University of Alaska

This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond. 

The University of Alaska Southeast’s ceramics classes in Juneau are hard to get into — because so many people want to take them. 

Jeremy Kane has been teaching ceramics for 20 years. Each year, the ceramics department makes and donates hundreds of bowls to the Empty Bowls fundraiser, which raises money for the Glory Hall shelter in Juneau. This year’s fundraiser is on Sunday. 

KTOO sat in on a bowl-making demonstration in his intermediate class at UAS. 

Listen:

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Speaking to his class: But we’re going to start with about a couple of pounds of clay, maybe a little bit more — two-and-a-half, two-and-a-quarter. It’s not really so important how you make it was just a matter of being efficient with your operation.  

And when I put this clay on the wheel, there’s no need to show off. Make that nice round ball of clay, getting your hands smacking around a little bit. This clay is going to soften up so much.

Center it, and enter it. If the clay is wedged properly, shouldn’t have to do too much centering, shouldn’t have to do too much work at all. 

Interview transcript: My name is Jeremy Kane. I moved to Fairbanks when I was 18 years old with my friends, and I had taken ceramics classes as a kid, so I’ve been making things for a long time. So I took college ceramics starting when I was 18 in Fairbanks. Then I have a master’s degree from Ohio University. That’s when I finally landed this position here, and I’ve been working here ever since. So it’s my 20th year teaching. 

To class: I encourage you guys to try to set some goals for timing on these pots. We had like a race in grad school one time, I think I made 45 bowls in an hour. All the clay was prepped, not talking to anybody, you just sit there and go knock them out. And then later, you got to trim them.

So I wouldn’t go to that extent, but I think that you guys should all easily be able to make 10 bowls. I mean, easy.

Interview: This particular project, we do it for the homeless shelter in town, and we’ve been doing it for years. We’ve donated thousands of bowls to this particular project over the years. But I don’t want it to be just a donation. I want the students to be able to learn from it.

To class: Part of a nice handmade bowl has to do with the fact that you still have a hand in it. Okay, so some of the nicest pots you’ll buy, that are actually commercial pots, like say from China. They all have reference of hand marks in them, because that’s what people like.

You can see there’s a little undulation in that pot. Undulation means it’s got a little wiggle to it. When I make pots, I like to have that motion in there. Or else I can just buy them at Kmart. You guys probably don’t know what Kmart is anymore. 

Interview: I try to encourage them to do it different ways, different styles of bowls and different techniques. So itʼs not necessarily like one standard bowl you crank out, I want them to really think about it.   

To class: You know, when you think about bowls, like for this particular project, I want you guys to like — we’re not just donating time. I want you guys to think about things — and it sounds selfish, but when you’re making pots, you gotta make them for yourself. If they’re nice enough for you, then they get really evenly distributed throughout the community, essentially. Okay, so you don’t make things for other people, you make them for yourself. Because you’re the artist, you’re the person who spends the time doing it. But you gotta make something that you like.

Interview: I do think that making things in multiples is the only way to learn how to make pottery. You know, it’s kind of the art of repetition. 

To class: But when it comes to making pots, sometimes it’s nice to have a bigger, bigger bowl. You want room in that bowl to be able to put stuff. So if you’re serving somebody dinner and you have this really tiny little bowl that you made, you’re real proud of it. Maybe it’s better to put like jelly or like put some sort of dip in there or something. 

But a real bowl would have enough room that you could serve food and still have like two or three inches on the top of that pot in order to be able to look at the surface on that ceramics, or to be able to see what it is, or it creates a contrast between the food. 

Say you’re eating some sort of crab bisque. Right? Oh my God, that sounds killer. Did anybody bring that tonight for class? I wish you did.

So many cultures have that sort of specialty, different foods and different spices, but it’s all food. People make potatoes, meat and vegetables. That’s the world. It’s not that amazing. But the dishes that the stuff is served in, I think, make it amazing. 

Okay, alright, get to work. 

You can check out work made by Kane’s students at the Juneau Arts & Culture Center Gallery through April 27.

The University of Alaska Southeast’s student news publication says the Juneau campus and its Title IX office aren’t doing enough to protect students from sexual assault.

It’s led to student outcry and prompted campus officials to bring their concerns to the university’s Board of Regents. 

Title IX is a federal law that prohibits sex discrimination — including sexual violence — in educational programs and activities in the U.S. All public and private schools, school districts, colleges and universities must comply with its regulations.

In mid-February, students from the publication, The Whalesong, wrote in an editorial that the Juneau campus wasn’t protecting students under that law.

