engaged anthropology on “the last frontier”

E N G A G E D A N T H R O P O L O G Y O N “ T H E L A S T

F R O N T I E R ”

Kerry D. Feldman1

University of Alaska Anchorage

The distinction between engaged/applied anthropology and traditional anthropology has notbeen rigid in Alaska since the early 1970s. Why? And how has this engagement occurred for fourdecades at the University of Alaska Anchorage? This paper describes the socio-political realitiesof Alaska and how faculty and students responded in their engaged research, teaching, andservice. Cultural and linguistic anthropologists engaged with a variety of Alaskan communities,primarily Alaska Native, sometimes working with federal, state, and private agencies servingnorthern populations, which now includes over 90 ethnic groups from around the world.[engaged anthropology, Alaska Natives, empowering communities, engaged learning]

I N T R O D U C T I O N

When I arrived in 1973 at the newly established Senior College of the fledgling Universityof Alaska Anchorage (UAA), there was a constellation of social and political realities inplace for innovative relations between academia and local communities, primarily AlaskaNative communities. Faculty in our department became involved with these realities,which we did not invent but had to understand and become part of, if we and ourstudents were to play a meaningful role on the “Last Frontier” of the United States.Because we were a relatively recent university, we were not bound by academic traditionsthat sometimes encourage a gulf between the Ivory Tower and the lived-lives and needsof communities.

N O N R I G I D B O U N D A R I E S I N A L A S K A B E T W E E N E N G A G E D / A P P L I E D A N D

T R A D I T I O N A L A N T H R O P O L O G Y

The distinction between engaged/applied anthropology and traditional anthropologyhas not been rigid in Alaska since at least the mid-1970s (Feldman et al. 2005, Feldman1981a). Anthropologists who reside in Alaska engage in projects on behalf of communitiesas well as traditional research without much concern for whether their work is classifiedas engaged or traditional anthropology. Why? Many reasons could be given, dependingon the anthropologist, but here let me note two: better data result when a project hasthe support and participation of local communities or is initiated by them, and ourresearch and service activities focus primarily on indigenous and other peoples whoare our neighbors, not people in a “land far away.” There is a greater percentage of

ANNALS OF ANTHROPOLOGICAL PRACTICE 37.1, pp. 113–132. ISSN: 2153-957X. C© 2013 by the AmericanAnthropological Association. DOI:10.1111/napa.12020

A n n a l s o f A n t h r o p o l o g i c a l P r a c t i c e 3 7 . 1 / E n g a g e d A n t h r o p o l o g y o n “ T h e L a s t F r o n t i e r ” 1 1 3

indigenous people (ca. 15 percent) among the total population of the state of Alaskatoday than in any state of the U. S. (only 1.2 percent of the U.S. population todayare indigenous people/Native Americans). There are also over 28,000 Alaska Nativesliving in the Municipality of Anchorage, making Alaska’s urban center also the largest“village” in Alaska. There are over 220 indigenous villages statewide recognized by theU.S. government, each recognized as “tribes” by the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs.Although Alaska is enormous in territorial size (about three thousand miles east to westand over a thousand miles north to south), there are less than 750,000 people residingin the state, half of whom reside in or near Anchorage. Overlapping social networks arecommon.

Two significant factors for understanding the engaged nature of cultural and linguisticanthropology at UAA (and anthropology at two other Alaskan universities, not discussedhere) regarding Alaska Natives are (1) Alaska Natives are encouraged to enroll in anthro-pology degree programs related to their future careers by both anthropologists in thestatewide University of Alaska system and practicing anthropologists in public or privateorganizations; and (2) the creation of the Alaska Anthropological Association in 1975,following the first statewide anthropology conference held on our campus in 1974. Thegoal we envisioned for that first conference was to form an organization (to provide aholistic professional context) that would allow northern anthropologists to come togetherannually to share their interests.

Since then, we have had Alaska Natives as featured keynote speakers at some ofour annual awards banquet. As the mission statement of the Alaska AnthropologicalAssociation notes:

For more than thirty years our members have helped to break new ground in basic andapplied research, to build collaborations between researchers and communities, andto foster public knowledge and interest in circumpolar cultural heritage2 (emphasis added)[http://www.alaskaanthropology.org/].

I will elaborate on how the above-emphasized aspects of this statement foster nonrigidboundaries between engaged and traditional anthropology in Alaska.

The Impact of Alaska Native Anthropologists

There are Alaska Natives who now hold doctorate, master’s, and bachelor degrees inanthropology. Some of them work for their regional nonprofit corporations (cf. Arnold1976 to understand the origin of Alaska’s regional Native corporations which providea nonreservation, indigenous corporate identity, related to land ownership). The non-profit arms of these corporations focus on health care, social services, and educationneeds of their member. But anthropologists of Alaska Native descent, as well as scoresof non-Native anthropologists from university programs around the United States, arealso employed, side-by-side as equals, by agencies at private, local, state, and federallevels. Sixty percent of Alaska is owned by the federal government as national parks,national forests, and national wildlife refuges, with missions that include responsibilitiesto honor indigenous peoples’ traditional uses of those lands. Other indigenous scholars

1 1 4 A n n a l s o f A n t h r o p o l o g i c a l P r a c t i c e 3 7 . 1 / E n g a g e d A n t h r o p o l o g y o n “ T h e L a s t F r o n t i e r ”

hold academic and administrative positions within the University of Alaska statewidesystem as professors or directors of programs related to Alaska Natives, side-by-sidewith non-Native university personnel. For example, one of our UAA InterdisciplinaryM.A. graduates (anthropology and English, in the 1990s), Professor Phyllis Fast, whois of Athabascan descent, completed her doctorate in anthropology at Harvard Uni-versity and is now a colleague in our department. Her published dissertation receivedthe 2002 prose award from the University of Nebraska Press for books authored by in-digenous scholars (Fast 2002). Clearly, indigenous colleagues can impact “seeing thingsfrom a Native perspective,” and motivate other colleagues to do more than traditionalresearch.

An example of an indigenous scholar who has influenced anthropology in our depart-ment, statewide and nationally, is Rosita Worl, of Tlingit Indian descent in SoutheastAlaska. She was nominated by both non-Native and indigenous anthropologists, andreceived the prestigious Solon T. Kimball Award for Public and Applied Anthropol-ogy awarded by the American Anthropological Association, at the annual conferencein San Francisco in 2008, the first indigenous anthropologist to be selected (or evennominated).

Worl has been a friend and colleague of our department for over three decades. Shehas served for many years as president of the Sealaska Heritage Institute, a researchand cultural renewal organization of her regional corporation in Southeast Alaska rep-resenting Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian peoples. Worl’s doctorate in anthropology wasearned at Harvard University, following undergraduate courses in anthropology fromone of our professors emeritus, William B. Workman (an archaeologist), in the 1970s.She studied with Workman when he was at Alaska Methodist University, a privateuniversity in Anchorage, now reorganized as Alaska Pacific University, adjacent toUAA. Rosita told me, when notified of her selection for the Kimball award, thatshe didn’t know that what she was doing was considered “applied” or even “public”anthropology—words that she never heard during her coursework at Harvard Univer-sity. In her view, she was just “doing anthropology.” I have noticed this same view held byother indigenous scholars at UAA and statewide, who are very engaged with their localcommunities but view this engagement as simply being a scholar in their disciplines.This indigenous approach to “doing anthropology” merits further examination andunderstanding.

