The Fight for the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge

As the Trump administration greenlights drilling in ANWR, a native leader finds herself on the front lines

This story is part of The Trump 45, a special package about Trump’s impact on individual lives.

By Bernadette Demientieff, as told to Alyssa Giacobbe

I am part of a long line of people born into the Gwich’in Nation of Fort Yukon, Alaska. My mother was Gwich’in. So were my grandmother and my great grandmother. My five children, and five grandchildren, are Gwich’in, though it’s entirely possible there will be no native land left for them to inhabit by the time they are my age.

The Gwich’in are comprised of 14 different communities and about 9,000 people. For tens of thousands of years, we have lived off the land, relying primarily on the Porcupine caribou to survive. We still do. We have grocery stores, but some Gwich’in are hundreds of miles from the nearest town, and so store-bought food is very expensive. A jug of milk can cost us $15, a loaf of bread $10.

In 2017, Congress passed legislation authorizing drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The refuge is the biggest in the U.S., spanning 19 million acres — about the size of South Carolina — and has been protected from oil and gas…