After Alaska

By Jessica Segall

Within the next few hours I will take a swim in Lake Champlain.  Within the next few days I will return to the Appalachian Trail to hike and look for chanterelles. The Green Mountains in Vermont and the White Mountains in New Hampshire have been my favorite camping grounds since college - the first place I found that one could hike for days without seeing another body.  It was here that I tried my first attempt at solo camping, and stayed up all night to the sound of stomping hooves around me.  Vermont feels somehow like a halfway point in between the wilderness of Alaska and my home New York City.

The expanse of Alaska will forever change the way in which I experience and consider the terms wilderness. The Appalachian Trail is now a trail, a National Forest with clearly marked terms of engagement.  The formerly most remote space I enjoyed in the states is now a place that I can drive to in a weekend.  The house we are staying in is accessible through a campground on Lake Champlain. RVs with humming generators circle several acres of mowed grass, and campers rent golfcarts to travel the distance from the lakeside back to their sites. Or, if you prefer, an antique fire engine has been outfitted into a shuttle bus. At the camp there is both an RV and small river kayak with the words, "wilderness" branded on the side.  

Last week, when asking around for good hiking trails, a Vermont neighbor suggested Camel’s Hump, part of the Appalachian Trail.  He lamented the overcast sky, saying on a good day, “one can feel like they are on top of the world up there.”  It reminds me of a conversation in the Noatak with Mike, Tama and Andrea about climbing mountains.  During our residency, we hiked through tundra to small raised outcroppings with exposed gravel to look for archeological sites of interest.  Andrea and Tama were both eyeing the mountain beyond the lake.  I remarked, somehow, on the desire to climb to mountain peaks as part of human nature.  Mike’s opinion was that this desire, the desire to reach the highest elevation for a Freidrich - esque point of observation, is part of a newer cultural construct.  He said that the earlier inhabitants of the Noatak would have looked at the mountain peaks and just think of the wasted energy expended to get there, with no advantage to climbing it - no caribou on top of the mountain!  We, the recreational campers who were well-fed up to our trip to the Noatak and can reasonable expect to be well-fed for the rest of our lives, see a mountain differently.  A change in perspective, ego, nourishment, exhaustion.

Not everyone should want to, or has the means to have an experience like we were offered in the Noatak Preserve - to be delivered across hundreds of roadless miles via float plane and hike without trails, and I am forever grateful for the opportunity.  I will continue to explore and honor the other National Parks, but the sheer size of Alaska's 19 million acres of preserves and parks has left an Alaska – sized impression in my mind and soul.

Progress, Loss and Language

By Jessica Segall

A close friend of mine passed away while we were camping in the Brooks Range, hundreds of miles from a telephone where someone could reach me with the news.  Knowing now, it is filtering the way which I experience this place.  It is a challenge to be so far from home, 3,361 miles from home, to be exact. Much of the last weeks have been spent calling friends and relatives to plan the memorial. However, there is some comfort to being here.  With a heavy heart I can walk out to edge of town to study the Chukchi Sea, or walk 5 miles to the tundra expanding beyond the horizon.  

There is nothing like death to remind us of our role in the life cycle, some larger, inevitable force that births us and swallows us back up. I was already planning to write about the perceived separation of man and nature in the Eurocentric worldview.  There seems no better example than that blow to mortality to feel the physical-ness of being of nature, not stewards of nature.   As my friend was an artist, often working with natural themes, I include her work in this post and had her in mind when writing, considering our shared connection to painting and language.
 

We were lucky enough to be invited by the Parks Service to return to the Brooks Range last week, and camp in a new location, 200 miles from Kotzebue.  In between that time I pulled in nets at fish camps and with subsistence fisherman in town, learned how to catch and fillet a salmon.  Living in the Alaskan arctic means participating directly in the food chain.  Daily life is sustained by the hunt, and requires defending oneself from larger carnivores.  When the average Western consumer is part of a cash economy, purchases food from secondary or tertiary vendors imported from all corners of the planet, it creates a disconnection from region, season and a sense of an integrated whole. When the largest predators have been hunted to extinction on most of the American continents, it is reasonable to feel, at the top of the food chain, a dominion over other life forms, power over nature.

