Episode 113 - Arctic

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this episode of the liturgist podcast is brought to you by the podcast no place like home a podcast that gets to the heart of the biggest and most urgent story of our time which is climate change how do we stay sane in the age of climate change does personal choice really matter how is climate change related to spirituality these are the kind of questions that hosts and friends anna jane joyner and marianne hit explore in intimate creative and surprising ways anna jane is actually one of the people that was really instrumental in making today's liturgist podcast episode happen and she's a bright and charming kind person and uh if you're interested in how to make this home of ours a livable place in the future you can find and subscribe to no place like home at no place like homepodcast.com or just find it in apple podcast spotify stitcher or wherever you find your favorite podcasts all right well let's get to the show well it's 4 54 am finally got down the kitchen turn on the light see all my gear out here on the table and uh i was pretty excited last night yesterday about this trip and then i woke up and i was like what the hell am i doing like going to the wilderness what the hell feels insane right now uh let's go up the arctic i don't know here we go welcome to the liturgists podcast everybody my name is michael gunger this summer the liturgists got invited to go to the arctic refuge in northern alaska to do a podcast about the threat of cultural genocide and climate change to this sacred area that's been one of the last great untouched pieces of wilderness on earth and i was excited about it when i first heard about it but the morning of as you could hear in my voice i was feeling apprehensive this place we were going was way off the grid you know i mean i haven't historically been a real wilderness man i'm a big fan of things like beds and running water and indoor plumbing i spend most of my time strumming guitars and talking in microphones you know i'm pretty much helpless if a button pops on a dress shirt so now i needed to learn how to use bear spray to defend myself in the arctic circle you know i mean out of my zone synchronicity this is science mike and jamie lee finch it's 5 33 am we're already at lax dear god and uh i'm feeling remarkably not nervous about our trip but i'm trying to find some hope that i'll see something on this trip that gives me hope or gives me a good story to tell everyone about what's possible with the arctic and with climate change because right now to be honest i'm really really cynical and hopeless how are you feeling tired and ready to be somewhere extremely quiet for a few days and ready to be very quiet while i'm there and learn find that same hope that you're looking for um find it from the earth and find it from the people we'll be interacting with so other than that just want some coffee that we can do all right fine they're better people than me all right mike we just walked off playing here in fairbanks a little different world up here in los angeles a little bit a lot more trees yeah the weir case where i get off on an airport and the air feels more pleasant than l.a yeah i feel nice the alaskan summer welcome off the plane william hey i don't sound good but this way this is this is reality podcast i've been flying for eight eight hours today yeah because you came from nyc yeah jfk and now i'm in inc no we're not in anchorage we're in fairbanks fairbanks alaska second largest city i watched the biggest little farm and stopped like four times it's good good primer for this one it's going through all of our gear and making sure everybody has everything they need to stay warm that's dan he's the guy tasked with keeping us city slickers alive in the arctic wilderness i wanted to bring my telescope so bad but there's no way i'm tracking anywhere with that one will dan and his colleague michael from the wilderness society lay out for us as much as they can about what our trip is going to be like as you fly out there you will notice you will not pass a road you will not pass a hospital the arctic refuge is remote extremely remote we are on our own it's gonna be light almost the whole time other than a couple hours of dusk in the middle of the night it's probably gonna be cold we're gonna need five layers of clothing we're gonna pack it all in waterproof bags we're gonna have to poop in the ground oh and no deodorant why one of the specific dangers out there that we should talk about is crispy bears grizzly bears after going through all of the survival stuff that we need to go through dan pulls out a giant map and begins to talk to us more about why we are actually there so michael's sort of touched on it just the size and scale of alaska but it's a big state dan tells us about alaska about how big it is about how new it is to the united states i mean alaska only became a state in 1959 and as you could probably guess there were people living there already when we decided to make it our state people had been living there quite a long time actually the quechin tribe which is the people that we would eventually be meeting had been living on that land for about 30 000 years yeah you heard that right 30 000 years take that in for a second alaska as a state is 60 years old the united states of america is less than 250 years old the first europeans to arrive in north america at least the first for whom there is solid evidence were norse who landed here about a thousand years ago jesus was born about 2 000 years ago plato was born about 2500 years ago i mean if you've ever been to a place like athens or rome and seen the ancient ruins you get the feeling that two three four thousand years was a long time ago thirty thousand years the gwichin and other native and indigenous groups of people have lived in what we now call northern alaska living off of and with the land in harmony and then white people came and with them diseases and poisons violence a mass genocide that resulted in the obliteration of so many lives and so much of these people's lifestyle and culture we force them to move into villages taking away their children and sending them to english boarding schools where so much of their culture and heritage was systematically whitewashed and destroyed yet the gwichin and many other indigenous people groups have fought hard and managed to survive somehow many of the inuit and native populations still live off the land in a way that might be hard for a lot of us who live