In 1980, Worl involved me in a project regarding the protection of the subsistencehunting of beluga (sisuaq) “whales” by Alaska Natives. The project was funded by theAlaska State Legislature, initiated by an Inupiaq legislator from the highly Inupiat-populated town of Kotzebue in Northwest Alaska. My task was to prepare a reportfor the legislature regarding the impact on Alaska Natives if the International WhalingCommission (IWC) added beluga whales to its Schedule of species in Alaska to bemonitored. The IWC was considering enacting a quota or ban on subsistence belugawhale harvests in Alaska, without documentation of the local impacts of such actions, oreven knowing how many beluga inhabited and were harvested annually in Alaskan andsurrounding waters. I took a sabbatical leave to read everything I could find about whales


and those who hunted them, through time, around the world. With the approval andsupport of the Inupiaq Village Council of Buckland, Alaska (pop. 180), I engaged in Juneof that year in participant observation of a communal subsistence hunt of sisuaq in theenormous Eschscholtz Bay of NW Alaska (Feldman 1986). It was the first ethnographicstudy of subsistence beluga whale hunting in Alaska, having significance for traditionalanthropological understandings as well. I documented that only 1–2 percent of belugain waters surrounding Alaska were annually harvested by Alaska Natives, which is asustainable harvest rate, among other findings. The IWC decided not to add belugawhales in Alaska to their Schedule.

This discussion of only one anthropological research project illustrates one of the keyfactors identified above as significant in understanding engaged research in Alaska—the role of indigenous anthropologists in creating what “anthropology” means todayin Alaska. Dr. Worl explained to me later that the reason she asked me to conductthe fieldwork for the project was to educate me about the realities of rural AlaskaNatives’ lived-lives. She wanted to emphasize, in my understanding of issues confrontingindigenous peoples in Alaska, their perspectives regarding their subsistence lifestyle—their hunting, sharing, and being Inupiat, resulting in how they found meaning in lifeand raised their children. Lesson learned. I was born and raised in eastern Montana,coming from farming roots, for whom harvesting and consuming “whales” had littlemeaning or significance. I later discovered that Inupiaq people do not even have aclassification term for “whale.” Each species is unique, unrelated to other kinds of“whales” perceived by western science (Feldman and Norton 1995). This example showshow engaged research (with and on behalf of Inupiat/indigenous people) and traditionalanthropological research goals (how Inupiat classify plants and animals) can intersectwith and reinforce each other.

The Alaska Anthropological Association

To effectively engage anthropology anywhere, a wider supportive context is needed orhelpful for maximum success. The Alaska Anthropological Association (Alaska Anthro-pological Association 2012) celebrated its 40th year of conferences in 2013. It now includesover 260 members, about one-fourth of whom are graduate and undergraduate students,many from the “Lower 48” states in the United States, including academic anthropol-ogists and those employed in federal, state, and private research or other organizationswhose mission involves anthropological expertise. Most anthropologists in Alaska whoare employed outside of academia view themselves simply as anthropologists, not as“practicing anthropologists” or as “engaged anthropologists,” although many now viewwhat they do as “applied anthropology.” The “Little Triple a,” (or, “aaa”) as we refer to ourassociation, also publishes a journal, The Alaska Journal of Anthropology, in addition toa quarterly Newsletter and a monograph series—Aurora. The presidents, boards of direc-tors, newsletter, monograph, and journal editors have always been a mixture of academicand practicing anthropologists. Currently we have a student position identified for theboard of directors and a board member who is an Alaska Native with a doctorate degree,who heads the Language Program Manager of the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak, Alaska.


S O C I A L / P O L I T I C A L F O R C E S A N D E N G A G E D A N T H R O P O L O G Y O N T H E L A S T

F R O N T I E R : 1 9 6 0 S – 1 9 8 0 S

Anthropologists in Alaska were not involved in the most significant event in the socio-political life of Alaska and its indigenous peoples after statehood was granted to Alaskain 1959—the passage by the U.S. Congress of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act(ANSCA) of 1971. And even a decade later, anthropologists were not involved in the nextmost significant congressional act affecting Native people—the Alaska National InterestsLands Conservation Act (ANILCA 1980). Why? Anthropologists residing or working inAlaska prior to the 1970s and at times into the ‘80s, often came from traditional universitybackgrounds in the Lower 48 that did not recognize or highly value applied or engagedanthropology. As a result, it didn’t occur to Alaska state or federal policy-makers, or toAlaska Natives, to seek anthropological knowledge or input into these congressional actsthat concerned indigenous peoples.

In the 1970s, Rosita Worl was the only Alaskan indigenous anthropologist, but at thattime her Harvard anthropology faculty did not approve of or encourage applied or en-gaged scholarship. She was required to conduct her research outside of her Tlingit cultureso that she could continue the anthropological tradition of not investigating one’s ownpeople to ensure “objectivity” in her research. Her dissertation regarding Inupiat (north-ern Eskimo) whaling was not accepted by her faculty committee. She abandoned her goalof a doctorate in anthropology and began to focus her work in Southeast Alaska on behalfof her own people. Her later work on traditional Tlingit law, done for her people, resultedin an invitation from her Harvard mentor, David Maybury-Lewis, to revise it as a disserta-tion, eventually earning her a doctorate in anthropology from Harvard. During this time,Maybury-Lewis himself became an activist in trying to preserve indigenous societies viathe journal he founded with his wife, Pia: Cultural Survival Quarterly. Maybury-Lewishad come to appreciate the validity of indigenous people documenting their own culturesand trying to protect their rights and well-being, something Rosita had wanted to do asgraduate student decades earlier (Personal Communication, Rosita Worl 2008).

The perspective toward engaged anthropology began to change in Alaska after the1970s, due in part to the ideas related to civil rights activism unleashed in the 1960s inthe United States. There were many reasons for this change, but the primary source inAlaska, in my view, were Alaska Native people themselves:

The Alaska Federation of Natives was formed in October 1966, when more than 400 AlaskaNatives representing 17 Native organizations gathered for a three-day conference to addressAlaska Native aboriginal land rights. From 1966 to 1971, AFN worked primarily to achievepassage of a just and fair land settlement. On December 18, 1971 the Alaska Native ClaimsSettlement Act (ANCSA) was signed into law (Alaska Federation of Natives 2013).3

Prior to this, each group of Alaska Natives usually worked on behalf of legislation toprotect their own groups’ best interests and their rights vis-a-vis the newly establishedstate of Alaska (1959) and the federal government that had earlier purchased Alaskafrom Russia (1867).4 Neither of those legal enactments addressed the rights to land and


resources of the indigenous owners of the land or their powers of self-governance. Thediscovery in 1967 of enormous deposits of oil offshore in the Alaskan arctic at PrudhoeBay brought the issue of land rights to the forefront. Before these deposits could bedeveloped and moved nearly a thousand miles south to Valdez, Alaska in Prince WilliamSound, for shipment to refineries in the Lower 48, across the traditional lands of diverseAlaska Native groups, the rights of Native groups to land in Alaska would have to beresolved. Since 1971, Alaska Natives have had to continue to fight to maintain their rightsto traditional subsistence resources on their lands and neighboring federal parks, wildliferefuges and protected forests, as well as on state-owned land. One problem was thatlawmakers did not know the difference between the “traditional subsistence hunting,gathering and fishing” by Native people and what those similar harvesting activitiesmeant to non-Natives.

