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Amy Foote with Alaska-grown potatoes.
30-Second Reads

Voices of Alaska

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Chef Amy Foote and the Traditional Foods Program of Alaska Native Medical Center As executive chef at the Alaska Native Medical Center in Anchorage, Amy Foote is determined to provide the hospital’s Alaska Native and American Indian patients with traditional foods that are both healthy and culturally meaningful, which Foote says can aid healing. Foote’s kitchen provides 5,000 meals a day to inpatients, outpatients, and visitors at the campus hotel. “Our traditional foods program accepts donations, but we also collaborate to see what can be hunted, fished, gathered, or grown. We have Alaska Native-raised reindeer, wild-caught salmon, and seal donated by Alaska Native hunters. I also work with farms and Alaska Pacific University to grow traditional plants, including hydroponically, so we can get the foods that really heal and comfort our patients. I love my job. It requires building partnerships and sometimes getting people to think differently, like when we…

Members of the 2023 Imago Initiative meet in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
30-Second Reads

Imago: Re-imagining Conservation 

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Initiative brings new ideas on public lands management National parks and wildlife refuges are revered as places to find healthy habitat, clean water, and opportunities for recreation and reflection. But the story of our public lands is also marked by mistreatment and displacement of Indigenous people, including here in Alaska. Now, in a project called the Imago Initiative, Indigenous people, federal policy makers, and conservationists are re-thinking how to manage public lands to better align with Indigenous traditions. And they’re starting at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the nation’s largest refuge. Meda DeWitt of The Wilderness Society explains that the initiative is meant to foster on-the-land dialogue that integrates Indigenous knowledge and perspective into existing public lands management. Last summer, DeWitt was among a group of Indigenous representatives, conservation group leaders, and agency officials who discussed the initiative while camped in the remote refuge for over a week. “When you’re…

Thermosyphons like these that stabilize permafrost at the Fairbanks International Airport are also being used in arctic ice cellars.
30-Second Reads

Local Fare

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Can Modern Technology Save Ancient Food Storage Techniques in a Warming Arctic? For many centuries, people along the Beaufort and Chukchi seas have preserved whale meat and other foods by digging ice cellars, called siġḷuat, into the permafrost. The cellars can store hundreds of pounds of whale meat, more than any modern household freezer could hold. And North Slope residents like Doreen Lovett, who is director of natural resources for the Iñupiat Community of the Arctic Slope (ICAS), say they are better at preserving freshness and flavor. Cleaning and maintaining a siġḷuat is also tightly tied to Indigenous whaling practices. In recent years, thawing of permafrost due to anthropogenic climate change has led siġḷuat to leak or collapse, threatening both essential food supplies and long-held cultural practices. In response, ICAS is awarding grants to use long metal pipes filled with refrigerant, called thermosyphons, to protect siġḷuats. The pipes are drilled…

The National Native American Veterans Memorial.
30-Second Reads

Native American Veterans Memorial dedicated

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Ceremony included Alaska Natives On Veterans Day, 2022, over 1,500 tribal members from across the United States, including Alaska Natives, participated in a dedication ceremony for the National Native American Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. The memorial, completed in 2020, is the first Washington, D.C. monument to honor the military service of Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Native Hawaiians. The monument was designed by Harvey Pratt, a Marine Corps veteran and member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma who served in the Vietnam War. Pratt’s design is intended to include commonalities among tribal groups but also to respect the uniqueness of the nation’s many hundreds of Indigenous cultures. The monument consists of a large stainless-steel circle balanced on a carved stone drum. It is set in a natural area that includes wetlands, benches for gathering or quiet reflection, lances for hanging prayer flags or other mementos, and water…

Tlingit Culture, Language and Literacy principal Eldri Waid Westmoreland.
30-Second Reads

Language and Culture Program expands in Juneau Schools

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Lingítin the Classroom A Juneau School District Lingít language and culture program that began in 2000 is expanding. Through a Sealaska Heritage Institute grant and support from the school district, the program recently hired its first permanent principal and is now available to middle school students. In May, the school district hired Eldri Waid Westmoreland as the program’s new principal. Westmoreland, who is Lingít, taught at the preschool, elementary, and middle school levels over three decades. She also owns Math Raven, an Indigenous education, research, and curriculum firm. Molly Box, who served as interim principal for the program for several years, describes it as an elective curriculum that is place-based and uses oral narrative themes and stories often connected to seasonal harvest activities. “It’s very connected to the land and the Lingít culture,” says Box. In addition to hiring Westmoreland, the Sealaska grant will bring in new teachers, additional help…