AJ Schultz, the publication’s student editor, said the editorial was a response to a long-running problem.

“There are so many instances of Title IX systems failing individuals and groups at this university,” he said. “I, in my role, was just bringing that forward and trying to fairly assess all the systems at play that kind of created that environment.”

The editorial included stories from multiple students who say the university mishandled their reports of sexual assault, and in turn, made them feel unsafe to share reports in the future. And since the editorial came out, students have been sharing their stories on social media and pressuring the university for change at a series of listening sessions held on campus.  

“Me — and everybody else on Whalesong and everybody else who has been coming to the listening sessions — we’re just trying to push mainly the Board of Regents to create stronger support systems across the entire university network that exists for survivors trying to go through the grievance process safely for their physical and mental health,” he said. 

Dr. Aparna Palmer took over as chancellor of UAS last summer, and Mitzi Bolaños Anderson became the school’s Title IX coordinator in October. The two have been at the forefront of the campus response to the student outcry. 

Beginning in early February, the campus began hosting the Title IX listening sessions. Palmer said they’re a chance to hear student’s concerns and work to address them.

“I do think that these are issues that probably have been kind of collecting under the surface for quite a while, it definitely precedes me,” she said.

Palmer said students have made it clear they don’t think one employee overseeing the Title IX office is enough. They’ve also called for more engaging Title IX training and a stronger security or police presence on campus.

Palmer shared the student’s concerns regarding UA Title IX policies at a Board of Regents meeting in late February. She said the campus plans to hire a deputy Title IX coordinator to help Bolaños Anderson in her work. That person will begin this month.  

“By no means are we done in terms of how we already responded there is more to do,” she said. “I come to you today as chancellor to ask for your continued support and advocacy in regard to Title IX.”

During the meeting, UA President Pat Pitney said she takes the UAS students’ concerns seriously as the UA system continues working to better its Title IX policies and response. 

In 2017, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights said the UA system had badly failed students and staff who were sexually harassed and assaulted. 

“This was a major topic for the board for several years and we have made tremendous progress,” she said. “They are challenging and we want to continue to improve on the progress we’ve made over the last several years.”

In 2019, a campus climate survey estimated that more than 4,000 students across Alaska campuses had experienced some form of sexual assault — either on or off campus — since enrolling. 

Still, local experts like Mandy Cole, the executive director of AWARE, Juneau’s domestic violence support organization, said rising reports of sexual assault don’t necessarily mean campuses have gotten more dangerous – it just means more people are coming forward with their stories.

“My answer is that it’s always been there — it’s always been there. It’s always been just as bad as it is today, forever. And the only way it gets better is if we talk about it,” she said.

Palmer, the UAS chancellor, said the listening sessions will continue in the coming months. Bolaños Anderson said the changes already taking place likely wouldn’t have happened if students hadn’t shared their concerns.

Chemical analysis of a 14,000-year-old woolly mammoth tusk found that the animal, a healthy female that trekked about 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) from Canada’s Yukon Territory before dying at 20 in Interior Alaska, had territory that overlapped that of early humans.

The chemical fingerprints in the tusk, combined with DNA analysis of the bones of two young mammoths found in the area, create a compelling case that the people who lived in Pleistocene-era Alaska hunted the giant animals, according to research led by University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists. The findings are detailed in the journal Science Advances.

The mammoth was discovered in 2009 and named Élmayųujey’eh, or Elma for short. The name, bestowed by the Healy Lake Tribal Council of Interior Alaska, translates to something not beautiful but very striking in appearance.

Found along with Elma’s tusk were remains of two juvenile mammoths – the ribs that held meat known to be used elsewhere by ancient humans. They died near a spot along the Tanana River known as Swan Point, which is the earliest confirmed human habitation site in Alaska. Isotope analysis of the tusk shows a life’s journey that began in the vicinity of ancient human settlements in Canada.

Though there is not a “smoking gun” showing that Elma was killed by hunters, there is a “preponderance of data” supporting that conclusion, said Matthew Wooller, a coauthor and director of the Alaska Stable Isotope Facility at UAF, where the chemical analysis was conducted. Elma’s journey started in the vicinity of known sites of ancient human habitation in Canada and ended abruptly in the vicinity of a known human habitation site in Alaska, where campsites hold evidence of hunting in general, such as remains of other animals and blades typically used in hunting. “So it’s just uncanny to us,” Wooler said.

The reconstruction of Elma’s life journey provides valuable information for modern animals now roaming the same territory that she trod. It is a warning sign for conservation of critically endangered large animals like rhinos, said Audrey Rowe, a UAF PhD student who is the study’s lead author.

