Thursday, January 4, 2018: 4:10 PM
Washington Room 3 (Marriott Wardman Park)
Since its creation in 1960, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) evolved from a little-known park on the fringe of Alaska to the most controversial parcel of land in modern U.S. environmental politics. The discovery of North America’s largest oil field at Prudhoe Bay in 1968 and the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System by 1977 transformed AWNR into the “holy grail” for proponents of oil and gas development. As advocates of wilderness and development clashed in the halls of Congress over the fate of ANWR, the voices of the Alaskan Natives were simultaneously marginalized and appropriated. Where environmentalists saw charismatic megafauna and “boosters” dreamed of a massive oil reservoir, local First Peoples rejected both unchecked extractivism and the idea of wilderness. Far from speaking with one voice, the Inupiat and Gwich’in peoples of the northeastern Alaska charted different visions of development and subsistence needs that reflected their millennia of land management. Their dissonant voices—both within and between their communities—over time further accentuated the fallacy of a singular or unchanging “native position” towards utilizing parklands.
My presentation explores how First Peoples negotiated, triangulated, and resisted mineral development and wilderness preservation agendas in ANWR. Their struggles for subsistence rights, alternative modernity, and preserving integral customs demonstrates how First Peoples have engaged with park-creation, park-development, and park-preservation schemes in contradictory and consistent ways. Ultimately, the Gwich’in and Inupiat defy easy characterization and instead fought for “native life on native terms.” With the Arctic Refuge more likely to be opened to development now than any other time before in history, analyzing the self-determination of the Refuge’s First Peoples has seldom been more appropriate or necessary.