Succulent scents of caribou, moose, muskrat and beaver — boiled, roasted and fried — waft from the kitchen. Young children chase one another around the community centre, clutching bags of dried caribou, strings of meat stuck in their teeth. The stage is set with pink iridescent streamers and the band’s fiddles, guitars and drums, ready for a night of music and jigging.
Adults and youth alike give their names to a coordinator with a notebook, signing up to join in the games, including caribou head skinning, log sawing and muskrat-calling. Outside, there’s still ice on the Porcupine River — break-up is late this year, locals say. There’s no caribou in sight, but people know they’re close by. The spring migration is underway.
Several hundred people from across the North have gathered here in Old Crow, Yukon, a subarctic community at the 67th parallel, to celebrate Vadzaih Choo Drin, or “Big Caribou Days.” It’s the 25th anniversary of the event celebrating the seasonal return of the Porcupine caribou herd, one of the largest barren-ground caribou populations in North America, as they migrate toward their summer calving grounds in Ivvavik National Park and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. The Gwich’in refer to the calving grounds as Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit — the sacred place where life begins.
Several hundred people from across the North gathered in Old Crow, Yukon, this May to participate in games and celebrate the Gwich’in people’s relationship to the Porcupine caribou herd.
“My grandparents, they taught me about caribou. They take me out to the caribou when they’re coming, they show me the different age groups and tell me the names of these caribou,” Randall Tetlichi, a Vuntut Gwitchin Elder, says at the opening ceremony in late May.
Before he was allowed to hunt, Tetlichi had to learn how to distinguish between the big bulls, young bulls, one- and two-year-olds, pregnant females and the “old females with dried-up udders” who grunted up the hill behind the others. The last group was the one to harvest, he says. This knowledge of caribou traditionally guided the way the Vuntut Gwitchin managed the herd that migrates across the Porcupine River every spring and fall.
“Our job is to teach the young people,” Tetlichi says, offering a song and prayer for vadzaih, Gwich’in for “caribou,” welcoming them back home to Old Crow.
“I wanted the kids to have that taste of what our grandparents worked so hard for in Crow Flats,” Teresa Frost, an event coordinator with the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation (VGFN), says to the crowd, as volunteers hand out bags of caribou dry meat and bone grease.
Christine Creyke and Randall Tetlichi participate in the Big Caribou Days opening ceremony. Creyke, who is a member of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, says she feels an “immense responsibility” to protect the Porcupine caribou herd for future Gwich’in generations.
Old Crow Flats, located north of Old Crow, is a traditional place where people camp, trap muskrat and hunt for what remains their most important food source — caribou.
The fate of the Porcupine caribou herd — considered one of North America’s last remaining healthy herds at an estimated 218,000 animals — is bound up with the fate of the Gwich’in people. The story of the Gwich’in people and caribou is a story about a multi-generational struggle to advocate for the permanent protection of the Porcupine caribou herd’s calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
But the fate of the caribou — and the Gwich’in way of life — is now intricately tangled up in U.S. President Donald Trump’s recent moves to expand oil and gas activity in the refuge. The refuge has long been an ideological battleground between those in favour of drilling and those against it, but with Trump at the helm, the stakes have never been higher, pitting the Gwich’in people against what they’re calling an unprecedented threat as they work together to protect the caribou they depend on.
A fly-in subarctic community at the 67th parallel, Old Crow, Yukon, is built along the banks of the Porcupine River. Every spring and fall, the community welcomes back the migration of the Porcupine caribou herd.
The Canada-U.S. border looms large in the fight to protect the Porcupine caribou herd, which crosses the border during its annual migrations. (Map: Shawn Parkinson / The Narwhal)
Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ poses immediate threats to the Porcupine caribou herd
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is a richly biodiverse ecosystem covering over 78,000 square kilometres, roughly the size of New Brunswick or South Carolina. It stretches from the Brooks Range mountains to the Arctic Ocean coastline, teeming with migratory birds, grizzly and polar bears, wolves and pregnant caribou who gather together to drop gangly calves onto the tundra. For the Gwich’in, it’s sacred territory. Here, there are stories told about the Gwich’in trading half of their heart with the heart of the caribou.
For decades, U.S. governments have been pushing for exploration and development within the refuge, including Ronald Reagan in 1987 and George W. Bush in the 2000s, with the goal to open up oil and gas development in an area known as “the 1002,” a 6,000-square-kilometre tract of land within the refuge. The United States Geological Survey estimates there could be somewhere between 4.3 to 11.8 billion barrels of oil in the area, but no one can say for sure — 3D seismic testing has never been done.
