Albuquerque’s final annual Gathering of Nations Pow Wow drew over 100,000 participants and attendees from tribes across the country to Expo New Mexico on April 24-25.
One of the attendees was Neets’aii Gwich’in elder Sarah James from Arctic Village, who came from Alaska for the Pow Wow. James is internationally-known for her efforts to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from oil and gas development.
She won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2002, and is among multiple Native women authors in the book “Worlds within Us: Wisdom and Resilience of Indigenous Women Elders.”
The Gwich’in peoples live in the northwestern limits of boreal forest, and are also known as Caribou people, for their ties to the Porcupine Caribou, native to the area and one of the people’s sources of food, tools and clothing.
“I grew up protecting the caribou because that’s who I am, caribou people, and that’s the food on our table, and that’s our way of life, so it’s a human right to us,” James said, pointing to a map of the caribou’s breeding and migration patterns.
Recent oil and gas developments are threatening the caribou and the Gwich’in people, James said. The Bureau of Land Management plans to hold an oil and gas lease sale in Alaska’s Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge on June 5. This would be the first time commercial oil drilling would occur within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
“You have a voice there as an individual, each and every American has a right to say no to gas and oil in Coastal Plains,” James said.
James said she has seen the threat of oil and gas in the ANWR since the 1980s, when she observed drilling projects beginning without adequate consultation with local Indigenous people, and is now seeing the threat again under the Trump Administration.
The reserve is approximately the size of South Carolina, and has no roads or facilities, providing critical habitat to migratory and resident wildlife. Located on the homelands of the Iñupiat and Gwich’in peoples, it has the largest designated Wilderness within the National Wildlife Refuge System, according to theU.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
“A whole ecosystem still works here,” James said. “This is coastal plain, and there’s mountain here, along the foothills of the mountain, (predators) are birthing there too. Grizzly, eagle, wolverine, wolves, they’re raising young, while caribou (are) raising their young.”
James said she was among the elders and tribal leaders who helped create a resolution in 1988, called Gwich’in Niintsyaa, to prohibit oil development on calving and post-calving grounds of the Porcupine Caribou Herd.
James said she grew up with both a Western and traditional way of life.
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“I had to live in those two worlds since I can remember because the government said we have to go to school, so that kind of put us into village colonization,” James said.
James was a speaker at the first United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992, where she spoke in defense of the Arctic, and in her youth, was part of the 19-month occupation of Alcatraz during the start of the Red Power movement.
“If we don’t protect places like that, (future generations) will never get to see it,” James said. “This is not only for my generation, but your generation, too, down the line and unborn generations.”
Leila Chapa is the social media and photo editor for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at socialmedia@dailylobo.com or on X @lchapa06
Paloma Chapa is the multimedia editor for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at multimedia@dailylobo.com or on X @paloma_chapa88
Leila Chapa is the photo editor for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at socialmedia@dailylobo.com or on X @lchapa06
Paloma Chapa is the multimedia editor for the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at multimedia@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @paloma_chapa88
