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Honoring 50 Years of Arctic Insight

by Alison Bowen, CLA Staff Writer

Mary Ehrlander remembers trekking down to the Yukon years ago with students with a van full of students.

One year, they drove about 12 hours down to Yukon College at Whitehorse to participate in the program she had organized, called Canada Day and highlighting common issues between Canada and ������app– historical, political, economic, social, cultural. During these events, topics included everything from Canadian films to land claims.

The road trip itself was a special adventure.

“That was just so much fun,” she said laughing. “There was a terrific sense of camaraderie in the van.”

But then, after arriving at Yukon College, days of meaningful interactions followed. Students were hosted by the Inland Tlingit First Nations people one year; another year they were able to celebrate the 50 years of ������appstatehood alongside 100 years since the Yukon’s territorial status. “These two symposia were terrific cross-cultural and cross-national exchanges and wonderful experiences for the students and faculty who participated.”

For half a century, UAF has been a leader in studying the Arctic and the North.

The university’s Arctic and Northern Studies (ACNS) program started in 1971, with a B.A. in Northern Studies, an interdisciplinary degree with multiple disciplines across campus focusing on the North.

Now, the department is the only program in the country offering full degrees on the Arctic. The program offers a B.A. in Climate and Arctic Sustainability, an M.A. in Arctic and Northern Studies, and a Graduate Certificate in Arctic and Northern Studies. A number of Interdisciplinary Studies Ph.D. students also are housed in Arctic and Northern Studies.

The program began during the Cold War, with the tensions that came with it. Also at this time, indigenous people were beginning to communicate more, and environmental issues were emerging as pressing issues -- spurring more need for collaborative problem solving and more travel among the circumpolar regions.

Decades after the program’s launch, professors worked together to create a M.A. program, noting the great access students could have from both faculty expertise and the library collection -- plus, of course, proximity to the North itself.

Ehrlander herself was one of the first graduates of the M.A. program. She was finishing her B.A. in political science when the program was being launched, and she was allowed to start the program in her final undergraduate year. So after earning her B.A. in 1992, in 1993 she was one of the first two graduates of the M.A. program.

“That was pretty exciting,” she remembers.

This timing coincided with the Soviet Union’s collapse, as well as opportunities for more collaborative research projects.

Of this time, Ehrlander remembers how relations between East and West were thawing, inspiring the recognition of the circumpolar north as a region with common histories, economic characteristics, political challenges, cultural characteristics and social issues – all worthy of comparative study.

After she got her M.A., she moved to Virginia for her PhD at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, later returning to ������appto complete her dissertation.

“I came back to Fairbanks, which was my home,” she said.

After teaching at Lathrop High School for four years and completing her PhD, she joined the faculty as assistant director of Northern Studies and Assistant Professor of History in 2001.

“It was all a bit daunting,” she said, “having my former professors now as colleagues.”

The founding director, Dr. Judith Kleinfeld, mentored Ehrlander.

“It was a very nurturing culture, where the faculty got to know the students well and were very supportive, and really took an interest in their academic progress,” Ehrlander said. “And so that’s been a culture that we’ve fostered all these years.”

Professors host potlucks; small class sizes are intentional.

“The best decision I ever made was to recruit Mary Ehrlander,” Kleinfeld said. “Her door was always open to students as was mine. Students did not have to make appointments to see us.”

Of the program’s beginnings, Kleinfeld noted how Anne Shinkwin, the dean of the College of Liberal Arts, thought it was important to have an Arctic-focused program, as opposed to a traditional discipline like history or biology.

At the time, this was unusual, she noted. Students were used to doing work in a discipline and it was challenging at the beginning to recruit students. “I wanted to find strong students, with academic talent, who were interested in the region and making a contribution to it.  The students were able to use knowledge from a discipline but would apply it to the region.”

By using personal contacts, she found strong recruits, including Julian Tomlinson, who told Kleinfeld he had never seen a professor who called him on a Friday evening to talk about his interest in the program.

One of their goals was students making contributions to overall understanding of the Arctic, including publishing an article on the subject in a scholarly journal; students could use the tools of historical analysis to illuminate a question of the North, like the influence of missionaries on rural Native communities, and in fact this was a student’s thesis subject.

In another example, Julian Tomlinson, documented a trip mushing dogs through the Canadian Arctic, arranging for Canadian students in elementary schools to follow his progress and learn a great deal about dog mushing and the geography of the North.

At times, Ehrlander has co-directed the program; she also directed the program from 2010 to 2018. During that time, she recalled, much attention was being paid to the Arctic. For example, because of the way the ocean circulates, pollutants end up concentrating in the Arctic and created toxic levels of pollutants in the food supply of Indigenous peoples.

All of these were topics they tackled in the department and reasons prospective students were interested in the program.

People have always been interested in the Arctic for