Dried caribou meat is distributed at the Old Crow Community Centre. For decades, Gwich’in people have organized to resist oil and gas drilling in caribou calving grounds — a fight they vow to continue as U.S. president Donald Trump pledges to “drill, baby, drill.”
For decades, the Gwich’in have been organizing to prevent exploration — agreeing with Western science that finds drilling in the calving grounds would likely cause calf mortality and devastating declines in the herd’s size and resilience, which refers to its ability to cope with changes in the environment.
In 1988, Gwich’in Elders and leaders from communities in Alaska and Canada gathered in Arctic Village, Alaska, to found the Gwich’in Steering Committee with the goal of collectively lobbying U.S. policymakers for the permanent protection of the refuge. For the Gwich’in it was a pivotal moment, having been divided by the border as part of colonization, to unite and strengthen their nation’s collective voice.
For years, Gwich’in advocacy worked to keep oil and gas out, while lobbying for the permanent protection of the refuge. In 2015, President Barack Obama recommended Congress designate over 49,000 square kilometres of the refuge as “wilderness,” but it failed to pass. In 2017, the political pendulum swung back with President Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which mandated two oil and gas lease sales in the refuge to offset corporate tax cuts. Despite being slapped with a lawsuit by the Gwich’in Steering Committee in 2020, Trump held the first lease sale on Jan. 6, 2021, offering 22 tracts of land, equal to five percent of the refuge. The Gwich’in people and their allies urged oil and gas companies and banks not to bid and the sale didn’t go as planned. Only three companies bid, generating US$14.4 million — a long shot from Trump’s estimated US$1.8 billion.
From 2021 to 2024, former president Joe Biden’s administration sought to undo what Trump had done in the refuge, including cancelling all of the leases, citing insufficient analysis under the national Environmental Policy Act. Despite this, Biden was still legally bound to the second lease sale laid out in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. In December 2024, no companies bid. Shortly after, the state of Alaska sued the Biden administration over the cancelled leases — and in March, a judge ruled in its favour.
Community members compete to make a fire and boil tea the fastest. This year, the festive atmosphere at Big Caribou Days gave way to more sobering discussions about what U.S. president Donald Trump’s re-election could mean for the future of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which provides habitat the Porcupine caribou herd depends on.
At Caribou Days in Old Crow in May, the games gave way to more sobering discussions about what Trump’s re-election in January — and his executive order to “drill, baby, drill” and reinstate the terminated leases — could mean for the future of the refuge.
“Over the next few years, more than ever, we’re going to need to come together,” Harold Frost Jr., deputy chief for the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, told the crowd, warning the community about what would come to be signed into law on July 4 — Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill.”
The new budget bill — which critics argue is an extension of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — doubles the number of lease sales in the refuge, stipulating that four additional sales, no less than 1,600 square kilometres per lease, must take place within the next 10 years. The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society Yukon told the Narwhal that Trump could be attempting to create market stability for oil and gas companies over a longer duration of time. Even if a democratic government were elected, it could be exceedingly difficult to change the new bill, as Biden failed to do with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Today, the Alaska industrial development agency, holding the reinstated seven leases in the refuge, is on the brink of undertaking seismic testing for the first time in history — one step closer to drilling in the calving grounds.
“We are no longer dealing with a familiar threat,” Frost Jr. told the Narwhal, after the signing of the new bill. “We are facing an administration willing to bypass reason, disregarding science and economic logic, to achieve its goal of drilling. We must organize. We must amplify our voices. We must protect this sacred place with everything we have.”
Gwich’in relationship with caribou begins ‘in our mother’s womb’
“The first time I tasted caribou was when I was born,” Tetlichi says over the sound of fiddle music and boots stomping along to the beat. He was born in Johnson Creek, 140 kilometres south of Old Crow, but moved north when he was eight years old.
When Tetlichi was 13 years old, he remembers camping in Old Crow Flats with his grandparents and witnessing the spring migration of the Porcupine caribou herd. He waited with a rifle and watched the caribou draw closer. He spotted an “older, dry cow that didn’t have a calf in her” and his grandfather gave him the okay. As Tetlichi skinned the caribou and cut the ribcage, his grandfather brought over a cup and filled it with the animal’s blood. He handed it to his grandson after he’d finished skinning the caribou. “Drink this,” his grandfather said.
