Juneau residents remembered and honored those who made the ultimate sacrifice during Memorial Day observances under sunny skies and breezy conditions in Juneau.
Observances were held at Evergreen Cemetery, Riverside Memorial Park, and the Southeast Alaska Native Veterans Memorial.
Here’s audio from the observance in Evergreen Cemetery:
The University of Alaska Museum of the North opens a new exhibit Saturday. “Expedition Alaska: Dinosaurs” gives visitors the opportunity to experience paleontologists quest and what they’re finding in an underexplored region.
Amid the stapling, drilling and cutting of the dinosaur exhibit going up, Museum of the North earth science curator Pat Druckenmiller reflects on the aberrant natural environment Arctic Alaska dinosaurs roamed 70 million years ago.
Druckenmiller has spent the last eight years working in Alaska, looking for and finding evidence of dinosaurs in a part of the world where the creatures once walked, but few paleontologists have explored.
The museum exhibit includes casts of footprints as well as fossilized bone fragments Druckenmiller and fellow scientists are using to identify and even discover dinosaur species.
Druckenmiller is working with Alaska Native speakers to come up with names for the new Alaska dinosaurs. The exhibit takes visitors into what it’s to be paleontologist exploring for dinosaur evidence in Alaska’s backcountry.
Roger Topp heads up production at the museum and has accompanied the paleontology team to shoot photos and video. He’s also involved in fleshing out an exhibit, which includes dinosaur models, even one that moves.
Other kid friendly parts of the exhibit are a big orange tent fashioned after one paleontologists use in the field, and tubs of silt visitors can paw through to try and find fossils. Seeing it all come together and connecting scientific field work with the public is gratifying for Druckenmiller.
Druckenmiller says some of the special exhibit materials will be incorporated into the museum’s permanent dinosaur display, which hasn’t been updated in 30 years.
A Tooksook Bay teenager who became a singing sensation on Facebook performed for ambassadors and Arctic VIPs at the State Department in Washington D.C. last week.
Secretary of State John Kerry introduced Byron Nicholai at a reception to mark the beginning of the U.S. Chairmanship of the Arctic Council. The two-year rotating chairmanship gives each arctic country an opportunity to set priorities. The United States has selected ocean safety, security, improving living conditions and climate change. Kerry described the balance:
“We have to implement the framework that we’ve developed to reduce emissions of black carbon and methane in the Arctic, and at the same time we have to foster economic development that will raise living standards and help make renewable energy sources the choice for everybody.”
Alaska leaders have urged the State Department to focus beyond climate change and recognize the needs of Arctic people. That message came through in Kerry’s speech.
“As beautiful as it is, (the Arctic) is not just a picturesque landscape,” Kerry said. “It’s a home. It’s a lifestyle. It has a history, and those folks deserve as much respect for that as anybody else in any other habitat on the earth.”
Nicholai was the only performer at the reception in the ornate Benjamin Franklin room of the State Department. He is 17, and has more than 16,000 followers on his Facebook page “I sing. You dance.”
Urban life has long drawn young people out of rural Alaska. Now art is imitating Alaska life in a first-time Juneau playwright’s new play “They Don’t Talk Back.” The debut work has caught the eye of a well-known Native American theater company, and drawn the homegrown playwright to Los Angeles.
Frank Katasse says his writings often explore the sometimes confusing differences between his Tlingit heritage and contemporary society. When inspiration hits he will compose a monologue, a soliloquy or a poem; this is his first full-length play and is composed of several years of these writings that ride on a central theme.
Not expecting much, Katasse submitted his play to a leading Native American theater company Native Voices at the Autry in Los Angeles. The theater chose Katasse’s play amid numerous submissions as one of three major works to present at this year’s 17th Annual Festival of New Plays.
“He’s an amazing first-time playwright,” says Native Voices Producing Executive Director Jean Bruce Scott. “The fact that this is his first full-length play is telling in terms of his natural talent.”
Scott says the play is unique: “He’s using what we’re currently calling interludes that bracket the individual scenes that are happening in the play. And the interludes, each one of them is different. One may be Tlingit drumming and singing. One may be a poem. He’s using spoken word.”
He’s also using what Scott calls a beatbox-like rhythmic language.
“And then he’s telling a very important story in Indian country, and that is the connection between culture and history, and the present day, and how do Native people hang onto their children.”
Katasse will be in Los Angeles through the end of May for the Playwrights’ Retreat. A full company of nationally recognized directors, dramaturges, producers, designers and Native American actors will read and critique “They Don’t Talk Back.”
Katasse is excited, but says playwriting is different from his usual role as an actor.
“It hasn’t even started yet and I’m nervous, which is very odd,” Katasse says. “I don’t get nervous very often going on stage. But already I’m feeling like it’s something that is out of my control and I just have to trust the ensemble which other playwrights have obviously done with me.”
It’s ironic that Katasse is leaving Juneau himself, but that irony is not lost on him. He plans to bring back all that he learns and share it with aspiring playwrights in Juneau.
At the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society Conference in Juneau this week, a panel of five discussed climate change and traditional knowledge.
Rick Edwards is the research aquatic ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service. He likened the observations of indigenous people to scientific models.
“If we focus on that part of this integrated body of spirituality, culture and knowledge, and if we focus on observation-based natural history parts of that, then indeed, that looks a lot like science to me,” he said.
In 2010, the Forest Service partnered with tribes nationwide to study the effects of climate change. Alaska Native tribes are also participating.
Ida Hildebrand is the tribal natural resource program director for the Chugach Regional Resource Commission, a nonprofit that oversees the stewardship of natural resources in the Chugach region. Hildebrand cautioned Native people to exercise sovereignty over their traditional knowledge.
“That is your tribal choice. You have that knowledge, you don’t have to share it. Or you can share parts of it and not all of it. There’s sacred knowledge. There’s common everyday knowledge. There’s all kinds of traditional knowledge,” she said.
The research is funded with federal money which means information gathered could become public record. The goal of the project is to preserve tribal culture in the face of changing climate.
Alaska communities could better adjust to climate change if hunting and fishing rules become more flexible.
Craig Fleener, Gov. Bill Walker’s special assistant on Arctic policy, says northern Native peoples had the ability to adapt before western-style government took over.
“A thousand years ago, if the caribou didn’t come, you killed a moose. If the caribou that should have come to your community three weeks ago, two weeks ago, one week ago, today, weren’t there, well, you harvested them next week,” he says.
Fleener says more regulations defining seasons and bag limits need to be adaptable.
“We don’t do it enough. It’s very tough, especially with the rigid management structures that we have. But I think that’s something we really have to focus on. And I think at some point in time, we all have to come together and talk about how we’re going to continue to adapt to the changes that are around us,” he says.
Fleener made his comments to the Native American Fish and Wildlife Society, which is holding its annual convention in Juneau this week.
Fleener is Gwich’in Athabascan from Fort Yukon. He’s a former deputy commissioner of Alaska’s Department of Fish and Game. He also was Walker’s running mate before his independent campaign merged with Democrat Byron Mallott’s.
Fleener urged tribal and other representatives at the convention to educate themselves about Arctic issues.
The United States this year took over chairmanship of the Arctic Council, an eight-nation coalition. Fleener says that’s good. But decisions about the region should be made by the people who live there.
“We need to have a voice. Alaska really has not had a voice on the international front when it comes to decision-making at the Arctic Council,” he says.
The council does include representatives of northern indigenous groups. Fleener, for example, has chaired a council of Gwich’ins from Alaska and Canada.