in places with public services and infrastructure to understand in the arctic village which is a place we would eventually be visiting people still get about 80 of their nutrition from wild game in the area they have to again there are no roads up there anything they would buy has to be flown in specifically for them a gallon of milk costs something like 10 dollars and they're poor they need the land but because of colonization and climate change the land has taken a real beating and just as they are in some of their most dire straits that they've ever been in as a people with the oppressive boot of white colonialism on their necks president trump went ahead and inserted into his tax bill a provision that would allow oil companies to move into quechin people's sacred land and drill for oil an action that would absolutely devastate and already severely oppressed and hurting people and do untold damage to some of the last unspoiled wilderness in america so it's monday morning it's uh gosh i don't know just before 6 a.m got up early and took a shower knowing it would be my last for a few days and now as i'm getting ready i'm faced with the question can i wear deodorant they told us we can't take deodorant because it will attract bears so does that mean i can't wear deodorant today uh to be better safe than sorry i probably shouldn't but wow i'm gonna stink really bad it's funny how we care about such little things it is 6 15 in the morning in fairbanks alaska the sun has been up for a lot longer than i have and today we're all going to be getting into some very tiny planes and flying about four or five hours north to the coastal plain where we will make camp where we will stay for the next three days without a lot of things but mainly without deodorant so this is going to get interesting flying over northern alaska in a little prop plane is a unique experience you know i mean most of us have seen land that is less populated than places like los angeles but most of us have not seen anything like the vast expanse of land up near the arctic circle in alaska to fly for hours without seeing any power lines roads cars houses i mean just miles and miles of untouched land in every direction from the plane it's pretty spectacular on the way in we all just sat quietly i mean it's quiet as it is in one of those little planes but we just sat there looking out the windows at the humanless landscape of raw earth below us absorbing the majesty of mother earth her forests and streams the lakes the mountains the valleys we soared over raging rivers and breathtaking waterfalls the ebb and the flow of color and texture on the surface of the planet as it has evolved naturally for millions and millions of years was a true wonder to behold we even saw a couple grizzly bears just before we landed on the tundra in the middle of absolutely nowhere as far as human beings are concerned anyway you know we'd come to discover that it wasn't actually nowhere it was a profoundly sacred and ancient place but i got to tell you that feeling when that plane landed and then we took our stuff out and then the plane just like rolled away and flew off oh god it was like surreal the feeling of being absolutely alone it was really wild this audio is from a video on my phone and what you're not seeing is jamie and i dancing around like fools what i'm hard in my seven wing right now oh she's now running spinning around like a five-year-old her arm's outstretched it's pretty great we humans have turned planet earth into something that would barely be recognizable to most humans through history somehow with our clever brains and opposable thumbs we turned meadows and streams into freeways and strip malls and don't get me wrong i love human civilization aside from the modern luxuries and conveniences that we have made there's also art architecture music philosophy science spirituality all sorts of incredible innovations that make life on planet earth such a magical place but we ought not play down the meadows and the streams earth isn't just some treasure chest to pull out materials from for our inventions and our innovations it is our very foundation for life she is not our possession she is our home we are not her master we are her children we are part of her and frankly we're lucky to be i mean life is fragile we exist within a sliver of possibility a comparatively paper-thin layer of atmosphere on the surface of a brilliant blue gem suspended in a vast ocean of space and most of the time that earth has been here we humans have not been and standing there in that humanless expanse of mother's untouched territory one could not help but feel how very connected to her and dependent on her we really are i'm in my tent that we just built after being dropped off by a tiny little four passenger plane i can't describe how quiet it is out here and it's enormous um i think i've definitely been in places that have felt big before but this feels genuinely enormous like i thought i knew what that word meant before coming here and now i feel like i have a greater understanding and appreciation for the idea of enormity it's huge and it is quiet and it is beautiful and we were flying in and we were flying over these over the mountains and through the mountains and over the tundra and i saw this gorgeous glacial water i'm assuming i don't know maybe i should ask someone because it was a really really vibrant and light blue i just couldn't stop staring our whole trip up here we are remote this is the furthest away i've ever been from people and i love it this is just me it's uh gosh i guess mid or late afternoon and today we took a hike to this i don't know what to call it other than a monument valley um it's up on top of a mountain there's these large stone statues i mean natural rock formations that you create as statues with your imagination and it's really high it is wild and accommodations for human civilization and for people haven't been made and that means when you enter anwar as they call it you are taking risk and i haven't felt at risk of any more than maybe a sprained ankle so far but as we started to climb up next to this creek into the mountains up to the valley itself uh at this point only michael and our guide dan have continued jamie is uh probably 30 feet up the mountain from me she's reached as far as she can go when she got further than i did i literally don't know how i would get from where i am to where she is i'm actually surprised i made it this far with my fitness level and general clumsiness i do not know how i'm