Vuntut Gwitchin Government, Gwitchin Tribal Council – The U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday passed the “Build Back Better Act”, which restores protections to Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit (The Sacred Place Where Life Begins), also known as the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Coastal Plain is critical to the survival of Vadzaih (caribou). The Porcupine caribou herd completes of one of the world’s largest land animal migrations and is vital to the subsistence lifestyle of the Gwich’in people in the Yukon, Northwest Territories and Alaska.

When more than 400,000 acres of the Coastal Plain were leased by the Trump Administration, not a single acre was leased by a major oil and gas company.