“He said, ‘Now you can call yourself a hunter because you drank that blood and the caribou is part of you. The caribou is in your body and now you’re going to understand the movement of the caribou,’” Tetlichi says. “I felt happy and proud.”
Randall Tetlichi remembers hunting caribou with his grandfather when he was 13 years old. “The caribou is a part of you,” he recalls his grandfather telling him. “I felt happy and proud,” he says.
The Gwich’in people have been intertwined with the Porcupine caribou herd for thousands of years. There is archeological evidence of their close bond at different sites across northern Yukon and Alaska, including Van Tat Gwich’in Teechik, a hunting camp located 60 kilometres east of Old Crow where archeologists discovered tools made from stone, caribou antler and bone, some estimated to be 3,000 years old.
When he was growing up, Tetlichi’s Elders told him stories about “caribou fences,” large structures built from spruce logs that measured kilometres wide at the mouth and funnelled caribou into a corral where they’d be snared and speared.
“The whole community was part of it,” Tetlichi says, referring to building the fences — carrying trees from places that were sometimes kilometres away — and also the hunt.
Community members skin caribou heads as part of Old Crow’s Big Caribou Days festivities. The caribou head is considered a delicacy by the Gwich’in people.
With the onset of colonization and introduction of firearms, people stopped using caribou fences. But there are 46 known caribou fence sites in Alaska and northern Yukon with seven located in Vuntut National Park to the north of Old Crow.
Oil exploration to the south and north of Old Crow began in the 1950s. In the late ‘60s and through the ‘70s, Tetlichi and other men from Old Crow travelled north to work at drilling sites in the Mackenzie Delta. “We didn’t question it,” he says. But after a decade, he recognized the negative impacts of oil and gas on the land and people.
“I seen it, I felt it,” he says. “They’re not good.”
Alice Vittrekwa (right) made quick work of her caribou head during the head-skinning competition at Caribou Days — she finished in under three minutes.
When the Gwich’in Steering Committee formed in 1988 to lobby against oil and gas in the Porcupine herd’s calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Tetlichi was chosen to travel to Washington, D.C., on one of the first delegations. He remembers sleeping on a church basement floor and experiencing culture shock from the city’s traffic and noise. He was afraid, but Tetlichi knew he was there to talk to people about what caribou meant to the Gwich’in people and what would be lost if they opened up the refuge for oil and gas exploitation — so that’s what he did. He shared stories with politicians and citizens alike. Four decades later, he hasn’t stopped.
Lorraine Netro, a Vuntut Gwitchin Elder who was born and raised in Old Crow and today lives in Whitehorse, agrees about the importance of speaking out. “The Elders in our nation asked us to educate the outside world about why we need to protect that sacred place where life begins,” she says. Disturbance to the calving grounds will “destroy the caribou and destroy us as a people,” she adds.
Netro says the sacred connection with caribou begins “in our mother’s womb, when we taste caribou.”
She remembers watching her mother hunt and skin caribou in Crow Flats, and the feeling of happiness, knowing they’d have food to eat and new moccasins and clothing to wear. No part of the animal was wasted. Her grandmother made sinew from the tendons.
In the late ‘90s, Netro joined the advocacy efforts to protect the Porcupine caribou herd. In 1999, she followed in Tetlichi and other Gwich’in leaders’ footsteps, participating in a lobby delegation to Washington. It opened her eyes to the power of storytelling — even when they had only “five, ten minutes” to speak with U.S. politicians — to change people’s minds and shape policy and decision-making. The Gwich’in have “touched many, many people”, she says.
“It’s part of our responsibility. It’s about our future generations — seven generations and beyond — so that our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren can be blessed to have that spiritual and sacred connection to the caribou.”
Every spring, the Porcupine caribou herd fords the Porcupine River on its way to its calving grounds. Photo: Atsushi Sugimoto
Gwich’in members and Elders have been travelling to the U.S. to advocate for caribou for decades
Kris Statnyk, a member of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, remembers watching a video of his own grandmother, Dr. Reverend Ellen Bruce, speaking at the Gwich’in gathering in Arctic Village in 1988, and family members travelling to Washington to lobby politicians. Even as a child, advocating for caribou felt like a kind of rite of passage.