going to get down there were several moments i realized you know i'm making choices that for me probably only work in one direction so it's gonna be quite an adventure getting off this mountain but i wanted to see if i could get to the top and uh i'm gonna guess i'm about 45 of the way up it looks less steep ahead but the path is less clear and i literally don't know how to continue forward so i'll sit and wait by this stream and see what nature has to tell me i'm sitting on some moss in this gorgeous foggy craggy ravine with all these alien looking rock structures this creek is flowing down from the mountains into the past where we're staying meets up at the river down there and then it flows out to the arctic ocean as we're flying through all of this and as i've been walking through all of it i just keep seeing flow everywhere from the air you could see all the little streams and tributaries and rivers flowing through the earth like veins through a body and out of the earth it's at a different time scale a different ace of perception than human beings operate at but all these rock formations are the flow of the tectonic plates the movement under our feet pushing up the rock and the soil flowing with movement and somehow all of this movement is the same movement that that gave rise to lava and heat and ocean and life microbes and single-celled organisms and multiple cells blowing together to create larger and more complex organisms and systems and ecosystems and then humans and all the systems within humans and all the microbes within humans and all the cooperation between air and sun and earth that keep humans living and breathing and talking and tweeting it's all just the same flow it's the movement out of god's self into god's self and that's why when i look at this river i'm not looking at an other it's just the flow noticing the flow the same flow that pushes this water that is here in this moment down these rocks which are here at this moment down into that river which is here at this moment it's the same flow that casts the light into these eyeballs that are here at this moment through these stories in my brain at this moment utilizing all the blood vessels that are flowing through this body like rivers through the earth the flow witnessing itself speaking to itself putting it into words to enjoy itself listening on a podcast to enjoy herself a beautiful flow i hope you're enjoying this moment you're being all of this and from here it's breathtaking i was speaking to the water earlier and i thanked it then he she thanked them because they don't need us but we need them and we would not be here in any capacity if this water was not willing to share themselves with us and i'm feeling slightly grieved over the fact that we are so often through our lack of mindfulness unwilling to share ourselves these next few days at least i'm mindful and i've made a promise to the water continue to be mindful and grateful and reverent it's hard to explain just on an audio without a visual but if you were here and you could see it you would i don't know if you could feel anything but wonder and gratitude and some grief so it's our first morning in the freaking freaking cold of an arctic summer and i was just really curious like what everyone's noticed what you're feeling what you've experienced i feel an awe like i feel this land this space this time together just feels really sacred and feels really like i feel centered i feel like nothing else really matters outside of this moment yeah i feel that same very similar way like i'm very aware of how empty it feels but it doesn't feel the lonely kind of empty no it feels very full um i feel very present to this specific kind of fullness in that emptiness if any of that makes sense i could probably make sense to all of you because you're here um i also feel just very i just feel very good i slept really well last night um we've been really well taken care of by our guide and host and i feel awake and alive i think it's weird i've been to a lot of places on our planet and there's a certain like commonality to ecosystems like so this is what deserts are like and this is what you know boreal forests are like and this is what really hot wet climates are like but the arctic tundra it feels more like an alien planet than an earth ecosystem yeah it does it's beautiful um it's very it's a never felt a place like this like just feeling absolutely away from all human civilization um i'm also like not a camper so i'm like i didn't sleep very well and i live a pampered life last night we could tell that uh michael was starting to fray around the edges because he was like is there a hot springs nearby and it turns out there's a lukewarm springs that's like a really hard day's hike and i could see him mulling it over consider that yeah he might still be considering it if we ever just we look up and he's gone we know where he went if either of those if it was either hot springs or a slightly shorter hike it'd be a no-brainer but a full like a full day it was easier for a lukewarm it's a little much so you like hot springs that's kind of outdoorsy stuff you like you just don't like camping i love the earth i just i like sleeping in beds and using toilets showers running water i mean one way to look at humanity is like we're the global ecosystem champion at nest building yeah like we're just incredible at nest building and uh the arctic is one of the few environments so hostile to human nest building that we haven't settled here yeah i mean this is like a summer so this is like the as pleasant as it gets here and uh i think my hands about to fall off i'm so cold i'm the only one wearing gloves holding these microphones i didn't think i could work the microphone with with a glove on you can do anything if you believe in yourself it's crazy how untouched this land is you know yeah like you can feel there's no trails it's all uneven like walking is difficult to do and so yeah very few humans have ever really come here and then if they do they've only come certain times you're extremely aware that we are not supposed to be here it it isn't for us like this specific spot and the only way that we've made it for us is by bringing as close as we can get to our nesting with us and without any of this we would die pretty quickly out here and that's interesting because i've never been somewhere that remote where i've been that aware that i mean we're in good hands but we're hanging on by a thread technically it can go wrong at any moment there's no yeah we've never what