Community Health and Well-Being in Rural Alaska

Much of America thinks about community health as being about access to medical care. However, recently sociologists have been following the lead of rural and indigenous communities and broadening their ideas about community health. The term "community health" actually means the health and well-being of an entire community, not just about individuals' health. In rural Alaska, community health includes such elements as: availability of safe water; sanitary system; access to healthy foods; lack of pollutants and toxic elements in the land, water, and air; effective garbage management; accessible medical and traditional health care; vibrant community traditions and rituals; access to adequate education; access to reproductive health care. In this section, students will explore community health and wellbeing in Alaska from these broad perspectives. Here are some of the questions we will pursue:

1. what are the markers of "good" community health? What makes up a sense of community "well-being"?
2. Is there a locally available medical facility in all rural Alaska communities? If not, how do rural residents obtain medical care? How much does it cost? Who picks up the tab?
3. What role do Alaska Native corporations play in providing for community health?
4. How are traditional and cultural practices integrated into community health?
5. Does every village have safe water? Sanitation? Garbage management? If not, why not? What are the barriers to providing safe water and sanitation to all rural Alaska communities?
6. What toxins and pollutants threaten the health and well-being of rural Alaska communities? What is causing the problems, and how are the problems being addressed?
7. What kinds of illnesses and diseases are common in rural Alaska? Are there "cancer clusters" or other markers of cultural disruption and/or environmental pollutants and toxins that disproportionately affect certain rural areas?
8. How does age, sex, race/ethnicity, and age shape community well-being?

Food and Rural Alaska

In mid-to-late summer, fish racks like this one dot rural Alaska villages all along the rivers. Salmon are the primary fish hanging up to dry, or smoking in tarp-covered shelters. But other fish are also important food sources for rural Alaska. Late summer is also the time when rural Alaskans gather berries of all sorts to store for winter. Later in the year, just as the snow starts to fly, rural Alaskans hunt moose and caribou, ducks and geese, and sometimes bear and other large mammals. But wild-gathered foods are becoming scarce--federally-instituted catch quotas this year, for example, have forced rural Alaskans to watch king salmon swim by on their way to Canadian streams. They are forbidden to catch them, although king salmon have been a foundational food for rural Alaska since time immemorial. Industrial, military, mining, and other development activities threaten wild foods, from salmon to moose to caribou to berries to ducks to geese. The number of available wildlife for hunting has decreased, and increasingly rural Alaska looks to stores to purchase food. But what is in those stores? Much of the stuff sold in rural Alaska are processed foods, high in carbohydrates and sugar, packed with salt and chemicals, and culturally incomprehensible to older Alaskans. Additionally, store-bought food is expensive in rural Alaska. Some communities are able to farm and to raise gardens to provide for their food needs. But much of rural Alaska is inhospitable to most forms of farming, and thus rural Alaskans are often faced with the difficult task of putting healthy, nutritious, affordable, culturally-recognized food on the family table.

In this section, students will explore food and rural Alaska. Some of the questions we will ask include:

1. what are the major foods used in rural Alaska? How have foods changed in rural Alaska in the last several decades?
2. why is store-bought food so expensive in rural Alaska?
3. Why are salmon runs being restricted? What kinds of hunting and gathering laws have restricted the ability of rural Alaskans to put food on their table?
4. how has wolf control, bear control, and other predator control programs been used to increase wildlife populations for hunting? Are these programs effective? Are they scientifically justified? Politically justified? Who do they benefit and how do we know?
5. What is in the food in the rural stores? Are the stores equally distributed in rural Alaska?
6. How has immigration and emigration affected the availability of certain foods in rural Alaska?
7. How secure is Alaska's food? What is food security, and how does this new concept shape Alaska's rural food policies?

