In Arctic Village, 230 miles north of Fairbanks, just across the East Fork of the Chandalar River from the refuge, people watched stories about ANWR on news delivered to their living rooms by satellite. They saw on the Internet that most every national outlet covered Obama’s announcement. Stories quoted politicians, environmental groups and oil company spokespeople, but few mentioned their point of view. A few Gwich’in leaders wrote editorials published in Alaska papers, but that was all the world heard from them.

“It was as if we did not exist,” James says. “But we have been here for thousands of years.”

Villagers are very happy about a wilderness designation, James says.

“I can’t stop smiling, that’s how good the news is to me, she says.

They hope the president will go further, circumventing Congress and using his power to designate the land as a national monument. Among all the parties with a stake in whether or not drilling happens in ANWR, they feel they have the most to lose, she says.

“We support 100 percent keeping it closed,” says Ernie Peter, an Arctic Village tribal council member and former chief. “It is for our younger generation.”

Obama plan to preserve coastal plain

Obama's proposal will add "wilderness" designation to the entire Alaska refuge, making it more difficult for companies to drill for oil and gas. The USGS estimates there is between 4 and 11 billion barrels of recoverable gas in the coastal plain where caribou go to calve.

Source: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge Comprehensive Conservation Plan , Chapter 4. Map by Alex Newman/Al Jazeera America.

Should the caribou be harmed and their numbers reduced, people wouldn’t have the food they depend on and would likely have to move, James says. Village life sustains a fragile culture. There are only 8000 Gwich’in total in Alaska and Canada, James said. In Alaska, there are now fewer than 300 people fluent in Gwich’in.

Edward Sam, another village elder, compared the threat to the caribou to the way killing buffalo destroyed Native American communities in the Lower 48.

“They kill all the buffalo; that’s the only way they won,” he says. “That’s the way I read my history.”

At the moment, the Porcupine Herd is very healthy. There are more than 190,000 animals in the herd, more than there has ever been since scientists started to study it in the 1980s, according to Jason Caikoski, assistant area biologist for northeast Alaska with the state Department of Fish and Game.