I remember Stanley saying to me once when we were out with the boat bringing in the fall caribou kill: "You're one of the last white people who's gonna get to see this."
Then he stopped himself and said, "no, you're one of the last people to see it."
No one mentions people in the articles about the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Nevermind that the word "Gwich'in" means "people." Never mind that Stanley is Gwich'in and has been eating caribou meat since he could chew. I read newspaper after newspaper with no mention of Stanley's people - a nation, if certain treaties are to be believed. What the articles do mention is national security. We're going to drill oil on the arctic plain because of national security.
For 40,000 years there have been people and caribou in the Arctic. There are stories going so far back that in them people and caribou are the same. Stanley told me this around a campfire on the Porcupine River. We were eating fresh caribou, barely cooked, flash-seared in a pan over the spruce fire. Behind us in gathering dark, the carcass steamed on new snow. And he told me how the people, the Gwich'in, never go to the arctic slope where the caribou calve - it is an old agreement, as old as the stories. Birth should be given in peace.
Neither peace nor birth seem particularly likely under the arm of an oil derrick. So here is nation without security, and we know it from being told: Without security, there is no survival.
Survival could be synonymous with the people and the caribou in the Gwich'in language. The three are bound to the land: the Gwich'in cannot live outside it or beyond it. If one senator from South Carolina said it was a barren place then it was only because he could not see.
There are those who will claim that I am being a romantic, telling stories of noble savages and Eden in the raw. To which I say: I lived there for two years, enough time to understand that it is not romantic to confront a choice between starvation and giving up everything that defines you and your people.
There are those who will ask: "What of our security of our nation, and of the dangers of foreign oil?" I say that anyone with half a brain and a calculator knows that the barrels of crude under the Refuge will yield enough oil to keep cruder Americans content for six months even as it makes the crudest of them rich.
So I desire infernal and poetic justice. A plane crash. All 51 senators who voted to slip drilling into a budget bill - cowards dodging filibusters in their Brooks Brothers suits - gone down in the wilderness, starving to death for lack of meat. That would do: Starvation is slow and leaves time for regret.
Regret, however bitter, does not salvage the past. When Stanley made fire and we ate meat, it was 10 miles from a cave where the oldest human artifact on this continent was discovered: a piece of caribou bone chipped into a hide scraper. It stayed in a cave unchanged for 40,000 years. Which is to say, marks remain in the Arctic. If you drill oil, if you bring in the machines and pull up the earth and put down the roads, it will scrape deep into the tundra. These marks will not heal. They will be our artifact
Bathsheba Demuth '06 is an independent concentrator.
