Year in Review: 2024 brings innovation and unity to the Arctic

The year of 2024 was bright and memorable for the Arctic. Here are several highlights reflected in print.

1. Subsistence kept the residents united.

In Point Hope in spring, a whaling captain and widow Lenora Kaumauq Tuzroyluk shared the bounty during a whaling feast to support women like her.

“It’s an honor for me to be here in Point Hope, to take my husband’s crew and carry it. It’s a blessing,” she said. “I’m gonna hunt all year round, and I’m gonna feed the widows because I know how it is when you love to eat the food, and your husband’s gone, and you have no one to hunt for you.”

Whalers of the Arctic have been advocating for their rights, and as a result, the International Whaling Commission in September extended catch limits for subsistence bowhead whale harvest for northern Alaska communities for the next six years, creating more certainty for hunters.

In the Northwest Arctic, caribou hunters have been for years voicing their concerns about diminishing Western Arctic Caribou Herd. This year, to protect the herd, federal regulators cut caribou harvest limit to 15 animals a year and closed Game Unit 23 to nonlocal hunters.

While hunting traditions vary across the villages in the North Slope and Northwest Arctic, all have subsistence practices. For Blue Christmas event in Utqiagvik in December, a sculptor carved an umiaq with various figures and animals on it and next to it to represent the whaling and hunting traditions that bring local villages together.

2. Hunters in the Arctic have been using innovative tools to adjust their practices and increase safety

When it comes to innovating hunting practices, science goes hand-in-hand with traditional knowledge in the Arctic.

Whalers in Utqiaġvik has been using sea ice radar that shows how the ice has been changing. The University of Alaska Fairbanks scientists have been working to put radars in more communities and create a way to alert residents about the ice that is about to become unstable.

“If we can predict when ice is going to start moving, if we could predict that ahead of time, it’s gonna be a game-changer,” a long-time whaling captain from Utqiaġvik Michael “Quuniq” Donovan said.

To give snowmachiners in Kotzebue more information about ice safety, the Alaska Arctic Observatory and Knowledge Hub and the Native Village of Kotzebue deployed an under-ice oceanographic instrument to monitor ice thickness and snow depth offshore of town.

During the open water season, hunters in Wainwright, Point Hope, Utqiagvik and other places installed buoys close to their communities to measure wave height and support maritime activities That real-time data was available to subsistence hunters through a prototype app.

“We are technology-oriented,” John Hopson said. “We always take traditional knowledge and keep it with us, at the same time, applying it to technology.”

3. New programs to revitalize language

Preserving language and culture is always top of the mind for Arctic residents.

An Iñupiaq immersion program returned to Utqiaġvik last year to serve its youngest students after more than 20 years. This fall, educators maintained that classroom and opened a second one for kindergarten students.

“Our language programs are not just this add-on, or this extra thing,” said Tenna “Qaġġuna” Pili, director of Iñupiaq education at North Slope Borough School District. “We’re making this shift as a state to center all of that — not just our language programs and revitalization of our language programs, but culture and rooting all of our systems in ... understanding the depth of that, the breadth of that, and what that means for our students.”

On the state level, a group of Alaska Native educators created a framework that adds more structure to teaching reading in each of the 23 official Alaska Native languages. The new reading standards aim to support students’ learning and help teachers communicate learning expectations and progress.

“The schools are partly responsible for stripping away languages,” T’aaḵu Ḵwáan educator Shx̱éi Nancy Douglas said. “We need to create a framework so that the schools can be part of bringing languages back into the lives of our students, into the lives of our families.”

4. Public services have been improving for Arctic residents

To support youth in North Slope communities, local health professionals tripled the number of clinicians in 2024 and started offering students one-on-one conversations and group gatherings to work through anxiety, build coping skills, manage emotions and connect to their community. The steps were a part of the push to improve mental health services in the region, especially for young residents.

“They are the future, and it’s an investment that’s worth taking,” said Lynette Hepa, director of the North Slope Borough Health Department. We are “making sure that we’re setting them up for success, not just academically, but building that generational resiliency and that emotional resiliency so that our community and our culture can keep going.”

In the Northwest Arctic Borough, a Village Public Safety Officer has started carrying a firearm on the job, for the first time in nearly a decade in rural Alaska. The main goal of arming the officers is to make their job safer and help them better protect communities.

5. Point Hope City Council decided to remove mayor from office

The Point Hope City Council unanimously voted to remove the city mayor from office in September. The decision followed accusations from the city’s former finance administrator that the mayor misused public funds, as well as escalating tensions between the mayor and the council over the resulting investigation.

“It’s been a long time coming. I’m glad that you guys put this meeting together and have this discussion because, like you’ve seen, it not only affects this council, but it affects our whole village,” said Eva Kinneeveauk, the president of the Native Village of Point Hope. “That’s what’s needed to happen ... even though this has been very difficult for everybody.”

6. Kotzebue residents saw a historic flood that left homes and property damaged

Pushing aside debris, totes and trash, Minnie Norton slowly walked on the Kotzebue Sound beach toward what remained of her house in October. A few days after waves had torn the shore apart, the blue structure slouched toward the water, surrounded by objects the ocean spit back out: pieces of wood, a brand-new washer, totes with soaked clothes, Norton’s favorite chair.