Two anthropologists played significant roles in defining what was meant by AlaskaNative “subsistence lifestyles”: Rosita Worl (noted above) and Steve Langdon, a non-Native anthropologist in our department whose engaged scholarship is discussed below(cf. Feldman 2009). The hunting of whales and land animals, and harvesting of wildplants by Native peoples, were done not only for economic purposes or for sport orrecreation, but were integral to cultural practices related to the requirements of socialreciprocity and identity as an Alaska Native. Worl and Langdon established the legalmeaning of Alaska Natives’ “subsistence” activities for state and federal agencies.

One thing Western sports hunters, fishers, and gatherers have had difficulty graspingis that the sharing of their wild harvests is not required by their culture as it is amongAlaska cultures, and is not woven into the socio-cultural and moral fabric of their lives.The individualistic self and values of Euro-American culture clash with the socio-centricSelf and values of indigenous people in Alaska in this and other regards. For example,anthropologist Phyllis Morrow (UA, Fairbanks) explained to the Western legal scholarsthat in Bethel, Alaska, a Yup’ik (southern “Eskimo”) regional center, the Yup’ik languagehas no word for “individual rights.” Yup’ik culture emphasizes the obligations of anindividual to others. It made little sense to tell a Yup’ik person accused of a crime thathe or she had a “right” to remain silent, to not incriminate oneself. Is this researchby Morrow (1993) an example of traditional or engaged scholarship? Obviously, it’san example of both. This kind of translation across cultures, as well as translation ofthe knowledge of indigenous leaders and elders, occurs regularly in Alaska to confrontthe often incommensurable gap between a hunting and gathering ethos with that of awestern, capitalist, individualist mentality including its values/legal system.

T H E E S TA B L I S H M E N T O F A N A P P L I E D A N T H R O P O L O G Y P R O G R A M AT T H E

U N I V E R S I T Y O F A L A S K A

The establishment in 1976 of a four-year University of Alaska campus in Anchorage, withthe potential for graduate programs, laid the foundation for the development two decadeslater of an applied M.A. degree program in anthropology that encouraged engagedscholarship—an emphasis that was new in the statewide anthropology degree programs.


Today, faculty and students at UAA and the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), andthose at the smaller University of Alaska Southeast (UAS) in Juneau (the coastal statecapital of Alaska, unreachable by road), are all involved in varieties of engaged scholarship.However, it was the UAA anthropology faculty in 1994 who envisioned something uniquein Alaska: a Master of Arts program that would have tracks for applied research in culturalanthropology, forensic anthropology, and cultural resource management. With a letterof support from colleagues at UAF, and from practicing anthropologists working inprivate, state and federal agencies, a four-year quest began to offer a graduate programemphasizing applied tracks, receiving University of Alaska Board of Regents approval in1999. Since then, numerous theses in applied cultural and cultural resource managementresearch, plus a few in forensic anthropology, have been completed at UAA. Many of theapplied cultural theses required extensive engagement with communities. These studentshave moved into significant positions among federal, state, and private organizationsin Alaska, including Alaska Native organizations.5 Some of these students are of AlaskaNative backgrounds.

Ours was envisioned as an applied program that would involve students in local com-munities and in state, federal, and private research or service organizations that neededour graduates to accomplish their missions and goals. This approach might be called“Developing Reciprocal Relations” with nonacademic organizations. Our departmentwould provide well-educated employees for organizations in return for their support ofour program and students. The latter support meant offering paid internships and men-toring our students, then hiring them before or after their degrees were completed. Ourstudents often receive full or half-time employment after only one year in our program,which slows down the time it takes them to write a thesis, but they see immediately howtheir academic education relates to the needs of society and employment in Alaska. Theseorganizations are a major conduit through which indigenous Alaskan peoples’ concernsregarding land, subsistence rights, and more acquire legal and policy teeth.

Our department’s faculty and students’ efforts have focused primarily on the needsand concerns of Alaska Native peoples. They have indicated major concerns regardingbut not limited to cultural renewal, the education of their youth and respect for theirelders, protection of their subsistence hunting, fishing and gathering traditions and rightsas well as their commercial fishing rights, control over/input into oil exploration, miningor any economic project that threatens their lifestyles and fishing streams, impacts ofclimate change on their subsistence lifestyle and survival as villages, their physical andmental health (their suicide rates are often twice the national average—highest in theUnited States, but only in some, not all, locales), and the preservation and renewal oftheir languages.

E N G A G E D S C H O L A R S H I P AT U A A

The rest of this article provides specific examples of work done by both Native andnon-Native anthropologists at UAA, that underscores the importance of community


engagement and applied scholarship in addressing issues identified as important byNative Alaska residents.

Historical Roots

Anthropology put to use in an engaged manner at UAA, in cooperation with communitiesand organizations serving those communities, has historical roots reflecting the somewhatunique (certainly unusual) constellation of social forces and individuals coming togetheron the Anchorage campus after 1970. The ethos of the separate Anchorage CommunityCollege (ACC) included an emphasis on empowering students of all socioeconomic levels,ethnic backgrounds, and academic abilities. When the University of Alaska statewidesystem absorbed ACC and added Anchorage Senior College in 1969 to teach upperdivision courses, the groundwork was laid for a four-year university with a campuschancellor in 1976 (the University of Alaska [UA] system has a president at its helm,reporting to a Board of Regents).

These years were contentious in that the Ph.D. level faculty of the Senior Collegeoften clashed with the usually M.A. level faculty of the former community college. SeniorCollege faculty claimed students from ACC came to upper division courses unpreparedfor coursework. In 1987, after a decade of separate governance systems, the UA Boardof Regents united all community colleges and four-year campuses into three distinctuniversities in Fairbanks, Anchorage, and Juneau.

The anthropology departments of ACC and the Senior College avoided the acrimonysurrounding them by functioning as one department for the sake of students and forour discipline. The anthropologist at the Senior College prior to my arrival, Dr. NancyYaw Davis, returned in fall 1974 after her one-year leave of absence, and we continuedour collaboration with our four ACC anthropology colleagues. Davis had already begunengaged scholarship, working with Native villages that had been disrupted and destroyeddue to the 1964 Great Alaska Earthquake 9.2 earthquake that lasted four minutes andpermanently altered the landscape in Anchorage.6 This brief history helps describe howthe service-oriented ethos of the former community college blended with the traditionalacademic research focus of the Senior College faculty. In noting this, I also wanted toacknowledge the ACC faculty and their students for helping me overcome whatever“Ivory Tower” academic attitudes I had at the time, as a newly minted Ph.D.

