Born and raised within the bowl of Anchorage, Alaska, Gretchyn holds a deep rooted love for the vast ecosystems of the land. Once she graduated from East High School in the spring of 2014, she immediately had her heart set on the temperate rainforest of Juneau as her new learning environment. She is currently in her second year at UAS studying Environmental Science and will (hopefully) be admitted in the Outdoor Studies and Leadership Certificate Program this fall where she anticipates developing skills to prepare her for a career in outdoor education and further her quest for global environmental awareness. She chose to study Environmental Science with the greater goal of connecting larger audiences to science and deepening humanity's understanding of the value of the natural world, empirically and intellectually, as well as for the sake of survival. When she isn't occupied with academics, you can spot her coordinating with different clubs on campus for Earth Month festivities. In her downtime she enjoys hiking new trails, discovering new loose leaf tea blends and riding/fixing up her bicycle.

I was born in Juneau on a freezing wintery November 28, some years my birthday often falls on Thanksgiving Day. Later when I was married and had my children, I often did a lot of the cooking, preparing the dinner days ahead that I always forgot about my birthday. These past years with all my grown children and their grandchildren scattered around in Anchorage, Seattle area, I celebrate mine by volunteering at Salvation Army Community Thanksgiving with lots of people including Alaska Governor, the local Juneau Mayor and usually a lot of locals. It is very enjoyable greeting lots of friends. I look forward to Thanksgiving. I do that now rather than fight air traffic, it has become too strenuous for me and no fun. I went to a segregated elementary grade school, attended Wrangell Institute and graduated Garfield High school in Seattle. I preferred to finish in Seattle because the racial discrimination was blatant, cruel and hateful in Juneau. During the summers when I was too young I worked in salmon canneries to earn my own clothes and luggage because we had to take a steamship to go to City of Wrangell, an overnight trip that I loved. I loved to fish, learned how to cut, clean and smoke salmon, later to vacuum salmon. Sometimes we slept right next to the smoke house. I love the smell of smoking salmon. We put up a lot of natural food, picked all the berries that grew around here. In elementary school I learned to sew my own dresses and sometimes to even to design them. In boarding school some classes took turns working in the kitchen and cleaning the dining rooms. I was kept on campus many Saturdays for smoking cigarettes. The boys had a smoking room but the girls were not allowed to smoke. I did not appreciate that treatment so I decided to leave and finish in Seattle. I liked living in Seattle, tried to attend a college only to find that the BIA did not have such a program. I tried anyway and found it was expensive and too costly for me. Eventually, I met the father of my three sons. When we got married, my name became Marie Bonifant. After we divorced and I moved to San Fransisco, a city I fell in love with. I was hired to work in the Pacific Tel & Tel in the Accounting Unit. It was non-union and had many unfair practices against women. I became a Union organizer, elected to Executive Committee of CWA Local 9410. Through that organization I competed for a full scholarship to attend University of California Berkeley for a full year. I also became involved with the Tlingit Land Claims, representing California-living Tlingit. That led to the State Land Claims and how I met and divorced my husband in Juneau. I did not like moving back to my hometown because of racial discrimination that was still there, albeit not blatant. I earned my four-year degree in Liberal Arts from University of Alaska Southeast. I worked at the Alaska Native Arts and Crafts managing the entire program. After that I worked for the Southeast Community Action Program. I loved that job because it took me to many villages all over Alaska. I already had been to almost all the villages and towns in Southeast Alaska. Of course by then I could put up with racial discrimination, and loved my hometown. My then husband worked for the University and in his research involved a lot of traveling in Japan and Europe and Mexico. I did my own research mainly where women were concerned. After my divorce I was happy to attend any church that I wanted, Salvation Army, St Nicholas Orthodox, Presbyterian, even Buddhist temple. I often visited my sons who live down below, but now they come up to visit me. My grandchildren now come to spend a few days with me. I am a Shareholder in the Sealaska and Goldbelt corporations. I do a lot of volunteer work in the education area. I broke my left wrist last February 4th and that took me out of action until just recently. I have always believed in politics and attended this annual Political Caucus. It is a joy to become active again. It is wonderful that in this workshop I get to meet some of my students from the online "Cross Cultural and Intellectual Property Rights" course that I taught for UAF. This is how Alexander Ketzler, who is also involved in this workshop, met and became friends.