Migration, Immigration, and Emigration and Rural Alaska

The movement of people in and out, across and through what is now Alaska is as old as humanity itself. Some 14,000 years ago, people moved across the Bering Land Bridge (now under water) down into Alaska. There is some evidence that communities may have arrived in Alaska by boat as well as by foot. In the eons since then, of course, there has been constant movement of people in and out of Alaska and neighboring nations, including Russian missionaries, American missionaries, Canadian fur trappers and traders, merchants, gold miners, oil pipeline workers, university students, cannery workers, timber workers, coal miners, railroad workers, and most recently, military workers. While debates rage in urban Alaska and the rest of America about undocumented workers from Latin American nations, the face of immigration in Alaska looks quite different. In terms of ethnic immigration, we have fewer Latino/a (aka Hispanic) immigrants, and more Hmong and Japanese compared to the American Midwest, for example. We have more ethnic Russians than Vietnamese. Much of the movement into Alaska have been other Americans moving up here for work. The oil pipeline in the 1970s and 1980s brought a huge influx of other Americans into the state for well-paying jobs. Many of them stayed. The recent military build-ups have brought other Americans into our state. In the past, Filipino and Japanese people moved here to work in the Southeast canneries. Most of the immigration (movement of people from their region into a different region) into Alaska are men, resulting in the most lop-sided demographic sex distribution in America. Conversely, most of the emigration (movement of people within their same region) out of rural Alaska are women. Immigrants and emigrants tend to be younger, and are often single. However, the most recent waves of US military emigrants tend to be families, with or without children.

Movement of people in and out and across Alaska is contentious, like movement of people are elsewhere in the US. But the arguments for and against movement differ. In this section, students will explore immigration, migration, emigration and Alaska. Some questions we will explore include:

1. why do people move to Alaska? Why do people move out of Alaska? Why do Alaskans move within Alaska?
2. what ethnicities are represented among Alaska's contemporary migrants? How do the contemporary streams of people differ from historical immigrants?
3. Why is immigration different for men and women?
4. How does rural Alaska adapt to the newcomers? How do the newcomers adapt to Alaskans?
5. What does immigration and emigration bring to rural Alaska? What are the costs to rural Alaska? Do rural Alaska communities benefit equally from immigration? Do some rural areas pay a larger cost for immigration than other communities?
6. How does racism and ethnocentrism shape immigrants' Alaska experience? How do the newcomers cope with discrimination? How are rural Alaskans (especially Alaska Natives) affected by newcomers' racism against them?

Economies in Rural Alaska

What is an economy? Sociologists define an economy as the structured system of production and distribution of goods and services. Throughout most of its history, Alaska has been characterized by a subsistence economy, meaning that local communities produced food, tools, shelter, clothing and footwear, healthcare, art, music, water, transportation, and other goods and services from the land, with largely internal distribution systems. So, for example, a typical Alaska community would have consisted of a handful of large, extended families who gathered berries, lichens, greens, mussels, eggs, and other small foods; hunted larger animals such as caribou, ducks, whales, geese, moose, and seals; fished all year round; used hides, sticks, bones, branches, trees, rocks, and snowblocks for shelter; utilized herbs, shamanism, and other health crafts to cure illness and injuries; made their footwear and clothing from skins and plant fibers; and distributed the goods and services they produced among themselves with some bartering and trading with other local communities. In subsistence economies, the community owns the means of production--in other words, the land, tools, animals, craft knowledge, and everything else needed to produce goods and services were owned in common by the people themselves.

With the immigration of new settlers into Alaska, new capitalist economic systems were introduced and the older subsistence economies could not successfully compete. In a capitalist economy, goods and services are produced by people who sell their labor to a tiny group who owns the means of production. Under capitalism, the means of production most commonly mean the factories, tools, equipment, land, animals, energy, trucks, railroads, and craft knowledge (intellectual capital). And only a small fraction of the people actually involved in production and distribution own these things. They use their ownership in these things (capital) to produce profit for themselves. Local knowledge, local crafts, local culture, local labor--these things are now said to be commoditized, or sold to make profit for the owners of the means of production (capitalists).

Today, most of Alaska is characterized by what sociologists call mixed economies: there are still some elements of subsistence economies that are left-over from earlier days, but markedly transformed by the influences of capitalism. In rural Alaska, one can still see how important subsistence economic systems are to the people, while at the same time, one can see how capitalism has reshaped the very way rural people even think about their economies.

In this section, the students will explore the various local economies of rural Alaska. Some of the questions we will examine include:

1. how have extraction industries, such as gold, coal, and copper mining, oil production, whaling, and timber affected local communities? How have local economies been affected? Are the benefits and costs of extraction industries equitably distributed across rural Alaska?
2. how has commercialized fishing (especially factory trawlers for cod, halibut, and salmon) affected local fishing economies? What rural Alaska communities are especially affected?
3. in what Alaska communities do subsistence economies continue to thrive? What communities have adopted mostly capitalist economic structures?
4. how has the building of US military bases affected rural Alaska economies?
5. what are some new, emerging economic possibilities for rural Alaska? In particular, see if you can find out how medicine and healthcare facilities, craft guilds, industrial prisons, university annex campuses, and eco-tourism may have affected local Alaska economies.
6. how bright (or dim) is rural Alaska's economic future?

