A Forum program brings together audiences and presenters charged with being “as bold and as radical as possible” By Aurora Ford
T F I H S ALASKA FELLOWS The Alaska Fellows program is a 9-month-long postgraduate fellowship that places recent college graduates from around the country with organizations in Anchorage, Juneau, and Sitka. The program was founded in Sitka in 2014, initially launched with Yale University graduates as a way to bring motivated, talented college graduates to Sitka for nine months to live together communally and serve the Sitka community. The program has since expanded to recruit young people from schools around the country and has developed a growing emphasis on providing an avenue for Alaskans to return home after postsecondary experiences out of state. Fellows receive a modest living stipend, funding for relocation, and communal housing. They attend opening retreats as well as facilitated “convenings”—programmed events that draw together all 20-25 fellows across all three sites to cultivate connections at the beginning and end of the program. The Forum has just signed on Sarah Richmond, Reed College ’19, from Portland, Oregon, as Cuckoo’s successor; she will join the organization in September, 2019 and will be focused on bringing community voices into program design.
to talk about the thematic connections between the two ideas, and then generate one or two questions to ask of both presenters that are designed to generate further discussion, find unexpected connections, and build stronger community. Cuckoo Gupta, a recent graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University in Columbus, Ohio, is the facilitator of the project, and is here working with the Alaska Humanities Forum for nine months through the Alaska Fellows Program. “There’s a very clear need for this kind of an event here in Anchorage,” she says. “A lot of people have told us that it’s very unlike the usual trivia nights or storytelling events around town, and that it’s really refreshing. Based on our feedback surveys, 92% of people have met someone new at these events, which is something we were aiming for. Now we have a system and a structure, and a steady audience of about 40 people at each event—we’ve had five so far—and the more we do the more we realize what is missing and what we’re already doing well. We really push our presenters to be as bold and as radical as possible.” Of the things Culture Shift has done well so far, one is the diversity of the presenters they have brought to the podium. Alice Glenn, for example, is a 30-year old Alaska Native Iñupiaq woman, born and raised in Utqiaġvik, the northernmost city of the United States, who went to college for Aerospace Studies and has presented before panels of NASA scientists on what NASA can learn from the Iñupiaq way of life, living and working in the remote Arctic. “There was an astronaut named Harrison Schmidt who came to my village when I was 10 or 11 years old. He is a geologist and retired NASA astronaut who went to the moon. After hearing him speak, I was all in,” she says. “I became really interested in how you can help people do the work they need to do in space but also enjoy their lives while they’re doing it. There were all these experiments on socialization taking place in HAB units, in very small environments, people living together in tiny cabins, and being from a small community in far-northern Alaska, I was like, ‘Hey, we’ve already done that!’ I thought, as an Alaska Native person, this is what I can contribute to the space program.” She has since started her own podcast, “Coffee & Quaq” (an Iñupiaq word meaning frozen or raw meat or fish), when she realized that she wasn’t seeing stories in the media that contained the perspectives of young Alaska Native people. “I first heard about Culture Shift when I did a workshop with Cuckoo on leading discussions that build community last October,” Glenn says. “When Cuckoo told me about it, I was on board. I was really nervous because I don’t really think of myself as a radical person, but I did a talk about the podcast, and what I’m trying to do.” While it may not be in Alice’s nature to think of herself in radical terms, her upbringing in remote Alaska, connection to one of the oldest cultures still existing in the world, credentials as a scientist, and innovative ideas on how to preserve Alaska Native culture into the future certainly support the argument that there are few, if any, other people like her out there. A L A S K A H U M A N ITI E S F O R U M S P R I N G 2 01 9
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