Ask someone from the Lower 48 what they know about the Yukon River, and most will invoke the Klondike gold rush, or perhaps the writing of John McPhee. Even in Alaska, celebrations of extraction frequently overshadow public commemoration of other, particularly Indigenous, histories. This talk looks at the intertwined, co-dependent lives of people, dogs, and salmon along the nineteenth century Yukon for examples of how to tell more capacious, polyvocal narratives—and the stakes of doing so for and about Alaska, a place where the politics of who speaks the past has bearing on present conflicts over land, meaning, and the possibilities of the future.

Free and open to the public. Please use the museum’s 7th Avenue entrance. A reception with light refreshments and cash bar is at 6:00 p.m. Lecture at 7:00 p.m. A book signing of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait will follow the lecture.

Bathsheba Demuth is an Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University, where she specializes in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in the north began when she was 18 and moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon, where she spent several years mushing, hunting, fishing, and otherwise learning the ways of the taiga and tundra. Her multiple prize winning first book, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (W.W. Norton) was named a best book of 2019 by Nature, NPR, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal among others. Demuth holds a BA and MA from Brown University, and an MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Her writing has appeared in publications from The American Historical Review to The New Yorker. A current Carnegie Foundation Fellow, she is working on a book about the environmental pasts of the Yukon River. When not in Alaska, she lives in Rhode Island.

The lecture, jointly sponsored by the Alaska Historical Society and the Cook Inlet Historical Society, is part of the Alaska Historical Society’s annual conference. This year’s theme is “Conflicting Visions in Alaska History.” The conference will take place, primarily online but with some in-person events in Anchorage, October 6-8 and 13-15. Environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth is the keynote speaker.

The Alaska Historical Society is a non-profit, volunteer-based organization dedicated to the promotion of Alaska history by the exchange of ideas and information, the preservation and interpretation of resources, and the education of Alaskans and others about the state’s history (https://alaskahistoricalsociety.org/about-ahs/conference/).

Alaska Historical Society & Cook Inlet Historical Society present: History from Dogsled: The Yukon and the Stakes of Telling the Past