2016 Annual Humanities Grants
42
Dirigibles of Denali Nathan Shafer Various Locations / $8,500
Katie John Collection Alaska History Conservancy Mentasta Village / $10,000
Few people have heard of Denali City and Seward’s Success, two planned but never built “domed cities” in central Alaska. Dirigibles of Denali includes augmented reality renderings of Denali City and Seward’s Success on the sites where they were intended to be built. Seward’s Success was proposed in 1968, but scrapped in 1972, after which Denali City, a new capital of the state, was proposed in the foothills of Denali. Both were imagined with biodomes for regulating the environment, and the project takes its name, “Dirigibles of Denali,” from one of the intended methods of transporting visitors to Denali City. The project is as futuristic as its subjects—with a mobile device, an app will place video, audio, and virtual environments over images in the book (see story, page 10).
Dr. Cynthea L. Ainsworth has worked for 30 years collecting audio and video recordings documenting the life of Katie John, the traditional Ahtna Indian elder from Mentasta Village who passed away in 2013. With the partnership of John’s daughter, Norah John David, and John’s granddaughter, Kathryn John Martin, Dr. Ainsworth has curated the Katie John Collection. A grant from the Alaska Humanities Forum is assisting the team in its pre-planning for the digitization of the collection. “On an ethnographic stage, Katie’s life history is a glimpse of a traditional lifestyle that to some extent is still being practiced—it’s a living culture—but her approach to it, and the way that she did it, the way she practiced her tradition and the way she remembers it, and talks about it, all of those things are what make this collection important,” Dr. Ainsworth says. “Many of the aspects of that lifestyle have not been published yet.” Digitizing and protecting the recordings from the last 27 years of Katie John’s life will ensure the collection’s future accessibility.
A L A S K A H U M A N I T I E S F O R U M FA L L 2016