Last stand in the Arctic                                

The Gwitchin tribe digs in against U.S. plans to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. At stake: The dwindling herd of caribou and the tribe's way of life.

By Paul Salopek
Tribune foreign correspondent

October 2, 2005

THE PORCUPINE RIVER, Canada -- 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.

A small, cold war

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 damned 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.

The essential animal

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, 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."

Tetlichi offers this bleak assessment atop Old Crow Mountain, 5 miles from the village. He has just killed a bull caribou. It is one of five he will shoot this season to feed his family--a perfect animal lying in the snow under an electric blue sky. Panting with exertion, Tetlichi chops off the bull's head and scoops out the finger-size botfly maggots that infect most caribous' throats. The eyes in the decapitated head are huge. Even dead they shine like molten tar. Occasionally, from certain angles, they catch the Arctic sunlight and reflect it back pale green, the color of lightning.

The white man's caribou

Gale Norton, the U.S. secretary of the interior and the senior government official responsible for ANWR, once visited Gwitchin country in Alaska and responded to elders' anxieties over oil drilling in the refuge by urging the Indians to "expand your worldview."

What Norton implied was: The needs of the industrial majority trump the needs of the aboriginal few. Her advice, though, fundamentally misreads the nature of modern Gwitchin life. It isn't narrow. It straddles millenniums.

According to archeological evidence found in caves in the Yukon, the Gwitchin may be the oldest native culture in the Americas. The tribe's ancestors arrived from Siberia at least 13,000 or 14,000 years ago, long before the more famous Eskimo.

Shadowing herds of migratory animals, they dragged moose-hide tents with the aid of harnessed dogs. Their shamans conversed with animals through dreams--particularly with the vutzui, or caribou. The tribe, linguistically related to the Navajo, was fond of tests of strength, such as wrestling matches for men and women. And having reached what is now central Alaska and the Yukon, they settled down to gorge on wild berries, salmon and a cornucopia of game.

Few modern Gwitchin sugarcoat this past: They are still too close to the land for that. In famine times, infant girls were killed to save food, and crippled elders would ask to be left behind to starve.

Today, willow bows and dog sleds have given way to high-powered rifles and motorboats in Old Crow. But because of the tribe's profound seclusion, the pace of modern assimilation still feels jarring, raw.

Junked snowmobiles and plastic lawn chairs crowd yards alongside gory piles of decapitated caribou. Inside the cramped little homes--simple frame structures that cost the tribe an average of $120,000 to build because every nail must be flown in--hanks of jerked caribou meat, rifles of all calibers, antlers, skin blankets and other frontier artifacts jostle with satellite televisions that rarely seem to be switched off.

Teens sporting baggy hip-hop pants and eyebrow rings now monitor the caribous' migration on a Web site that tracks collared animals by satellite. Meanwhile, at the village store, a relic of the famed Hudson's Bay Company fur-trading empire, Indian elders scratch their heads over cans of Pringles-brand potato chips. A single air-freighted cucumber costs $4.10.

"Too much white man's stuff too fast," says Tetlichi, the village healer. "It's like eating a lot of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Heartburn avenue."

Tetlichi, 53, is deeply worried about the Americans' plans for ANWR. But he sees it as just the latest blow to a way of life already reeling under the combined assault of television, alcohol and the wage economy.

Old Crow is a relatively healthy Arctic community. It isn't plagued to the same terrible degree as other native settlements by problems like drug abuse or teen suicides. (In Alaska, the suicide rate among Indian youths is three times the national average.) Still, the Gwitchin aren't completely immune from the effects of cultural erosion.

The village school teaches up to 9th grade. Half the kids who leave for a boarding school in Whitehorse never return. And those who do often end up working low-paid tribal jobs. Very few live completely off the land anymore, as their parents did. Many feel adrift, caught between worlds, and seek solace in drugs or alcohol. Though Old Crow is officially "dry," liquor is smuggled into the village, most recently in a shipment of dog food. A bootleg pint of vodka sells for $150.

"That's what makes saving the caribou even more important," says Tetlichi, who has the cautious step of an alcohol survivor. "They are--what's the English word?--the anchor."