dan was telling us yesterday there's nowhere in the continental us that is as far as we are right now from just a road like the lengths we had to go through to get here in the first place like two airplane rides yeah and i don't mean like a connecting flight yeah tiny place i mean like we were in a plane the size of a sprinter van and they're playing a little bit smaller than a honda civic six landings and that little flight over those mountains though one i was glad i took motion sickness medicine but it was beautiful it was so oh it was amazing yeah i had a spiritual experience because when we were going over the mountains into sunset pass i put on spirit by beyonce from the lion king and i i took everything within me not to put my hands up and worship on the plane like well there wasn't a whole lot of room it was like ah just so majestic just this land is majestic this energy is majestic i feel like i'm just my body's soaking it all in yeah the silence is amazing yeah just wait that is cold yeah you don't hear planes overhead you don't hear birds you don't it's just this expansive past this valley with no sound yeah it's pretty amazing that might be one of my favorite parts yeah i'm just aware of how much noise we live in it doesn't matter where you live and even if you're in a rural part of america you still still hear noise even if you're in the deep south you you're crickets like this is the most you hear is when it gets a little windy and that's it we have that bird up and talk to us yeah i'm just gonna say how are you gonna how are you gonna do your birding out here i haven't just gotta watch clothes i've seen several birds you have to sit still and quiet or trained for the birthday 20 minutes and then you'll a bird will fly into view and because i i don't know if that bird yesterday had seen people before i don't think so the way it came up at us was it definitely checked us out yeah wait a minute when you guys were well you you all decided to pike around the mountain and i was like wow such fools because they're gonna have to walk all that again william and i wisely chose to sat and contemplate nature yes wisely and we were and then nature contemplated you i mean i keep having moments like that where you're saying how you're like i don't think this bird has ever seen humans before i keep having moments where i'm seeing like we saw that wolf at a distance yesterday or like this yellow flower an arctic poppy and i keep thinking about the fact that it's likely that what we are looking at no humans i've ever seen before that feels really sacred to me this fog around us feels really sacred too yeah the way it's just descending on us again you notice this it's actually coming down on us right now as well i know because i've gone from being comfortable to freezing again look at the i mean just in the last five minutes it's just well it's thursday morning and i'm sitting in my tent um our plane out will get here between you know 25 minutes and 55 minutes from now if all goes well we're gonna pack up and uh leave the wild and head into arctic village and arctic village is a gwitchen village and is a little more human civilization-like than the true wild we've been in but still won't have things like cell phone service or plumbing and what i'm really looking forward to learning from the gwichen people how climate change has been impacting their way of life and really what oil exploration does to their way of subsistence living so with a little sadness we say goodbye to sunset pass that's been our home for the last few days but i'm really looking forward to hearing what the glitching have to tell us that can help us contextualize the experiences we've had here so it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourself or feeling connected to the people that we love better help will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house and 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listeners that are interested in uh issues of justice and science and yeah and i don't understand that crap it's like a radio show yeah yeah and we're we're trying to organize young people into acting to protect the glitch and way of life and the sacred lands of the refuge the bottom line is i don't have to do this you know i don't need to do this because we've done it so many times and this is all we get to sponsor interviews and nobody go around and try to help so my point of view from that day on is that you know if you guys want to do this you guys got to pay to pay the people of their services because you guys couldn't make money out of this i want to wear another somehow and we know that we're not sponsored idiots up here we've been dealing with this with presidents senators congressmen a lot of uh people from hollywood robert redford you know john denver they all been here we're not we're not just a pushover but we have to believe that um every one of you every one of us says we didn't even invite you people over here you just invite yourself and then you and then within 300 years you just destroyed it come on think about it you know when you guys are the little kids yeah you guys should know better it took over how many billion years thought to create our sun and our sun created our earth and our earth created at north america which created us as a as a people from north america and we we were doing a pretty damn good job until 1914 1992 it was a people that uh over in europe and chopping their head each other head off and burn each other alive and if you pray a different way they'll kill you for that so these people were scared and came over and and the native helped them it's the second year the first year they all died titled because they don't know how they wanted a land okay yeah the certain land they wanted so they brought in small parks people from europe and destroyed all it went all the way up here as far as the caribou before 1492 there were a couple hundred thousand of caribous along with canada and alaska and a couple of billions of buckles and salmons and all that is there and you destroyed in three inch within 300 years if if we're running it it'll probably be the same you know but then you get these uh certain white people who is superior who thinks that we are not educated or anything like that to to create a society where we could live what happened when you guys found out about that tax bill um what what have you guys been doing to bring about resistance to the idea of oil extraction we've been fighting uh terrorism since 1492. and we're pretty damn good