Igor Pasternak is a contemporary artist whose research, teaching, and studio practice explore art as a prodigious investigative activity that spans many disciplines. By approaching the study of social and cultural practices as aesthetically driven engagements, Igor contributes novel understanding to the multi-disciplinary studies of foodways, built environments, material culture, and human ecology. Igor teaches a variety of studio and theory courses in visual arts at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, as well as Anthropology of Art and Introduction to Ethnomycology – courses that he team-delivers with his wife, cultural anthropologist Sveta Yamin-Pasternak. Over the last ten years Igor and Sveta have been working as a husband and wife team, conducting field research and artist-led outreach efforts, enacting street and stage performances, writing for scholarly and popular periodicals, installing interactive exhibitions, hosting open studio events, and developing new curricula for the university programs and community organizations. Igor has had several solo exhibitions and participated in numerous group shows. His art is part of permanent collections in several museums in Alaska and Washington DC. Igor’s current teaching appointments at the University of Alaska Fairbanks are based at the Art Department and Ethnobotany Program, and his research appointment is based at the Institute of Northern Engineering. Igor encourages social scientists, resource managers, architects, engineers, and professionals from various fields to think of contemporary art as an asset in research, outreach, and application.

Amy Phillips-Chan serves as the Director of the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum in Nome, AK. In Nome, the museum is finalizing construction of a new facility, preparing to move the collection, and undertaking collaborative exhibit development. Dr. Phillips-Chan received a PhD from Arizona State University in 2013 with her dissertation research focused on reconnecting engraved imagery on ivory drill bows with oral histories and traditional ecological knowledge from the Bering Strait. She is a Research Collaborator with the Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center and a Board Member of the Alaska Anthropological Association. As an Arctic Researcher, her primary goals are to promote museum-community partnerships, engage youth in applied collections research, and involve the public in collaborative exploration of their circumpolar cultural heritage.

Stockholm University (Sweden) Currently I am 43, Swede and anthropologist. Previously I used to be younger, Soviet, Lithuanian, hybrid manager and businessman. As this eclectic summary may already be hinting, my interests are quite multidisciplinary. Or, rather, for the questions I ask, answers from any single discipline are rarely satisfactory. Then again, I rarely ask questions to start with – I rather dive into things I find interesting, trying to figure out what makes them interesting, and once I have a proposition, I craft a question that it might be an answer to. I believe that work I’ve been doing lately is related to why there is art. My narrative-in-progress positions art as infrastructure for social cohesion and seeks to theorize how contemporary art – in all its western ambiguity and particularity – gains its particular social efficacy. The flip side of this inquiry is whether concept of infrastructure can be productively applied to other phenomena than roads, pipes and cables. I am also interested to explore possible analytical gains from conflation of artistic and anthropological research methods for inquiries into other than purely artistic topics. Among other keywords that tend to attract my attention is architecture, urbanities, environment, actor-network theory, organizations, complex adaptive systems.

Griffin Plush is a first year Social Science student at the University of Alaska Southeast. Originally from Seward, he was involved extensively in environmental advocacy and developing youth leadership across the state as a leader in the Alaska Youth Environmental Action program. In August he became one of the four inaugural U.S. Arctic Youth Ambassadors where he went to the GLACIER Conference and met with several Arctic officials, including Secretary Sally Jewell, Secretary John Kerry, and Admiral Robert Papp. Recently, he attended the Arctic Science Summit Week in Fairbanks, where he began working with other students in the Arctic to find new ways to include youth voices in Arctic Council proceedings consistently and effectively. He is interested in the prevention and mitigation of climate change and the preservation and revitalization of indigenous languages and cultures.

Stacy Rasmus, PhD, is a Research Assistant Professor in the Institute of Arctic Biology and Center of Alaska Native Health Research at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Of Coast Salish descent on her mother’s side, she continues to build relationships with American Indian and Alaska Native communities through research that has spanned over two decades and focuses on the development of interventions to reduce the unacceptable burden of health disparities among Indigenous peoples. She specializes in the implementation of community-based and Tribal participatory research approaches. Her research interests involve understanding the intersections between culture, health and wellbeing and the role of social determinants in addressing health disparities among American Indian and Alaska Native peoples. She is currently PI of several externally-funded projects that together form a program of research focused on increasing Indigenous youth and community resilience. In Alaska, she leads a team of researchers and Indigenous community members in the development, implementation and dissemination of a cultural, community-level intervention to reduce disparities in alcohol abuse and suicide among Yup’ik Alaska Native youth (NIH R01AA23754). She is also PI of projects that utilize indigenous knowledge and social science methods as part of a comparative and collaborative study of community adaptations to rapid social and environmental change in Siberia and Alaska (NSF 1424042). Additionally, she works with communities in the Pacific Northwest, leading a study to determine Coast Salish American Indian strengths and resilience against drug abuse (NIH R01DA029002).

