Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Lauren Oaks is an ecologist and the author of In Search of the Canary Tree.

In this piece, Lauren listens to three generations of an Anupiac family in Katsabu, Alaska,

discussed the transformations and losses in their community that have resulted from climate change and COVID-19.

As she reflects on what will be needed to build resilience in the face of an uncertain future,

Lauren considers the meeting place of scientific knowledge and indigenous ways of knowing.

The first time I corresponded with Maya Kataklukan, she was about to leave town and head up river for a hunt. Moose season opens August 1st, she wrote, and because of the inconsistent

migration of the caribou herds, moose is our only other choice for large land mammals. In recent years, the start of the caribou herds, moose is our only other choice for large land mammals.

In recent years, the start of the caribou migration and its duration have become more variable.

So have the terrain covered by hundreds of thousands of hooves and the lives of the hunters pursuing the herd.

The caribou moves south from the flanks of the Brooks range,

often crossing the tundra later in the year than they have in the past, and unpredictably so.

Fall and winter come later now too. The ice, thin and slushy in places, melts and cracks and

slips away earlier in the spring.

Born in Katsubu, Alaska and raised on the shores of Cape Krustenstein

National Monument, Lukan is half a new pack and half finish.

She is the former mayor of the city of Katsubu and was a federal land manager in

northwest Alaska

before recently taking a new position in tribal relations.

In 2015, when President Obama traveled to the Arctic to bear witness to the effects of climate change in the north,

...