Holding the River, Holding the Past: Co-Creating Knowledge in a Changing Alaskan Landscape

The Anthropology Department, with co-sponsorship from the Humanities Center, the Geography and the Environment Department, and Community Geography, welcomes Jonathan Lim, postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arkansas, to deliver his lecture, “Holding the River, Holding the Past: Co-Creating Knowledge in a Changing Alaskan Landscape.”

Quinhagak is a community of around seven hundred Alaska Native people on the Bering Sea. Beset by grave challenges in the form of climate-related landscape ecological change, the Yupik people of Quinhagak have nonetheless held on to their traditional ways of life and cultural heritage. Taking proactive steps to mitigate these challenges, they worked with spatial researchers to found a community-owned geospatial company in 2022 named. Nalaquq, Inc. (trans. “It is found”) in order to map threats to cultural heritage, including archaeological sites and centuries-old subsistence areas.

In a recent example of a severe landscape shift, the river upon which Quinhagak is sited is experiencing drastic erosion, and is threatening to avulse (i.e.. stop flowing), which would deprive the community of access to the all-important annual salmon run. Through the lens of a recently-awarded NSF grant between Nalaquq and the University of Arkansas to address this potentially dangerous waterway change, we will explore how tensions between Alaska Native communities outside academic researchers may be navigated for the good of the community, and if meaningful knowledge co-creation and collaboration is indeed possible in the windswept tundra of Southwest Alaska.