the world. Kassi brought every day items from her community to demonstrate how reliant they are on subsistence caribou harvesting. Without a doubt, though, it was never the props or even the history lessons that moved people. The Last Great Wilderness slideshow is a multimedia experience that draws viewers in. You can watch a facsimile of it on Dunway’s website. Music, narration, beautiful photographs – often centering Gwich’in people and their way of life – told a story, presented scientific information (including the stuff the Reagan administration tried to suppress), and offered glimpses – in the form of static photographs – of Gwich’in life. But it was always people like Norma Kassi, Glenna Frost, and Luci Beach who made the story of the slideshow matter. Every time a Gwich’in spokesperson from the Steering Committee stood before one of these audiences, they made the reality of who would be harmed if the rich assholes from ARCO and other oil companies were allowed to drill and develop the 1002.

Sarah: When Luci Beach, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, spoke during the slideshow program in Grand Rapids, Michigan in 2004, one local organizer noted that her participation “added a perspective that I think most Americans need to hear. She was able to communicate the relationship that the native Gwich’in and Iñupiat people have with their natural environment.”^[29]

Averill: Every two years the Gwich’in gather to “reaffirm their commitment to protect the coastal plain from drilling.” Bernadette Dementieff, who served as Executive Director of the Steering Committee until the early 2020s, described the 2016 gathering in Arctic Village as “so powerful. … We danced, we sang, it was such a good time. We were well provided for and I felt that our ancestors were sitting there with us.”

Sarah: Once again, their way of life, their homelands, and their commitment to protecting the coastal plain from drilling is under threat. The US government’s blatant disregard for both scientific fact and the human costs is what moved Lenny Kohm to work with the Gwich’in on the Last Great Wilderness traveling slideshow. Of course, Kohm was not the first well-intentioned white man to waltz into a Gwich’in village with ideas and passion. When Lorraine Netro of the Old Crow community (which numbers about 280 residents) saw the white man with a camera in her village, taking photos of things and people like he had a right to, she confronted him. She asked him who he was, what he was doing in Old Crow, and when he’d be leaving. When he told her he was Lenny Kohm, a photographer, she gave him a stern warning: ask permission before taking pictures of people in her village, especially elders.^[30] She, like so many Gwich’in, was too used to the white people who showed up and took what they wanted without permission – photographs, land, promises. When elder Hannah Netro saw that same white man, she chased him with a stick after she caught him taking a photo of her stacking wood without her permission. “Nobody knew who I was,” Lenny later admitted, “just this funny-looking guy who had three cameras around his neck. They looked at me just like I was anybody else who came to study or look at them.”^[31] According to the Gwich’in who traveled with him and the slideshow throughout the 1980s through the 2000s, he was different. He learned how to be a collaborator.

Averill: To be sure, Lenny Kohm was the wheels of the grassroots movement that brought the Last Great Wilderness to towns and cities across the US. Speaking at Kohm’s funeral, Luci Beach said “He let us be our own spokespeople…He never told us what to say.” Beach was one of those collaborators who believed that “If it wasn’t for Lenny, I really think there would be drilling in the Arctic Refuge right now.”^[32] But, Kohm knew–as Berger knew–that the people to whom these issues matter most were and are the engine of the movement to protect the Arctic Refuge. There is no vehicle without the engine. But I think what Dunway’s book shows is that the important work to protect our vulnerable ecosystems cannot be laid solely on the shoulders of the Gwich’in and Inuit. When communities are subjected to state violence, are robbed of their food sovereignty, are kidnapped from their cars, are made vulnerable by the systems that are–in an alleged democracy and free country–supposed to protect them, then we all need to stand up with them. Like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

Sarah: At the same time, standing up with those communities does not mean taking over the movement (which, as White Women Who Chronically Cannot Stop Themselves From Getting Shit Done^TM, is something we always need to check ourselves on). It’s essential to center the voices and needs of the people whom we’re standing with.

Averill: That’s, I think, what The last Great Wilderness traveling slideshow is an example of, and I think that’s what Dunway was trying to highlight with the story he wove together. When I first started reading Defending the Arctic Refuge, I was moved. It’s a story of grassroots activism, of the little guy and the marginalized rising up to meet the seemingly impenetrable wall of capitalist and imperialist greed in this country — and winning, however temporarily. I started reading the book while Operation Metro Surge was still terrorizing communities in Minnesota, while I was still getting hourly updates of ICE agents occupying the town I work in and kidnapping people. As I read, I felt galvanized, because this story seems to be one of hope and justice and possibility. I wondered, though, what this story means to the Gwich’in people.

Sarah: Dunway opens the book with members of the Gwich’in communities saying that Lenny was a bulwark in the storm. But the storm didn’t go away. Lenny died in 2014, and nothing he did permanently put a stop to the threat against the Arctic Refuge. And now here we are, with Trump pushing forward the lease of these critical caribou calving territories to the destructive forces of the oil and gas companies.

