Artists and writers in the Anchorage Museum’s new book, How to Survive: Practicing Care in a Changing Climate, consider how love, protection, nurturing, and sharing can help us navigate climate change.

In celebration of National Native American Heritage Month, Alaska Native contributors Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich, Laureli Ivanoff, and Jen Stever will read their work and share text by the late Alaska artist Jenny Irene. A brief Q&A will follow.

The program is organized in collaboration with the Alaska Center for the Book, Alaska’s affiliate of the U.S. Library of Congress Center for the Book.

How to Survive, edited by Anchorage Museum chief curator Francesca Du Brock, is a companion publication to the How to Survive exhibition, which was on view October 2023 – January 2025. Contributors to this anthology connect Alaska stories to global contexts, considering ideas of interdependence, place-based knowledge, repair, and activism, offering novel ways of understanding our responsibilities to each other and to the planet. Copies are available at the museum store, and will also be available to purchase at the program.

Free, registration recommended but not required.
 
About the Speakers: 
Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich is a Koyukon Dené and Iñupiaq carver and interdisciplinary artist. Ivalu creates representations of the revered wild relatives that have provided for her, her family, and her ancestors, maintaining the viewpoint of seeing these resources from homelands as gifts to those who reciprocate respect and care for the land and wild relatives that share it. With ancestral ties to the communities of Nulato, Nome, and Utqiagvik, Ivalu currently resides between the Dena’ina homelands of Anchorage and Cohoe.

Laureli Ivanoff is an Inupiaq and Yup’ik writer and journalist from Uŋalaqłiq (Unalakleet). A former radio journalist, Ivanoff writes regularly for High Country News in a column exploring the seasonality of living in direct relationship with the land, water, plants, and animals in and around her home community in Uŋalaqłiq. She currently lives and works in Anchorage, AK.

Jen Stever (they/she) is an Iñupiaq writer, mom, artist and photographer. Stever is a graduate of the University of Alaska Anchorage’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing and Literary Arts program. They are the author of two poetry collections and serve on the Advisory Committee for the Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference.

Jenny Irene was an Inupiaq artist whose work, primarily with photography, focused on identity, community, place, refusal, and access. She received an MFA in photography from the University of New Mexico, and a BFA in Photomedia and a BA in American Indian studies from the University of Washington. Her work has been exhibited at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Haus Kunst Mitte, the Portland Art Museum, SITE Santa Fe, and the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.

Image: Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich, The Gift, 2022. Image courtesy of the artist.

National Native American Heritage Month Book Reading: “How to Survive: Practicing Care in a Changing Climate”