Five Alaska Native artists will be in the spotlight during a polar arts panel at this week's Arctic Circle Assembly in Reykjavik, Iceland.
The assembly, through lectures, panels, workshops and presentations, takes a critical look at contemporary circumpolar issues like infrastructure, community health and resource development. Typically, it's been the domain of scientists and policymakers, but that's changing this year. (Alaska Dispatch News Publisher Alice Rogoff is a co-founder of the Arctic Circle.)
Sponsored by the Anchorage Museum, the panel is called "Polar Lab: A Shared North -- An Arctic Identity." Its aim is to highlight the voices of indigenous artists sharing their firsthand experiences of space and place in the changing landscape.
"The museum has long looked at the north but often with the past as a lens. And the past is very instructive but it's at a time now that the museum, to be relevant, needs to be looking at what's happening in the world right now and what it means to a lot of different people," said museum Director Julie Decker.
For Decker, the Arctic is a place that, especially now, inspires artists and scientists, historians, researchers and people in commerce and politics. But it's also a place that's tied to the indigenous communities that have lived here for thousands of years.
"So there's the critical importance of indigenous knowledge in the conversation," said Decker. "There's so much we can learn from looking at indigenous ways of adapting to the environment, to the landscape and to the future."
That's the concept behind Polar Lab: to bring together the different perspectives and provide space for them to interact. While it's the name of the panel, it's also a larger endeavor of the museum that uses exhibitions, programs and conversations in a variety of settings.
"Museums for a long time were considered these keepers of history and preserved and curated objects. And we think that our modern and contemporary role is really to curate conversations. Objects are important because they are something real and tangible and true to examine but they're only meaningful if you bring people together around them," Decker said.
Allison Warden is an Inupiaq artist who grew up in Fairbanks but has strong family ties to Barrow and Kaktovik. She's participated in numerous collaborations with the museum and will be one of the panelists in Iceland, alongside Joan Naviyuk Kane, Sonya Kelliher-Combs, Da-ka-xeen Mehner and Aaron Leggett.
Warden considers herself an interdisciplinary artist and rap musician. She chose that style because it allows her to use all the tools available to explore issues.
She'll be performing snippets of her work centered around the theme of climate change and its effects on local communities, including her song called "Where Did All the Ice Go?" It tells the story of a polar bear whose cousin is swimming back to shore with her cubs. But she leaves the ice too late and it's too far away, so both of her cubs drown.
"It was inspired by what I've seen up there," said Warden. "I went out on a boat with one of my uncles and he pointed out one iceberg that was in the distance. He said, 'Do you see that big, huge iceberg over there? There used to be lots of them everywhere. But now we can barely even see one.' So, the effects of climate change in the Arctic are well pronounced and I've seen it in my own community."
It's stories like this that Decker hopes to highlight in the panel.
The idea came after she attended the 2013 Arctic Circle Assembly. It reminded her of conversations she'd heard before in which there were business, policy and science perspectives, but no added layer of culture and art, which adds authenticity and depth.
"For years I've worked with artists who are the non-traditional researchers, who place themselves in these environments and spend a lot of time investigating them and then create this visual and narrative sense of a place that I found really compelling," said Decker. "We can talk a lot about resource reserves and resource extraction, the opening of shipping lanes, drilling and melting sea ice, but the reason people find those issues urgent is because they affect life ways."
For years, Warden has been an advocate for protecting the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which contains Kaktovik. She talks openly about her opposition to drilling in the refuge and her reasons aren't necessarily political, but are tied to what the land means for her family and community.
"It's only been 150 years that the people of Kaktovik had contact with the non-Native population everywhere else. And it's been a really harsh history as far as the military bases coming into our village, moving the village, my mom going to boarding school, different policies that were enacted. It's been a series of rapid changes and rapid colonization in just a lifetime," said Warden.
She sees parallels with the rapid changes currently affecting populations across the Arctic.
"For me it's too much," said Warden.
With regard to the museum's goal of remaining relevant, exploring these cultural impacts through a critical lens is paramount.
And because the Arctic is a common space for the world's northernmost countries and a focus of international attention today, bringing these ideas to a diverse audience is a priority.
"I always hate that idea that art is emotional and science is factual because I think that's a stereotype that artists think that way and scientists don't," said Decker. "I think there's a shared investigation into a place and that to understand its depth and its meaning, you need to know those interplays between those different perspectives."
This story first appeared in The Arctic Sounder and is republished here with permission.