Contributors

Vinnie Baron is a teacher at the local Ulluriaq School in Kangiqsualujjuaq, a village located on the east side of Ungava Bay, in Nunavik. She also serves on Makivik Corporation’s board of directors, representing her community’s and Nunavik’s interests. She has a passion for going out on the land. She and her husband, Felix St-Aubin, have three wonderful children that they hope will practice their culture as they have been taught.

Hugh Brody is a writer, anthropologist, and filmmaker. He spent ten years immersed in the lives of Indigenous peoples of arctic and subarctic Canada. His books include The People’s Land, Maps and Dreams, Living Arctic, and The Other Side of Eden. His films include Nineteen-Nineteen, starring Paul Scofield and Maria Schell; a series of documentaries made with peoples of the North; and Tracks Across Sand, a set of sixteen films made with the ‡Khomani San of the southern Kalahari. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Aboriginal Studies at the University of the Fraser Valley, in British Columbia, and is an honorary associate at the Scott Polar Research Institute at the University of Cambridge. He also is an honorary professor of anthropology at the University of Kent.

Kenneth Buck is a web designer and computer programmer who holds degrees in archaeology and computer science from the University of Calgary.

Anna Bunce was first introduced to Arctic berries during a trip to Iqaluit, on southern Baffin Island, where she was researching climate change adaptation and health as part of her master’s degree in geography, which she earned at McGill University. She currently works as a First Nations relations advisor for the British Columbia government.

Donald Butler is a post-doctoral research fellow in the Laboratory for Sedimentary Archaeology, Department of Maritime Civilizations, at the University of Haifa, Israel. His research interests include multi-variate statistics and the multi-element and molecular analyses of soils at archaeological sites, including areas of the Canadian Arctic.

Michael A. Chlenov (PhD, Cultural Anthropology) started his professional career as a cultural anthropologist, historian and linguist in the early 1960s. He has conducted about 20 anthropological field studies in Indonesia, Yamal and the Bering Strait area of Siberia, Abkhazia and Daghestan in the Caucasus, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan in Central Asia. From 1965–1999 he was a fellow of the Moscow-based Institute of Ethnography of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and from 1994–2015 worked as a Dean at the Moscow-based State Jewish Academy. From 1998–2005 he worked as Deputy Director in the joint project between the Moscow State University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem “Center for Jewish Studies and Jewish Civilization.” He now serves as an alumni Professor at the Maimonides Academy in Moscow.

Aron L. Crowell is an Arctic anthropologist and Alaska Director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Arctic Studies Center. His research and publications in cultural anthropology, archaeology, and oral history reflect collaborations with Indigenous communities of the North. He is the curator and project director for the exhibition Living Our Cultures, Sharing Our Heritage: The First Peoples of Alaska, at the Anchorage Museum, and leads ongoing community-based programs in Alaska Native heritage, languages, and arts. Crowell’s doctorate in anthropology is from the University of California, Berkeley, and he is an affiliate professor of anthropology at the University of Alaska.

Peter C. Dawson is a professor in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology at the University of Calgary and a research associate at the Arctic Institute of North America. His research interests include the digital preservation of tangible and intangible heritage at risk.

Martha Dowsley is an associate professor at Lakehead University, in Thunder Bay, Ontario. She has worked with northern Indigenous communities for the past ten years, examining human-environment relationships. A project on Inuit women’s environmental relationships revealed the deep attachment to the land that is facilitated through berry harvesting. Dowsley hopes that the lessons learned from these women will help to encourage society at large to nurture the precious human-land connection.

Robert Drozda first developed an interest in Alaska Native oral history and place names in the early 1980s, when he began fieldwork associated with the US Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) ANCSA 14(h)(1) historical and cemetery sites project. His Alaska fieldwork spans the Yukon-Kuskokwim Rivers and Delta, Nunivak Island, northwest Alaska, and Agattu Island, at the far western end of the Aleutian chain. Working with the residents of Mekoryuk, on Nunivak Island, he developed the Nunivak Place Name Project and served as principal grant writer for Nunwarmiut Piciryarata Tamayalkuti (Nunivak Cultural Programs), most specifically in support of their Cup’ig language preservation and continuance projects.

