Gwich'in

Ch’eelil Peter, 17, who is Gwich’in and Diné and lives in Arctic Village south of ANWR, is a party to a lawsuit seeking to shut down the natural gas pipeline once and for all.

Alaska political leaders have long pushed to allow oil and gas drilling on the refuge’s 1.5 million acre coastal plain, an area seen as sacred to the Indigenous Gwich’in because it is where caribou they rely on migrate and come to give birth.

Bernadette Dementieff, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee, in a statement thanked the administration for the lease cancelation but said “we know that our sacred land is only temporarily safe from oil and gas development. We urge the administration and our leaders in Congress to repeal the oil and gas program and permanently protect the Arctic Refuge.”

“I feel a little bit of relief knowing that somebody will be down there that can really relate and understand what it is to be Alaskan, to be an Alaska Native and to have that connection to our homeland,” said Demientieff, executive director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee.

The Indigenous Gwich’in have fought for years against efforts to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and she hopes to lay out their concerns with Peltola.