Early Engaged Anthropology at UAA: mid-1970s

I was committed to conducting research with, not simply “on,” communities due tomy graduate school mentors, Robert A. and Beverly Hackenberg, at the Universityof Colorado, Boulder (1969–1973).7 When I arrived, the Dean of the Senior College,Wendell Wolfe, recruited me with the specific goal of “building bridges” to ACC andto the anthropology department of UAF. He also asked me to coauthor a grant proposalwith a psychologist at the nearby Alaska Methodist University (now reorganized as AlaskaPacific University) for submission to the federally funded “University Year For Action”program. The Senior College received $100,000 from our coauthored grant proposal tocreate (1975–1977) what today would be called “engaged university” coursework in all


Senior College departments. When the funding ended, most faculty returned to theirpreferred form of academic instruction, discovering that they couldn’t cover a semesterof course material if students were spending up to one-third of their time engaged ina project with a local community. But for some faculty the seeds had been plantedregarding the educational value for engaging academic disciplines in real-life communityissues.

Simultaneously, the faculty in the Senior College Division of Behavioral Sciences(including departments of anthropology, psychology, sociology and social work) initiatedthe Behavioral Science of the North conferences (1974–1976). I was asked to codirectthose conferences with a psychology and sociology faculty member.8 Instead of theusual academic conference, we decided to invite significant organizations in Anchorageand statewide, to participate as equals, to present papers and be part of discussionsoccurring after each presented paper. Adequate time was allowed for the exchange ofideas and concerns involving local practicing psychologists, social workers, equal rightsgroups, women’s organizations, politicians (at the local, state and federal levels), andmore.9 Local leaders and citizens began to regard our campus faculty and students aspartners with them, and as sources of knowledge and skills useful for understanding andaddressing local social issues. The keynote speaker at our 1976 conference, Laura Nader(from University of California-Berkeley’s anthropology department), remarked that shehad never seen such an academic conference, with dozens of community, state, andfederal organizations/leaders participating as equals, with ample time after presentationsto discuss the practical or policy implications of the presentation.

Illustrative of the results of this engaged ethos that developed in those early years aretwo projects that began in a campus course on research methods in cultural anthropology:“Elderly Alaskan Natives in Anchorage: A Needs-Assessment for Social Service ProgramPlanning” (1978), and “Alaska Native Youth Away From Home: A Comparative Study ofDisplaced Youth” (1980). Both projects were written by students, mentored by a facultymember (myself ), and funded by grants from the National Science Foundation’s StudentOriginated Studies program. Local support came from the Alaska Native Foundation,Cook Inlet Native Association (CINA), Salvation Army, Office of Human Developmentof the Municipality of Anchorage, the State of Alaska Human Rights Commission, amongother organizations. Each team of five undergraduate students (one interdisciplinary M.A.student headed the elderly Natives study—Chuck Hines, a retired carpenter), includedan Alaska Native student. An older Yup’ik female student who was part of the elderlyAlaska Native study was selected as the NSF SOS Program’s “Outstanding Student.”10

Many of these students went on to complete graduate degrees in social sciences, includinganthropology.

For example, Judy Ramos, of Tlingit descent from Southeast Alaska, was an un-dergraduate anthropology major responsible for a section of the 1980 study of AlaskaNative youth living in institutions for purposes of health, education, social services ordelinquency (40–60 percent of all institutionalized youth in Alaska were, we discovered,Alaska Natives). She completed an M.A. elsewhere, has worked since then primarily onbehalf of her village on subsistence rights and other projects, and is currently enrolled in


a Ph.D. program at UAF, encouraged by Steve Langdon of our department (cf. Langdonbelow) and Dr. Aron Crowell, director of the Arctic Studies Center of the SmithsonianInstitution located in the Anchorage Museum for History and Art.

Of the engaged projects I have been involved in since then (e.g., Feldman 1981b, 1994;Feldman and Brewer 1996), I will describe only one due to space constraints, and the needto move on to the engaged work of colleagues. I was asked in 1998 by Native people livingin the small, mainly white town of King Salmon, on the Alaska Peninsula, to work withthem on their effort to receive U.S. Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) tribal recognition.My task was to research the presence, kinship bonds, and associations they had as Nativepeople since 1936 and prior in the area where current “King Salmon” developed. Theyreceived tribal recognition based on my research (Feldman 2001). Due to that project,Natives in the coastal town of Seward, Alaska asked for my assistance in 2007–2008

for similar research.11 The latter petition to the U.S. Department of the Interior is stillbeing reviewed. Most of the Native people in Seward are of mixed-descent—a littleover 10 percent of the total population of Seward (pop. 3,000+) are Natives – comingfrom virtually all across Alaska. This research explores new turf in Alaskan anthropologybecause its primary focus is the identity of Alaska Natives of people who have a Caucasianfather or grandfather. Phyllis Fast and I are now developing a co-edited book proposalon “Alaska Native Identities.” This is another example of how an engaged project canlead to the exploration of more traditional anthropological questions.

I wrote an introductory essay (Feldman 1981a) for an issue of the Alaska Journal ofAnthropology focused on applied and urban anthropology in Alaska; I also edited thatissue. This was the only issue of the journal focused on applied/engaged and urbananthropology in Alaska.

Engaged Scholarship of Steve J. Langdon: Indigenous Alaskan Subsistence Practices,

Commercial Fishing, and Preservation of Indigenous Traditions and Rights

Steve Langdon has been involved in engaged research related to indigenous peoples,mainly in Southeast Alaska (Tlingit, Haida, Tsimshian, and Eyak peoples), for fourdecades (e.g., Langdon 2008, 1986, 1999, 2006, 1979; Langdon and Feldman 1982).However, he would go beyond this designation and characterize his engagement as being“critically humanist” as defined by Bruce Knauft (1996). As Langdon explained to me:“ . . . my vantage point is more one of ‘immersion’ through which to document, valorizeand sustain key dimensions of cultural practice while at the same addressing the contextof power and structural violence that impact those cultural practices.” (Langdon, PersonalCommunication, Feb. 20, 2013)

I can only briefly describe the breadth and impact of Langdon’s work. His dissertationresearch in the mid-1970s was based on his work as a crew member of Alaska Nativecommercial fishing boats (understanding commercial fishing via participant observation).One of his goals has been to work as a partner with Tlingit and other villagers in SoutheastAlaska to sustain traditional relations with lands and waters by resuscitating appropriatescaled commercial fisheries and by renewing traditional subsistence harvest practices,especially in marine areas now prohibited by state or federal legislation. For example, he


recently traveled with Tlingit villagers to a complex of small islands in open Pacific Oceanwaters where they traditionally harvested seagull eggs, a prized delicacy. He employedone of our graduate students to document this effort in video format. This is one ofnumerous cultural heritage preservation and renewal projects that Langdon has engagedin with villagers (sometimes including members of his family in these village visits). Hehas, for example, taken a Heinya Tlingit elder on boat travels around her area, video-recording her recollections of what occurred at various points during her lifetime, andYakutat Tlingit elders more recently to the waters of Disenchantment Bay at the frontof Hubbard Glacier where seals were harvested and traditional practices associated withthe hunt documented.

