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This place is Point Hope and I’ve been living here for 22 years - that’s my whole life.
We’re about 700 people, surrounded by the ocean that we eat off of -
the ocean, the land in the summertime, the furs in the wintertime.
I’ve been living here all my life, and I love Point Hope.
I love what I do, I love what I learned from my grandparents.
They used to always Eskimo dance, and that’s how I learned to sing,
how I learned to dance it.
Every song has a story behind it.
My favourite thing to hunt is probably the whale – the bowhead whale.
We call it the gift.
On one whale our whole community can survive a whole year.
This is my aunt’s house. She was married to my great uncle.
She lived in this house up until 1975.
The animals are who we are. They’re our identity as a people.
The whale is the centre of our lives
our houses, our feast grounds, our graveyards are made from the whale jawbones.
The skins of our drums are made from the whale liver.
That’s why we’re so concerned for the animals.
If the animals are gone, we’re gone.
If Shell comes here and drills, I’m scared of probably losing... everything.
A little spill could ruin everything for us.
We won’t be able to go for our hunt, we won’t be able to fill up our freezers.
You never know what’s going to happen in the Arctic.
The wind changes, the ice comes and blows with the wind
and you’re not talking a little lake of ice
you’re talking hundreds and hundreds of miles of ice out there.
We fear an oil spill.
We're a precious place, our land, everything up here
if they get a spill, what are they going to do? They said they could fix it, but…
The ocean to us is our garden.
I really don’t want drilling in my garden.