Scott A. Heyes leads the Heritage Sustainability Team in cultural heritage at Rio Tinto in Perth, Western Australia. He also holds research associate positions at the Smithsonian Institution’s Arctic Studies Center, in Washington, DC, and Monash University, Australia. He holds a PhD in Geography from McGill University.

Gary Holton is professor of linguistics at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and co-director of the Biocultural Initiative of the Pacific. His work focuses on the documentation of the Indigenous languages of Alaska and the Pacific, with an emphasis on spatial orientation and traditional knowledge systems.

Colleen Hughes holds a master’s degree from the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology, University of Calgary. Her research interests include toponymy, digital heritage, and the archaeology of the Canadian Arctic.

Peter Jacobs is emeritus professor of landscape architecture at Université de Montréal. He served as chair of the Kativik Environmental Quality Commission, in northern Québec, for thirty-eight years and is the former chair of the Commission on Environmental Planning of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. He is a fellow of both the Canadian and the American Society of Landscape Architects and a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts. He is currently chair of the Montreal Heritage Council.

Emily Kearney-Williams is a science illustrator and fine artist who grew up on Tybee Island, off the coast of Georgia, to which she attributes her love of the ocean and the natural world. She studied science illustration at California State University, Monterey Bay, receiving her graduate certificate in 2017. She recently worked as a medical illustrator at St. George’s University in Grenada, West Indies, in connection with the university’s BioMedical Visualization Fellowship. She has used her art to help teach about environmental issues and Indigenous cultural history in the North and currently balances her time between medical illustration and studio art, in Half Moon Bay, California.

Igor Krupnik is Curator of Arctic and Northern Ethnology collections and Head of the Ethnology Division at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. His areas of expertise include ecological knowledge and cultural heritage of the people of the Arctic; impact of modern climate change on Arctic residents, their economies, and cultures; and interdisciplinary collaboration in Arctic research. He has worked for forty years with indigenous Arctic communities, primarily with the Siberian Yupik and Inupiat people in the Bering Strait Region on collaborative efforts in the documentation and sharing of cultural knowledge, and in opening archival and museum resources for people’s use in education and heritage preservation. Krupnik has published and co-edited more than twenty books, collection volumes, catalogs, and community heritage sourcebooks, including many supporting the use of Arctic indigenous knowledge and languages.

Apay’u Moore is a Yup’ik artist from Bristol Bay, Alaska. Her work draws its inspiration primarily from her cultural values and from the wilderness. By focusing on this subject matter, she hopes to help people gain insight into the higher level of spiritual interconnectedness that her people have with the living world even in the face of cultural trauma and colonialism. She is best known for her whimsical salmon paintings that were inspired by the fight against the Pebble Mine prospect, which she staunchly opposes and believes is a prime example of the signs of cultural obliteration that Yup’ik elders have warned of for generations. She now lives in Aleknagik, Alaska, with her two children, with the goal of becoming more firmly rooted to the subsistence lifestyle that brings purpose to living in the present with gratitude and contentment.

Murielle Nagy is an anthropologist and archaeologist affiliated to the Archéologie des Amériques research centre (CNRS/Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne). She received an MA in archaeology from Simon Fraser University and a PhD in anthropology from the University of Alberta. She has worked for Indigenous, governmental, academic, and touristic organizations in the Yukon, Northwest Territories, Nunavut, Nunavik, Greenland, and Alaska. From 1990 to 2000, she led three oral history projects for the Inuvialuit Regional Corporation. At Université Laval, she was a postdoctoral researcher, an adjunct professor, and, from 2002 to 2017, the editor-in-chief of the journal Études/Inuit/Studies. She has written on Arctic archaeology; Inuvialuit oral history; intellectual property and ethics in Indigenous research; and missionary-explorer Émile Petitot.

