After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Alaskan Stories: Sedna the Sea-Goddess & Myth of Last Frontier

Episode Date: January 28, 2024

We are the stories we tell. In Alaska the Inupiaq people tell the story of Sedna the goddess of the sea. They understand that the land they live on is a complex web of physical and spiritual beings.But the colonisers of Alaska tell a different set of stories about the same landscape. They tell stories of Wilderness and of the Last Frontier.Our guest today is Tia Tidwell (@tiaannamarie) professor of Alaska Native Studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. She belongs to the Nunamiut people of Anaktuvuk Pass. Tia’s recommendations:Alaska is the Center of the Universe (Audible exclusive podcast)The Alaska Myth https://www.thealaskamyth.com/Produced by Freddy Chick, Senior Producer is Charlotte Long.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AFTERDARK sign up now for your 14-day free trial http://access.historyhit.com/checkout/subscribe/purchase?code=afterdark&plan=monthlyYou can take part in our listener survey here.

This episode of After Dark is sponsored by True Detective Night Country, which is set in Alaska. It stars Jodie Foster and Kaylee Reese, and it's available now to watch on Sky TV. At the bottom of the ocean, somewhere off the shores of the North Slope of Alaska, is a house. Outside it is a dog. Inside is a woman called Nuleayuk, or Sedna, the lady who lives in the ocean. She's the goddess of the sea, the one responsible for autumn storms that crash against the land and for the life in the water. Despite her great power, she still bears the scars from the day long ago that she became a goddess. Because where her fingers should be, there are only stumps.

Stumps left behind by her father's knife as he cut away the fingers that clung to the side of his boat. Her crime? Disobedience after he bade her marry. As Sedna sank into the water that day, the blood poured from her wounds and became sea mammals that now swim in the sea. And the dog, really her shapeshifter husband and the reason she could not, would not marry, dashed out from the land to join her in their new home at the bottom of the ocean. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Anthony. And I'm Maddy and today's episode is sponsored by True Detective Night Country. I am so excited for this episode. It is set in Alaska, just as True Detective is.

And today we are going to be exploring two different and often opposing sets of Alaskan myths or stories and how that fits into history. First, there is the vast, complex storytelling traditions of indigenous Alaskan myths or stories and how that fits into history. First, there is the vast, complex storytelling traditions of indigenous Alaskan communities. And then there are the myths created by American settlers and colonists, which talk about myths of Alaska as a wilderness, the so-called last frontier, myths that turn colonizers into so-called true Alaskans. Our guest today is Professor Tia Tidwell. Tia is Professor of Alaska Native Studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and she belongs

to the Nunamut people of Anaktuvuk Pass. So Tia, first things first, welcome to After Dark. Hello everyone. Thank you so much for being our guide today. Now we're going to come on to talk about your work on settler fantasies in Alaska. First things first, how's the weather there? So it is currently negative 38 degrees Celsius outside, which is an experience to live through. I personally like this feeling. A lot of people find it extremely alarming. I think both responses make a lot of sense. But you walk outside like this and you just take a deep breath in and the inside of your nostrils just completely freezes. It's such an icy feeling. That is so wild to me. Anthony and I are recording here in the UK and we've just had very by by contrast very gentle storms that have hit the UK and every time that we have anything close to minorly severe weather in this country we

completely freak out across Britain across Ireland everything grinds to a halt trains are cancelled I cannot imagine what would happen to us all if we went out and it was minus, what did you say, Tia? 38? Minus 38? Minus 38 Celsius, yes. Yeah. We have our own kind of freakouts too. So every once in a while, it will rain on top of the snow and ice. And if it rains here, everything, everything shuts down. And it's because it freezes into this thin layer of ice on top of everything and so it's almost like you know kids are going to school at negative 40 they're playing outside at recess up to negative 20 but if it rains the world stops that is it's hard to get my head around and you guys also have polar night as well in Alaska where it's dark for, it's months of the year, is that right? So it depends on where you are. The story of Sedna is a story that belongs to the Arctic coast,

the circumpolar Inuit people. And up there, it does get very dark for a really long time. I lived there in Ikiagvik when I was a child. But I live here in the interior right now. And it never is really completely dark all day. We still get we get like some I think you would call it dusk or something. But it is it does feel like I should be hibernating and not saying things on a podcast. I often feel quite jealous of that environment. I think probably one of very few people in that this idea of eternal night is very appealing to me for some reason. It really does feel like something I don't know. I'm constantly drawn to it. The nearest I got was I spent some time in Iceland once and we had quite a lot of darkness.

