Anchorage Daily News

WASHINGTON -- Anti-drilling activists visited federal officials this week to lobby against drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on offshore sites in Alaska.

Sarah James from Arctic Village, on the border of ANWR, and five other activists -- including two from Canada -- were in Washington on a trip organized by the Alaska Wilderness League.

The group met with several high-ranking officials from the Obama administration -- including Assistant Interior Secretary Tom Strickland and Larry Echohawk, head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs -- as well as members of the Alaska delegation and a staffer for the Senate Indian Affairs Committee.

An elder of the Gwich'in Nation, James won the Goldman Environmental Prize for extraordinary grass-roots leadership on environmental issues.

James said drilling for oil on the refuge's coastal plain -- a federal area estimated to hold major oil fields but now closed to oil development -- would threaten the birth place of the Porcupine caribou herd, sacred to the Gwich'in people.

"We are caribou people. It's our clothing, our story, our song, our dance and our food. That's who we are. If you drill for oil here, you are drilling right into the heart of our existence," James said.

Her village of about 150 people is among the first to be experiencing the devastation of global warming, James said, calling climate change a human rights issue.

Emilie Surrusco, a spokeswoman for the Alaska Wilderness League, said the women made the 5,000-mile trip "to bring a face to the issues their communities are dealing with on a daily basis."

Mae Hank, an Inupiat from Point Hope, said she lives in fear of an oil spill that could devastate her community. "It would annihilate our culture," she said.

The Gwich'in have been strong opponents of allowing oil development on ANWR's coastal plain, while most Alaska politicians, some Arctic coastal Natives and many Alaskans have pushed Congress for years to open the area to oil leasing.

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