The Alaska Legislature last month passed a resolution urging Gov. Bill Walker to declare a linguistic emergency for Alaska Native languages. Now, advocates from across the state are collaborating to help breathe new life into some of these languages. Approximately 140 language instructors, first-language speakers and language learners will attend the Alaska Native Language Revitalization […]
Millions of Alaska birds nest on rocky emerald islands seen by few people other than ship captains. One of the funkiest of these creatures is the crested auklet, which looks like a bassist in a punk band and smells like a tangerine. These hand-size birds have intrigued Hector Douglas for years. He just wrote a […]
Several times in the distant past, our home planet has been cleansed of its residents, with the exception of a few plucky survivors. Perhaps the best known and most spectacular extinction was that of the dinosaurs, caused when a meteorite six miles in diameter crashed into Earth about 65 million years ago. There was another […]
In a packed university conference room, biologist Randy Brown spoke of chinook, the fatty king of far-north salmon. “It’s more than just a fish, it’s a culture,” Brown said to the Fairbanks crowd, many of them Alaska Natives. Brown is the lead author on a paper in which he documented all the known Yukon River […]