The Epilogue treats the Alaskan airplane crash in August 1935 that took the lives of Rogers and his good friend, the pilot Wiley Post. This tragedy was followed by an outpouring of public grief not seen in America since the death of Abraham Lincoln seventy years before. A flood of eulogies, newspaper and magazine stories, radio broadcasts, and political speeches confirmed the Oklahoman’s standing as a beloved friend and folk hero to millions of Americans.

Landscapes are important frames for understanding and bridging environmental perspectives, including between Indigenous and scientific knowledge systems. Landscapes are both “natural” and “cultural,” for, as Indigenous societies attest, all landscapes manifest the coevolutionary interplay of human and nonhuman forces.  We apply three integrated ecological lenses to analyze this interplay: historical ecology, ethno-ecology, and political ecology. Our case study is the Alsek-Dry Bay region of Southeast Alaska and Western Canada, at the intersection of the northern Tlingit and Athabaskan worlds. Historically an epicenter of astonishing geological dynamism and disruption, biological productivity and diversity, this landscape was also a mecca of cultural exchange, contestation, and appropriation. Ironically, the Alsek-Dry Bay landscape is now “preserved” as the center of a celebrated World Heritage Site based solely on its “natural” landscapes and “wilderness” character, and not for its Indigenous identity as a place of outstanding cultural significance – where the trickster-worldmaker Raven literally transformed the cosmos and topography – and the product of deep cultural-environmental histories. Bringing these ecological perspectives together enables a broader appreciation of the natural and cultural dynamism that has shaped such sites and of the enduring value and lessons of Indigenous knowledge systems that have coevolved with rapidly changing landscapes.

The Klondike gold rush, sparked in August 1896, brought tens of thousands of people from around the globe into the Yukon. Whalers had reached the Mackenzie Delta from the Pacific in the same decade. The demographic wave crested in 1900, the same year as a combined influenza and measles epidemic spread through Alaska into the Yukon, known as the Great Sickness. Oral histories and archival evidence show that it was not the absence of immunity but rather the synergistic effects of multiple pathogens that produced this devastating epidemic and its consequences.

As elsewhere in the global history of colonial health, public health and the control of infectious diseases turned Indigenous bodies and lands into sites where the state sought to assert greater control – and met significant resistance. This chapter considers these dynamics through a focus on vaccines, quarantines, and efforts to forcibly relocate sick northerners between 1900 and 1920. Particular attention is given to smallpox epidemics that spread widely and were a main vehicle for public health measures, but caused few deaths.

St John’s, Newfoundland, to Vancouver is about 3,000 miles; Plymouth, Massachusetts, to San Francisco is about 2,700 miles, the distances which English covered on its westward expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific between 1700 and the late 1800s. Revolution, purchase, negotiation, violent conquest, slavery and genocide brought the continental USA finally to its modern geographical limits. English-speaking powers controlled the east coast of North America from Labrador to Florida, and the west coast from the Arctic Ocean to the USA–Mexico border between San Diego and Tijuana. The 250 years of spread of native English speakers occurred at the expense of indigenous North American languages, and to a lesser extent Spanish, French and the other languages of other European colonists.

Within the scholarship on ‘U.S. state and empire building in the longue durée’, Alaska plays a surprisingly small role.3 Past the sizable shelf of studies on World War II, the region also vanishes in the literature on the early years of the global Cold War, despite Alaska’s geopolitical prominence and the corresponding effects of additional defence spending, construction, and employment in the period leading up to statehood in 1959.4 Support for (essentially concurrent) statehood in Alaska and Hawai’i was unquestionably ‘entwined with the buildup of both territories as major Cold War defense installations’.5 To rectify that double oversight, and to draw together periods frequently rendered discrete, this chapter uses the United States (US) military, an institution pivotal to the establishment, expansion, and direction of Alaska as a settler colonial society, to stitch together a century of Alaskan history.

The first written description of the muskox was published in 1744 by Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix, a French Jesuit and historian, within a description of ‘New France’ (the French colony of North America) in his multi-volume Journal d’un voyage. He describes an animal encountered in the area of Hudson Bay with long, beautiful hair and a musky smell in rutting season – and he gave it the name boeuf musqué.1 Musk was originally a label for the odour from the gland of a male musk deer, a native of Asia, which was used in perfumes, but animals with similar type odours were given musk names, like the muskrat and musk shrew. Charlevoix’s original descriptor for the animal stuck: it became muskox in English, moskusokse in Norwegian, myskoxe in Swedish, Moschusochse in German, and stayed boeuf musqué in French.

This chapter provides a snapshot of the recent history of Indigenous political movements in the circumpolar north. Over the past six decades or so, Indigenous peoples across the Arctic have pushed forward with political action and initiatives that have aimed to secure national and international recognition of their rights, land claims, the granting of autonomy, and participation in many of the decision-making processes and institutions of governance that affect their lives and homelands.1 Indigenous peoples’ organizations have also become major actors in Arctic environmentalism and international circumpolar affairs.