“Oh, my poor house,” she sighed.

A powerful fall storm that destroyed homes and roads in the community of Kotzebue this fall was especially devastating for structures along the beach — like the houses on Shore Avenue where Norton and her neighbors lived. After the storm, at least 30 houses still needed repairs, cleanup was ongoing, and the city’s residents grappled with the need to fix snowmachines, keep their soaked houses warm and prepare for future emergencies.

7. Several Northwest Alaska women became lactation counselors to support mothers

When Jessica Snyder gave birth to her first child, her grandmother, a traditional midwife, was by her side to answer questions about feeding the baby. Now Snyder wants to provide that support to other women in her village.

“I have no more grandmothers now,” she said, “so we need to fill that void.”

A Noorvik resident, Snyder was among several women in Northwest Alaska who are part of the Village-Based Lactation Counselors project, spearheaded by a subsidiary of the Nondalton village’s Kijik Corporation, International Data Systems.

“The women in the region, they prefer to go to someone they actually know instead of someone they don’t know,” said another participant in the project, Frances Williams. “I think that more women should come forward and do it.”

8. Barrow girls basketball team took second at state and honored their late coach with strong game

Barrow Whalers girls basketball team, who claimed second place in the 3A state basketball tournament last spring, honored their late coach by playing their hearts out.

“Everything’s dedicated to him,” said senior Kiara Burnell, who’d had Derek Ahgeak as a coach since she was a freshman. “It’s really personal this year.”

“These girls have a lot of heart. They love the game of basketball, they love each other. This is a family we’ve built. We’ve built something special here,” head coach Nicole Smith said. “So we knew that we could do it, it was just gonna take a lot of hard work and aggressive defense, which we did. Ultimately we couldn’t score enough points on the other end.”

9. Wainwright revived skin boat-making tradition

After decades of dormancy of skin boat making practice, a group of Wainwright residents attended a series of March workshops in Utqiaġvik to learn how to sew sealskins to cover boat frames. The workshops were a part of a broader effort to preserve whaling traditions within North Slope communities.

“There was a lot of hands-on learning for us,” said Wainwright resident and whaling captain’s wife Edna Ahmaogak. “It brought a sense of energy and revitalization to a practice that has just been quiet for a while and hopefully will begin again in our community.”

10. Iñupiaq artists have been taking the stage in Alaska and nationally

Alaska author Nasuġraq Rainey Hopson released her debut novel, “Eagle Drums.” An author and illustrator from Anaktuvuk Pass, Hopson recently earned both a Newbery Honor and an American Indian Youth Literature Award-Middle School Book Honor for her debut.

Hopson hopes her experience as a writer will inspire and help other Indigenous people overcome the fear of entering the world of publishing. Writing, she said, can be a step on a journey to heal the generational trauma of Indigenous people punished for speaking their language. It can be a way to invest in spiritual and mental health.

“I would like this to encourage Indigenous people to write, especially for children,” she said. “Writing is incredibly healing.”

Emmy-nominated Iñupiaq playwright Cathy Tagnak Rexford had a premiere of a new play, “Cold Case,” in Juneau and Anchorage. Rexford, who is from Anchorage and has roots in Kaktovik and Utqiaġvik, focused in her play on the struggles of a family whose relative goes missing or has been killed.

Rexford said she has relatives who have gone missing or were murdered. She said such losses are devastating on an individual level and on a community scale. She said she hopes that the play moves people to understand that the statistics are human beings.

“For each missing and murdered Indigenous relative, a missing person, there is a story like this. It needs to live beyond the families. It needs to live in our collective consciousness, our collective lives if that makes sense. It’s too much for families alone to hold,” she said. “On a basic human level, this is a reflection of so many other layers of humanity in our country, you know — it’s related to violence against women in particular; it is related to violence against the land, against the waters, against our animals and all life, really.”

Another artist who took spotlight this year was Jamie Sikkattuaq Harcharek. The Iñupiaq teacher from Utqiaġvik, made her screen debut in the Emmy-winning “Sweet Tooth” on Netflix.

“I live in Utqiaġvik,” she said. “Up here, when the opportunity comes, you strike.”

More than a dozen Alaska creators participated in the production of the award-winning show “True Detective: The Night Country.” The show is set in a fictional town that is a collective depiction of Kotzebue, Utqiaġvik and Nome, and the story follows two law enforcement agents as they investigate the disappearance of several men from an Arctic research center. When actress Jodie Foster won an Emmy award for her lead role in the series, in her acceptance speech, she thanked the Iñupiaq people — a recognition that warmed the hearts of many Alaskans.

“Our stories, identities, experiences, and mere existence on Earth are often overlooked, silenced, put into a museum exhibit, or blatantly exploited for shock value, exotic appeal, or sensationalization,” said Coffee & Quaq producer Alice Qannik Glenn . “By the simple act of Jodie Foster recognizing Iñupiaq people by name, she is returning the creative credit and origins of our stories to our people — for the benefit of all people. It’s a simple but revolutionary act that says, ‘The creative forces of Hollywood see us.’

“It might not seem like much, but for an Iñupiaq girl from Utqiaġvik, it reminds me that our stories have an impact all over the world, and that for creative Inuit, anything is possible.”