at it it's about surviving all the time it's people bothering you all the time like you never receive anything bad you know i could make this place livable so many of us modern americans perhaps especially white americans don't have a super deep sense of our lineage and history most of us are part of families who have only been in this country for a few generations or less and to hear somebody like calvin speak about what you guys did can be confusing or even off-putting for some of us we might say you know i didn't take your land white fragility might say that you know maybe my ancestors did but i didn't but let me give you a little analogy here imagine that you and your family have been living in a home for 20 years over these two decades you've really made yourself a home the walls are covered in your family pictures and there's etch markers in the closet on the wall from the children growing through the years you've built up so many stories and memories through the years in this house and then at some point some invaders move in without permission and kill almost everyone in your family day after day more and more of the family of the killers move into your house taking what they want painting over the height etchings on the walls tearing down the family photos and just generally destroying the whole house how would you feel about these other visitors how would you feel about any of the individuals who were associated with them even if it wasn't the specific individuals who did the killing or the painting or the vandalism wouldn't you still feel a little bit like get the out of our home well in the time scale for how long the chin people have been living there in their home as compared to how long white people have been coming around and vandalizing and destroying and killing i mean it's all comparatively recent history and for somebody like calvin who actually does have a deep sense of heritage and lineage and culture it's all still happening colonialism is still happening it may not be in the form of smallpox ridden blankets anymore but it's still coming at them in the form of tax bills and missionaries and yes even podcasters like me trying to come and tell their story for them and i may not have been the person to snatch children away from their parents myself or hit those children in the head with a stick when they speak their own native language in their english boarding school but i wasn't born there i'm an outsider who came barging in with my microphone an expensive rei camping gear and high-minded idealism that i learned in the united states of america the country that claimed the land that calvin's people have lived on for 300 centuries as our own and if you think of how recently we did that to them in terms of that house analogy before just to let that timeline of how recent this history is sink in a little bit if you lived in that house for 20 years do you know how recently in that same ratio of time that your house became the official property of the invaders aka the united states of america two weeks ago for the gucci all this just happened and it's still happening and still the guccin invited us into their homes they were kind to us they told us their stories we lost our culture our way of life and that's what happened to us my mom says starvation most of my people died from starvation our first visitor is french people for trapping and their hair just only for high price for it was high price then and that's all they're here for nothing else and when they did that they came with poison it's a strict night liquid strict night and what they do is they lace that bait on that trap and any animal that eats on the fire right there you know and that strict night is very toxic and you can't even touch your skin it'll get trembled from there it affects the nerve system and so they use those big rubber gloves and our people don't know all that they don't even know the name for poison my mom used to call it when i was young said don't go over there it's dirty i don't see nothing dirty about it you know and hair that's a cap in those trappers state in and i don't know what she don't touch nothing don't eat the berries don't go near you know and all that kind of stuff that woman's name is sarah and she was our guide and host through the village not only did she share her home and her stories with us but she gave us a first-hand experience of the strength of her and her family and her people how hard they fought over the years fought for their children for their culture for this land for the earth all the decades that they've fought politically in the united states for big oil to not come into this specific plot of land this has been going on for decades and until now they've managed to hold them back but with this tax bill colonialism has reared its ugly head again in a very direct and violent way and is threatening not only the ecosystem and the animals and the life that depend on it but also the beautiful people who will be most severely affected you know right now the federal government's gonna try to uh drill for oil in in the coastal plain this is sarah's brother gideon that's an area where where animal used for breathing for cabin ground for uh where you find terrible heart and also geese god damn it you know thousand thousand of keys goes up there and nests some of them fly as far as from south america to to nest up there all were directed yeah you know and porcupine cable hurt cabin ground is right there right there where they want to drill and i tell you what those animals are wild animals they're wild and uh and it's kind of a disturbance which would hurt that herd no all my life i live off the land this is charlie i've hunt fish trap all my life and right now we got a big major threat to to wildlife out there you know caribou day sensitive just like any other animal and a certain time of the year that's when they're the most sensitive and that's when they have their young and where they want to where they have their young is where they want to drill for oil yeah i look at where they used to migrate and the people that used to live off of that caribou they're not there no more that's what's going to happen with this this herd too the same thing is going to happen there one day they're getting up and leave they want nothing more to do with it you know like i said during that time of year that's when they're they're most sensitive i don't know if you got a chance to see the trails while you were up there the trails that the caribou go through the trails yeah those