“Really, my takeaway is that large animals are so much more fragile in terms of extinction than smaller ones,” Rowe said. “You see this over and over again throughout the history of the planet.”

She cited the way that non-avian dinosaurs disappeared but tiny mammals that were scurrying around the planet at the same time endured. The pattern continued through the end of the last Ice Age and into modern times, she said. Larger animals that take longer to reproduce are “not resilient against sudden changes,” she said.

For woolly mammoths, the reasons for extinction continue to be debated. Were they victims of climate change, or were they hunted into oblivion by ancient humans?

Rowe said does not belong to either “camp climate change” or “camp overkill.”

It is unlikely that mammoths would have survived in Alaska, at least, even if there were no people, she said. But overhunting could have contributed to the demise, especially considering how long it took them to reproduce. They reached sexual maturity at about 15 years, and their gestation period was about 22 months, she said.

“So killing one mammoth is a bigger impact on the population than killing one bison or one moose or one caribou just because of that much longer period of time that it takes for them to reproduce,” she said

Elma’s fate was different from that of a different Alaska woolly mammoth that trod much of the same ground about 3,000 years earlier, a male named Kik. Previous isotope analysis of his tusk, also done by the UAF team, traced his wanderings in Interior Alaska and through the Brooks Range until he died, alone, of starvation at about age 28. Those findings were released in 2021.

There were some revealing differences between Elma’s travels and those made by Kik. Elma chose more high-elevation areas, which made sense because the climate changed significantly in the 3,000 years since Kik’s travels. By the time Elma was on the scene, warming had caused lower elevations to be wetter, soggy and brushier, making it more difficult for such large animals to navigate than the steppe-dominated landscape of Kik’s time, Wooller said.

“For anybody that has done any walking about in Alaska, you know, the last place you’d want to be walking about, during summer certainly, is down in the kind of swampy lowlands, the muskeg and the like,” he said.

All those movements could be tracked back in time in the layers of Elma’s and Kik’s tusks. Mammoth tusks, which grew in layers at consistent rates throughout the animals’ lifetimes, turn out to be excellent recorders of history, matching what the animals ate to the varied geologic structures across Alaska, which have their own chemical fingerprints, Wooller said.

The findings about Elma, on top of those about Kik, are proving useful for another animal that travels long distances over Arctic Alaska terrain: caribou.

Like the extinct mammoths, caribou depend on a climate that is changing rapidly, becoming less hospitable as woody shrubs spread north and displace the tundra plants that caribou normally eat.

Caribou are not in danger for now, as they reproduce quickly and have the benefit of modern wildlife monitoring and management, Rowe said. But there are some potential trouble signs, she said.

“If the entirety of Alaska starts to be covered in boreal forest or maybe even if more temperate climates start to creep northward into where we live, that would not be ideal for caribou and we might see a lot more moose, a lot less caribou perhaps,” she said.

As part of her research into ancient caribou and reconstruction of herd movements, Rowe is using isotope analysis of teeth that is similar to what has been used on the woolly mammoth tusks. She is comparing modern teeth from the Fortymile herd with teeth from ancient caribou that used the same territory. Part of her work will be to determine whether the ancient and modern caribou are linked or are completely different biologically, as well as determining if they have been ranging over the same territory for thousands of years or have made changes in their travels.

Analysis of the teeth is more challenging than that performed on the much-bigger mammoth tusks, Rowe said. Unlike mammoth tusks, caribou teeth grow at uneven rates and stop growing entirely after the animals’ first two years of life.

There are other key differences, aside from the obvious fact that caribou are still here while mammoths are not.

Mammoths didn’t really migrate in the sense that biologists use the word, she said. They traveled around a lot to find food, but they did not use regular seasonal back-and-forth pathways.

Mammoths were among those animal species with small feet for body size, which appears to be a feature that helped doom certain Pleistocene animal species that were not able to adapt to post-Ice Age change to a warmer climate with more swampy terrain and more snow. Like mammoths, extinct woolly rhinos and ancient Pleistocene horses that once roamed northern Alaska had small feet relative to their body weight, while caribou, moose and muskoxen and other animals with feet large enough to spread out body weight more effectively on soft surfaces are still here.

The string of ancient human sites along the Tanana River, aside from suggesting hunting of mammoths that regularly traveled that corridor, show how habitat changed over thousands of years. There was a shift from a heavy reliance on big Pleistocene mammals during Elma’s time to more bison and elk about 1,000 years later to a much heavier reliance on caribou starting about 6,000 years ago.