Writing in 1916, shortly after his appointment as ‘Geologist in Charge of Explorations’, the celebrated Canadian geologist and explorer Charles Camsell reflected on the prospects for development in Canada’s ‘unexplored’ Arctic: ‘It is to the mining industry more than any other that we must look for co-operation and assistance in the exploration of our northern regions.’1 Camsell hailed the prospects for mining to launch the transformation of remote, sparsely populated Arctic and Northern regions into prosperous, modern Euro-Canadian settlement frontiers. Nearly forty years later, reflecting on his geological career and the surge in mineral development activity in Canada’s north in the decades around World War II, Camsell confidently concluded, ‘To my mind the whole future of the North country depends primarily upon its mineral wealth.’2 Camsell’s visions of mining’s capacity for transforming the Arctic both echoes and anticipates the ideology of ‘frontierism’ characteristic of industry boosters and state agencies around the circumpolar Arctic.

The winds howled as the members of the First Combat Intelligence Platoon mushed their huskies through the darkness of an Arctic January day. Temperatures reached −43 degrees Celsius as the men scouted the river valleys and mountain passes of Alaska’s Brooks Range. This was no ordinary mission, and these men were no regular infantry. The platoon, comprised of soldiers from the Alaska Territorial Guard (ATG) – a military reserve force of Alaska Natives known as the ‘Eskimo Scouts’ – was the vanguard of the first reconnaissance survey of a petroleum pipeline from Alaska’s North Slope. In the early winter of 1945, three ATG patrols totalling eight men spearheaded a survey of a potential pipeline route from Livengood, north of Fairbanks, to Umiat on the North Slope. The men travelled over 3,200 km by dogsled in the middle of Arctic winter, battling snow deeper than a metre.

We explore the policy feedback process and describe how state policies have evolved or devolved in the specific issue area of firearm laws and domestic violence. This chapter demonstrates how and when states respond to the need to reform their domestic violence laws and shows how key actors in that process, including legislators and interest groups, affect the content of the policy that is adopted. The chapter includes examples of states whose definition and scope of domestic violence laws vary and contrast them with each other and with federal law. We present six studies of states that differ in their legislative histories on domestic violence laws to identify key factors that can explain this variation; we test these factors in the quantitative analysis presented in Chapter 4.

One important piece of the return to the 1970s is to return to 1970s levels of crime. The good news is we are already well on our way. As Figure 21.1, from the PEW Research Center, shows, the United States has been enjoying steady declines in the crime rate since the 1990s.1

At a meeting in Alaska in 2000, when several indigenous speakers shared stories about the rapidly shifting climate, sea ice, and weather in their home areas. I was amazed by how thoroughly they analysed signals of change and how nuanced their observations were, compared to the crude models of prehistoric climate change available in the literature. For many people living in the more temperate mid-latitude areas, ‘climate change’ is about heat and warming. Not so in the Arctic, where the best summary of climate change is that “it’s not cold enough” (Krupnik et al. 2010c). Indigenous people in the North, particularly those living on the seacoast, depend on long cold winter to build solid offshore ice. They monitor the ice for six to ten months every year; they travel on ice, and hunt from it to catch the animals that sustain their life. The Eskimo explanation “it’s not cold enough” has perfect sense from the principles of sea ice geophysics. It requires long cold days to build solid ice. If the ice is weak and broken, comes late or leaves early, more heat is absorbed into the ocean producing thinner and weaker ice next winter. This is a synopsis of what scientists call ‘Arctic amplification’. Over the past 40 years of satellite observations, Arctic sea ice has declined dramatically – in its seasonal extent, overall volume, age, and duration. In the northern Bering Sea, sea ice distribution in winter has changed, in professional terms, from a predictable system of icescapes to a mixing bowl of drifting floes. Hunters in many communities report that they have not seen thick bluish multi-year ice of their youth in years. Arctic people have noticed this transformation very early and they have spoken about it loud and clear since the late 1990s. Yet they monitor the ice from their particular vision of users, not as scientists. This paper introduces the study of indigenous sea ice nomenclatures as a path to document, sustain, and ‘co-produce’ local knowledge about ice and Arctic change.

The Iñupiat Eskimo on Alaska’s North Slope live semi-traditional lives characterized by subsistence hunting and fishing and expansive natural travel networks. To the Iñupiat, the North Slope coastline is a social-cultural boundary between sea and land, marked by the location of past and current settlements, burial sites, family hunting locations, traditional places of refuge, and places immortalized through traditional stories. The coastline is where they observe, enter and exit the marine environment, and hence is interwoven throughout their local and traditional knowledge of the ocean and sea ice environment. Rarely, do local experts speak of ocean or ice features, or of a hunting story, without referring to a place on land. North Slope communities and their coastline are also staging areas for scientists who have adopted the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas as their natural laboratories. This chapter will explore a cross-section of the North Slope’s rich history of scientists working with local indigenous experts on coastal and marine topics, with specific attention to coastal emergency preparedness.