In early September, POW Creative Alliance member Brennan Lagasse was invited to join an emergency gathering of the Gwichʼin people, to be held in Vashrąįį Kʼǫǫ, also known as Arctic Village, Alaska. The urgent issue at stake? Protection of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Specifically, the refuge is under imminent threat of seismic exploration, the invasive process oil companies use to determine where to drill for oil. The Alaska Wilderness League compares this exploration process to dozens of 90,000-pound trucks, which weigh more than a herd of elephants, being driven across fragile permafrost and ice. This can leave permanent scars on one of our nation’s most wild ecosystems, sacred grounds for the Gwichʼin and calving grounds for the Porcupine caribou herd.
Lagasse, a sustainability professor at the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe, has been visiting Arctic Village by invitation since 2014 and has taken his students there on several occasions to learn from and listen to the Gwichʼin elders about their way of life and how to protect this important ecosystem. But this recent meeting was different than his previous trips. It felt like mission critical. We called up Lagasse to ask about what went on in the meetings and what we can all do to help.