Here is a graph that Amelia created about the role of the military in Alaska's economy. What other industries, governmental entities, and/or NGOs shape our rural economy?

Agriculture and Livestock Production in Rural Alaska

There are not many herds of cattle and other livestock here in Alaska, especially when compared to the lower parts of our continent. In the Plains States, for example, and in the US Southeast, there are miles and miles of fenced-in pastures where hundreds of thousands are animals are being raised. You see nothing like that up here. There are also not as many acres of land devoted to agriculture. Again, elsewhere in the US, e.g. the Midwest, crop fields roll on as far as the eye can see. Again, comparatively few of Alaska's land is set in crops. But that doesn't mean that there haven't been numerous attempts to introduce conventional agricultural and livestock production in Alaska. Some of the attempts have been quite successful--the Mat-Su Valley represents some of this success. Alternately, there have been some spectacular failures--UAF's own Large Animal Research Station (LARS) might fall into this category. In this section, the students will explore livestock and agriculture in rural Alaska. Some of the questions we will pursue include:

1. what is the history of livestock and agricultural production in Alaska?
2. what kind of livestock and crops were raised here, and what was the success rate? What kinds of crops were raised, and what was the success? What is the current success rate for contemporary livestock and crop production? How has farming changed in Alaska?
3. what kinds of markets exist for Alaska agriculture and livestock? How do animal and agriculture products get to market?
4. is there potential for specialized agricultural and livestock products here? For example, do muskox and reindeer, and the specialized tundra-based plants that feed them, offer a potential boom for Alaska farmers? How about organic farming? Mushroom farming? Tree farming? Hemp and/or marijuana farming?
5. which communities benefit from Alaska-based farming? are the benefits of farming equitably distributed across Alaska?
6. what is the status of community-supported agriculture (CSAs) in Alaska?

In the photograph above, a newborn baby reindeer tests its legs under the watchful glare of its mother at the Large Animal Research Station (LARS) at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. This Alaska Dispatch article describes the reindeer farm, and asks for names for the new babies. http://www.alaskadispatch.com/article/20130403/uaf-asks-help-naming-newborn-reindeer-experiment-farm

Rural Collectives in Alaska and Beyond

During the 1960s through the 1980s, thousands of communal experiment dotted the American and Western European landscapes. Many of these communal experiments were quite radical in nature, challenging capitalist materialist values, patriarchy, confines of gender, agribusiness farming practices, notions of sexuality, even contemporary religious practices. Others were quite conventional, expanding traditional ideas about farming, spirituality, family and community life into a communal environment, but otherwise not challenging the existing status quo.

Although there were several rural collectives in Alaska, few survived for very long past their initial founding. And there were some astounding defeats. Elsewhere in rural America, several communal experiments thrive to this very day. In this section, students will curate online resources about rural communal and/or collective experiments, and share them.

The photo above is one of the structures from the Matanuska Colony, a 1930s Depression-era communal experiment funded by the US government. The barns, fields, other outbuildings, some of the families, and other elements of the Colony are visible today in this area just north of Anchorage.

The photo below is of Tamarack Knoll Community, founded a decade ago and still thriving in a rural area near Fairbanks. The Tamarack Knoll Community is an interesting example of modified form of intentional community, where individuals and individual groups can set up their own households in privately-owned dwellings on communally-owned land, while sharing at least a few evening meals and chores as a community. More and more, cooperative living groups are experimenting with alternative forms of decision-making, financial arrangements, and other matters of day-to-day life as a group.

Matters of gender, sexuality, race--and the organization of power around these matters--emerged early in the cooperative experiments of the 1960s-1980s. A key example of these types of communes are documented in the womyn's land movement, aka the lesbian land movement. Lesbian land collectives were my dissertation topic a decade ago. At one time, there were 200 lesbian land-based collectives in the US, but now there are probably fewer than a dozen that are truly cooperative and communal in their organization. The lesbian land movement founded a quarterly magazine that continues to publish, and now hosts blogs and other online resources for womyn (and, increasingly, others) who wish to share a life on land with others like themselves. The photo above shows women at an Oregon land trust at a board meeting.