Elsewhere along the Tanana River corridor, though not at Swan Point specifically, is evidence of ancient people eating salmon. The oldest archaeological evidence of salmon consumption was found at a site known as Upward Sun River. There, 11,500-year-old chum salmon bones found by UAF anthropologist Ben Potter, also a coauthor of the study about Elma, showed how ancient people started a shift into fishing.

While changes in the landscape are believed to have driven mammoths into oblivion, their disappearance could have also changed the landscape. Through grazing and tramping on the ground, they put a check on the spread of vegetation and helped preserve permafrost freeze, Wooller said. “And so the removal of ecosystem engineers would certainly have had an impact, for sure,” he said.

Partly because of that and partly because of the general fascination with the ancient creatures, there are efforts to resurrect the species. Wooller is a scientific adviser to one company, Colossal Laboratories and Biosciences, that is seeking to reestablish mammoths or mammoth-like cold-climate elephants to help restore far-north grasslands like those of the past, which it describes as better carbon sinks than the current mossy and forested terrain that has succeeded the mammoths’ era. There are other companies, in the United States and in Korea, that are pursuing the same goal. Possible methods could use ancient DNA and replicate it through cloning or employ some sort of artificial insemination with modern elephants. Another project, Pleistocene Park in Siberia, is focused on recreating the steppe ecosystem that supported the extinct mammoths, using large grazers like bison and muskoxen to do so.

Rowe is skeptical that Alaskans would welcome giant elephant-like creatures stomping around the state’s Arctic landscape in the modern era. But if not practical for Alaska, the idea is more intriguing for a different location, like Siberia or Mongolia.

“I personally think it would be really cool to be able to see a mammoth or something close to it again,” she said. “Maybe not necessarily here, but I certainly, I would certainly take a trip to Pleistocene Park to see it if that were to happen someday.”

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

For years, scientists have wondered why North America’s highest mountain is not a volcano. All the ingredients for volcanic activity lurk deep beneath Denali, which sits above where one planetary plate grinds past another.

Recently, while looking for something else, researchers found a reservoir of what might be magma, seven miles beneath the muskeg of middle Alaska.

The spot intrigues Carl Tape because above it, at the ground surface, are ancient volcanic features.

Tape is a seismologist with the University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute. A few years ago, he headed a team that peppered seismic instruments along the Parks Highway and on the Denali seismic fault. They installed hundreds of seismometers at spots along the road and dozens more right on the fault.

While looking at the seismometer data, which revealed ground motions large and small, Tape and his colleagues noticed a spot where earthen waves slowed down as they passed through.

“Sometimes a slowdown is due to sediments, such as those in the Tanana (River) valley,” he said. “Sometimes it’s due to magma. This one is beneath the Buzzard Creek maars.”

The Buzzard Creek maars are two vegetated craters northeast of Healy. They formed when molten rock rose to the water table and blew up about 3,000 years ago. Geologists have found rocks around Buzzard Creek with the same chemical signature as Aleutian volcanoes.

Those volcanic features near Healy are within a region scientists have named the Denali Volcanic Gap. The gap is a puzzling absence of volcanoes from Mount Spurr (across Cook Inlet from Anchorage) to the Wrangell Mountains in eastern Alaska.

Volcanic activity of the Aleutian Islands seems to end at Mount Spurr. But if the curve of the Aleutian Arc were to extend north, it would intersect the Alaska Range.

Other conditions there are favorable for volcanoes, too: Most of the Aleutians are located about 60 miles above where the slab of the Pacific plate plunges beneath the North American plate. The Buzzard Creek craters and the mountains of the Alaska Range (including Denali) are located about 60 miles above the interface of the giant plates.

University of Utah student Santiago Rabade pored over subtle signals picked up by the dense network temporary seismometers Tape and his team had set up quickly in February 2019. Then they performed rare winter fieldwork to detect aftershocks from the magnitude 7.1 Anchorage earthquake on Nov. 30, 2018.

The earthen hum generated by ocean waves disturbing the sea floor is a constant source of noise we can’t feel but seismometers can; that signal allowed the scientists to detect the patch of magma beneath the Buzzard Creek craters.

“We had zero plan to look for what we found,” Tape said. “It’s fun to find results when you don’t seek them. And it’s generally better science.”

A next logical step to discover more about the mystery magma spot would be to cluster seismic instruments directly above it. Tape is hoping his team’s recent paper will inspire someone to take a closer look at the red blob that might help solve the riddle of the Denali Volcanic Gap.