Old Otis in his office. Otis remains a fan favorite at Brooks Falls in Katma
Authentic Alaska

Of All the Bears I’ve Loved Before

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A history of my favorite bears There’s Otis and Grazer (featured in our July/August issue) and a bear that guides used to call “Old Sow” until someone said that wasn’t very nice, and they changed it to Looper. At one point I thought a bear was named Starbucks, which I kind of liked, but evidently, I heard it wrong. His name was Scar Butt, which makes sense when you see him. There’s Crimp Ear and Broken Ear and Foster Mom. Also, Peanut, Lefty, Sister, Agro, Blondie, Holly, Backpack, and 747 (like the jumbo jet—you get the picture). And then there are ones I’ve named by watching them: Snorkel, Social Services, Yoga Bear. You might think I’m talking about characters in a Disney movie, but nope, these are monikers of Alaska’s bears—bestowed upon them by rangers, biologists, visitors, and guides over years and miles. It’s also possible that when bears traverse…

Authentic Alaska

Unpublished Alaska

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Newly discovered images by Edward Curtis In 1927, photographer Edward Curtis left Seattle for Nome on the final leg of a journey that had taken him across the continent. He’d devoted three decades to a project called “The North American Indian,” a 20-volume collection of photographs of Native Americans taken on their lands. Alaska Natives along the Bering Sea coast would be his final subjects.  Upon reaching Nome, Curtis purchased a boat, hired a skipper, and with his grown daughter Beth Curtis Magnuson and his longtime assistant Stewart Eastwood, traveled to numerous villages, taking pictures of Indigenous residents whose forebears had inhabited the land for thousands of years, and who had only recently come into full contact with Europeans. Curtis was a portrait photographer by trade, and his work reflects this. “When you look at all the other photographers in the same period that were out taking pictures of…

Ken Chase
30-Second Reads

Who’s in a Name?

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Real people are in all those unnamed photos  In this photo taken by my mom when we lived along the Iditarod trail at Farewell Lake in 1974 and ’75, musher Ken Chase takes a break from the race to chat with us and rest his dogs. An Athabascan from Anvik, Chase ran the Iditarod 16 times, most recently in 2002. He placed in the top 10 three times. Hear his recollections about racing on photographer Jeff Schultz’s Faces of Iditarod site: faces.iditarod.com/ken-chase. Something that has always made me uncomfortable as an editor is using photos of people without naming them. Historical photos of Alaska Natives are notoriously nameless; the caption typically reads along the lines of “Native man in a boat,” or “Tlingit shaman in full costume.” So I’m particularly excited to share this issue in which nearly all of the images of individuals include names of Alaskans living (or…

Authentic Alaska

Ancient Arctic Cultures led the way

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High Tech I stood on a cut bank bright with autumn, the hoarse shouts of ravens echoing in the silence. Across the Kobuk’s clear, tannin-tinged flow rose a prominent, birch-spangled knoll; and beyond stretched an expanse of country, rising toward the looming, cloud-brushed pyramids of the Jade Mountains. This place, Onion Portage, known to the Inupiat as Paatitaaq (for the wild, onion-like chives that grow here), is marked by a great looping bend several miles long where the Kobuk reverses direction and almost circles back on itself before resuming its meandering westward flow. I lingered here as people have since time forgotten—not just centuries, but millennia according to the work of archeologist Louis Giddings. Roaming alone through the upper Kobuk in the early 1940s, Giddings, a researcher from Brown University, found his way to Onion Portage as so many had before him, following the river, drawn by the shape of…

Authentic Alaska

Maggie Shipstead

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Inspired by Alaska Maggie Shipstead’s novel Great Circle follows the life of Marian Graves, a female pilot who disappears near Antarctica in 1950 while attempting to circumnavigate the earth north to south. While the book is packed with shipwrecks, plane crashes, bootlegging mobsters, Hollywood scandals, and forbidden romance, a sizeable part of the story takes place in the glaciers, frontier towns, and wilderness of Alaska. The 600-page book—spanning three generations and nearly 100 years of history—took Shipstead more than six years to create, and was a finalist for the 2021 Booker Prize. In this interview, Shipstead describes how Alaska helped inspire her story of a woman breaking barriers, both personal and universal. —AS TOLD TO AND EDITED BY MOLLY RETTIG Your protagonist, Marian, had a pretty crazy childhood. She survived a shipwreck as a newborn in which her father, the captain, rescued Marian and her twin brother in a lifeboat.…

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