Post by blackcrowheart on Oct 22, 2005 17:10:33 GMT -5
`Caribou People' wage last stand in the Arctic
BY PAUL SALOPEK
Chicago Tribune
THE PORCUPINE RIVER, Canada - (KRT) - Old Stephen Frost is preparing to kill a caribou.
The Gwitchin Indian elder stands in his skiff on this silver-skinned stream in Canada's vast and wild Yukon Territory. He shoulders a heavy .30-.30 rifle. And he fires twice at eight of the deer-like animals swimming the sparkling currents - Whang! Whang!
The herd is only 20 feet away. But, inexplicably, the bullets go high. The caribou scramble ashore unscathed.
Peering back at Frost with the large, frank eyes of children, the animals vanish into a maze of willow branches dense as basketry.
"Lousy luck," Frost rasps.
The 72-year-old woodsman, a weather-beaten crag of a man who likes to come across as hard-boiled, mutters excuses. He blames the rocking boat. He curses his aging, unsteady legs. But he is a bad actor.
Later, he will pass up more opportunities to kill caribou. And, forgetting his lousy luck altogether, he will shoot other game with heedless skill - plugging a beaver through the eye and blasting a duck out of the water at 40 yards.
"Them caribou ain't got much of a future," he finally admits, uneasily. "To be honest, I'm glad to see 'em get out of rifle range."
Frost is referring to the central catastrophe facing his obscure tribe of Arctic hunters: The once-mighty Porcupine caribou herd, which has been the main food source of his people since the last Ice Age, is dwindling, nobody knows exactly why. And now, controversially, the U.S. government wants to drill for oil in the caribous' calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, just across the Alaskan border.
Like many traditional Gwitchin, Frost fears that oil rigs in the refuge will deal a knockout blow to the ailing herd and herald the slow death of his tribe's 13,000-year-old subsistence culture, the last of its kind in North America.
Frost doesn't dwell on this crisis. Nor does he talk much about his wife, Ethel, who is ill with cancer. Nor, aside from a few crusty jokes, does he complain about his own creaking body, which is starting to fail him, with pains stabbing his arthritic knees and neck.
Instead, the stoic old hunter betrays his sorrows by what he withholds.
On days that follow, Frost loads two rifles and a shotgun into his boat. Tying on his greasy marten-fur cap, he stalks the waters of the Porcupine River as he has for more than 60 springs. But he doesn't take an animal. He misses. He holds his fire. He displays a forlorn quality of mercy that no subsistence hunter can afford.
---
Sometime later this month, Congress is set to decide, after almost 30 years of contentious debate, whether to allow oil exploration to proceed in ANWR, the country's premier wildlife refuge.
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita blew new life into the dispute after ripping through the nation's oil infrastructure and boosting gasoline beyond $3 a gallon. Now, drilling proponents are seizing on that price spike to push for more domestic oil production.
"When Katrina and Rita come into it, the American people know what to be scared of," says Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who is helping shepherd the Arctic drilling plan through an omnibus budget bill. "I think the American people are asking: `Why don't we have enough energy?' And they're not susceptible anymore to misrepresentations that ANWR is some kind of pristine wilderness. It's empty. It's ugly."
To environmentalists, that's sacrilege.
Many activists regard the Alaskan refuge - christened by some a "precious jewel of the circumpolar north" - as a cross between a cathedral and the Alamo: a symbolic last stand to protect not only a vast Arctic ecosystem but the sacred idea of American wilderness itself. The remote 19.6 million-acre sanctuary teems seasonally with caribou, polar bears, wolves and some 150 species of birds. If this holy of holies is pried open for oil, they warn, few protected areas in the country would be safe from development.
The Bush administration, which has made ANWR the centerpiece of its energy policy, calls these claims fear-mongering. Government officials point out that only an eighth of the refuge - some 1.5 million acres of coastal plains dubbed the "1002 area" - would be subject to exploration. Moreover, they say ANWR's untapped petroleum reserves are a necessary antidote to the crippling U.S. addiction to foreign oil. Five billion to 11 billion barrels of black gold are thought to lie pooled under the tundra, or enough oil to power the entire U.S. economy for six months to a year.