I think we maybe got two or three hours during December, but that was about it. But I kind of loved it. But I presume to live in it endlessly is somewhat tougher, right? Yes. Yeah, it can get inside you. It becomes a feeling. It becomes a feeling of darkness. You know, I do like it because it does signal to us that it's time to rest. And I think in the maybe capitalist driven time watching world that we live in, we come out of touch with the seasons. And here in Alaska, the seasons don't let you do that. They really are going to guide the way that that people are in the world. And I think alongside this darkness that we

get right now in the summertime, we have this delirious light that is, I mean, you never experience darkness in the summer here. And the energy that people have, it really is, it's kind of a delirium. Yeah. You mentioned Sedna there, and we heard something of her mythology, her story at the beginning of this episode. I'm just wondering what role storytelling has in dealing with life in Alaska. You talk about how the weather, the light can kind of become part of your interior world and your experience of being there. Is storytelling a way of combating that, of understanding? Is it at odds with the landscape or is it something that helps you to sort of work with

it whilst you're living there? You know, I really like the way you're phrasing that question. But I think that the way that you're talking about story and landscape is a common experience for all of humanity. Every single culture creates stories to understand the world that they are experiencing and how they imagine their connections to place and to each other and to the non-human world. I think, so I'm Inupiaq. I am from Anaktuvik Pass, which is in the Brooks Range. We're actually Inupiaq, interior Inupiaq people. But I also spent time as a child in Utqiagvik, which is on the coast. And of course, Sedna is a sea goddess. And, you know, I think I want to

share a little bit about the importance of storytelling and the care that is really important to give to our words, because I'm a little nervous talking about Sedna, because, of course, she's extremely powerful. Alongside the way that every human culture creates stories to understand our world, every human culture has this concept of the way that speech creates action around us. And I think within British history, you have John Austen, the British philosopher, who comes up with this concept of speech acts, which is that the concept of the action that coincides and happens because of speech. So if I were to call your name Maddie or Antony, you might turn to me and ask or look at me. And so my speech has created that action

in the world. And recently when I was in my home community of Anaktuvik Pass, I was visiting world. And recently when I was in my home community of Anaktuvik Pass, I was visiting with one of our elders, which is always a privilege. And he was sharing stories with me about his life. And I was asking him if there was anything that he would like me to share with my students at the university, the young people here to kind of help guide them. And he wanted to emphasize the power of speech and the power of words. And he was saying, when we speak, it's like magic there, there's power in, in our words. And so he looked at me and he was like, look at you. I've, I've cast a spell on you with my words right now. You're looking at me, you're sitting still, you're listening. The things that I'm saying are changing the way you see the world.

And I think that if we think about storytelling in that tradition of, it's more than just telling a story. Our speech becomes part of the world. And so I think because of that, when speaking of figures like Sedna, it's so important to have those conversations in a way that is respectful of her power and her reality, because I don't want to accidentally provoke her. her reality because I don't want to accidentally provoke her. Yeah. Tia, it's so, well, it's, it's actually quite moving listening, listening to you speak and very, it's reminding me of something. So I'm, I, I'm Irish and that storytelling tradition that is with us in Ireland is quite upfront as well. And we experience a lot of our past through storytelling and probably shape a lot of our future through it too.

One of the things that reminded me, we did an episode on the Banshee very early days when we were recording After Dark and myself and one of my friends, who's an actress, Siobhan McSweeney, we were talking about the Banshee and we were talking very lightheart myself and one of my friends, who's an actress, Siobhan McSweeney, we were talking about the Banshee and we were talking very lightheartedly about the Banshee, but Siobhan and I were exchanging voice notes afterwards. And there was something of that too, where we said,

we probably should have been a little bit more reverential towards the idea of the Banshee, even though we don't carry that figure with us in the same way, perhaps, as people in previous times did. But just the power that that language has, I'd never looked at it like that. It was a feeling for me at the time, but actually, you've just verbalized it there. And it's incredibly moving because it links us to the past in a very immediate and real way.