Today, Statnyk is an Indigenous Rights lawyer based in Gitxsan Territory in northern B.C. and the co-chair of the Gwich’in Council International, along with the head of delegation for the Arctic Council. He continues to work closely with Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and a large part of that, Statnyk says, is continuing his ancestors’ legacy of advocacy for the Porcupine caribou herd.
Despite more than a hundred years of colonization, he says, caribou continues to be a mainstay of Gwich’in life, culture and food security. While the majority of other barren-ground caribou herds in Canada are threatened — their habitat fragmented by industrial development — Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation has worked to protect the Porcupine herd in Canada by negotiating their land claim agreement in 1993 and creating Vuntut National Park in 1995, protecting key habitat in Yukon where no industrial development can occur.
In the 1990s, the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation worked to create Vuntut National Park, which protects key habitat for the Porcupine caribou herd in Yukon. But the First Nation can’t easily influence what happens in the herd’s calving grounds across the border in Alaska. Photos: Atsushi Sugimoto
But across the border, the calving grounds in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — and influence over U.S. politicians — has always remained something the Vuntut Gwitchin can’t directly control, Statnyk says, and now, perhaps, more than ever.
He travelled to Old Crow in May to speak at Caribou Days and take part in the festivities and discussions on the urgency of the times.
“Seismic activity could be happening in [the refuge] within a year — that’s just the reality,” Statnyk says. “We haven’t really come close to that before. We can try to slow down the regulatory process and dissuade companies and banks from supporting projects in that area, but it’s difficult to prevent this U.S. administration from greenlighting things they want.”
Oil and gas development in the sacred calving grounds in the refuge is “a clear violation” of the Gwich’in people’s rights to self-determination as expressed in the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Statnyk says. (While the U.S. has officially endorsed the declaration since 2010, it is not legally binding. Today, Indigenous groups are calling on Trump to operationalize the declaration.) In addition, the U.S. is failing to to implement its responsibility to consult with Gwich’in and other Indigenous communities in Canada, as stipulated in the Canada-United States agreement on Porcupine caribou conservation, a treaty signed in 1987.
“On the Canadian side, we’ve never, ever been invited directly [by the U.S. government] to participate in any of these regulatory processes,” Statnyk says. “It’s always been on our own initiative where we’re asserting and showing up.”
The Fort McPherson Jiggers perform at the Old Crow Community Centre during Caribou Days.
Despite the political situation they’re up against, Statnyk is heartened by the legacy of relationships that have been built over the past decades with people, politicians and communities in the Lower 48 and across Canada.
“We’re always told [by our Elders] to go out and make friends, to do this in a ‘good way,’ ” Statnyk says. “It means a lot of things for how we conduct ourselves, even when people are making decisions as if we don’t exist, or don’t matter.”
The long game has always been the permanent protection of the coastal plain, which requires congressional legislation, but it’s a goal the Gwich’in remain committed to.
‘I’m up here hauling all my water to soak my hides. We don’t need all of this gas’
Christine Creyke, a member of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation and Tahltan First Nation, carefully hangs her caribou and moose hides on a spruce beam outside her home in Old Crow, lovingly inspecting each one. Days, weeks, months of physical work went into processing these hides: fleshing, scraping, wringing, softening and smoking.
When she’s working on hides, Creyke feels a strong sense of identity and community.
“There are conversations that happen around hide work in terms of culture and what it means to be Indigenous,” Creyke says. “These relationships, both the ones made between people working on hides together and the ones made between people and caribou through the process of hide tanning are important for healthy communities.”
When Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation lands manager Christine Creyke works with caribou hides, she always tries to “think about the animal and honour what they endured.”
Every hide is unique, she explains, pointing to a cream-coloured caribou hide pricked with small holes. The holes look like stars scattered against the night sky. They’re scars from warble flies, parasitic flies that lay their eggs in the legs of caribou. The hatched larvae migrate onto the caribou’s back where they feed off the animal, causing major energy losses.
“I want to sew something special with this,” Creyke says, handling the scarred hide with affection. “I always try to think about the animal and honour what they endured.”
As a result of climate change and warming temperatures, warble flies may be developing earlier in the summer, which could harm caribou — particularly during the calving season. Creyke is worried how cumulative pressures from oil and gas, along with climate change, could impact herd resiliency.
In 2024, Creyke, who works as the lands manager with Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, was appointed on behalf of Old Crow to serve on the Gwich’in Steering Committee and advocate for the Porcupine caribou herd. It’s been a huge learning curve to navigate U.S. politics and the environmental assessment process in Alaska, Creyke says, but it’s one she’s embracing. In addition, Creyke was recently appointed to the Gwich’in Council International.