But largely lost in all this acrimony is another, older conflict altogether: an improbable human-rights struggle with echoes from the frontier wars of another century.
The Inupiats, or Eskimos, generally support drilling in ANWR for the jobs and revenues it will bring to Alaska's frozen North Slope. But further south, among the immense spruce barrens of central Alaska and the Canadian Yukon, the Gwitchin Indian tribe sees the appearance of new oil rigs in the same ominous light as Plains Indians watching immigrant wagons trundle over the prairie horizon.
For the Gwitchin - "Caribou People" whose population of 7,000 is divided between Canada and Alaska - the stakes couldn't be higher.
Because of its geographical isolation, and the high cost of flying food into its tiny communities, the tribe maintains one of the last true subsistence hunting traditions on the continent. Today, every Gwitchin still consumes an average of 250 meals of caribou meat a year.
Yet by cruel coincidence, in the 100,000-square-mile patch of Alaskan and Canadian wilderness that the caribou call home, oil abounds in just one spot: directly under the animals' sensitive ANWR calving grounds.
"The big oil corporations say they can drill there without harming the land or the wildlife," says Joe Linklater, chief of the Canadian village of Old Crow. "Well, that's like our tribe telling Americans to trust us with an experiment that may end up taking away all their cars.
"We didn't ask for this fight," Linklater adds. "This is about our survival as a people."
The Gwitchin effort to safeguard their caribou-based culture isn't new. Their fight began back in 1988, when worried tribe members from Canada and the United States (the American tribe spells its name "Gwich'in") gathered for the first time in generations at Arctic Village, Alaska, to coordinate a common defense against both the global oil industry and the most powerful government on the planet.
Since then, this little-known war of resistance, planned in log cabins at one of the uttermost ends of the Earth, has taken some bizarre turns.
Tough hunters who had never set foot on a plane have donned cheap business suits and jetted to Washington, where they have stalked the halls of Congress on behalf of the caribou. Some have carried bags of dried caribou meat on their lobbying trips because restaurant food makes them ill. Others have gotten hopelessly lost on the capital's subway system.
Along the way, the rustic tribe has pressured the Canadian government to protest ANWR drilling on environmental grounds. They have recruited Jimmy Carter and Robert Redford as allies. And, collectively, their handful of villages have scraped together hundreds of thousands of dollars - squeezed from cash-strapped tribal councils or solicited from U.S. and Canadian environmental groups - to broadcast the Indian perspective of the ANWR crisis.
Old Crow, Canada, population 245, is a typical front-line community in this small, cold war.
Hunkered on the gravelly banks of the Yukon's wild Porcupine River, the village is an absurdly remote and beautiful place. Still untouched by roads, its cluster of 50 or so frame houses is accessible by bush planes that jounce over the ice-smeared Ogilvie Mountains from the faded gold rush town of Dawson City. Other visitors travel two rugged days cross-country, by riverboat or snowmobile as the season dictates, to reach the village from the nearest Canadian highway.
Old Crow's branch of the Gwitchin tribe, the Vuntut, or "Lake People," isn't necessarily opposed to industrial development. They once allowed oil exploration on federal holdings in their tribal lands, noting that it wasn't in the critical caribou calving areas. And they have invested their funds shrewdly in a local airline and in real estate in Whitehorse, the distant territorial capital.
But few other Arctic villages have undertaken the quixotic step of earmarking $250,000 of their $8 million annual budget to block the world's last superpower in its tireless quest for oil.
Among the tattered notices pinned to the village bulletin board - hand-scrawled requests to buy babiche, or caribou rawhide, and terse announcements for shooting matches at the local dump - there is a crisp memo "encouraging all residents to come hear the latest report from our neighbors who carried our message to the United States Congress."
"People outside just don't realize how much we depend on these d**ned caribou," says Stephen Frost, the caribou hunter who lives in Old Crow. "What are we going to do if they disappear? Close up shop and move to Washington? Are the politicians or the oil companies going to buy us a lifetime supply of hamburgers?"