Yeah. And, you know, within Nupak traditions, there's two kinds of stories. The first kind of story is a story about your own experience. So these are the things that you yourself have experienced in your life and you share those in order to entertain and to teach and to be known by your community. But the other kind of story is this is the stories like Sedna, like the story of the Northern Lights, like the little people, like other figures that I'm actually just a little bit too superstitious to name here on this podcast. And those stories, they have a lot of protocol around how you talk about them. And I think, you know, we shared one version of a Sedna story at the start of this podcast, but I think that's one of many different ways that, because Sedna as a sea goddess belongs to the Inuit circumpolar Arctic. And so the story of her and her name, it is sometimes unique to each community. And I think that none of that, there is no one truth of Sedna, right? It's not a

competition of, well, this is the true version. She can have many truths because she's a powerful, multifaceted woman. But if I think about the components of the story of Sedna, she is a woman who was extraordinarily beautiful, extraordinarily we had sea mammals, before we had whales and seals and salmon. And something happens where she is in relationship with a shapeshifter, which is a taboo. It's a taboo to be in a relationship with a shapeshifter. And sometimes she's in a relationship with a shapeshifter. And sometimes she's in a relationship with a shapeshifter because of love, like in the story that you shared. And sometimes she's in love, or she's in relationship with a shapeshifter because of shamanistic trickery. But the defiance of Sedna is that she refuses to marry. She refuses to marry in every story any of the strong men of the village. And then after that,

it's kind of like the rupture of the story is kind of catalyzed by this refusal to marry. And also, there's some kind of rupture that happens between her and her father, where she is thrown over the umiak or falls from the umiak or is pushed from the umiak. And she tries to climb back. And as she tries to climb back on, her fingers are cut off one by one, and her forearm maybe is cut off. And as she falls to the ocean floor, instead of dying, she gives us this beautiful gift of all the sea mammals that we are so reliant on as a people in order to live a good and bountiful life. You know, I think a lot of people imagine the Arctic as a place that's fairly desolate or barren. But the Arctic, for people who think of that place as a homeland,

is a place of abundance and a place of plenty and a place of a good life. And I think that what becomes really powerful about Sedna is that although she became who she is, Although she became who she is by like this refusal to kind of marry and this rupture that happens between her and her father. Her power is so great as a woman that we all become reliant on her favor forever afterwards. And so ultimately, it kind of shows that equality between men and women that is really inherent to Nupak culture. Yeah. Tia, I'm really fascinated by the fact that most of these stories are coming down initially through oral storytelling. And now there's all kinds of ways that particularly the Sedna story, you know, you can watch people telling the story on YouTube, for example. There's a lot more sort of avenues.

You can watch people telling the story on YouTube, for example. There's a lot more sort of avenues. And we're going to talk about some of the storytelling modes or genres around Alaskan landscape and mythology. But the Sedna story in particular, it's a very ancient form of storytelling. And her story is sort of tied to the human history of the landscape and possibly the history of the landscape before people. Do you feel that's right? When I think about how old the story of Sedna is, to me, it really is the beginning of the world. So in a lot of stories, Sedna has children with this shapeshifter. And half of her children are Inukbek, they're Inuit, they're the origin of the way that we think of ourselves as people is as the real people. That's what it means, the real people.

And half of her shape-shifting children, they leave. They go out into the world. And the Inuit Inuk'bak people have this knowledge that they're going to come back and that they have this shape-shifting trickery within them. And for us, that really explains kind of when, you know, different European or Russian or American colonizers and settler colonizers came back. That was our way of understanding. We knew that they would.

They were Sedna's children. Tia, can I just ask, how does it feel to live with these stories? Because the way you're describing this is, to me, feels very present tense and that you walk with these stories and they can morph and change, but they become part of you and wider Alaskan culture and cultures. I'm just wondering how it feels to live in the present tense with all these stories buoying you up. You know, it feels great. But also, I think that there's a scholar that I really like, Daniel Heath Justice, and he writes this book called Why Indigenous Literatures Matter. And he really, he opens it with this idea that every single person is shaped by story. That's what makes us

people, distinct peoples. And so you and I, we have our own stories that we have shaped for ourselves. But every single person is born into a context of stories. And so it might feel more apparent to you because of the difference in the stories that are the context of being in Alaska. But I might, you know, I might have the same questions for both of you, like, what is your experience being shaped by the stories that are the context of where you are? It's just what we live and breathe. I love this idea that we're all walking around and we are the sum of those stories that we've been told and they've become part of our sort of DNA, I guess. And certainly our sort of cultural position is informed by them.