Langdon also demonstrated via traditional research methods that the state of Alaska’s“Limited Entry Fishing Permit” law, enacted in the 1970s to protect the commercialfishing rights of rural Alaskans (i.e., mainly Alaska Natives), actually resulted in thetransfer/sale of indigenous fishing permits to commercial fishers outside of Alaska, pri-marily from Seattle. Although indigenous families might own a commercial fishingpermit, due to traditional involvement in this fishery, they might not have the collateral,credit history, connections, or bureaucratic knowledge to purchase a required permitand modern fishing vessel. He was also instrumental in envisioning and implementinga culturally congruent practice of commercial fishing among coastal Alaska Natives,encouraging the sharing of fishing harvests among villages based on a regional sharedquota system rather than competing among various villages for fish, as is encouraged bycapitalism. Solid engaged scholarship is grounded on solid basic research.

Langdon developed a remarkable two semester Special Topics course in anthropologyin 2006, with James Fall and Aaron Leggett, which had a lasting impact on Anchorage(Langdon and Leggett 2009): “The Dena’ina Heritage Representation Project.” Thecourse was supported by the UAA Center for Community Engagement and Learning,which was established in 2000. Fall is an anthropologist employed by the SubsistenceDivision of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, a Dena’ina expert and coauthor ofShem Pete’s Alaska: The Territory of the Upper Cook Inlet Dena’ina (Kari and Fall 2003).Leggett was a B.A. major in anthropology at UAA (now graduated), and a memberof the Dena’ina Eklutna Village (pop. 70), located 24 miles northeast of Anchorage.The Dena’ina had fish camps located in the Anchorage bowl area before constructionbegan on the Alaska Railroad in 1910, resulting in the tent city of Anchorage in 1915 thatdisplaced the indigenous population to Eklutna.

Native and non-Native students learned from Dena’ina elders and leaders about howareas in and around Anchorage were used by Dena’ina people prior to the influx ofwesterners. A Dena’ina elder explained that a downtown Anchorage street (4th Avenue)had been a moose trail through a thick birch tree forest, where moose were hunted.Students designed signage to be placed at important sites, which the municipality willconstruct as funding becomes available. Leggett used the posters made by studentsin the class to successfully argue in 2008 for the naming of the new 200,000 squarefoot, $111 million, Anchorage Civic and Convention Center: “The Dena’ina Center.”The ballroom and main rooms of the center are named for Dena’ina place names and


people, such as “Idlughet” (Dena’ina word for their village of Eklutna) for ExhibitHall.

In 2013 Langdon was invited by Southeast Alaska Natives to present the keynoteaddress at the 100th anniversary of the founding of their Alaska Native Brotherhoodand Sisterhood, due to his extraordinary diligence in tracking down for them, in theU.S. National Archives, treaties they developed in the 1870s to establish peace amongthemselves. He also found, among other things, documents showing federal recognitionof their customary ownership of places of traditional subsistence hunting, fishing, andgathering, and how they named geographic areas—information now in curriculummaterials for youth in the area.

Engaged Linguistic Anthropology: Alan Boraas and Language Renewal among

Dena’ina

In our statewide university system, former community colleges became part of the UAstatewide system in 1987. In Anchorage this meant that four community colleges in ourregion became part of our Major Academic Unit (MAU). Kenai Peninsula College (KPC)is one of them, serving communities some 120 miles south of Anchorage, whose soleanthropology full-time faculty member on their main campus is Alan Boraas.

Professor Boraas is a rare four-field anthropologist with expertise in cultural, ar-chaeological, physical, and linguistic anthropology. His career spans over three decades,focused primarily on research with and on behalf of Kenaitze (Athabascan) Indians inhis area. Kenaitze people today reside in the small, mainly non-Native towns of Kenaiand Soldotna. Prior to the purchase of Alaska from Russia by the United States in 1867,Russian fur traders established fort and trading posts in this area. The decimation of theindigenous population began with the arrival of Russians and new diseases to the region.Alaska became a state of the U.S. in 1959. Boraas involves Kenaitze youth and other tribalmembers in his archaeological excavations and took it upon himself to learn the verydifficult Dena’ina Athabascan (Dene) language in order to help preserve and renew thelanguage.

Boraas created a website for the Dena’ina language which allows Kenaitze peoplewherever they now live to hear how their language sounds, to learn the complex verbstructure of the language (it is a verb-based language, Boraas notes, rather than a noun-based language such as English), and allows them to learn the deep cultural meaningsfound in it. He spent years recording the stories in Dena’ina of one of the last fluentspeakers of the language, Peter Kalifornsky (requested to do so by Mr. Kalifornsky,who came one day to Boraas’ office). The website Boraas created, in partnership withthe Kenaitze tribe, allows one to hear how phonemes and morphemes sound and howsentences are spoken, and includes knowledge embedded in the language (the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis influenced Boraas’ efforts) as explained by Mr. Kalifornsky. Boraascollaborates in this language renewal effort with linguists at the Alaska Native LanguageCenter of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, particularly with James Kari, a Denelinguistic expert who has published extensively on the Dene language. James Kari and


Boraas (1991) coedited a book containing the collected writings of Mr. Kalifornsky, whichreceived the 1993 Book of the Year award from the Before Columbus Foundation.

Boraas was invited in 2001 by the Anchorage Daily News (ADN), to write op-edmonthly columns on matters of interest to him and Alaska. Before this, he wrote nu-merous op-ed columns for a local newspaper in his rural area. His ADN essays areamong the most informative columns available in Alaska, insightfully covering topicssuch as the Iraq war, a proposed large-scale mining project in a salmon-rich area ofBristol Bay that is important to Alaska Natives, and the need for Anchorage to improveits refuse treatment process before releasing its refuse into the Gulf of Alaska. In 2009,three years prior to Langdon’s reception of the award, Boraas received the Universityof Alaska Foundation’s Edith R. Bullock Prize for Excellence. Boraas was also honoredin 2009 by the Washington, D.C. Association of Professional Anthropologists (WAPA)as one of their four Praxis Award finalists for his Dena’ina language renewal effort.12

Earlier, in 2000, Boraas received an honor that is the most meaningful to him, thehighest recognition of the Kenaitze Tribe for his work on their behalf: honorary tribalmembership.

Boraas’ current engaged scholarship is a coauthored report with anthropologist Cather-ine Knott to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency regarding the impact on subsis-tence salmon fishing for streams exiting into Bristol Bay of mining activities, includinga proposed mine in the area (known as the Pebble Mine, an international mining com-pany). At least $250 billion in gold, copper, and other ores are thought to be undergroundon state-owned land in that area that the Pebble Mine would uncover. This mine has thepotential of destroying indigenous and sports fishing in the area streams and in BristolBay. Boraas’ coauthored report will take the discussion deep into the meaning of fish andof all forms of life to the people in the area, not simply to impacts on harvested caloricimpact, economic impacts, or other western foci of the notion of an “environmentalimpact.”