As a village elder, Frost tries to project a cranky optimism around Old Crow.
He does this even in his cramped home, where his wife, Ethel, a heavyset woman with artificially curled hair, shuffles from the room whenever the rare visitor arrives. Frost teases her gently about her shyness. Or he cracks profane jokes. But in quiet moments a certain melancholy drapes his coppery features. He quietly shoves grains of sugar around his kitchen tabletop with a work-gnarled thumb. Or gazes for long, silent stretches out his windows at the Porcupine River, where he was raised unschooled except in the harsh lessons of trap lines and fishing camps.
Beyond the sparkling river jut billions of cold-stunted spruce trees. It's springtime 75 miles north of the Arctic Circle. And there are caribou out there, moving through the forests like smoke.
---
A few facts about barren-ground caribou:
They are biological putty - creatures so warped by the extremes of environment that they seem afflicted with a multiple personality disorder.
During the lush Arctic summers, when caribou turn into mowing machines, their stomachs balloon in size by almost 50 percent. Stuffing themselves with grass and lichen, many gain half their body weight in fat. Their coarse dark hairs, hollow for insulation and to improve buoyancy on river crossings, turn pale and shaggy in the winter. Bulls sprout baroque, 5-foot antlers to joust over females. Then, a few months later, they drop them. No feature is immune from this shape-shifting. Even their hooves elongate in the cold, to better dig through winter snow. The same caribou sighted in January and June might easily be mistaken for two different species.
They are constant strangers.
In the spring, caribou herds can trudge hundreds of miles north to the treeless Arctic shoreline, where open vistas and sea breezes foil predators and biting insects. There, they give birth to their young in scenes of wild abundance and untrammeled beauty that rival Africa's Serengeti. By late summer they are on the move again, back to the shelter of the boreal forest. Tens of thousands of caribou die on these annual migrations. As evidence, a grim confetti of caribou bones litters the tundra, the leftovers of hungry grizzlies, wolves, eagles, foxes, ravens and human beings.
"Pretty much everything eats, scavenges or parasitizes the caribou," says Dorothy Cooley, a Yukon government biologist. "A big chunk of the northern ecosystem rides on their backs."
The crucial question, of course, is how a new oil field in ANWR would add to that heavy burden. And because science can't provide a mathematical reply, the answer has been hijacked by rhetoric on all sides.
A computer-modeled study recently released by the U.S. Department of the Interior, for instance, suggests carefully that calf survival in ANWR would plummet if the caribou are spooked from their grass-rich calving grounds. And here the oil industry scoffs, citing positive wildlife trends at Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field on Alaska's North Slope.
"Clearly, from the central caribou herd experience at Prudhoe, oil infrastructure does not chase away the herd and does not decimate it as the greens claim," says Adrian Herrera, a spokesman for Arctic Power, a pro-drilling lobby group funded largely by the state of Alaska. "This isn't an either-or situation. You can have development and preserve the environment at the same time."
Herrera invokes a mantra that has helped smooth the passage of the drilling agenda through Congress: "Clean" new oil technology, such as lateral drilling - where one wellhead can tap huge areas - means that just 2,000 acres of ANWR's calving grounds will be disturbed by the roughnecks and their machines.
Still, a majority of U.S. and Canadian biologists remain skeptical.
Years of research demonstrate, they say, that pregnant cows have in fact shied from the pipelines and gravel roads at Prudhoe; they have retreated to less disturbed habitat - a luxury not available to the Porcupine herd because its coastal plain is small by comparison, and hemmed in by inhospitable mountains. (Bulls are less sensitive and have been known to enjoy the breezes atop drilling pads.)
Such nuanced arguments frustrate the Gwitchin.
Any tinkering with their herd, they insist, is like gambling with the air they breathe. If the animals are merely frightened away to more-distant migration routes, they say, communities like Old Crow, which straddles ancient caribou river crossings, could simply cease to exist.
"The ancestors warned us about this bad time coming," says Randall Tetlichi, a traditional healer in Old Crow. "I think the caribou know what's happening in this world, and they have decided to leave, to go back to the spirit world."