The Wilderness Act defines wilderness as a protected place where "man, himself is a visitor." While the intent is of the act is to protect our natural resources from destructive human intervention, the language draws a violent division, not only in terms of gender relations, but also in suggesting that man (and not woman) is not of nature, spawning from Judeochristian ideas of man as a likeness of God that has dominion "over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth." Changing the conversation to encompass other worldviews, animistic and non – Western could re-enforce an interconnected sense of self and responsibility. 

Considering protected wilderness areas only ones that have not had a human history is problematic to archeologists, who are researching the millennium of human occupation in arctic Alaska.  Some of the archeological viewpoints are also representative of a Western bias, especially ones that consider Indigenous cultures as part of natural history, but Western culture as part of human history.  Searching around the archeological sites, items we saw were either deemed historic (oil cans dropped from planes for potential, future refueling) or pre-historic (stone tools, petroglyphs).  By this definition, something becomes part of history is once it is recorded in writing, (written language which can be translated – Hieroglyphics were considered part of pre-history until the Rosetta stone).  In 2005, I visited the South African Museum in Cape Town, the first natural history museum in sub-Saharan Africa. The museum displays were in the process of renovation, removing dioramas of indigenous people working with stone tools, updating the idea that African history is natural history and colonial history is cultural history.   

As a visual artist, part of my job is to find ways to speak outside of language – which can operate on a physical, sensorial, absurdist or spiritual level.  When finding artifacts in the Brooks Range, each object told a story tantamount to written language.  Mike Holt, lead archeologist for the The Western Arctic National Parklands, explained to us how to identify lithics (stone tools) among the exposed gravel of the tundra by looking for marks of intention.  His trained eye can tell the difference between an apprentice and the marks of a trained craftsman making a projectile point.  As such, a trained painter can look at a painting and tell from the marks what the interior life and ideology was of the maker.  Setting aside easily dated material such as subject matter, the maker can be read by the size of the canvas, the speed in which it was made, the dexterity of marks and which marks are withheld.  A straight line is an ideology. A curved line is a different worldview. This is the written language of the artist, the human hand.  Coming down to it, the terms of history and pre-history, culture vs. civilization, man vs. nature is married to an idea of progress, and a straight line as a worldview.

Images by Anitra Haendel

Nature Provides

 

 

By Jessica Segall

 

July 22nd - Deposited by float plane somewhere within the 6.5 million acres of the Noatak National Preserve.  Before our trip, we met with a local elder and Native Alaskan liason for the National Parks Service. He laughed when we mention the word "wilderness," saying that we are about to enter his "backyard".  I think about this sentiment on our trip, considering the meaning behind the term "backyard" - familiarity, governance.  A demarcation of the view of nature between Native Alaskans, who have thrived by subsistence hunting and gathering on this land for centuries, and the majority of modern Americans, who, if they have familiarity in the wilderness, know it on a recreational level.  Times have changed.  Motorboats replace the umiaq, snowmachines replace dogmushing or hunting on foot, yet the knowledge for Native Alaskans required to subsist on this land is an intimate, and communal understanding of animal migration patterns, seasons, distance, materiality and necessity.  

I re-read the definition of wilderness in The Wilderness Act, stating wilderness is "untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain ...without permanent improvements or human habitation."  Archeological artifacts are strewn throughout this preserve, dating back centuries.  There are lithics, stone formations and cache pits.  Yet this only triples the need for protection of these lands - as an important archeological site hosting some of the oldest relics of North American civilization, as a vast reserve of nature in an unaltered state and as the lifeblood and food of Native peoples.  I was aiming to write about wilderness and American identity, how the millions of protected acres and varied wilderness biomes could and should define our country as much as the latest media trends and foreign policy.  However, the protection of this land is larger than a question of American identity.  Alaska was ratified into statehood in 1959, while the indigenous inhabitants have continued to maintain culture here for centuries.  Borders may shift again.  I see the protection of this place not as an identity, but as a legacy.