Dr. Cheryl Rosa is Deputy Director and Anchorage-based Alaska Director of the United States Arctic Research Commission (USARC). She received a Doctorate in Veterinary Medicine from Tufts University and a Doctorate in Biology from the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She has been active on the North Slope and in the Russian Far East in a wide range of studies, including wildlife health and zoonotic disease, marine mammal stranding response, subsistence food safety and oil spill/offshore discharge research. She is a member of the International Whaling Commission’s Scientific Committee, as well as numerous other federal and non-federal boards and steering committees. She also is interested in owls, mushrooms, cephalopods and hikes with tall dogs with long noses.

Dr. William Schnabel is the interim director of the Institute of Northern Engineering. Dr. Schnabel joined UAF in 2007, after spending the early portion of his career working as a faculty member at the University of Alaska Anchorage, and working as an engineer in private industry. An environmental engineer by training, Dr. Schnabel’s research interests have focused on balancing Alaska’s need to both use and protect our lands and waters. Dr. Schnabel has studied hydrology in Alaska’s most remote Arctic rivers, water quality in Alaska’s rural and urban communities, and has worked with Alaska’s industries to more effectively manage water resources and mitigate environmental threats. Dr. Schnabel served as director of the UAF Water and Environmental Research Center from 2009 – 2014, and has served as an Associate Professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering since 2013.

Robin Shoaps is an assistant professor of Anthropology and Linguistics at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. Her research investigates language use as a site for the production and negotiation of social categories and cultural values. Her specific interests focus on how people use linguistic and semiotic resources to take stances, particularly in ritual, religious and political contexts. Methodologically, she pairs participant observation fieldwork with linguistic analysis of ethnographic and mass-mediated talk. Dr. Shoaps has done ethnographic fieldwork with evangelical Christians in the US and Guatemala and folk Catholics in Guatemala. She has a particular interest in radio and has published and offers a class on talk radio and discourses of the American Right. She has been following American conservative talk radio since 1994, although her primary site for linguistic and ethnographic fieldwork has been in two Maya communities in highland Guatemala. She joined the faculty at UAF in 2012, after having positions at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and at the University of Chicago. She is expanding her research to Athabaskan languages and is particularly interested in native pastors and religious history in the Interior. Through exposure to the diverse student population at UAF and living in proximity to a military base, Dr. Shoaps has also become interested in military language and the adaptation to civilian ways of speaking that veterans have to make when they finish serving.

I completed a PhD in Slavic Linguistics at UC Berkeley in 2011, focusing on cognitive aspects of Balkan and South Slavic motion verbs, carrying out long term field research in Bulgaria. My post graduate experience includes administration of the East European Folklife Center, a nonprofit organization dedicated to teaching and promoting traditional Balkan music, dance, and cultural exchange. Beginning in 2014, I joined the NSF Polar Program funded Energy Futures of the High North project, editing project publications, providing feedback on international collaboration and field methods, with limited academic visiting and ethnography in Finland, Norway, and Iceland, attending circum-Arctic policy conferences such as Arctic Circle in Reykjavik and the Norwegian TransAtlantic Science Week in Toronto. I am currently teaching economics and history classes in the international program of a San Francisco Bay Area private high school.

Ricky Tagaban is a full time Queer/Tlingit artist from Juneau, Alaska. Tagaban received an Individual Artist Award from Rasmuson Foundation in 2013, & has studied Chilkat weaving with Tlingit artist Clarissa Rizal, cedar bark weaving with Della Cheney, & engraving under Ed Kunz Jr. Tagabans solo exhibit, Sexual Sovereignty showed at the International Gallery of Contemporary Art last July. His work sometimes obscures divisions between traditional & contemporary platforms. Tagaban has been a full time Chilkat weaver since April 2013. Tagaban has performed as drag queen Lituya Hart since September 2015, & has participated in Femme Fatale, ‘Twas the Drag Before Christmas, & Stop Draggin’ My Heart Around which took place in Juneau, & in the Ramshackle Cabaret in Sitka.