I loved the scene, just thinking about how we are sponsored this episode by True Detective. And I note here that you've watched some of the show and i loved the scene where we saw there was a young child a toddler who'd drawn i think a picture of sedna in a multicultural house and there was some kind of discussion and maybe even a bit of tension there about how those traditions and those stories were being handed down and it's that scene rings more true to me now the way that you're talking about how, how those stories really do become part of us, and we absorb them, and they are what we take out into the world. So that's, that's really

interesting. I wonder, I mean, have you have you watched the show? Did you see that scene? Yeah, so I watched the first two episodes episodes and I was drawn in and like a little nervous. I hope we're not going to provoke anything with this show. But I think I, you know, I loved seeing the image of the toddler drawing that picture of Sedna with her blood just streaming from her fingers. And I think, you know, one of the things that it reminded me of is that this tradition of protecting childhood innocence is actually, I think, you know, one of the things that it reminded me of is that this tradition of protecting childhood innocence is actually, I think, a British invention. And it's fairly recent. Like, if you look at older stories like the Brothers Grimm, the fairy tales, they're pretty dark.

They're really dark, yeah. They're really dark. And those were stories for adults, but also for children. And, you know, to be a child, I think that they're way more capable of understanding the world as a complicated place that is full of light and dark. And maybe we do a disservice to them when we are hiding those truths from them. we are hiding those truths from them. You know, when I was a child living in Utkaagvik, you know, it was a, there was danger there. And there's danger in Alaska and everywhere because of the elements and because of our place as humans, not over nature, but as a part of nature. And I remember dog mushing out on the Arctic ice and I had my own dog team. And I remember my uncle was like, don't fall off your sled. You'll get eaten by a polar

bear. We won't be able to find you in time. And I, that was, it was a really, I was, I knew that that was true. And, and so I, you know, if I had eyes on my runners, if I had fallen, if I was being drugged, like I did not let go of my sled because I did not want to get eaten by a polar bear. That was a reality of life there. Disrespecting that we are not over nature. We're part of it. And eventually our bodies get to, you know, feed the life that will continue to feed the lives of people. I think that is a perfect place for us to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about the opposing, I suppose is one word we could use, set of stories that are

told about Alaska. And those are the ones created by the colonisers themselves. We'll return with the rest of this episode in a few minutes, but we wanted to take five to tell you about the new series of True Detective Night Country, starring Jodie Foster and Kayleigh Rees, as it's actually sponsoring this episode of After Dark. Jodie Foster and Kayleigh Reese as it's actually sponsoring this episode of After Dark. Now, this is the fourth season of True Detective, and it's the first set in Alaska. But if you haven't seen any of the other series, then that doesn't matter, which is good because I haven't seen any of the other series. I'll be watching them now. But you can come to this with a fresh mind and all of the episodes are available to watch on Sky TV. Now, we've watched the first couple of episodes, and I have to say

I really love this show. Anthony what are your thoughts on it? We have the incredible actors Jodie Foster and Kaylee Reese just leading the pack and the dynamic between the two of them is incredible. As an actor myself it's incredible to watch the two of them work and play off one another and balance each other out as well it's one of the things you look for in a drama series i don't know what did you think about their relationship and their working relationship no i completely agree and when we meet jodie foster she is this kind of hard detective in this really difficult landscape in a really difficult community and kaylee reese is a kind of rookie as sort of outsider character i guess like she

has presumably been a detective but she starts she's been demoted there's some kind of historic trouble or tension between the two of them that's going to unfold through the series that absolutely drew me in immediately for me the claustrophobia of the show is so paramount the fact that it all takes place in the dark, the whole story is set during polar night, there is no natural sunlight during the day, during the night, it's just pitch black the whole way through. And it creates this feeling of mounting dread, I think. I'm only on episode two at the moment, and I'm already absolutely hooked. I just feel so much for this community.

