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The Trump administration has scheduled an oil and gas lease sale in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for June 5.

Some shit you should know before you dig in: If you’re unaware, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge covers roughly 19 million acres in northeastern Alaska and has been at the center of a decades-long fight over energy development. The refuge’s coastal plain could hold as much as 11.8 billion barrels of recoverable oil, but the same stretch of land is where a caribou herd central to Indigenous subsistence has calved for generations, and some groups (like the Gwich’in) say it’s sacred. Despite this, the Iñupiaq community of Kaktovik, the only village actually inside the coastal plain, has supported drilling, arguing that oil and gas revenue is essential to the region’s survival (more than 95% of the North Slope Borough’s budget comes from resource development). Congress first authorized drilling in the refuge in 2017, and Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, passed last year, now requires at least four lease sales in the coastal plain by 2035.

What’s going on now: The Bureau of Land Management announced Friday that the June 5 auction will cover at least 400,000 acres of the refuge’s 1.56 million-acre coastal plain. It will be the first such sale under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the third overall in the refuge’s history. The most recent one, held in the final days of the Biden administration, attracted no bidders, which officials at the time framed as proof the industry had no appetite for drilling there. The Trump administration has dismissed that argument, pointing to a record-breaking lease sale last month in Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve as proof of strong industry demand.

Some Indigenous groups and conservation groups have vowed to fight the sale.

In a statement to AP, Galen Gilbert (who is the first chief of the Arctic Village Council), said, “The Trump Administration’s relentless push to auction off this sacred land despite overwhelming public opposition and industry that has already signaled they are not interested makes clear that this administration values corporate interests over the rights and lives of Indigenous peoples.”