trails they've been going through them for thousands of years the same trails that they're going through right now and that that goes to show you how how many years that they've been migrating up there they have their young the last time that i flew up there and i see those trails and i did i i can't even imagine i tried to imagine how many millions of caribou went through those trails you know or thousands of years that's what they want to continue to do you know and they develop they develop oil up there and big oil rigs and drilling rigs and stuff like that that's going to change they go somewhere else we don't see them no more what that's this is the our lifestyle here that's part of our life you know a big part of our life yeah so yeah it's um the idea that in just a few hundred years tens of thousands of years could be disrupted yes is astounding it is it is yeah you know it and it's evil yeah yeah they uh like i i was saying you know you look at the beauty of this place it used to be like that all over the world in remote areas it's not like that no more yeah very very few places left like this yeah i was taught that when you go out in the woods you respect the animals the water and the land you know that's the way i was raised until the day i die that's what i'll be doing it's not just a danger to the animals it's danger to the terrain it's a danger to the water you know they say that they have technology to do things right but at the same time there's still major oil spills happening right well where's all the technology they're talking about you look at the uh you look at the dakota uh pipeline what happened last year yeah that's a big disaster there yeah and uh for years and years they say the oil companies say they have the technology to do it right well if if that's so then stuff like that wouldn't happen got another big threat up here right now too that's with climate change and uh a big part of climate change has to do with fossil fuels and that's what they want to go after more of it yeah yeah yeah the big big change that we see here and now this the the permafrost thawing out you look at it different species of fish like the salmon the the runs aren't like they used to be and i know a lot of that has to do with the water temperature yeah so yeah it's a big part of our life right here living off the land that's how we stay alive you know you can go down to the river and with a cup and drink water all right out of the river there's places like fairbanks or anchorage you can't do that other major cities even in the outskirts of them you can't do that but we can still do that here there are other people that they don't uh they don't really think about other people's lifestyle especially out in rural alaska you know what they always think about is money yeah you know you could have all the money in the world you go out in the woods and get stuck all that money in the world ain't going to help you you know we've been living like this for generations and uh that's what that's what we want to continue to do you know some people say that oh it's you you come here and people are kind of poor well you look at our lifestyle this is a rich lifestyle we live you know you look at these people here they're healthy you know everything that we eat pretty much is natural you look at uh obesity now you look at diabetes and stuff like that all that is from processed food i mean i i can't i go to a store and i look at some places in the cooler area how much microwavable food there is there it's virtually impossible for you to go down to the store every day and buy store-bought food year-round here it's virtually impossible this is our home here yeah this is where we live yeah that's the way we want it that's the way we want to keep it and a big part of that lifestyle has to do with caribou it has to do with the ducks the geese the fish moose deer uh sheep yeah there's a big decline in sheep over the years too and i i have a feeling that's uh things like that is going to continue if things don't start changing yeah you know i i think about our younger generation you know 10 years from now what are they going to have to go through if things change especially with oil companies up there yeah you know maybe not in my lifetime but the ones behind me how are they going to have a living that's what we're trying to watch out for our future generation a long time ago before we were born or when we were kids and all that the elders that's what they were watching out for for future generations that's what we're trying to do right now yeah i don't know it's i know it's a it's a big battle that we're up against but we don't give up person after person story after story and one couldn't help but feel the weight of all of this this isn't just about a single plot of land it's not just about republicans or democrats or oil companies or conservationists this is also a story about colonialism a story about how one group of people namely people of european descent came to a land that was not their own and use their religion to justify the violence cruelty and genocide of countless people a cultural genocide as well that has happened and is still happening what the government is currently doing in choosing short-term oil profits at the expense of all of us in the long run it's not just an isolated event it's another action another act of violence and a long line of actions another kick to the head of some of the most oppressed people on this continent as they already lie on the ground bleeding my question is dear liturgists are we okay with that are we just going to sit by and write it off as their problem or could we use some of the millions of voices that listen to this podcast to speak up and say no this is not acceptable we're running out of natives i am the only probably the last one you're going to see i speak my language and i'm full-blooded and i'm handsome as hell so after this probably be no more but that is what the doing of other people not us if you're religious like christian where the hell do you stand i mean either you can if you have to uh say and get up and say this is strong i can't sleep at night and we should really do something about this you know especially the white people but it's not happening if you're interested in using your voice to help kelvin and sarah and gideon and charlie and all the guichen people and our earth and all of us as it relates to this situation in the arctic go to the liturgists.com arctic and because this is sort of an evolving fight that page will be