You feel like you're out there in the snow, on the ice, isolated with everyone. It draws you in though, right? Because there's so many, there's so many different mystery dramas that you could tune into. And often I find myself kind of wandering as I'm watching them because you've seen the formula before, you've experienced some of these hurdles that they have to get over. But there's something about this series of True Detective where we are invited into a very, I think it's kind of what you're describing, this very complete world where the set pieces are absolutely gorgeous. There is this, I don't want to give too much away, but there is this set piece, I suppose is the best way, this ensemble

set piece that they take into a local gymnasium. And as the second episode goes on, it starts to defrost. I'm not going to go any further than that, but it is A, very gruesome, B, intriguing. It's a clue of sorts that's starting to reveal itself in the narrative. But it's also, and when you watch it, you can see if you agree with me on this, but there's also something very artistic about it, something very beautiful about it. So you're constantly kept intrigued by, yes, the story, but also this kind of beauty that surrounds some of the harshness that takes place in this Alaskan landscape. Anthony, it's fascinating to me that you love Jodie Foster.

You love to watch her as an actor, you can really appreciate her craft. I'm coming at this as a viewer. And for me, Jodie Foster is just the epitome of that kind of really gruesome, exciting, psychological, true crime, thrillery genre on the big screen on TV. And I think for, of course, in Silence of the Lambs, she's this kind of classic icon of this kind of TV. And she really doesn't disappoint in this. I think this is another iconic role for Jodie Foster.

And I'll tell you why I think so, because she, you know, you and I and the team at After Dark, we always pride ourselves on being storytellers when it comes to telling these histories. Jodie Foster is the consummate storyteller. When she is communicating these scripts to the audience,

she just has a way of getting directly to us in our living rooms so that it feels like a really immediate experience that we are going through with her and the rest of the ensemble. So she is, I think, at the top of her game. And I actually, I can't wait to see more from her over the whole series. Because like you, I'm up to episode two right now. And I just can't wait to see

how she's going to be stretching those acting muscles over the next few episodes that are coming up. There's also, beyond the main cast, we've spoken about that, there's an incredible ensemble of lots of Brits, lots of British actors lots of british actors including two from the cast of killing eve i notice which i don't know just adds a little bit of of appeal i think to to viewers on this side of the pond um the set piece that you're speaking

about in the gymnasium that has stayed with me i've been thinking about that over the last few days i can't get it out of my head it's such a theatrical thing and we can't give any more away but listeners of after dark i guarantee you are going to enjoy this show so if you are intrigued and you should be true detective season four is available to watch exclusively on sky tv and episodes are dropping weekly on sky atlantic go find out for yourselves it really really is the must-see TV at the Chicago World Fair and historian Frederick Jackson Turner is delivering a eulogy on the American frontier. He says, masters the colonists, strips his old ways from him, puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee, before little by little the colonist transforms the wilderness not into a version of the old

world he's come from, but into a new product that is American. He ends with the lament that now, four centuries from the discovery of America, the frontier has gone. Meanwhile, in Alaska, the famous environmentalist John Muir is bestriding mountains and glaciers, declaring in rapture that, to the lover of pure wildness, Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world. Here was the last frontier, a wilderness waiting to be shaped by those who felt themselves worthy of shaping it. um beautiful accents well done applause um okay so we've had this idea of living in tandem with the land that indigenous culture gives us this idea of being in conversation with it and telling stories that warn of its dangers um but very much that look to collaborate and respect it i think this is a very different perspective

on the same landscape, isn't it, Tia? It's an idea of conquering and controlling the wilderness. So when does this idea of Alaska as the last frontier, as this great wilderness, when does this take hold? You know, I want to comment a little bit on John Muir's rapturous writing about Alaska. It calls to mind, like, I don't know if you all are familiar with the American designer Lisa Frank, who makes those folders and they're all like leopard print and unicorn. I just I'm imagining John Muir bestride a mountain.

Muir bestride a mountain. It's like he's just like riding a white tiger with a laser shooting out of their eyes. And there's like unicorns and rainbows and stardust, etc. It's very rapturous the way that he's. And when you think about the indigenous people's interactions with John Muir, I imagine that they might have seen him in that way, because he was so reckless and so unwilling to listen to his guides the and also doesn't really acknowledge their presence as he's in Alaska it's really like he is he sees Alaska as this really empty space just ready for Americans to like construct their identity here but just like ignoring the lived human experience and relationship with land. So John Muir, he's the sometimes considered the father of like the national parks. I don't want to hate on national parks. And you know, I don't want to hate on John Muir's love of nature. I also love nature

