Teaching Good Relations in the Land of Plenty: Iñupiat and Non-Iñupiat on the North Slope of Alaska

The fellowship will allow me to maximise the impacts of my research in several ways while preparing me for a career as an Arctic researcher working with museums. It will give me the opportunity to prepare my work for academic publication and conference presentation; it will provide me with resources to share my findings with the community I undertook my work in; and it will allow me to share my findings with the broader public.

As I continue to build my professional networks and add to my teaching experience and museum-based professional skills, I will aim to reform popular narratives of the Arctic that approach it from a distance and centre the lives, aspirations, and challenges of the Indigenous communities that call it home.

Over the course of the fellowship year, I will share my findings through outputs targeted at academics in the different fields I draw upon. Sharing the findings of my research with Iñupiat (Alaskan Inuit) and non-Iñupiat transient workers in the village of Utqiagvik, Alaska will contribute to knowledge concerning the role that differing economic motivations and different understandings of community, place, and value play in interethnic relations.

Importantly, having conducted my research in the Arctic, my results also provide insight into different perceptions of the Arctic environment specifically, as it is experienced by Indigenous and non-Indigenous residents. In disseminating my findings, I will build upon and update academic understandings of the present-day Arctic, providing on-the-ground analysis born of 16 months in the region among residents of different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds.

I will also share my findings with members of the Utqiagvik community. My research was designed with the interests and concerns of the Iñupiat community in mind. Collaborating with a tribal higher education institution, I made sure that the questions I asked and the data I collected would be of both academic interest and applied, practical use.

Reporting the causes of tension between Iñupiat and non-Iñupiat transient workers, as well as the factors that underlie good relations between the two groups, will contribute to efforts to bring both cohorts together and create an enduring positive impact in the community.

I will use my findings on contemporary Iñupiat life in the Arctic to create public facing educational materials, disseminated through the Polar Museum. The Arctic has been imagined by those living outside of it in numerous ways: as dangerous; as mystically charged; and as geopolitically important. Over the course of the year, I will work to create content that refocuses attention on Indigenous Arctic residents and their experiences of the region.

My research found that different understandings of the Arctic landscape affected how Iñupiat and non-Iñupiat interacted with one another. In conversation with research collaborators, I will generate both print and web-based content that presents museum visitors with new insights and information on a much-imagined landscape. I will incorporate digital media into the project's educational outputs and create virtual scans of objects not on display.

These scans will be used to create engaging content as well as new data to share with my collaborators.

Teaching will provide another means of sharing the findings of my work, by providing a new cohort of students with alternative sets of narratives and meanings to frame their own research in the Arctic. By emphasizing the work of Indigenous academics in my lectures, seminars, and MPhil supervising, I will push students to think beyond their expectations of the Arctic and its peoples.

By the end of the fellowship year, I will be well prepared for the next stage of my career as an Arctic researcher in the museum field. I will continue to work with Arctic Indigenous communities and the cultural institutions that hold their heritage objects to disseminate more inclusive ideas about the North.