An Alaska Native Cultural Charter School project

Phyllis Fast (UAA Anthropology and Liberal Studies Departments) and Nancy Furlow(Tlingit, interim Director at the time of the UAA Alaska Native Studies program), bothindigenous scholars, engaged in a project (2010) with the Alaska Native Cultural Charterschool that received its first students in a former furniture store in Anchorage in 2007.The school has about 170 students in kindergarten through sixth grades. Fast and Furlowincluded four Alaska Native college students who met with the grade school studentsevery Friday morning for ten weeks. The students earned credits and stipends throughthe UAA Center for Community Engagement and Learning. Also, two Alaska Nativeelders came to the school to tell stories and to give demonstrations. This communityengagement effort included making paper models of Aleut (today known as Unanganpeople) bentwood hats, constructing “Eskimo” yoyos, making paper sandhill crane masks,and creating a quilt for the school. Pride in traditional cultural art and crafts is part of themission of this school. Fast is also a recognized Alaska Native artist and offers a course atUAA on Alaska Native Art.


Embedding an Indigenous Language in a Rural Yup’ik School: The Work of D. Roy

Mitchell, IV

Working with personnel of the Lower Kuskokwim School District beginning in 1989,Roy Mitchell, his colleagues at the local Kuskokwim Campus of the University of Alaskain Bethel, and Yup’ik parents, local leaders, and a few non-Yup’ik teachers and parents,envisioned and implemented a way to improve academic standards while using theYup’ik language for elementary classroom instruction in Southcentral Alaska. About 35

Yup’ik village schools are involved in the district. Bethel is a predominately Alaska Nativeregional center (pop. 6,080, in 2010). They developed a Yup’ik Language Immersionprogram, beginning in kindergarten, including both Native and non-Native students,extending through the sixth grade. After three years of classroom instruction solelyin Yup’ik, students combined English and Yup’ik in their later course work (Personalcommunication, Mitchell, February 2013). In 2008, the valedictorian of the Bethel HighSchool graduating class was a student who entered kindergarten the year the Yup’ikLanguage Immersion program began. Interestingly, he is a white student, son of parentswho worked for establishing the school in the 1990s. The language immersion andrenewal program continues successfully today. Mitchell is currently enrolled in a doctoralprogram at UAF while teaching as an adjunct professor in our department. Yup’ik is themost widely spoken indigenous language in Alaska with perhaps 10,000 speakers.

Engaged Anthropology Among UAA Research Units and New Adjunct Faculty:

Projects Related to Fisheries, Education, and Health

There are anthropologists doing significant engaged scholarship among our UAA adjunctfaculty and anthropologists in research units. For example, Marie Lowe, who holds a jointappointment in our department and in the Institute for Social and Economic Research,has been engaged in research projects involving Alaska Natives related to fisheries (e.g.,Lowe and Carothers 2008) and the education of Native youth. She currently directsa project, “UAA Transitions,” in partnership with the Anchorage School District thatbrings high school students, primarily from minority background, to the UAA campus,to interact with peers at UAA, encouraging students to attempt college who come fromfamilies lacking college level experience.

Another engaged anthropologist is David Driscoll, director since 2008 of the UAAInstitute for Circumpolar Health. Illustrative of his work is his project (2010–2012)“Promoting Community-based Adaptation Planning for Climate Change: Developinga Surveillance and Response Toolkit in Alaska,” funded by the National Center forEnvironmental Health. This effort involved coordinating community-based lay observersand developing a toolkit to guide local surveillance of climate change events, to analyzelocal natural and health events, and try to mitigate climate-change related events withpublic health significance. He and his colleagues have conducted various cooperativeprojects requested by the Southcentral Foundation, the major nonprofit arm of theCINA headquartered in Anchorage, such as evaluating their approaches to health issuesor helping a village in the CINA region to understand and gather data on a localhealth issue. He and his colleagues develop research protocols based on discussions with


villages, the Native group gathers the data, and submits it for analysis. Then cooperativediscussions occur about how to use the data to improve local conditions or services.

An adjunct professor in our department and Ph.D. candidate in medical anthropologyfrom McMaster University, Sally Carraher, became involved in two community-basedprojects in an indigenous arctic community in the Northwest Territories, Canada (nowa fulltime assistant professor in our department, replacing me in our department).In the Aklavik village H. pylori Project, Sally works with epidemiologists from theUniversity of Alberta to examine Helicobacter pylori bacterial infection and its link tohigh rates of stomach cancer. Using participant observation, she has explored how culturalconstructions of cancer, H. pylori bacteria, and risk influence health-seeking behaviors,and described how these practices are related to the social inequities that exacerbate H.pylori infection in Aklavik. In her newest project, she is working with Aklavik’s residentsto develop participatory-action research through cooking classes that aim to reducefood insecurity, celebrate traditional subsistence practices and systems of reciprocity, andimprove local health.

N E W D I R E C T I O N S I N E N G A G E D S C H O L A R S H I P AT U A A : R E S P O N S E S T O

G L O B A L I Z AT I O N

Since 2005, some graduate students’ foci have shifted to populations related to theextraordinary globalization that has occurred in Anchorage since the 1990s. There arenow 91 different ethnic groups living in Anchorage who speak their own languages andcarry on their traditional customs, religious beliefs, and cuisine in their homes.

Three of our recent M.A. student theses have explored issues among Hmong peoplefrom Laos (ca. 4,000–6,000 Hmong in Anchorage), Hispanic people mainly from Mexico(ca. 18,000 Hispanic people reside in Anchorage), and United Nations political asylumseekers received by Anchorage (ca. 40 people per year, many from sub-Saharan Africa).These students engaged with local communities to understanding their situations andunique problems. They include the role and significance of Hmong gardening practicesin Anchorage (Brady 2011), why breastfeeding practices are declining among Hispanicwomen in Anchorage (Marın Carrillo 2006), and the initial health care experiencesin Anchorage for UN political asylum seekers from Africa and Southeast Asia (Jessen2009).

Brady’s research became a featured story in the ADN. She earlier traveled throughSoutheast Asia, later attended my course on “Peoples and Cultures of Southeast Asia,”then developed friendships with Hmong people in preparation for her thesis research. Shealso became acquainted with Hmong peers and families through her work as a substituteteacher for the Anchorage School District and through her volunteer work in bilingualeducation. Leaders and members of the local Hmong organization attended her thesisdefense and explained how pleased they were that their gardening practices were madeknown accurately to the public by Brady’s intensive involvement with them.13

An innovative project, “Diverse Voices of Anchorage Project: Students LearningFrom Communities,” was designed to connect students to the diversity of Anchoragecommunities. It occurred from 2006–2008 and was supported by a grant from the UAA


Chancellor’s Strategic Opportunities Fund. This project was developed by Phyllis Fastand myself but involved faculty from several departments as members of our advisoryboard and as mentors for student-initiated projects. We partnered with three organi-zations: the Municipality of Anchorage Mayor’s Office of Equal Opportunity, BridgeBuilders of Anchorage, and Healing Racism in Anchorage. We envisioned Anchorage ashaving a rich educational potential for students. Students would submit an independentcourse proposal for learning something of interest to them from a local community.Each student would find a mentor from a UAA department (e.g., journalism, psychol-ogy, sociology, art, music, anthropology, etc.) who would serve as the instructor of thecourse with learning objectives, methods and bibliography; students would present theirfindings publicly, including how UAA might be more responsive to the communityfrom whom students learned. Ten student projects were funded and completed, withextraordinary results, each student stating that the experience changed their lives. Thestudents’ projects were featured at the Anchorage Mayor’s Diversity Dinner held at theAnchorage Hilton Hotel.

