AFTER IMAGE

Sarah James, who is helping coordinate the legal fight on behalf of her tribe to protect the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from development, sits atop a four wheeler outside her cabin in Arctic Village in June 2019. Photo by Brian Adams.

ALASKA WATER WARS is a multimedia project led by journalist Daysha Eaton and funded in part by a grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum. The project shares the stories of Alaska Native people as they navigate the benefits and risks posed by new natural resource devel opment projects coming to their regions. While the exploration and development brings much-needed jobs and money to rural Alaska, Native communities have growing concerns about the impacts to drinking water, fish, wildlife, and their traditional ways of life. Eaton travelled to remote locations with photographer Brian Adams, spending an extended time within communities to gain an understand ing of this complex issue and, ultimately, to report about a little-understood dimension—the spiritual and religious aspects of the Gwich’in Nation’s struggle to protect from development their historical homelands on the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. “The fact that two female indigenous leaders’ voices es sentially tell this story from their perspective in their own words sets this project apart from most reporting on the topic,” reflected Eaton. “It is an example of the type of challenging journalism that I set out to do, journalism which strives to raise peoples’ consciousness and influ ence how leaders and citizens understand complex issues at the intersection of the environment, indigenous rights and American culture. This was not intended as an attack on Big Oil, but rather as an exploration of the Gwich’in’s spiritual practices in relation to the caribou.”

421 West First Avenue, Suite 200 Anchorage, AK 99501 (907) 272-5341 www.akhf.org

THE MAGAZINE OF THE ALASKA HUMANITIES FORUM SUMMER 2020