updated with information and it will also allow you to sign up for an email list to get updates and calls to action for ways that we can help again the liturgists.com arctic feel free to pause this episode now just add your name to that list so that you can join the people that are fighting for the gwichin and for this sacred piece of land thank you of all the people we spoke to i think the hardest conversation but the one that i felt was most necessary was the first one we had with kelvin and some of the things that he pointed out and some of the frustrations that he expressed about having these conversations over and over and over and not quite seeing people who have those conversations with him doing much else after that point i felt like there was maybe this part of my brain that i hadn't fully i don't know i guess maybe deconstructed from of um from my previous religious experience of like i'm gonna go do some really good work in the world here i go and then just getting there and having this conversation with this person just knocking in in the best way knocking down any idea that i had of myself being centered in this experience at all um or us or what we are doing being centered um and it was the conversation with him was tense and i feel like it needed to be and that when we were walking back after that conversation i felt the magnitude of the why behind the whole trip hit me in a way that i don't think it had before when we were just alone with ourselves on the coastal plains yeah that that conversation was really moving for me as well i just walk away with tears coming out my eyes because i think what the biggest thing i got out of this trip was a sense of of history and of how not in a vacuum this one thing is it's not just this one issue about this particular land with these this particular tribe you just have the sense when you spend some time in this region how long these people have been here how intimately their people are interwoven into the very land itself it's not just this it's like this has been happening to them now since white people moved into the area and said this is our land and here you can have part of it as long as xyz like making them move into villages making them change their whole way of life and then now it's just it's so obviously the shitty thing to do to go in there and be like okay now we're gonna drill here this is so obviously inhumane when you feel the whole picture yeah so it was it was a good amount of anger and and sadness and just a feeling of the injustice of how these people have been treated william said something yesterday i think just it was just a statement that felt to me just like it brought a lot of levity just the thought of claiming land is so violent just the idea of coming into a place that is not yours and saying it's mine now like on land like when we were talking to charlie and you pointed out mike saying you know i my ancestors came to this land in this year how long have your ancestors been here and i mean hundreds of generations it's nothing short of just absolute violence i was going to the arctic village to me highlighted how just complex and complicated all of this just really is how kind of what you were saying like how meshed it all is how compounded the pain is but also how compounded the legality and the politics and the the original sin like it's all it's kind of all been something that has been perpetually leading towards these people's dissemination their termination their extinction and this is just one more fight that is showing that they're not valued they're not loved that they're not seen that they're not heard that they have no real agency even when the government i guess gives them land whatever that means allows them to become a sovereign nation how even that in and of itself is a a step towards their own extinction because they're not even given the tools necessary to even support themselves um and and they're starting off in debt they're starting off in poverty um so yeah i when we went to kelvin's house and he raged at us in that moment i i understood that rage i was like i i know the frustration of this and i honestly i felt it was an honor and a privilege just to even be in this situation where i could hear someone else's pain and he could just throw it at me and i can just take it didn't have to defend myself i didn't have to explain myself i didn't have to explain my motives or our motives or well this is going to help you and why would you you know none of that mattered it was simply thank you for sharing i hear you i see you i can't take any of this away but i can be a witness to the fact that you're here that you exist and your story matters and the pain of your people matter um yeah that was some of my biggest takeaway and obviously like colonialism is a bitch like it really just is like it it it is royally screwed um with all of us and especially a nation um of people who are literally fighting for their own existence in a way that even a lot of us more in the states just don't quite understand what have you been able to take away mike i think i was struck first by the scale of arctic habitat and the necessity of the scale that of that habitat obviously with such short summers and such intense winters there's not a lot of time to build a plant-based food chain so with that you know relative lack of floral density you need these huge spaces and flying for hours and hours and seeing no infrastructure no power lines no roads it puts some context into the cost on the natural world of a modern western lifestyle right so most of our continent habitats are under far more pressure from infrastructure and that continual pressure on ecosystems is uh really dangerous for us not only for climate change but also for the stability of the the web of life that exists on this planet and even before we consider the gross and dignity to this native population that oil extraction in the coastal plain would look like this is one of the last naturally behaving ecosystems on the planet in a really fragile area the permafrost we know contains immense carbon and adding infrastructure and industrial activity at this moment seems to be the most short-sighted move we could make as a people but we're also the same people that elected a climate change denier right at such a critical moment so i guess it shouldn't be that surprising and then the other thing i was struck by was the um reality of a sustainable way of living as exhibited by first nations people in alaska they genuinely live in greater harmony with the