“I feel immense responsibility,” she says, acknowledging the support and inspiration of her mentors, including Netro and Norma Kassi. Kassi, a member of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation who was raised in Old Crow and today lives in Whitehorse, served as an MLA for Old Crow from 1985 to 1992 and has travelled around the world advocating for the Porcupine caribou herd.
Creyke points out the disparities that exist between northern and southern communities, particularly when it comes to drilling for oil and gas in the sacred calving grounds on the Alaska side, as well as their wintering grounds in the Eagle Plains Basin, south of Old Crow, on the Canadian side.
Chance Oil and Gas, a Canadian-owned company, currently holds eight oil and gas leases in the Eagle Plains Basin on 4,000 square kilometres of the Porcupine herd’s wintering grounds.
“I see these huge mega oil and gas projects as part of a way to fuel a world that is so far removed from ours,” Creyke says. “There’s just so much energy consumption in the world. I’m up here hauling all my water to soak my hides. We don’t need all of this gas. What I need is for my hides to be soft, and my caribou herds to be healthy, and my freezer to be full.”
Christine Creyke shows her hides in her grandfather’s smokehouse. Creyke notes that the oil and gas projects threatening the Porcupine caribou herd “fuel a world that is so far removed from” the Gwich’in one. “There’s just so much energy consumption in the world,” she says. “We don’t need all of this gas.”
She points to the startling declines of other barren-ground caribou herds in Canada, including the Bathurst herd in the Northwest Territories, which plummeted from 470,000 in the mid-1980s to 6,240 today. There is no harvest of the Bathurst herd allowed in the Northwest Territories, while a limited hunt is permitted in Nunavut.
“I can’t imagine what that means for people who relied on their herd for everything — food, clothing, culture and way of being,” Creyke acknowledges. “When I think about my kids and them wanting to work on hides in the future, … I have to do this advocacy work now.”
‘Trump’s not going to stop’: Gwich’in people organize to fight back for the caribou
Across the U.S.-Canadian border in the Gwich’in community of Arctic Bay, Alaska, Kristen Moreland, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, was devastated to receive the news of the “Big Beautiful Bill” mandating four new lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
“Hearing it was four more lease [sales] has our people on edge. Trump’s not going to stop,” Moreland says. “But that’s just going to make us work even harder to advocate for our land. With everything going on in this world, we need to stand together more than ever to protect the Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit — the sacred place where life begins.”
Recently, the steering committee announced an emergency Gwich’in gathering in Arctic Village on Sept. 4 for Gwich’in communities to come together to explore options — raising awareness, lobbying companies and financial institutions or taking legal action — for how to move forward as a unified front. Moreland says that’s critical to hear from Elders.
“It’s going to be like our first Gwich’in gathering in Arctic Village in 1988 when our Elders came together from Canada and Alaska, to come in solidarity for the opposition of oil and gas,” she says. “Our Elders need to guide us, right now more than ever, because they know what’s at stake.”
Gwich’in communities on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border are organizing to fight back against a proposed expansion of oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. A gathering to explore options is scheduled to take place on September 4, 2025.
Gwich’in communities are already feeling the loss of another vital food source, Moreland points out. Much like caribou, salmon have sustained Gwich’in and other Indigenous communities for millennia. But the collapse of different salmon populations in the North has resulted in empty freezers and pantries. Many communities haven’t been able to fish for the past five years. In 2024, a transboundary seven-year moratorium on fishing salmon in the Yukon River was implemented.
Eighty percent of the Gwich’in diet comes from the land, Moreland says, with caribou being the most important source of meat. They can’t afford to lose another critical food source.
“The caribou are not just a species to us. They’re essential to our food security and our survival. It’s not a metaphor. It’s lived reality.”
According to the Big Beautiful Bill, the first oil and gas lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge must occur before July 4, 2026, with the others to follow over the next nine years.
Despite the gravity of what this means for the fate of the Porcupine caribou herd — and the Gwich’in people — Moreland says their resolve to continue fighting for the protection of the calving grounds is stronger.
“No amount of money can justify what is taking place, and we will continue to stand up to anyone who seeks to contribute to this destruction of our sacred lands,” Moreland says. “We have a lot of people on our side. We will not stop fighting. We’re Gwich’in Strong.”