Averill: In some ways I feel like this is not that far off from the Minnesota experience, especially if you focus the narrative on the Latine and immigrant members of our community who’ve felt — and continue to feel — the fear of the US federal government. Yes, we had hundreds, thousands, of community members, many of them white, put their bodies in harm’s way to protect, defend, stand up for neighbors and strangers being bullied and kidnapped by federal agents. Those stories, those sacrifices, speak to hope, to community responsiveness, to the persistence of Minnesotans. But when the cameras turn off, then what? There are still thousands of our neighbors and community members detained, spirited across state lines, being held in prison camps hundreds or thousands of miles from their Minnesotan homes. There are still families who are behind on rent because they couldn’t leave the house, children in schools traumatized, neighborhoods that still shudder under the surveillance of helicopters and stink of tear gas. When I started writing this episode, I thought I was going to write a hopeful episode about the power of grassroots activism. But as I finish it, I am left wondering if what we did here was enough, and if what we went through will be enough to make sure it never happens to us or anyone else again. I wonder if anyone is still paying attention. I wonder when we’re going to say enough is enough. November is months away. An eternity, for the people still afraid to leave their homes, who are at risk of eviction, who’ve been fired as they sheltered in place; and for the people in prison camps without legal recourse, adequate food or medical care, or contact with their loved ones.

But like a protestor I met at the Whipple Federal building last year said, hope is not a feeling, it’s a choice. And we have many choices at our disposal. We can choose to give to mutual aid funds like the one run by Minnesota’s local sex shop, the Smitten Kitten. We can choose to donate to the ACLU and Immigrant Defense funds to provide legal aid to those being illegally detained. We can choose to change the world around us, one vote at a time.

Sarah: Thank you for joining us today. As always, we invite you to follow us on BlueSky and Instagram at dig_history. If you have a comment or question or want to share some kind words with us, you can always email us at hello@digpodcast.org – we love listener mail! If you’re an educator, we’ve got a compendium of episodes you can use in the classroom – and free teaching resources, including full lesson plans! – on our website, digpodcast.org. You’ll also find full bibliographies, the scripts for all of our episodes, resources, and a link to our swag store at digpodcast.org. We’ll also include links to mutual aid funds and legal defense funds on the blog post for this episode. Thanks for listening. Choose hope.

Bibliography

“Legal Action Challenges Arctic Refuge Drilling Plan,” Center for Biological Diversity, (15 Jan 2026)

H.R.1 – An act to provide for reconciliation pursuant to titles II and V of the concurrent resolution on the budget for fiscal year 2018. Congress.gov. (2017)

Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Status of Oil and Gas Program. Congress.gov. (Updated 4 Feb 2026)

Lenny Kohm and the Last Great Wilderness Tour (1995) Part 4

The Wilderness Act (1964)

Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (1980)

“The Inuit and Northern Experience,” Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume 2 (2015)

Thomas Berger, “Northern Frontier, Northern Homeland,” THE REPORT OF THE MACKENZIE VALLEY PIPELINE INQUIRY: VOLUME ONE

Finis Dunaway, Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice (UNC Press, 2021)

Donella Meadows, “National Energy Policy,” The Donella Meadows Project (Sep 1991)

Elizabeth Manning, “Trump Administration Opens the Entire Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to Oil and Gas Leasing,” (23 Oct 2025)

Brian Palmer and Anna Greenfield, “The Long, Long Battle for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” Natural Resources Defense Council (Oct 24, 2025)

Kyle Whyte, “Indigenous Climate Change Studies : Indigenizing Futures, Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” English Language Notes, Volume 55, Number 1-2, Spring/Fall 2017, pp.

153-162

Notes

^[1] Finis Dunway, Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice (UNC Press, 2021), 150.

^[2] Finis Dunway, Defending the Arctic Refuge: A Photographer, an Indigenous Nation, and a Fight for Environmental Justice (UNC Press, 2021), 32-33.

^[3] Qtd. in Dunway, Defending the Arctic Refuge, 34.

^[4] Dunway, Defending the Arctic Refuge, 36-37.

^[5] Dunway, Defending the Arctic Refuge, 112.

^[6] Qtd. in Dunway, Defending the Arctic Refuge, 41.

^[7] Dunway, Defending the Arctic Refuge, 42.

^[8] Qtd. in Dunway, Defending the Arctic Refuge, 41-42.

^[9] Dunway, Defending the Arctic Refuge, 20.

^[10] Dunway, Defending the Arctic Refuge, 22.

^[11] Dunway, Defending the Arctic Refuge, 24.

^[12] Dunway, Defending the Arctic Refuge, 28.

^[13] Dunway, Defending the Arctic Refuge, 29.

^[14] Dunway, Defending the Arctic Refuge, 23.