Preserving the Future: Indigenous Women in the U.S. and Canada are Taking on Big Oil — and Winning

The following article originally appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of Ms. Magazine.

“Most people don’t know what a subsistence way of life is,” says Faith Gemmill, an environmental activist from the Gwich’in territories in northern Alaska. “In other places, if you need anything you just go to the grocery store. Here, it’s not like that. We hunt for our food; we fish; we gather. It’s the cost of survival for us.”

On Alaska’s North Slope, where below-zero temperatures and underlying permafrost preclude agricultural development, indigenous communities necessarily rely on caribou and fishing for sustenance. But this subsistence way of life, which for many also bears a deep historical and cultural significance, is daily threatened by encroaching industries bent on extracting the region’s abundant fossil fuels—at any cost.

As a site of major oil exploration since the 1970s, Alaska now produces about 13 percent of the nation’s domestically sourced oil, with production steadily expanding across the Arctic. The cumulative effects of this development have impacted local communities in myriad ways. While a 2002 study by the National Academy of Sciences found that industry development displaced subsistence animals, damaged the tundra and exacerbated climate-change effects,Gemmill argues that the long-term impacts on humans are even worse.

“One community that has been surrounded by oil and gas development reported higher rates of asthma, pneumonia and other upper respiratory illnesses,” she explains, adding that potential risks are even greater. “If there were ever an oil spill, there is no way they could clean it up. They admit they don’t have the technology to clean up oil on ice.”

As executive director of Resisting Environmental Destruction On Indigenous Lands (REDOIL), Gemmill is part of a growing network of indigenous women organizing against oil extraction on their lands, both in the U.S. and Canada. In recent years she has focused on halting Shell Oil’s plans to develop offshore drilling in the Chukchi Sea, which borders Alaska’s northwestern coast. Shell leased the area from the U.S. government in 2008 for $2.7 billion, but Gemmill has repeatedly frustrated their attempts to begin exploration. Last year, REDOIL won a lawsuit against Shell, effectively halting production until more studies are completed on the potential environmental impacts of offshore drilling.

The oil industry wields incredible power in communities where exploration is taking place, often dividing residents by offering them economic opportunities—thus complicating activism against the destructive side of the industry’s activities.

“The industry comes into these communities when people are in high school and starts paying men huge amounts of money just to go to trainings—to get them hooked,” says Kandi Mossett, an organizer with the Indigenous Environmental Network. “It causes tension in the community, because while they’re destroying our water supply, they’re also providing jobs.”

While men have jobs in the industry, women have taken on the task of leading the activist fight. “My guess is that 98 percent of the leadership in the activist communities we work with are women,” Mossett says. “It’s not to say that men aren’t worried, but typically they will be the ones working in the industry, on the oil rigs. …I think women recognize that there is an inherent need to do something, because our children are sick and our future is in trouble.”

In Canada, indigenous women leaders have been facing off with the oil industry in communities perhaps even more gravely threatened than Gemmill’s.