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Many activists regard the Alaskan refuge - christened by some a "precious jewel of the circumpolar north" - as a cross between a cathedral and the Alamo: a symbolic last stand to protect not only a vast Arctic ecosystem but the sacred idea of American wilderness itself. The remote 19.6 million-acre sanctuary teems seasonally with caribou, polar bears, wolves and some 150 species of birds. If this holy of holies is pried open for oil, they warn, few protected areas in the country would be safe from development.
The Bush administration, which has made ANWR the centerpiece of its energy policy, calls these claims fear-mongering. Government officials point out that only an eighth of the refuge - some 1.5 million acres of coastal plains dubbed the "1002 area" - would be subject to exploration. Moreover, they say ANWR's untapped petroleum reserves are a necessary antidote to the crippling US addiction to foreign oil. Five billion to 11 billion barrels of black gold are thought to lie pooled under the tundra, or enough oil to power the entire US economy for six months to a year.
But largely lost in all this acrimony is another, older conflict altogether: an improbable human-rights struggle with echoes from the frontier wars of another century.
The Inupiats, or Eskimos, generally support drilling in ANWR for the jobs and revenues it will bring to Alaska's frozen North Slope. But further south, among the immense spruce barrens of central Alaska and the Canadian Yukon, the Gwich'in Indian tribe sees the appearance of new oil rigs in the same ominous light as Plains Indians watching immigrant wagons trundle over the prairie horizon.
For the Gwich'in - "Caribou People" whose population of 7,000 is divided between Canada and Alaska - the stakes couldn't be higher.
Because of its geographical isolation, and the high cost of flying food into its tiny communities, the tribe maintains one of the last true subsistence hunting traditions on the continent. Today, every Gwich'in still consumes an average of 250 meals of caribou meat a year.
Yet by cruel coincidence, in the 100,000-square-mile patch of Alaskan and Canadian wilderness that the caribou call home, oil abounds in just one spot: directly under the animals' sensitive ANWR calving grounds.
"The big oil corporations say they can drill there without harming the land or the wildlife," says Joe Linklater, chief of the Canadian village of Old Crow. "Well, that's like our tribe telling Americans to trust us with an experiment that may end up taking away all their cars.
"We didn't ask for this fight," Linklater adds. "This is about our survival as a people."
The Gwich'in effort to safeguard their caribou-based culture isn't new. Their fight began back in 1988, when worried tribe members from Canada and the United States (the American tribe spells its name "Gwich'in") gathered for the first time in generations at Arctic Village, Alaska, to coordinate a common defense against both the global oil industry and the most powerful government on the planet.
Since then, this little-known war of resistance, planned in log cabins at one of the uttermost ends of the Earth, has taken some bizarre turns.
Tough hunters who had never set foot on a plane have donned cheap business suits and jetted to Washington, where they have stalked the halls of Congress on behalf of the caribou. Some have carried bags of dried caribou meat on their lobbying trips because restaurant food makes them ill. Others have gotten hopelessly lost on the capital's subway system.
Along the way, the rustic tribe has pressured the Canadian government to protest ANWR drilling on environmental grounds. They have recruited Jimmy Carter and Robert Redford as allies. And, collectively, their handful of villages have scraped together hundreds of thousands of dollars - squeezed from cash-strapped tribal councils or solicited from US and Canadian environmental groups - to broadcast the Indian perspective of the ANWR crisis.
Old Crow, Canada, population 245, is a typical front-line community in this small, cold war.
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