One of these became the subject of an article in the ADN, a project by a sociologymajor who was a Samoan fafafine (a boy selected by his family to be raised as a girl, in partto attend to the needs of parents as they advance in years). That student’s project tookhim/her back to Samoa to interview older fafafines to better understand their roles andlife experiences. In another project, a music major learned about the nature and functionof the traditional classic music of India from local Hindu residents. He wrote a paperregarding the classical music of India and performed his transposed piece of Hindu musicplayed on his instrument, a clarinet, with this music deriving from the oldest Hindusacred scriptures. He said that he didn’t know music could be spiritual compared to thefocus in the UAA music department on classical music originating in Europe. Perhapsthe most significant of these projects was a year-long effort by a Yup’ik student called“Villagers In The City.” He made a 40-minute film documenting the adjustment toAnchorage of four Yup’ik college students from his village of Unalakleet. UAA obtainedthe right to make copies of his film to use in recruitment trips to rural Alaskan villagesand won a national award for this recruitment effort.

U A A C E N T E R F O R C O M M U N I T Y E N G A G E M E N T A N D L E A R N I N G , N E W

F A C U LT Y E V A L U AT I O N G U I D E L I N E S A N D T H E I M P A C T O F C A N A D I A N

E N G A G E D A N T H R O P O L O G Y P R O G R A M S

The Center for Community Engagement and Learning was established at UAA in2000, receiving recognition (2006) by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement ofTeaching as a “Community Engaged Institution.”14 Before and after, within and outside ofthis institutional structure, UAA anthropologists have engaged in and provided leadershipregarding research and projects with communities as partners.

The Center reports to Senior Vice-Provost at UAA, Renee Carter-Chapman, whoworked on our first statewide anthropology conference, graduated from our programwith a B.A. in anthropology, then completed her M.A. at the anthropology department


of the University of Michigan. She also received the Edith R. Bullock Prize for Excellence.Through this next generation of anthropologists, engaged anthropology at UAA is hereto stay.

UAA adopted strong support for engaged scholarship in its most recent FacultyEvaluation Guidelines (2012, revised 2013) for tenure and promotion of faculty:

UAA highly values and encourages quality community engagement as part of facultyroles and responsibilities. For those faculty members who choose to undertake com-munity engaged scholarship through their teaching, service, academic research or cre-ative activity, it should constitute a vital component of faculty evaluation considerations(http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/facultyservices/tenure/).

Our department, faculty and students have also benefited greatly from contacts withengaged anthropologists in Canadian universities who confront similar challenges andopportunities in working with indigenous communities. One of our faculty, DianeHanson, specializing in the preparation of students for careers in Cultural ResourceManagement (CRM), received her doctorate from Simon Fraser University. Althoughoutside the focus of this essay, Dr. Hanson’s approach to CRM archaeological trainingemphasizes working with indigenous communities regarding their pre- or postcontactpast. Some of our students have completed graduate degrees in cultural anthropol-ogy at McMasters University and the University of British Columbia in Canada, thenreturning to Alaska to work for federal, state, or private organizations, aware of thevalue and ethical importance of engaged scholarship with and on behalf of indige-nous communities. Earlier I cited a coauthored paper that included David Natcherregarding the history of applied anthropology in Alaska. Natcher came to our depart-ment after completing his doctorate at the University of Alberta (1999) and is cur-rently at the University of Saskatchewan. Among his assignments are to serve as theAcademic Chair of the Indigenous Peoples Resource Management Program and Exec-utive Directive Director of the Indigenous Land Management Institute (http://www.scienceadvice.ca/en/assessments/in-progress/food-security/expert-panel/natcher.aspx). Agraduate from our B.A. program in anthropology is completing his M.A. degree at theUniversity of British Columbia under Charles Menzies, one of whose edited books isnoted in the references cited of this essay. Menzies is also the new editor-in-chief of“Collaborative Anthropologies,” an annual publication at the University of Nebraska press(housed at and supported by Marshall University in West Virginia) (http://muwww-new.marshall.edu/coll-anth/).

Concluding Comment

Engaged anthropologists in Alaska, when at our best, are Raven’s assistants, preparingthe cedar box with Raven, that creative trickster, for him to place the sun, stars, andmoon in the sky, bringing light to earth. This essay highlights some of our efforts atempowerment and improved lives and living conditions of and respect for our diversecommunities in a potentially hegemonic university on the mythical Last Frontier of theUnited States.15


N O T E S

1. Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology, University of Alaska Anchorage. Contact: [email protected].

2. http://www.alaskaanthropology.org/, accessed February 21, 2013.3. http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=alaska+federation+of+natives+history&ei=utf-8&fr=blie7,

accessed Feb. 21, 3012.4. The exception was the establishment in Southeast Alaska of the Alaska Native Brotherhood and Alaska

Native Sisterhood in 1912, in Sitka, Alaska. These organizations worked in the Territory of Alaska and laterState of Alaska to combat racism against Alaska Natives and promote their civil rights.

5. Even earlier in the mid-1900s, one of our UAA BA graduates (a non-Native female student, with halfof her education occurring earlier at UAF) was hired as a “village anthropologist” by a Southeast AlaskanNative community and eventually adopted into their clan system. One cannot be more “engaged” than this.

6. It was the most powerful recorded earthquake in North American history, as well as the second mostpowerful seismographic-measured quake worldwide.

7. Joint recipients of the highest award given by the Society for Applied Anthropology, the MalinowskiAward, 1998.

8. I was elected Head of the Division of Behavioral Sciences from 1974–1976 (I resigned in order to focuson building the anthropology program).

9. The 1975 conference had papers presented, and workshops sponsored, for example, by representativesfrom the Alaska Governor’s Board on Criminal Justice, the Rural Impact Information Center of Fairbanks(during the construction of the oil pipeline from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez), Copper River Native Association,Municipality of Anchorage Planning Department, many northern Alaska rural communities, University ofAlaska departments of education from Kotzebue, Fort Yukon, Tanana, Dillingham, and the Alaska Departmentof Education, a State Senator from Anchorage, the Office of Child Advocacy of the State of Alaska, ArcticGas Co., Alyeska, Bureau of Land Management (Pipeline Co.), Environmental Protection Agency, OuterContinental Shelf Office of the U.S. Department of the Interior, Center for Northern Education Research ofUAF, Stanford University’s Institute for Communication Research, Governor’s Office of Telecommunications(Juneau), Allakaket Village, Lee Gorsuch and Robert R. Nathan Associates, Alaska Public Interest ResearchGroup, the Anchorage Action Council, the mayor of Anchorage, The Alaska Native Foundation, AnchorageUrban Observatory, of UAA, Katchemak Bay Defense Fund, Alaska Jaycees, State of Alaska Division ofMental Health, Alaska Area Native Health Services, Tanana Chiefs Health Authority, Gateway Mental HealthCenter, Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corporation, Norton Sound Health Corporation, U.S. National Instituteof Mental Health, Alaska Federation of Natives, and a dozen other organizations an villages. This conferencewas held at the Anchorage Westward Hotel with over 200 people attending.

10. The report for that project is now part of the baseline information being used by two indigenousscholars in the UAA College of Health and Social Sciences who head the UAA National Resource Centerfor American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiian Elders (funded by the U.S. Administration onAging).