BY PAUL SALOPEK
Chicago Tribune
THE PORCUPINE RIVER, Canada - (KRT) - Old Stephen Frost is preparing to kill a caribou.
The Gwitchin Indian elder stands in his skiff on this silver-skinned stream in Canada's vast and wild Yukon Territory. He shoulders a heavy .30-.30 rifle. And he fires twice at eight of the deer-like animals swimming the sparkling currents - Whang! Whang!
The herd is only 20 feet away. But, inexplicably, the bullets go high. The caribou scramble ashore unscathed.
Peering back at Frost with the large, frank eyes of children, the animals vanish into a maze of willow branches dense as basketry.
"Lousy luck," Frost rasps.
The 72-year-old woodsman, a weather-beaten crag of a man who likes to come across as hard-boiled, mutters excuses. He blames the rocking boat. He curses his aging, unsteady legs. But he is a bad actor.
Later, he will pass up more opportunities to kill caribou. And, forgetting his lousy luck altogether, he will shoot other game with heedless skill - plugging a beaver through the eye and blasting a duck out of the water at 40 yards.
"Them caribou ain't got much of a future," he finally admits, uneasily. "To be honest, I'm glad to see 'em get out of rifle range."
Frost is referring to the central catastrophe facing his obscure tribe of Arctic hunters: The once-mighty Porcupine caribou herd, which has been the main food source of his people since the last Ice Age, is dwindling, nobody knows exactly why. And now, controversially, the U.S. government wants to drill for oil in the caribous' calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, just across the Alaskan border.
Like many traditional Gwitchin, Frost fears that oil rigs in the refuge will deal a knockout blow to the ailing herd and herald the slow death of his tribe's 13,000-year-old subsistence culture, the last of its kind in North America.
Frost doesn't dwell on this crisis. Nor does he talk much about his wife, Ethel, who is ill with cancer. Nor, aside from a few crusty jokes, does he complain about his own creaking body, which is starting to fail him, with pains stabbing his arthritic knees and neck.
Instead, the stoic old hunter betrays his sorrows by what he withholds.
On days that follow, Frost loads two rifles and a shotgun into his boat. Tying on his greasy marten-fur cap, he stalks the waters of the Porcupine River as he has for more than 60 springs. But he doesn't take an animal. He misses. He holds his fire. He displays a forlorn quality of mercy that no subsistence hunter can afford.
---
Sometime later this month, Congress is set to decide, after almost 30 years of contentious debate, whether to allow oil exploration to proceed in ANWR, the country's premier wildlife refuge.
Hurricanes Katrina and Rita blew new life into the dispute after ripping through the nation's oil infrastructure and boosting gasoline beyond $3 a gallon. Now, drilling proponents are seizing on that price spike to push for more domestic oil production.
"When Katrina and Rita come into it, the American people know what to be scared of," says Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, who is helping shepherd the Arctic drilling plan through an omnibus budget bill. "I think the American people are asking: `Why don't we have enough energy?' And they're not susceptible anymore to misrepresentations that ANWR is some kind of pristine wilderness. It's empty. It's ugly."
To environmentalists, that's sacrilege.
Many activists regard the Alaskan refuge - christened by some a "precious jewel of the circumpolar north" - as a cross between a cathedral and the Alamo: a symbolic last stand to protect not only a vast Arctic ecosystem but the sacred idea of American wilderness itself. The remote 19.6 million-acre sanctuary teems seasonally with caribou, polar bears, wolves and some 150 species of birds. If this holy of holies is pried open for oil, they warn, few protected areas in the country would be safe from development.
The Bush administration, which has made ANWR the centerpiece of its energy policy, calls these claims fear-mongering. Government officials point out that only an eighth of the refuge - some 1.5 million acres of coastal plains dubbed the "1002 area" - would be subject to exploration. Moreover, they say ANWR's untapped petroleum reserves are a necessary antidote to the crippling U.S. addiction to foreign oil. Five billion to 11 billion barrels of black gold are thought to lie pooled under the tundra, or enough oil to power the entire U.S. economy for six months to a year.