and enjoy going to a national park. And so I don't want to really villainize that. But I do think that it is really interesting if we start to critically think about, you know, wilderness and what wilderness is. It's not really that, you know, wilderness is there waiting to be shaped or conquered by settlers. But wilderness is really a construct of the settler imagination. is really a construct of the settler imagination. And as a construct of settler imagination, it's there waiting to shape settlers into true Americans. And in that way, the settlers become the arbiters of what a true American is. And also wilderness, the way that they've configured it in their imagination, becomes of utmost importance. And so that has in that area for, you know, since time began, very long time. However, in 1980, that land where we are from, and is a part of us became

a national park. And so with that, you know, settlers have certain ideas of what can happen in a national park. And so they're like, oh, wait, you guys are living there? You can't live there. It's a national park. Oh, hunting? You can't hunt there. It's a national park. Or wait, are you using snow machines to get to the caribou herds? You know, you can't do that. It's a national park. And so I think wilderness as this pure, pristine figment of settler imagination, they have imagined that there's one way of interacting with it. And it's usually you have a lone person who is like, you know, roughing it with their hiking poles and their dehydrated food, and they're finding themselves and what they're finding is their identity as a true American.

It comes back as well to the idea we were talking about earlier, a very Western idea of individualism and sort of contrasted with more indigenous values of community. And I think the wilderness in the settlers' minds, particularly in the 19th century, as you say, it's all these lone figures, lone men in particular, bestriding like a colossus across these mountain ranges and sort of therefore proving themselves worthy of something within their own culture. It's reminding me as

well of we did an episode on the Erebus and Terra expeditions to find the Northwest Passage in the 1830s and 40s, when Franklin takes his men from Britain, and it ends terribly, they have to eat each other, it's awful. And in in that story they come into contact with indigenous peoples in the region that they're in and when they do that the people they're coming into contact with try to explain to them that they're interacting with the landscape in a way that is dangerous that they're not going to survive and you know they they pass these men out on the ice and actually they all die because they don't take any notice. And because they haven't really understood the landscape that

they're going into, because they see it as this thing to conquer or this thing to prove themselves in that it's going to be, it's somehow going to reflect their greatness back at them. And of course, it's such hubris that it ends horribly. And I can really see that idea here as well. Am I right in thinking that on Alaskan number plates today, it still says the last frontier? Yeah, or north to the future. That's another one. You know, I think that it's a lot of people think about the concept of manifest destiny or the concept of colonization or the patterns of it as something that happened a long time ago and it's finished now but the relationship between indigenous people and the united states is a relationship of

settler colonization and that's an ongoing relationship of settler colonization and i think that that these like older or maybe outdated notions of manifest destiny have just morphed into newer phrases like the last frontier or north to the future. It also has this implication when you were talking earlier about concepts of wilderness and the settler concept of wilderness where wilderness almost equals nothing. Whereas actually what you have been describing is abundance as opposed to nothingness. And so it's value systems that have been placed on the idea of wilderness that is in conflict, I think. There's this theory from John Locke, who I'm sure you're both familiar with. He's a British, again, British philosopher, he has this notion of the labor theory of value, which is how property is created. And property is created by mixing one's labor with

the land or with an object, or enclosing it. And so one of the moral legal justifications that colonizers used in order to dispossess native people from land was that this idea that they weren't using it properly because land is supposed to be either enclosed or extracted from. one modern day manifestation of that is a lot of times when people look at or imagine like vast swaths of land from urban areas in the United States or Canada, they often talk about the resource potential of that land. And I think that that is like some kind of anxiety that is around, well, we have to continue to justify our ownership of this place. And since the notions of property are so embedded in this like way of seeing land as a resource or something that is enclosed, it feels like a modern day way of, of like, that anxiety is kind of like peeking through, like, yes, we actually own that land. But how can we convince ourselves of that? Like, oh, because there's resource potential there. And, you know, in the past, a lot of that resource potential has been around, like extracting oil. But I think now, one of the ways that it's talked about as a resource is as, you know, a as a carbon trap or these ecosystems need to stay intact in order to keep our climate in balance.