natural world than the rest of us that share this continent progressive climate-centered organizations could do well to model their advocacy around the lifestyle and leadership of native people who were successful custodians of this land for 30 000 years whereas we've kind of squeezed all the pulp out of the orange and a short 300. the differences in those scales of damage over time are really stark that actually made me feel really hopeless but seeing folks like sarah and folks like charlie who have been fighting this fight for decades before i was born and they don't give up so who am i to say sometimes i feel too tired to continue what's that quote that uh anna jane joyner gave us uh about hope you want to say that you do we don't need hope we need courage yeah and that's really resonated with me across the arc of this entire experience i think that's that's why i wanted to come here and i wanted to us to go on this trip was to kind of get a little bit outside of our heads i mean i'm in enneagram five i know michael's an angry m5 too like kind of in our heady abstract like especially when we talk about these types of issues whether it's climate or it's race or it's whatever i wanted to do something that was really on the ground talking to people and and also immersing ourselves in nature and in the very problem that we often so easily talk about because i know i just pull up my phone and i read the article and i tweet it and i share it or maybe if i'm really woke i'm at a party do you guys know about this going on in the world right uh and so there was something really important about positioning ourselves physically in this remote space that yes is beautiful holy and sacred but it's also contested and is also the the battleground for probably what's going to become one of the biggest fights is fights of our generation which will be are we going to preserve one of the last remaining great wildernesses are we going to preserve the last great wilderness i think that's the the question we've got to ask ourselves and as a person of color i i thought it was so important to show up in the space because we don't always get opportunity to show up in these types of environments and also to even interact like i our struggles are often so disconnected like so the black liberation struggle oftentimes can feel very disconnected from the indigenous freedom struggle and so i really wanted to get on the ground and at least just be around people that have experienced the same wound and hear their stories and i don't know i feel like you might i don't know if bringing awareness will fundamentally change anything but i think it's courage for us to encourage for all of us to say we need to protect the arctic and so let's show up and let's at least try to do something and that's i would say a reason why i am very glad it was definitely a lot to go from three days in complete isolation and solitude to immediately like taking a tour of the village and interacting with people we'd never met before and doing like five or six interviews like all back to back to back it was a lot but i am really glad that we did it that way and we did it in that order to be able to spend time connecting with the land and that land not only then having and holding meaning for us as visitors to the land but then i feel like that it contextualizes that much more why the fight matters because again we can you know we can watch a movie or a video or look at pictures or read the articles do the research but actually being in that physical space it's hard to even like really put into words why it feels like that specific order felt very meaningful to commune with the land and then hear from these people who are in love with and are protectors of and are in deep relationship with the land why that land matters so much i had a real feeling of like we as humans we get this idea that we're we so fundamentally believe that we're separate from the land and truthfully like the land is going to be fine mama is going to do what she's going to do we actually are the earth doing what it's doing and the cost is not going to be to mother the cost of us resisting flowing with the natural order of things rather than flowing with the natural order of things the cost is to us the cost is our own suffering and we're cutting off our own legs this wilderness is not something that's separate from me down in la this earth is what sustains humans the biosphere the whole it's all totally interconnected this is not just it's it's indigenous people closest to it now that are most effective now but it's all part of the same system it's us screwing with that land and and sucking the blood out of its veins it's part of our body it's not like it it affects all of us eventually yeah the the chin and the the different indigenous peoples are going to have the the worst quickest suffering from us doing that as a but it's not it's us it's all part of our own very body and so it felt to me like being able to see a really important part of my body that i never pay attention to and i realize it's like we're thinking about just mangling it and just just you know harming it like why would why would we do that why would we just that short term get a good quarter for the oil company thing is like why what are we really so short-sighted and as our has our feeling of separateness from the land really gone that far yes yeah it has we hope you've enjoyed this episode of the liturgists podcast your hosts have been william matthews jamie lee finch science mike and myself michael gunger and one more reminder for all of you to go to the liturgists.com arctic to sign up for an email list that will keep you abreast of what you can do for the refuge the gwichin people and this wondrous planet of ours we'd like to offer our big thanks to our friends of the wilderness society for making this trip happen since their start in 1935 the wilderness society has been at the forefront of nearly every major public land victory in the united states each day thousands of acres of wild places are lost to mining drilling logging and other development but we don't have to give it all away together we can protect public lands and the folks at the wilderness society we're just so grateful for for being at the forefront of that battle today's episode was produced and edited by me with some assistance by tagus lair haydn and carter john music was by on earth and liminal a special thanks to our patrons on patreon for making this show possible all the love to all of you thanks for listening everybody