Thinking About Glaciers

As we work on the film, Tracing Roots, (working title) I’ve been thinking about glaciers.

They’re always on the move.  What they do impacts us. What we’ve done impacts them.

People around here, pre borders and highways, used to walk over glaciers to trade. As Lani Hotch says in an interview for the film, she remembers her grandmother’s stories of using an ice axe to travel to the interior from the coastal Alaskan community of Klukwan.

I  had a hunch, as I thought about glaciers that saying they’re melting was a simplification. Last week talking with Dr. Gwenn Flowers, a glaciologist,  I confirmed my hunch and learned about accumulation and ablation. When the loss is greater than the gain the terrain uncovered has usually not been exposed for a long time.

As I found in an article on archeological discoveries made possible by global warming, “An entirely new discipline of archaeology called ice patch archaeology is evolving. Ice patches are long frozen areas of water and snow that lie on the always shaded sides of mountain ranges”and they don’t move like glaciers.  More here.

In this landscape, archaeological artifacts that have been trapped in the ice for hundreds and sometimes thousands of years come to light once again.  These aren’t just stone objects, they’re organic material, like the Long Ago Man Found’s Spruce root hat–the hat Delores is replicating in the documentary.

When I chatted with a couple archeologists and read some more, I learned about finding Caribou dung in places where no one thought the caribou had been.  What was exciting about that was a 4,000 year old spear shaft found in the dung, So thinking about glaciers led me to talk about dung with scholars. That doesn’t happen everyday.

Plus Gwenn pointed me to a couple of useful resources.

Take a look at this interactive tool designed to help students better understand glaciers

Here’s a  link to Kate Hartman’s fun piece on glacier-human communication. It is a great example of art and science intersecting.

Eating Alaska Master Gardeners Conference Screening

Pulling out the Eating Alaska pins and postcards for a screening today to the International Master Gardener Conference: 9 and 11 AM in Sitka at Harrigan Centennial Hall. The conference includes over a thousand Master Gardeners* on a cruise ship making a stop   to find out what eating local means here.

The documentary Eating Alaska is a wry search for the “right thing to eat.” We’ve also described the 57 minute film as a story of “what happens to a vegetarian who moves to Alaska and marries a fisher-hunter” In screenings from Kotzebue to Warsaw, we’ve used the film to provoke conversations around questions such as:

• What is the most healthy, safe and sustainable ways for us to be part of the food chain?
•  What is our ethical obligation to the land and sea?
•  How is food a bridge between the natural and the social world?

Eating Alaska’s themes include sustainability, health, food justice and local vs. global issues. Public libraries, universities, art houses, Slow Food chapters, environmental centers and churches have not only screened the film, but used it to draw people together with local food potlucks, sustainability fairs, and fundraisers for greenhouses, food banks and farmers’ markets. The potlucks invite viewers to either bring something they “Grew, brew, caught,” or local, organic, fair trade foods. Discussion panels have included vegans, butchers, farmers, wild food harvesters, chefs, artists, and journalists.

E. Paul Durrrenberger. from the Department of Anthropology at Penn State recently reviewed Eating Alaska in CAFE. The Journal of Culture, Agriculture. Food and the Environment:

“Americans’ elevation of the denial of human and animal death to industrial status suggests the importance of keeping dying and killing hidden from view. To look your meat in the eye as you squeeze the trigger to dispatch the bullet to end its life, to walk to the fallen carcass and kneel beside it as you dismember it with a knife, and to feel the burden of the former animal become food as you hike out with it on your shoulders requires intimate familiarity with your food and puts it on a different existential, moral, and cultural footing than the anonymous chicken nugget you buy at a fast food depot. To all but the wealthiest of urbanites who can indulge in hunting vacations, this is a remote possibility, but residing in Alaska made the contrast inevitable for filmmaker Ellen Frankenstein, an erstwhile urban vegetarian struggling with questions of what we eat and how we think and feel about it….

Dilemmas need to go beyond guilt, as Durrenberger writes:

“Can we help our students envision these dilemmas with anything more hopeful or more productive than generous servings of guilt?Can we help them reformulate the question from the individual ones of whether it’s, in some sense, wrong to kill animals, to eat meat, or to eat industrial food to the larger community question of what kind of political economy can provide healthful and sustainably produced food for all?”

*The Master Gardener (MG) program started in Seattle in the 1970s as a way to extend the horticulture resources of Washington State’s land grant university  to the urban horticulture public in Seattle. The Master Gardeners receive 40 hours of training, similar to a basic three-credit-semester-hour, college-level horticulture class. Read more on the Sitka Local Foods Network site.

Thanks to University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service Sitka District office and other planners for including Eating Alaska in the conference.

Happy Frankenstein Day

I’m thinking about our relationship to technology, in this modern time of communication in a blink.

Humans as Christian Ervin, an interaction designer and architect,  reminds me have always manipulated their worlds.  He has just finished an advanced degree looking into the role of digital technologies in contemporary society.

I’m wondering how to pose questions and continue our conversation. My minder stutters, as I grasp for the language to use. While I have trouble thinking about how to talk about malleable realities, encoded information and action potentials, I did discover, today is Mary Shelley’s birthday.  The author of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus” (1818), was born 216 years ago today in 1797.

What’s the connection? And why do we still think about Shelley’s work almost 200 years after it was published? An article in Washington Post article, quoting Ronald Levao, editor of the ” Annotated Frankenstein”  (Harvard Univ. Press),  reminds us Shelley “articulated our desire for, and fear about, the transgression of fundamental boundaries…. between vitality and dead matter, the human and the inhuman, ideal aspiration and monstrous consequence.”  So, I’m not digging up graves, but I am thinking,  about consequences and boundaries. Plus isn’t it time to use the name “Frankenstein” in something I manipulate and create?

The project the works is  called “Frankentweet” and will turn into a documentary film. It will also take on other forms and ways of involving interaction.  This is post by E. Frankenstein, but there will be other authors on the Artchange, Inc. blog.  Stay tuned.

Want to learn a bit more about Ervin’s work and “The Digitally Mediated Body? Watch Ervin’s TEDxSitka talk.

Tracing Roots and Sharing Knowledge

We’re excited to jump back into production on a film we’re currently calling, “Tracing Roots,” a documentary with and about Delores Churchill.

Master Haida Weavers, Delores and her daughter, Evelyn Vanderhoop are ferrying their way to Sitka.

Evelyn,  Granddaughter of Selina Peratrovich, will give a presentation on the history of Northwest Coast wool textile weaving at 3:00 p.m. Tuesday, August 13th at the Sheldon Jackson Museum in Sitka, Alaska.  Following the presentation, Vanderhoop will weave in the galleries and discuss her work with visitors until around 5:00 p.m.

We will also be meeting up with molecular anthropologist, Dr. Brian Kemp.  As part of making the film, “Tracing Roots.” we’ll be talking about DNA and the journey Delores is on to replicate and understand the spruce root hat found in a melting glacier in the Yukon along with the remains of Kwaday Dan Tsinch, also known at the Long Ago Person Found.  Brian is coming to town for the Paths Across the Pacific Conference and it is an awesome opportunity to cross some new paths too.

Thanks to Delores and her family, the University of Alaska, SE, the Alaska Humanities Forum and the National Humanities Forum, and Rasmuson Foundation for helping to make this project possible.