Music, Art, & Performance in Rural Alaska

Rural Alaska is rich with cultural resources. Alaska Natives, white settlers, contemporary oilfield workers and homesteaders all engage in making art, social dancing, performing, and/or sharing music. Since statehood (1959), there have been a series of cultural revivals of different sorts. In this section, the students and I will share some of the art, music, and performance resources we discovered in rural Alaska. The photograph to the left was taken in Bethel in 2012 at a community fiddle dance. To read more about the dance, and the long tradition and upsurge in fiddle dances in rural Alaska, check out this article in the Anchorage Daily News: http://www.adn.com/2012/11/03/2681810/arriving-like-urban-sprawl-fiddle.html

Wildfires in rural Alaska

Summers are fire season in rural Alaska, especially Interior Alaska. This summer seems especially dramatic, as the one main highway running south out of Fairbanks was closed for a few days, and thick smoke commonly roils through the hills and valleys. Several evacuations have sent rural people scrambling for places to move their families, their pets, their household goods, vehicles and equipment, livestock, and sled dogs. Entire communities are blanketed with smoke, and some with ashes, making it difficult to breathe and triggering community-wide negative health effects. On this site, the students in Rural Sociology (SOC 301, Summer 2013, University of Alaska Fairbanks) will research and sociologically analyze wildfires in Alaska. Key questions that we will address include:

1. how are people and their communities affected by wildfire?
2. what are the social mechanisms that affect fire?
3. what are the policy implications of fire?
4. are some segments of society differentially affected by wildfire, e.g. what are the impacts of race/ethnicity, gender, social class, spatiality, age, and other markers of difference?
5. how are rural and other economies affected by fire?

Energy & Rural Alaska

Energy in Alaska. Here we are, sitting on some of the Earth's richest conventional energy sources: oil; natural gas; coal. In recent years, biomass and solar energy have been explored, both of which Alaska has ample stores. But energy is a double-edged sword, it seems. Development of oil, coal, and natural gas seems inherently plagued with the potential for catastrophic disasters: think of the Valdez oil spill, the debates about ANWR, and the recent oil train wreck in Canada for examples. The other side of that sword is money: there are riches to be had, massive untold wealth. Global oil corporation earn massive profits from energy exploitation in Alaska, while ordinary Alaskans pay some of the highest fuel costs in America. Cynics claim that the PFD--the share of the oil money the state gets that is shared with Alaskans every year--is nothing more than hush money, bribing

Alaskans not to closely examine the environmental degradation that accompanies oil development. Others note that without oil corporations, there would be no economy in Alaska: no university system, no roads, no electricity, no stores, no jobs, nothing but remote subsistence communities barely eeking out a living from the land. A normal personal would ask: where is reality?? The students in Rural Sociology (SOC 301 Summer 2013 at the University of Alaska Fairbanks) will research and analyze energy issues in rural Alaska. Key questions that we will address include:

1. how are people and their communities affected by the extraction of oil, natural gas, and coal?
2. what are the social mechanisms that shape how energy is produced in Alaska?
3. how are rural communities affected by the costs and availability of energy?
4. what are the policy implications of energy?
5. are some segments of society differentially affected by energy production and costs, e.g. what are the impacts of race/ethnicity, gender, social class, spatiality, age, and other markers of difference?
6. are there different, perhaps better ways of providing for Alaska's rural energy needs?

Floods in rural Alaska

Breakup in Alaska is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, when the ice goes out in the rivers, we know that winter is finally, finally over. But on the other hand, sometimes the ice goes out unevenly, with the ice jamming up in huge building-size jagged chunks that clog up downstream and cause massive flooding. The flooding can cause only minor problems, like having to patch roads. But sometimes the flooding causes severe problems, with homes being washed away, communities displaced, lives disrupted. At times entire village communities disappear in the water, causing untold grief and despair. The students in Rural Sociology (SOC 301, Summer 2013, University of Alaska Fairbanks) will research and analyze the issues of flooding in rural Alaska and share their insights on this blog. Key questions that we will address include:

1. how are people and their families and friends affected by floods?
2. what are the social mechanisms that affect floods?
3. how are communities affected by flooding?
4. what are the policy implications of flood?
5. are some segments of society differentially affected by flooding, e.g. what are the impacts of race/ethnicity, gender, social class, spatiality, age, and other markers of difference?

Here is a graphic contributed by Amelia that gives info on flood safety.