Tetlichi wears his long braids tucked up under a baseball cap. He is munching happily on dried caribou in his house. He slathers the dark jerky, which he eats all day, with butter--like toast--while his wife, Mabel, hunches over a table, tenderizing red caribou steaks with the butt of a butcher knife. Overhearing mention of ANWR, she declares, "We are very"--WHACK -- "angry with" -- WHACK -- "President Bush!"

Their son Randy Jr. isn't listening.

He's mesmerized by the MTV show "Pimp My Ride," which features an auto shop that tarts up jalopies. "Lady, you ain't gonna recognize this Mustang!" the host is promising from the set in faraway Los Angeles.

A few pickup trucks have appeared in Old Crow in recent years, brought in on temporary ice roads or barged to the otherwise roadless village on the Porcupine River. Randy Jr., 11, has never seen a real sedan.

The great warming

By early summer, the sun never sets in the Arctic. The quality of light is hallucinatory. For about three months it drenches the world continuously, giving the impression of a landscape without secrets. Even the deepest tree shadows are a pale, watery blue--a hue that, if it had a taste, would chill the palate like spearmint.

This sunny simplicity, however, is deceptive.

ANWR may well be, as many activists say, the biggest environmental battle in a generation. And it probably has spawned the most organized and focused Native American resistance campaign since the Red Power movement of the 1960s. But all this human drama is unfolding against a backdrop of complex and troubling environmental change.

According to the U.S. Arctic Research Commission, today's Arctic temperatures are the highest in 400 years. Canadian data suggest that the Yukon alone has warmed by 3 degrees since the 1960s. Glaciers are in retreat. Arctic seas have heated up, changing fish distributions. And spruces and grizzlies are advancing poleward into the once treeless tundra.

The effect of climate change on caribou has been perplexing.

In some regions, according to wildlife experts, the early-greening tundra has provided a bumper crop of caribou food, and the herds have boomed. This fact is recited often by the oil companies working on Alaska's North Slope. (At Prudhoe Bay, the largest oil patch in the U.S., the caribou herd has grown fivefold since 1978.)

Yet 100 miles to the east, the Gwitchin's beleaguered Porcupine herd has plummeted from 178,000 to 123,000 animals in the past 16 years. Researchers think that erratic thaws and freezes in the wintering grounds may be the culprits. This creates an icy armor over the snow, preventing hungry caribou from reaching the forage beneath.

"You used to see 500 animals at a time crossing this river, like one big stampede," Frost the hunter recalls, standing on the gravel riverbank of Old Crow. "Today, you're lucky to see 50 at a time."

It's a luminous May afternoon in the village. Gunshots echo in the distance. Hunters are bringing in dead caribou on boats and on four-wheeled buggies. But old Frost has stayed home. His legs ache--new aging pains. And his wife, too, isn't feeling well today.

Upstream, a tributary of the Porcupine has thawed and broken up, and chunks of ice slide down the currents. Mini-bergs the size of pianos collide, tinkling musically on the waters like falling glass. The river sounds like a crystal chandelier swaying in a breeze.

"This is how the land wakes itself up, renews itself," Frost explains, squinting poker-faced from the shore, his hands balled in his pockets. And given his burden of woes, it's a measure of the man that he says this without the least self-pity.

The gift of birds

Dorothy Frost is crying.

It's the last weekend in May--Big Caribou Days, a homespun festival celebrating the annual spring migration in Old Crow. And Dorothy, a tribal administrator and one of Stephen Frost's numberless relatives, is supposed to be giving a pep talk. She fidgets in the log community hall before a crowd of villagers clad in rubber boots and fleece jackets, outlining the Gwitchin's caribou crusade. But her voice trails off. Normally a jovial woman in glasses, she covers her eyes with her hand and sobs. Later another speaker, an elderly man just returned from lobbying in Washington, also breaks down. So does a young woman who stands in the audience to offer reassurance. It's hard to watch.

"Everybody's emotional right now," says Dorothy Frost, recovering her composure. "Things are coming to a head."

