Gail Norton: Switchin’ on Gwich’in

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Gail Norton: Switchin’ on Gwich’in
In her farewell note to Interior Department staff, Secretary Gail Norton
waxed poetic about the Gwich’in people who live just south of the Arctic
Circle:

America is blessed by its cultural complexity. … I was struck by a
statement made by a Gwichin elder in Arctic Village, Alaska. Her people
live a subsistence lifestyle, relying mainly on migrating caribou. She
said she wanted her grandchildren a thousand years from now to live the
same way.

But Norton wasn’t nearly as respectful when the Gwich’in were standing
in the way of her drilling plans. Norton was angry that the Gwich’in did
not support the Bush administration’s plan for drilling in the Arctic.
Shortly after visiting a Gwich’in village in 2001, she gave a speech
that said the Gwich’ins were making life harder for “children throughout
America”:

If the group’s goal is to continue their subsistence lifestyle for
generations, that is certainly their choice. … But that choice also
impacts others. The children throughout America, their lives will be
affected by these decisions as well whether they will have heat for
their homes, whether they will have jobs in a prosperous economy.

Norton’s farewell letter is clearly an effort to cast herself in a
favorable light, but the facts of her tenure remain clear: she was the
“administration’s biggest advocate for opening the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge on Alaska’s North Slope to oil drilling.” And she didn’t
let anyone slow her down.