A new bill that aims to address backlogged maintenance projects at the University of Alaska will be up for consideration as lawmakers return to the Capitol next Tuesday. The bill would set aside some $35 million this year to address some of the biggest priorities in the roughly $1.5 billion backlog.

The university system’s chief financial officer, Luke Fulp, said in a phone interview that catching up on deferred maintenance has been the top capital priority for the UA’s governing Board of Regents for more than two decades.

“This legislation is our plan to address that, and not just address it with one-time funding, but to look at a way that we can engage in in long-term planning around meeting the maintenance needs of our facilities and making sure that we’re avoiding critical failures and costly repairs as a result of not addressing the maintenance needs in a timely manner,” Fulp said.

Fulp said it’s a new approach for the university system. Instead of asking the Legislature to fund a specific slate of projects each year, the bill would lay out a six-year list of maintenance and modernization projects.

Unspent money would carry over to the next year, and regents would update the list as projects are completed. The Legislature would retain control over especially large projects that require more than $2.5 million in annual spending, and lawmakers would have the power to add or remove projects from the list.

In the past three years, Fulp said UA has received roughly $15 million a year despite $60 to $70 million in annual requests.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy has issued line-item vetoes on a number of university maintenance projects, including roughly $35 million last year that would have paid for campus upgrades around the state. In 2019, during Dunleavy’s first year in office, he cut some $130 million in university funding.

In this new bill, Fulp said the university is focused on what he calls “attainable targets” – that is, not eliminating the backlog entirely, but shoring up some facilities that are in danger of falling into disrepair and modernizing others. He says that under the plan, the university would commit some of its own money to the maintenance and modernization fund starting in 2028. That would ramp up to $10 million a year by 2034.

The UA system represents 40% of the state’s capital infrastructure, and the bill would protect the state’s investment, Fulp said. Rep. Will Stapp, R-Fairbanks, the bill’s sponsor in the House, said it’s a way to get ahead of crises before they happen.

“The university needs to be able to go say, ‘Hey, we have a long-term strategic plan, we’re going to start to replace roofs or boiler systems on these facilities’ and stuff like that,” Stapp said by phone from his home in Fairbanks.

“It really is a pay now or pay more later problem,” he added.

Though the bill contains language saying the Legislature intends to add $35 million to the fund each year, the final yearly contribution would be up to the House, Senate and governor. But Stapp, a member of the House majority caucus, says he’s open to discussing other methods to ensure long-term funding stability with his colleagues in Juneau.

UA’s head of state relations, Chad Hutchison, said by email that university officials have spoken with Senate leaders and staff about a possible companion bill. He says they’ve also raised the “principles” of the bill with Dunleavy’s office and heard “no known objections.”

The governor’s communications director, Jeff Turner, said in an email the governor does not take a position on pending bills, noting they can change significantly during the legislative process.

Lawmakers head to the Capitol for the second session of the 33rd Alaska Legislature on Jan. 16.

The University of Alaska’s graduate students have organized into a union, after votes counted on Friday overwhelmingly approved the formation of a local unit. Graduate students across the state – mostly at UAF in Fairbanks – are joining Alaska Graduate Workers Association-United Auto Workers.

 Sophia Sytniak, a graduate teaching assistant in clinical-community psychology at the University of Alaska Anchorage, said the union will represent about 450 fellows and graduate, research, student and teaching assistants. The next step is to survey members on what they want their union leadership to address with UA leaders.

“Some of the things that we’ve heard are things like health care, wages, those are some of the primary concerns,” Sytniak said. “Also, a lot of our contracts prohibit external positions. That’s a concern because with our wages, us not being able to make like living wages that we’re able to live off of, we’re also not able to seek other employment positions. And so that’s something that can be challenging.”

The union vote took place online from Oct. 13-26, with ballots counted last week by the Alaska Labor Relations Agency. Votes in favor of unionization prevailed 314-11.

Memry Dahl, the university system’s chief human resources officer, sent a system-wide e-mail message on Friday saying the outcome will be certified Thursday.

“After certification, university leadership looks forward to bargaining with the new unit in the future,” Dahl wrote.

Sytniak said the union will soon elect a bargaining team.

The UA students first started their organizing movement last winter, and are following a nationwide trend of student workers organizing with the United Auto Workers. Roughly 100,000 of the union’s 383,000 members work in higher education – although not all of those are student workers.

At its peak from the late 1960s through the 1970s, the United Auto Workers union was 1.5 million members strong. Today it’s barely a quarter that, and only about half of its members work in the auto industry.

The new unit of graduate students is the first UAW presence in Alaska.