And nature provides for us here, as it has for centuries. We pick tundra tea and blueberries, (not too much tundra tea - its a laxative!) and catch brown trout caught with a home-made fly fashioned out of gull feathers.  It took us days for us to prepare coming here - to pack food properly, to seal tents, to go through bear training.  I am nervous, as this is my second time in a Cessna (the first time of which was very turbulent and nauseating ride in the Nasca Desert, Peru).  Also, this is the most remote camping I have done, and the best chance I've had to encounter grizzly bears.  Bear spray, a highly potent form of pepper spray dangles from my hip at all times.  This hyper-awareness, the carrying of weapons, the shouting of "hey, bear!" every time we walk by a willow tree to warn bears of our arrival reminds me of the same 360 degree consciousness I employ when walking alone to my apartment at night.  There is a fear of the outdoors by the urbanite, the suburbanite, yet it presents no more realistic danger than driving to work or taking the subway.  Little brown sandpipers run along the lakeside, pecking about and cutely reminding me of my pet starling at home.  Later, I realize they have flown here from the southern tip of Argentina for their yearly migration.  We are not the only creatures who have traveled the distance to be here. 

  

A close - up of the spongy tundra, walking on it feels as if it wasn't designed for bipeds, leaving us off balance, and tired after a 3 mile hike. Meanwhile, wildlife leave elegant trails, superhighways shared by caribou and fox alike.

 

                   A simultaneous view from the east and west.  Time is confusing, and the lack of darkness means a lack of urgency. 

wildlife encounters, Kotzebue Alaska

By Jessica Segall

Tomorrow is the day we head out into the "wild".  After a week of sealing tents, stuffing bear barrels, bear safety training and the hospitality of the National Parks Service and Kotzebue residents, we will take the float plane out to Noatak National Preserve.  Today's trip up the Noatak River was delayed by a seizing outboard engine.  However, wildlife encounters were plenty, including beluga whale, fermented walrus, bearded seal, caribou, dried pike and a foraged, wild berry jam all present at the dinner table.  As a pescatarian for 25 years, I hesitated, but tasted everything, to the palate's delight.

Noatak Wilderness Science and Art Collaboration

By Peggy Lawless

The Aldo & Leonardo art-science collaboration at Noatak National Preserve began July 15. Three artists (Tama Baldwin, Jessica Segall, and Andrea Spofford) will assist archaeologist Michael Holt in surveying an important prehistoric site.



Nan Christianson, Hannah Atkinson, Frank Hays, Willie Goodwin,
Andrea Spofford, Jessica Segall, Tama Baldwin, Mike Holt

sky at midnight, Kotzebue, Alaska

By Jessica Segall

By Jessica Segall

One might think that one residency in the arctic would prepare you for the next.  As I prepare to leave for the Noatak Wilderness in mid - summer, the contents of my bags reflect a world of difference from my journey to Svalbard in the Autumn of 2011.  Close to the equinox, the sun will be up 24 hours a day for the first 9 days of our residency, where in Svalbard, we were graced with a sunrise which transitioned directly into sunset. The sun hugged the mountains, and only once do I remember feeling the sun's warmth on the side of my face.  Svalbard was a planet of ice flows seen from a moving ship, and participating in the wilderness residency in Noatak will include hours of hiking through boggy marsh grass and tundra.  Svalbard has no indigenous culture, and has only been inhabited by those seeking economy, first Russian and Scandanavian trappers and then miners, a university and now a growing tourist industry.  We will be working with the National Parks Service in Noatak, collecting data at a site of rare prehistoric petroglyphs, artifacts of an ancient and continuing culture. 

Rice, seaweed, rainpants, mosquitto netting, tent stakes, emergency blankets, an unfortunately hardcover copy of "The Human Experiment", wool everything.  These items go into my bags, striking a balance between over-preparedness and what I can carry - preparing for weather 45 - 85 degrees, sun, rain or snow.

 Another balance to be found is what a friend once called, "the balance between culture making and culture taking," a research residency as a means for production of new artwork.  A balance between  listening and speaking, between project outlines and thinking creatively in the moment. I am happy to be invited as part of the collaboration Fused Muse.  I will be taking footage during this residency to accompany a new composition and performance thematically formed around endangered languages and climates.