This was a rapid response research project that Principal Investigator Sveta Yamin-Pasternak and Co-Investigator Igor Pasternak at the University of Alaska Fairbanks began developing with the partnering communities in Alaska’s middle-Yukon River and Bering Strait regions right at the onset of the Covid-19 Pandemic, in mid-March 2020, when the quarantining, social distancing, travel bans, and other measures were first going into effect. We were interested how the fast-changing circumstances of the pandemic, reaching into the personal, social, and cultural dimensions of life for individuals and communities around the world will be lived out day-to-day in Alaska’s Indigenous societies, where the widely shared ethos is, “there is no such thing as living alone,” and where all major rites of passage and most everyday practices connected with food, childcare, eldercare, education, and spirituality are guided by the values of inclusion, collaboration, and cooperation. Such traditional care networks involve not only individuals living near one another, but also people living in different communities, located far apart, with the members of a network representing both rural and urban Alaska.

To carry out an ethnography of during the Covid-19 Pandemic, we worked with the local coordinators while also relying on our deep contextual knowledge as researchers with a longtime commitment to the study of history and culture in the Dene Koyukon Athabascan, Yupik, and Inupiaq communities. As university-based researchers we engaged community-based partners whose everyday involvements and obligations include being a health worker, community organizer, grocer, educator, home builder, blogger, social media group admin, provider of subsistence foods shared through local and traditional care networks. Some of our teammates are culture bearers living in multigenerational households, where they also have roles of a caregiver and parent. Overy time, our interest in how the covid-related safety measures translate into the everyday lived realities expanded to include such topics as community-level action during the Covid-19 case surges; participation in the vaccine rollout; logistics of care giving including the rural-urban connectedness in the care giver networks; intersectionality factors, such as living conditions and the direly low salmon runs in the Yukon River coinciding with the years of the pandemic; facilitation of wellness through artistic and subsistence activities; and the pandemic-era adaptations of the spiritual and social practice considered critical for the community and culture in the largest sense.  

Our findings illuminate several areas of cultural and social capital that helped fortify community resilience during the pandemic, which turned out to be a time of vast and rapid social-economic disruption at the regional, state, and global levels, affecting most aspects of everyday life. The insight we have gained speak to the cultural and community strengths that helped promote safety in preventing exposure and mitigating the spread of the coronavirus disease; security in ensuring access to food, water, and the necessary case; and vitality of the social life, relationships, and practices considered critical for the community sustainability and wellness. The concluding phase of our project coincide with the critical period of adaptation in the participating communities, concentrating on meeting the cultural expectations of honoring the lives lost through storytelling and rituals of remembrance such as potlatch.

                  Like many in the social sciences research community, we faced the challenge of conducting an ethnography under rapidly changing and unpredictable circumstances, where the long-established conventions of ethnographic research could not be put to practice. Throughout the project we participated in professional exchanges with health workers, policy specialists, social scientists, and educators serving students and diverse publics disproportionately affected by covid. We also offered webcasts on topics representing our areas of expertise as part of numerous ad-hoc efforts to facilitate broad-based learning and wellness. Studying the social and cultural impacts of the pandemic in some of the most underserved regions in the United States helped us improve our effectiveness as mentors, especially because many of our students at the University of Alaska Fairbanks are from rural Alaska and/or are members of disadvantaged groups. Throughout the project, we were incorporating our research findings into the curricula of Inuit Art, Indigenous Art and Culture, Northern Indigenous People and Contemporary Issues, Food and Culture, and other course that we teach at UAF.

The images included with this report speak to the pandemic-era forms of cultural expression in our study regions; cultural memory and community cohesion as a source of strength; resilient core value of protecting and caring for elders in Alaska’s Indigenous cultures (in stark opposition to the widely documented societal resentment toward the covid-related restrictions and the older-age populations whose vulnerability was said to warrant stronger protection protocols); site-specific safety measures adopted for the largely roadless communities in rural Alaska that typically rely on river travel, and the emergence of ad-hoc and community-organized efforts centered around the Indigenous language vitality, and heritage reclamation.

Last Modified: 10/28/2024
Modified by: Sveta Yamin-Pasternak