front cover of Community-Based Monitoring in the Arctic
Community-Based Monitoring in the Arctic
Finn Danielsen
University of Alaska Press, 2020
Community Based Monitoring Programs in the Arctic explores the concept and use of community-based monitoring (CBM) of ecological conditions in the Arctic. The authors analyze current programs and determines that CBM, while widespread and effective, nonetheless still has untapped potential. Presenting numerous examples and substantial data from a pan-Arctic survey and several workshops around the Arctic, Ths book offers a state of the field and a guide for mapping out the next steps. 

Contributors include Finn Danielsen, Noor Johnson, Olivia Lee, Maryann Fidel, Lisbeth Iversen, Michael K. Poulsen, Hajo Eicken, Ania Albin, Simone G. Hansen, Peter L. Pulsifer, Peter Thorne, and Martin Enghoff.
 
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Benchmarks
New and Selected Poems 1963-2013
Richard Dauenhauer
University of Alaska Press, 2013
Russian, German, Tlingit. Like the languages he translates, Richard Dauenhauer’s poetry offers unexpected surprises. A prolific translator who also works in Finnish, Swedish, and classical Greek, he has a poetic command of language that has earned him wide recognition over fifty years of published work. Benchmarks spans these decades of writing, and each poem contained within marks a certain place in time and space, like a surveyor’s benchmark. The poems play with language while focusing on the land and people of Alaska. And like Alaska itself, this book offers a variety of delights—readers will find a new experience with each turn.
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Aurora Watcher's Handbook
Neil Davis
University of Alaska Press, 1992
Neil Davis's decades-long involvement with the aurora extends beyond study and research. He has also been explaining this magnificent phenomenon to diverse audiences, sharing the knowledge with his graduate students and his grandchildren, with his fellow scientists through professional publications, and with the general public through newspaper columns. His ability to communicate both the facts and the wonder of the northern lights shows clearly in this book.

Starting at a basic level, the handbook begins appropriately with matters of immediate concern to someone who hopes to see an auroral display: what causes the aurora, where and when it is most often seen, and how best to capture it on film. Later sections provide a thorough and clear review of all aspects of auroral science, including the mysterious realm of auroral sound. In a concise and readable fashion, the handbook covers what is known about auroras, encompassing overviews of the northern Natives' legends and myths and the several theories geophysicists have produced to explain why auroras behave as they do. The Aurora Watcher's Handbook includes numerous illustrations, ranging from cartoons to color plates and drawings. 

 

"I am confident [this book] will become the aurora watcher's bible for many years to come." (Sky & Telescope)

"This is participatory science at its best!" (Midwest Book Review)

"A delightful book, highly recommended." (CHOICE )

"A complete course for the layman with an interest in the northern lights." (Fairbanks Daily News-Miner)

"[Davis] has written the book in a smooth, how-it-works style, and his presentation is remarkably clear. . . . [He] expended much effort on this book, forming from his lifetime of knowledge a coherent and comprehensible picture of the aurora for the non-specialist." (ARCTIC)

"For a comprehensive guide to the northern lights, read Neil Davis's The Aurora." (Small Press Magazine)

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Kayak Girl
Monica Devine
University of Alaska Press, 2012

In Kayak Girl a young child learns to cope with serious loss by focusing on something larger than herself. After Jana’s mother dies, she becomes withdrawn. Her grandfather, a carver, pays the girl a visit and finds her unresponsive to his care. He carves a figure of a girl in a kayak and asks Jana to promise that she will watch for the figure after he releases it upriver. Through the following seasons, Jana goes to the river daily and finds strength in the positive memories from her short time with her mother, even as she imagines the distant kayak girl’s struggles. Eventually, they are reunited, and Jana’s spirit is revived. Throughout the book, watercolor illustrations take readers to a magical place along an Alaska river and demonstrate the power of memory and a sense of place in the natural world.

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Water Mask
Monica Devine
University of Alaska Press, 2019
Water Mask is an adventurous memoir from Monica Devine, an itinerant therapist who travels to villages throughout Alaska and builds a life in this vast, captivating landscape. She traverses mountains, navigates sea ice with whalers, and whirls two thousand feet above tundra with a rookie bush pilot; she negotiates the death of her father, and the near-loss of her family’s cabin on the Copper River. Her journey is exhilarating—but not without reminders of the folly of romanticizing a northern landscape that both rejects and beguiles. Reflections on family, place, and culture are woven into a seductive tapestry of a life well-lived and well-loved.
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Woman Prime
Poems
Gail C. DiMaggio
University of Alaska Press, 2018
A woman is a series of shifting possibilities. The frame that contained her in the morning can transform into something completely different by afternoon. The roles she’s called on to play mutate over the years and throughout a lifetime. And her very place in the world is called into constant negotiation. In this swirl of contradictions, finding her own self—her core—can be a bewildering journey. Woman Prime is about the fundamental human wish to settle into an authentic self, a “prime” identity. It follows one woman through her roles—child, adult, wife, mother—and shows how she must remake herself through each new stage.
Like many women, the speaker believed that leaving her parent’s home, falling in love, and raising children would reveal the essential core of herself. Instead, she learns that those she loves can fail her and that she must embrace a world full of flickering and conflicting expectations for women. Woman Prime is about every woman and no woman—a mutable voice that will still resonate with anyone trying to reconcile their flawed and complicated selves.
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Steaming to the North
The First Summer Cruise of the US Revenue Cutter Bear, Alaska and Chukotka, Siberia, 1886
Katherine C. Donahue
University of Alaska Press, 2014
On a rugged frontier where the ocean was king, most laws came from those who ruled the sea—and few ships policed the western Arctic like the revenue cutter Bear. Commissioned into the organization that would eventually become the US Coast Guard, the Bear patrolled and charted the waters of Alaska and Siberia, bringing medical care, saving lives, and dealing out justice when needed. The ship’s crew and famous captain, the fiery Michael Healy, looked out for Natives and Americans alike in a time when Alaska was adjusting to its new status as a US territory.

Steaming to the North follows the Bear from May to October 1886 as it takes its first summer cruise from San Francisco up to Point Barrow and back again. This is the first book to exhibit the photographs taken by 3rd Lt. Charles Kennedy of New Bedford, introducing rarely seen photos of the last sail-and-steam whaling ships, capturing early interactions of Natives with white whalemen and explorers, and showing lives otherwise lost to time. Essays follow the logbook of the cruise and allow readers to vividly ride alongside the crew on a history-making voyage.
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With the Wind and the Waves
A Guide to Mental Health Practices in Alaska Native Communities
Ray M. Droby
University of Alaska Press, 2020
In With the Wind and the Waves, psychologist Ray M. Droby tells a story of treatment and learning, drawing on experiences ranging from an ocean journey he took on the Bering Sea while serving in a Alaska Native community to his clinical work as a psychologist in rural Alaska. Like negotiating an ocean, Droby moves “with the wind and the waves” while working with substance abuse disorders and mental health issues superimposed on intergenerational trauma and internalized oppression. He captures positive momentum in work aimed at facilitating self-determination with Alaska Natives and their communities while discouraging historical dependency and colonizing patterns of thinking and doing for mental health workers. Sensitive to the history of non-Native outsiders imposing their own culture on Native land, Droby presents here principles, combined with cultural and therapy considerations, that are designed to help people avoid replicating this history of harm. Recognizing the strengths of Alaska Natives and their communities, and the stages of change human individuals and communities undergo, Droby shows how to exercise a nonjudgmental presence as a mental health worker in rural Alaska.
 
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