The Gwitchin people have no legacy of armed resistance to European invasion, no mythic or bloodstained Wild West to draw grim inspiration from. There was no Gwitchin Geronimo. No northern Sitting Bull. Like most Canadian Indians, the usually peaceful tribe was incorporated into a tumultuous world the invaders called "New" through commerce, when the Scottish explorer Alexander Mackenzie first showed up on the Porcupine River in the 1790s, paddling a bark canoe packed with furs and trade beads.

"Nearly all European travellers who have visited the [Gwitchin] refer to their fine physical appearance and pleasant dispositions," wrote an anthropologist studying Old Crow as recently as 1946. "I found them to be self-confident and forthright, kindly, generous, intelligent, and honest."

The great irony of their long battle against the United States is that, win or lose, this very act of defiance has opened the door to change. And now, an alien new bitterness simmers in Old Crow. If Congress approves oil development in ANWR, some tribe members are vowing to meet the bulldozers at the refuge boundary with their hunting rifles.

"I've got news for the Americans," an angry young lobbyist named Shawn Bruce tells the somber community hall crowd. "If it comes down to it, we will become militant over that herd. We got Gwitchin men over in Iraq now. We got Vietnam vets. We will train warriors. We won't let them in the calving grounds. I burn. I am mad."

Stephen Frost, the master hunter, is more philosophical.

"I think what upsets people most isn't that them Americans will drill, but that they'll drill without even knowing we goddamned Indians exist," he sighs. "They'll get the oil for their cars. That'll be it."

Surveys taken since Hurricane Katrina jacked up gasoline prices tend to bear him out. According the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, public support for oil development in ANWR has risen from 42 to 50 percent over the past six months.

Back in Old Crow, Big Caribou Days ends on a down note. Almost nobody joins the late-night jigging contest--a dance competition set to fiddle music inherited from 18th Century European trappers. Frost walks home early, complaining about his knees.

A man of habit, he had gone out caribou hunting the day before, one last time for the season.

Ethel was away in Anchorage, undergoing a checkup at the cancer clinic. And the Frost household, long since emptied of its 11 children, had been unbearably silent.

The old man had sat on the banks of his beloved river, feeding willow sticks into a small fire. He never took a shot. Only a few straggling bulls were fording the Porcupine by this late date; the cows were already up north, leading the migration to their embattled Alaskan calving grounds some 200 miles away.

Frost passed the time calling to the birds. He did this uncannily, mimicking the squeal of field mice in distress. Again and again, Arctic owls in their snowy winter plumage swooped low. And ravens diverted from their high tangents in the sky to investigate.

He smiled. For a little while at least, all his troubles seemed like a dream. And for the first time in weeks, Frost seemed truly happy.

- - -

Uncertain future for the Porcupine caribou

The population of the Porcupine caribou, which is vital to the livelihood of the Gwitchin Indians, has been dwindling in recent years. The herd may be affected further if the U.S. drills for oil in the "1002 area," a part of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that includes caribou calving grounds.

Drawn to `1002'

Extent of Porcupine caribou calving grounds, 1983-2004

(cumulative)

Concentrated calving grounds, 1983-2004

(cumulative)

Compared with alternate calving locations, which

are few in part because of mountainous terrain, the

1002 area best lends itself to survival of the herd.

Among its benefits:

- Fewer pests and predators, including brown bears, wolves and

mosquitoes.

- An abundance of more-digestible plant species.

The nutrition and energy needs of pregnant caribou

are highest during calving season, and small changes

in diet could lower the survival chances of the

calves.

The Porcupine caribou

Antlers: Grow on both sexes, up to 5 feet long on males

Diet: Plants, including cottongrass and willow leaves

Coat: Dark, but turns pale and shaggy in the winter

Hooves: Large and wide, with a crescent shape and sharp toes

that support walking in snow

Size: 5 to 8 feet long, 3 to 4 feet tall

Weight: On average, 200 to 275 pounds

Sources: USGS, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, ESRI, Porcupine Caribou Management Board

Chicago Tribune / Sue-Lyn Erbeck, Steve Layton and Rick Tuma

Copyright © 2005, Chicago Tribune