But largely lost in all this acrimony is another, older conflict altogether: an improbable human-rights struggle with echoes from the frontier wars of another century.
The Inupiats, or Eskimos, generally support drilling in ANWR for the jobs and revenues it will bring to Alaska's frozen North Slope. But further south, among the immense spruce barrens of central Alaska and the Canadian Yukon, the Gwitchin Indian tribe sees the appearance of new oil rigs in the same ominous light as Plains Indians watching immigrant wagons trundle over the prairie horizon.
For the Gwitchin - "Caribou People" whose population of 7,000 is divided between Canada and Alaska - the stakes couldn't be higher.
Because of its geographical isolation, and the high cost of flying food into its tiny communities, the tribe maintains one of the last true subsistence hunting traditions on the continent. Today, every Gwitchin still consumes an average of 250 meals of caribou meat a year.
Yet by cruel coincidence, in the 100,000-square-mile patch of Alaskan and Canadian wilderness that the caribou call home, oil abounds in just one spot: directly under the animals' sensitive ANWR calving grounds.
"The big oil corporations say they can drill there without harming the land or the wildlife," says Joe Linklater, chief of the Canadian village of Old Crow. "Well, that's like our tribe telling Americans to trust us with an experiment that may end up taking away all their cars.
"We didn't ask for this fight," Linklater adds. "This is about our survival as a people."
The Gwitchin effort to safeguard their caribou-based culture isn't new. Their fight began back in 1988, when worried tribe members from Canada and the United States (the American tribe spells its name "Gwich'in") gathered for the first time in generations at Arctic Village, Alaska, to coordinate a common defense against both the global oil industry and the most powerful government on the planet.
Since then, this little-known war of resistance, planned in log cabins at one of the uttermost ends of the Earth, has taken some bizarre turns.
Tough hunters who had never set foot on a plane have donned cheap business suits and jetted to Washington, where they have stalked the halls of Congress on behalf of the caribou. Some have carried bags of dried caribou meat on their lobbying trips because restaurant food makes them ill. Others have gotten hopelessly lost on the capital's subway system.
Along the way, the rustic tribe has pressured the Canadian government to protest ANWR drilling on environmental grounds. They have recruited Jimmy Carter and Robert Redford as allies. And, collectively, their handful of villages have scraped together hundreds of thousands of dollars - squeezed from cash-strapped tribal councils or solicited from U.S. and Canadian environmental groups - to broadcast the Indian perspective of the ANWR crisis.
Old Crow, Canada, population 245, is a typical front-line community in this small, cold war.
Hunkered on the gravelly banks of the Yukon's wild Porcupine River, the village is an absurdly remote and beautiful place. Still untouched by roads, its cluster of 50 or so frame houses is accessible by bush planes that jounce over the ice-smeared Ogilvie Mountains from the faded gold rush town of Dawson City. Other visitors travel two rugged days cross-country, by riverboat or snowmobile as the season dictates, to reach the village from the nearest Canadian highway.
Old Crow's branch of the Gwitchin tribe, the Vuntut, or "Lake People," isn't necessarily opposed to industrial development. They once allowed oil exploration on federal holdings in their tribal lands, noting that it wasn't in the critical caribou calving areas. And they have invested their funds shrewdly in a local airline and in real estate in Whitehorse, the distant territorial capital.
But few other Arctic villages have undertaken the quixotic step of earmarking $250,000 of their $8 million annual budget to block the world's last superpower in its tireless quest for oil.
Among the tattered notices pinned to the village bulletin board - hand-scrawled requests to buy babiche, or caribou rawhide, and terse announcements for shooting matches at the local dump - there is a crisp memo "encouraging all residents to come hear the latest report from our neighbors who carried our message to the United States Congress."
"People outside just don't realize how much we depend on these d**ned caribou," says Stephen Frost, the caribou hunter who lives in Old Crow. "What are we going to do if they disappear? Close up shop and move to Washington? Are the politicians or the oil companies going to buy us a lifetime supply of hamburgers?"