But it's also kind of like a resource way of thinking about that land. Absolutely. Now, Tia, one of the things that you work on is modern day stories that are told about Alaska. on is modern day stories that are told about Alaska. We've thought a little bit about how some of the legacies of these particularly 19th century settler narratives are coming through in today's politics or in terms of the modern day relationship with the land in Alaska. But let's think a little bit about art. And of course, we can't necessarily separate politics and art here, but thinking about how Alaska is shown on the screen, but also, you know, there's been a sort of influx, for example, of stories about UFOs, of cryptids, that kind of thing in this landscape. this idea of filling it with something to explain that. Can you tell us a little bit about, you know, are there trends in how people tell stories about the Alaskan landscape? Do you see some of these historic ideas coming through today? Or are people inventing new ways to think

and write about the landscape? Patrick Wolfe has this, where he talks about the structure of settler colonialism as being an ongoing event and also structures that don't have to take a single form. It's like any story that is about eliminating Indigenous people's sovereignty over land in the present or in the future is doing the job of settler colonialism. And I think that as people become more critical of past narratives, like Little House on the Prairie, or Last of the Mohicans, or even Frederick Turner's eulogy of the frontier, it's really easy to pat ourselves on the back and recognize those as dangerous or harmful narratives. But we really are continuing to make narratives that don't recognize Indigenous people's sovereignty over land in the present, and they don't imagine Indigenous people's sovereignty over land in the future.

And I think that those narratives are dangerous. They have historical consequences that we've seen. They have political consequences. They have social consequences. Because settler law and logic create conditions for the inevitable disappearance of Native people through eliminatory structures like the way that they're orbiting who is Indigenous or who is American or who is Alaskan. And I think it's really important to highlight the way that imagination really has these tangible consequences that affect and shape the world that we live in. Do you have a suggestion for a story about Alaska, whether it's a novel, whether it's a podcast, whether it's a TV show that you feel goes beyond these limitations and these issues, and that can give us a hopeful, more inclusive version of Alaska?

Oh, my gosh. Well, yeah, I have 1 million suggestions. We have time, go through them all. Number one. million suggestions. We have time, go through them all. Number one. But I think if I were going to plug something right now to your audience that I think would be of interest and is really exciting to me is James Domic Jr. is an Inupiaq storyteller. And he created a couple years ago, this story called Midnight Sun. It's an audible story, so it kind of is genre fluid in terms of bringing that oral storytelling tradition to a modern day context. But he very recently came out with this new series called Alaska is the Center of the Universe, where he talks about the other than human relatives and figures that are part of the storytelling context of Alaska. And he just

includes such a diverse cast of voices and he does it in such a respectful way. I'm really excited about that one. And then of course, if you're interested in learning more about settler fantasies and how they shape modern day Alaska, I would suggest The Alaska Myth, which is another podcast series that I worked on with Caitlin Armstrong. And I think that she's done really tremendous work and included a lot of diverse voices as well. So I would recommend those two for now. Yeah. Tia, thank you so much for joining us on After Dark what a wonderful way to end my day

I know you're just beginning yours there but I hope I hope it gives you some energy and some creativity going forward because I know

I'm really inspired by our conversation today where can people find you are you on social media is there a way people can read some of your work because I think

loads of our listeners would be interested to know more about you Thank you very much it's been wonderful to be here I so again and I'm a professor of Alaska Native Studies at the University of Alaska Fairbanks my name is Tia Anna Tidwell my Nupak name is Pouya I'm named after my Anna sister and so you can find me that way I'm on social media a little. I like to, one of the things I really like to do, I have this social media series that's about gifts of

Nuna, which are, I really am interested in traditional plant medicine and like the ways that plants heal us. And so I'll share information about the, you know, the plants that are near and dear to my heart and how we can use them. So yeah. We would love to have you on another episode to talk about that if you would be happy to come back. Honestly, I would be. This is my favourite, I think, way to share information. Being in academia, a lot of the way that knowledge, it's almost sequestered in ways that aren't accessible to the communities that we're meant to serve. And I think being an indigenous scholar, it's really important for me to share

knowledge in ways that are impactful to the people that I want to serve. And so I really love the form of podcasts. Yeah, so anytime y'all want to talk about anything. We'll come back to you because that sounds absolutely incredible. Maddie, do you want to take us out? Yes, I sure do. Thank you everyone for listening to this episode of After Dark Myths, Misdeeds and the Paranormal.

If you've enjoyed it, you can leave us a review. You can follow Anthony and I and indeed Tia, our guest today, on social media. And we will see you next time. This episode was sponsored by True Detective Night Country. It's available to watch on Sky TV

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