Culture, Climate, and Food Security in the Alaskan Arctic

Catalog description

Alaska offers a unique opportunity for students to explore the intersection of Indigenous knowledge and culture, food systems, and climate change in a field-based setting. Alaska's extensive terrestrial and marine areas support a mixed cash and subsistence economy where communities rely on wild caught and commercially sold foods and other natural resources (oil, gas, mining) extracted for export and domestic use. This course will focus on food security and food sovereignty, climate change, and climate adaptation in Alaska's Northwest Arctic Borough - a region traditionally, and still largely, inhabited by the Inupiat. Inupiat communities continue to rely on their deep indigenous knowledge systems and strong cultural practice of sharing to bolster food security and food sovereignty in the face of rising climate pressures on their land- and marine-based food systems. They also co-manage certain resources with state and federal agencies to sustain long-standing reciprocal relationships with animal populations, which helps to buffer the impacts of climate change and economic development on food availability and food prices. The Iñnupiat have thus developed stewardship practices that are based on both Indigenous knowledge and western science. The course will consist of three parts: 1) Orientation, bonding exercises, and background lectures at the Stanford campus; 2) Field study in Alaska's Northwest Borough, centered in Kotzebue; 3) Meetings with Stanford alumni and other Alaskan experts in Anchorage before and after the field trip to Kotzebue. Travel to the Alaskan Arctic: The field study will be centered on Kotzebue, a town known by the Inupiat as Kikiktagrut ("almost an island"), bordering land and sea. In Kotzebue, students will have an opportunity to talk to local tribal leaders and Inupiat inhabitants, representatives of the Kikiktagrut Inupiat Corporation (KIC),…