As a village elder, Frost tries to project a cranky optimism around Old Crow.
He does this even in his cramped home, where his wife, Ethel, a heavyset woman with artificially curled hair, shuffles from the room whenever the rare visitor arrives. Frost teases her gently about her shyness. Or he cracks profane jokes. But in quiet moments a certain melancholy drapes his coppery features. He quietly shoves grains of sugar around his kitchen tabletop with a work-gnarled thumb. Or gazes for long, silent stretches out his windows at the Porcupine River, where he was raised unschooled except in the harsh lessons of trap lines and fishing camps.
Beyond the sparkling river jut billions of cold-stunted spruce trees. It's springtime 75 miles north of the Arctic Circle. And there are caribou out there, moving through the forests like smoke.
---
A few facts about barren-ground caribou:
They are biological putty - creatures so warped by the extremes of environment that they seem afflicted with a multiple personality disorder.
During the lush Arctic summers, when caribou turn into mowing machines, their stomachs balloon in size by almost 50 percent. Stuffing themselves with grass and lichen, many gain half their body weight in fat. Their coarse dark hairs, hollow for insulation and to improve buoyancy on river crossings, turn pale and shaggy in the winter. Bulls sprout baroque, 5-foot antlers to joust over females. Then, a few months later, they drop them. No feature is immune from this shape-shifting. Even their hooves elongate in the cold, to better dig through winter snow. The same caribou sighted in January and June might easily be mistaken for two different species.
They are constant strangers.
In the spring, caribou herds can trudge hundreds of miles north to the treeless Arctic shoreline, where open vistas and sea breezes foil predators and biting insects. There, they give birth to their young in scenes of wild abundance and untrammeled beauty that rival Africa's Serengeti. By late summer they are on the move again, back to the shelter of the boreal forest. Tens of thousands of caribou die on these annual migrations. As evidence, a grim confetti of caribou bones litters the tundra, the leftovers of hungry grizzlies, wolves, eagles, foxes, ravens and human beings.
"Pretty much everything eats, scavenges or parasitizes the caribou," says Dorothy Cooley, a Yukon government biologist. "A big chunk of the northern ecosystem rides on their backs."
The crucial question, of course, is how a new oil field in ANWR would add to that heavy burden. And because science can't provide a mathematical reply, the answer has been hijacked by rhetoric on all sides.
A computer-modeled study recently released by the U.S. Department of the Interior, for instance, suggests carefully that calf survival in ANWR would plummet if the caribou are spooked from their grass-rich calving grounds. And here the oil industry scoffs, citing positive wildlife trends at Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil field on Alaska's North Slope.
"Clearly, from the central caribou herd experience at Prudhoe, oil infrastructure does not chase away the herd and does not decimate it as the greens claim," says Adrian Herrera, a spokesman for Arctic Power, a pro-drilling lobby group funded largely by the state of Alaska. "This isn't an either-or situation. You can have development and preserve the environment at the same time."
Herrera invokes a mantra that has helped smooth the passage of the drilling agenda through Congress: "Clean" new oil technology, such as lateral drilling - where one wellhead can tap huge areas - means that just 2,000 acres of ANWR's calving grounds will be disturbed by the roughnecks and their machines.
Still, a majority of U.S. and Canadian biologists remain skeptical.
Years of research demonstrate, they say, that pregnant cows have in fact shied from the pipelines and gravel roads at Prudhoe; they have retreated to less disturbed habitat - a luxury not available to the Porcupine herd because its coastal plain is small by comparison, and hemmed in by inhospitable mountains. (Bulls are less sensitive and have been known to enjoy the breezes atop drilling pads.)
Such nuanced arguments frustrate the Gwitchin.
Any tinkering with their herd, they insist, is like gambling with the air they breathe. If the animals are merely frightened away to more-distant migration routes, they say, communities like Old Crow, which straddles ancient caribou river crossings, could simply cease to exist.
"The ancestors warned us about this bad time coming," says Randall Tetlichi, a traditional healer in Old Crow. "I think the caribou know what's happening in this world, and they have decided to leave, to go back to the spirit world."