Dr. Wiita is an interdisciplinary scientist that specializes in communication and collaboration across disciplines. She has worked in the Arctic for the past twenty years in both the public and private sectors doing land and natural resource management, conducting research, and managing research companies. Dr. Wiita is currently the Senior Research Scientist of her company Cinza Research in Anchorage, Alaska where she promotes interdisciplinary understanding in the social, natural, and public health sciences. Her interests include community-based research, community engagement in natural resource and land management, human dimensions of natural resource use, artists' experience of place, the connections between art and environment, and the culture of climate change. Her expertise includes cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration, project management and organization, qualitative research design, implementation and analysis, bridging quantitative and qualitative research methodologies, and interdisciplinary land management decision making. Her formal education and experience in both the social and natural sciences allows her to integrate a variety of methodologies and theoretical foundations. She has a commitment to culturally appropriate research and land management practices and understands the importance of developing community-based projects with people in partnership.

Donald Wright holds a PhD from the Sorbonne in Paris, France where he was also the recipient of the Chateaubriand Fellowship, a prestigious scholarship offered by the French government. As well as being an internationally renowned scholar, Dr. Donald Wright has lived and worked on four continents and given lectures in numerous countries, taught at various universities around the world and also worked in several museums, including the Louvre Museum in Paris, France. An author of two books, his primary focus is on the impact of language on cultures and how language - the building blocks of collective identity – are at the core of cultural and national identity. His first book, Science et Souffrance, is a study of the cultural evolution of the language of mental illness at the beginning of the 20th century. His second book, Antiquité moderne, is a study of how Greco-Roman antiquity played an important role in the construction of national identity in the 19th and 20th centuries. He was a scholar-in-residence on Muslim cultures for the National Endowment for the Humanities for one year. He currently teaches about cultures of the Middle East at Hood College where he is director of the Middle Eastern Studies Program.

Sveta Yamin-Pasternak is a cultural anthropologist, whose learning draws on ethnographic research in communities around Chukotka and Alaska, the experience of growing up in the Soviet Union, world travels, family relationships, lessons from students and mentors, and formal studies at Northern Illinois University, University of Alaska Fairbanks, and Johns Hopkins University. She is currently working through a joint appointment at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, teaching a variety of courses in the Anthropology and Ethnobotany programs and leading several collaborative projects at the Institute of Northern Engineering. Her research examines how human food practices in high latitude regions interact with the local climate, built environment, ecology, and aesthetics. Together with her husband, visual artist Igor Pasternak, Sveta helped develop a unique university course in Ethnomycology that delves into the realms of food, medicine, craft, commerce, spirituality, and recreation entangled within the relationships between humans and mushrooms. As a team of a cultural anthropologist and an artist, Sveta and Igor are working to uncover novel possibilities for research and public engagement that can be accomplished through various crossings and integrations of their respective fields.

I was delighted to have been invited to help organize this event when I was hired as a student assistant coordinator. I am a social science student with a keen interest in Archaeology. I am particularly interested in personal ornamentation and their similarities and differences worldwide in prehistoric societies. I am also often told that I need to refine my focus. My hobbies include hiking, tide pooling, people watching, political science, and knitting. This summer I will be attending field school in Peru at San Jose de Moro. I have intentions of pursuing further degrees in Archaeology after attaining my bachelors. I would like to thank you for attending this workshop and sharing your talents and knowledge to this discussion and once again welcome you to Juneau.

Hello and welcome to the Arctic Horizons Workshop: Arctic Social Sciences in the 21st Century! I have been hired as a student assistant coordinator and will be available throughout this event to answer questions. As a student of Anthropology and History my areas of interest include Victorian mortuary ritual, Northwest Coast art, and personal ornamentation and dress. This last summer I had the opportunity to volunteer at the new State of Alaska Museum facility, which reaffirmed my passion for studying artifacts as materialized thought. After completing my undergrad at the University of Alaska Southeast I will pursue a Masters in Museum Studies so that I may continue working with collections. When I am not studying I enjoy flat-stitch beading, coconut mochas, and scouring secondhand shops for unusual finds.

Lucas Bessire is a cultural anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker whose work focuses on the politics of Native life in the Americas. Committed to collaborative methodologies and community-based research, he has explored these questions most thoroughly through long-term engagements with Ayoreo-speaking peoples of Bolivia and Paraguay, the subjects of his recent award-winning book Behold the Black Caiman: a Chronicle of Ayoreo Life (2014, Univ Chicago Press), as well as a participatory video project he coordinates about Indigenous perspectives on extractive industry and environmental change. Currently, he is expanding these concerns to hemispheric scale. Together with environmental anthropologist David Bond, he is developing a multi-sited collaborative research program on how the future is created, contested and enforced in dialogues between Indigenous peoples, earth scientists and oil companies in northern North America. He holds a PhD from New York University and is a faculty member of the University of Oklahoma Anthropology Department.