11. Research conducted with Rachel Mason, who taught as an adjunct instructor in our department. Sheis the Regional Anthropologist for the Ethnography Program of the National Park Service (NPS), Anchorage.Mason is a distinguished engaged anthropologist in Alaska whose recent “Lost Villagers Project” for the NPSdocumented Attu village residents in the Aleutian Islands who were removed by the U.S. army from theirvillages due to the Japanese invasion there during WWII. She collaborated with Mr. Nick Golodoff (2012) inproducing his memoir, Attu Boy, about his being taken prisoner when he was six years old and forced to livein Japan.

12. The WAPA award is for outstanding project-specific achievement in translating anthropologicalknowledge into action that demonstrates anthropology’s relevance and effectiveness in addressing contempo-rary human problems.

13. Jessen (now Jessen-Rogg) has been employed in the research unit of the Alaska Native Tribal HealthConsortium even before completing her thesis. Marin Carrillo came to our program as an M.D. from Colombia


who is now pursuing licensing to practice medicine in the U.S. Southwest (and may have completed it bynow). Brady teaches English as a Second Language in France.

14. Developing an engaged learning center was initiated by a new Provost, Dan Johnson, via a successful$500,000 grant to establish the center written by Dr. Nancy Andes of the UAA Department of Sociology.Provost Johnson came to UAA from his position as dean of an engaged/applied social science college atthe University of North Texas (UNT). Johnson went on to a distinguished career as president of ToledoUniversity.

15. A bumper sticker one might still see on cars or trucks in Anchorage, for better or worse, is “We don’tcare how they do it Outside.”

R E F E R E N C E S C I T E D

Alaska Anthropological Association2012 About Us. http://www.alaskaanthropology.org/index.cfm?section=about-us&page=About-the-

Association, accessed February 21, 2013.Alaska Federation of Natives

2013 History. http://www.nativefederation.org/about-afn/history/, accessed Feb. 21, 2013.Arnold, Robert D.

1976 Alaska Native Land Claims. Anchorage, AK: Alaska Native Foundation.Brady, Margaret A.

2011 Hmong Gardening in Anchorage, Alaska: Cultural Continuity and Change in a Far North Diaspora.M.A. thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Alaska Anchorage.

Fast, Phyllis A.2002 Northern Athabascan Survival: Women, Community and the Future. Lincoln, NE: University of

Nebraska Press.Feldman, Kerry D.

1981a Anthropology and Public Policy in Alaska: Recent Policy Related to Legal Systems, Native Subsistenceand Commercial Fisheries. Policy Studies Review 1(1):87–110.

1981b Anthropology Under Contract: Two Examples From Alaska. In Anthropologists At Home In NorthAmerica. Donald A. Messerschmidt, ed. Pp. 223–237. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1986 Subsistence Beluga Whale Hunting in Alaska: A View from Eschscholtz Bay. In ContemporaryAlaskan Native Economies. Steve J. Langdon, ed. Pp. 153–171. New York, NY: University Press ofAmerica.

1994 Alaska Natives With Disabilities and A Rehabilitation Center: Holistic Applied Anthropology. AppliedPlains Anthropologist, Essays in Honor of R. A. Hackenberg 14(2):45–60.

2001 Ethnohistory and the IRA Tribal Status Application of King Salmon Natives, Alaska. Alaska Journalof Anthropology 1(1):100–117.

2009 Applied Cultural Anthropology in Alaska: New Directions. Alaska Journal of Anthropology 7(1):1–19.Feldman, Kerry D., and Kelly Brewer

1996 Assessing Speech Loss for Alaska Natives After Injury or Stroke. Poster Presentation, Tenth Interna-tional Congress on Circumpolar Health, Anchorage, AK: May 19–24.

Feldman, Kerry D., Steve J. Langdon, and David C. Natcher2005 Northern Engagement: Alaskan Society and Applied Anthropology, 1973–2003. Alaska Journal of

Anthropology 3(1):121–155.Feldman, Kerry D., and Ernie Norton

1995 Niqsaq and Napaaqtuq: Issues in Inupiaq Eskimo Life-form Classification and Ethnoscience. InuitStudies 19(2):77–100.

Golodoff, Nick2012 Attu Boy. Anchorage, AK: U.S. Dept. of the Interior, National Park Service, Alaska Regional Office.

Jessen, Cornelia M.2009 Refugees and Health Care Providers in Anchorage, Alaska: Understanding Cross-Cultural Medical

Encounters. M.A. thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Alaska Anchorage.


Kari, James and Alan Boraas, eds.1991 A Dena’ina Legacy, K’tlegh’I Sukdu: The Collected Writings of Peter Kalifornsky. Fairbanks, AK:

Alaska Native Language Center.Kari, James, and James A. Fall

2003 Shem Pete’s Alaska: The Territory of the Upper Cook Inlet Dena’ina. Fairbanks, AK: University ofAlaska Press.

Knauft, Bruce1996 Genealogies for the Present in Cultural Anthropology. New York, NY: Routledge Press.

Langdon, Steve J.1979 Comparative Tlingit and Haida Adaptation to the West coast of the Prince of Wales Archipelago.

Ethnology 18(2):101–119.1986 Contradictions in Alaskan Native Economy and Society. In Contemporary Alaskan Native Economies.

Steve J. Langdon, ed. Pp. 29–46. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.1999 Subsistence and Contemporary Tlingit Culture. In Will the Time Ever Come? A. Hope, ed. Proceed-

ings of the First Conference of Tlingit Tribes and Clans. Pp. 179–185. Fairbanks, AK: University ofAlaska Press.

2006 Tidal Pulse Fishing: Selective Traditional Tlingit Salmon Fishing Techniques on the West coastof the Prince of Wales Archipelago. In Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Natural ResourceManagement. Charles R. Menzies, ed. Pp. 21–46. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

2008 The Community Quota Program in the Gulf of Alaska: A Vehicle for Alaska Native Village Sustain-ability? In Enclosing the Fisheries: People, Places and Power. Symposium 68. Marie E. Lowe andCourtney Carothers, eds. Pp. 155–194. North Bethesda, MD: American Fisheries Society.

Langdon, Steve J., and Kerry D. Feldman1982 Anthropology and Public Policy in Alaska. Practicing Anthropology 5(1):4–5

Langdon, Steve J., and Aaron Leggett2009 Dena’ina Heritage and Representation in Anchorage—A Collaborative Project. In The Alaska Native

Reader. Maria Shaa Tlaa Williams, ed. Pp. 163–175. Durham: Duke University Press.Lowe, Marie E., and Courtney Carothers, eds.

2008 Enclosing the Fisheries: People, Places and Power. Symposium 68. North Bethesda, MD: AmericanFisheries Society.

Marın Carrillo, Belkis M.2006 Factors Involved in Breastfeeding Decisions among Lower Socio-Economic Level Hispanic Women

in Anchorage. MA thesis, Department of Anthropology, University of Alaska Anchorage.Morrow, Phyllis

1993 A Sociolinguistic Mismatch: Central Alaskan Yupiks and the Legal System. Alaska Justice Forum10(2):1,5–8.


engaged anthropology on “the last frontier”

Documents