Mark Nuttall is professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta. With a focus on climate change, resource development, and human-environment relations, he has carried out extensive research in Greenland, Canada, Alaska, Finland, and Scotland. He also holds a visiting professorship at the University of Greenland and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources. He is the author or editor of several books, including Climate, Society and Subsurface Politics in Greenland: Under the Great Ice (2017), The Scramble for the Poles: The Geopolitics of the Arctic and Antarctic (2016; co-authored with Klaus Dodds), and Anthropology and Climate Change: From Actions to Transformations (2016; co-edited with Susan Crate). He is the Arctic regional editor of The Polar Journal.

Evon Peter is a student and researcher of the Gwich’in language. From 2014 to 2020, he served as vice chancellor for Rural, Community and Native Education at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) and is currently senior scientist at the university’s Center for Alaska Native Health Research. A UAF alumnus, Peter is Neets’ąįį Gwich’in from Vashrąįį K’ǫǫ (Arctic Village), Alaska, where he spent three years as the tribal chief. He is a member of the board of directors of the Gwich’in Council International, which represents the interests of the Gwich’in Nation in the Arctic Council forum. His work has focused on incorporating Indigenous knowledge and practices into healing, leadership development, and, most recently, Alaska Native language programs. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Alaska Native studies and a master’s in rural development.

Kenneth L. Pratt is an anthropologist and ethnohistorian employed by the US Bureau of Indian Affairs and has forty years of experience investigating Alaska Native land claims. His research interests include the ethnohistory of southwestern and western Alaska, Indigenous place names, oral history, intergroup relations and territoriality, and Russian America. He holds a PhD in anthropology from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, is a research associate of the Smithsonian Institution’s Arctic Studies Center in Washington, DC, and serves as co-editor of the Alaska Journal of Anthropology.

Louann Rank worked with Yup’ik communities of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta over a period of eighteen years. She travelled for village outreach as an administrator with Bethel Community Services and then with a community health project for the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation. Later, she became an assistant professor in the Department of Alaska Native and Rural Development at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

William E. (“Bill”) Simeone has lived in Alaska for fifty years. During that time he has worked as a VISTA volunteer in the Yup’ik community of St. Michael, a lay worker for the Episcopal Church in the Dene community of Tanacross, a construction worker on the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and a paralegal for Alaska Legal Services. After receiving his PhD in anthropology from McMaster University, he worked as a consulting anthropologist, as a subsistence resource specialist, and as regional supervisor for the Division of Subsistence, Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Simeone has worked with the Ahtna for over twenty years on concerns related to fish and game issues, while also documenting many facets of Ahtna culture and history.

Felix St-Aubin lives in his family’s community of Kangiqsualujjuaq, in Nunavik, and is employed to assist with maintenance at the local Ulluriaq School. He learned about the land from his late grandfather, Willie Emudluk, and his friend Kenny Angnatuk. Both men were experienced hunters and knew the land well. He encourages younger generations to go out on the land camping more often to keep Inuit traditions going. He has taken up photography as a hobby.

Williams Stolz specializes in the study of forest foods. He completed his master’s thesis at Lakehead University in 2018 on the social economy of blueberry foraging in the context of the boreal forest ecosystem of northwestern Ontario.

Katerina Solovjova Wessels was born in Moscow and graduated from the Moscow College of Architecture with a master’s degree in the theory and history of architecture. She moved to Anchorage, Alaska, in 1990 and worked for twenty-six years with the National Park Service’s Shared Beringian Heritage Program. Wessels also continued to conduct archival research on Russian-American history, which culminated in the publication of The Fur Rush: Essays and Documents on the History of Alaska at the End of the Eighteenth Century (2002), a monograph co-authored with Aleksandra Vovnyanko that focuses on the early period of the Russian presence in Alaska. Wessels is currently the Council Coordination Division supervisor for the Office of Subsistence Management, US Fish and Wildlife Service, Alaska Region.