Identifying the Tools of Alaska Native subsistence in Metlakatla for a Just Transition

Tvetene is a PhD student at the University of California Berkeley

The problem I seek to address is developing renewable energy for the Metlakatla Indian Community that is culturally appropriate. During the previous energy transition to oil and gas, much infrastructure was built without consideration for Native relationships with land on which the infrastructure was built. Subsistence hunting, fishing, and gathering is a core aspect of Alaska Native culture as it connects us to our lands and for a Just Transition to occur, our subsistence ways of life need to be supported. Our subsistence relies on modern technologies to occur, but this is often not acknowledged especially in designing and building infrastructure upon which these technologies are dependent on.

         My proposed solution is documentation of existing Alaska Native subsistence hunting, fishing, and gathering practices in the Metlakatla Indian Community focusing on the tools that enable these practices and maintains the community’s Indigenous Knowledge. This documentation will be in the form of transcribed interviews with community experts and field notes from joining in subsistence harvesting, both of which will be handed off to the tribe for use as they see fit.

This documentation will serve as the basis for a public report identifying how subsistence is presently connected to the primarily oil and gas energy system. This report will hopefully prove useful to the tribe for renewable energy development that perpetuates subsistence practice rather than hindering it.

         This solution should assist the Metlakatla Indian Community in developing renewable energy that is appropriate for the community’s environmental and cultural needs, which are top priorities of the tribe. This solution will primarily advocate for the community experts who are generally the heaviest subsistence harvesters in Alaska Native communities and tend to distribute traditional foods across the community to those who are less able to harvest such as elders, working parents, the poor, and unlucky harvesters. These community experts have unique skillset and knowledges of their environments enabled by existing tools and technologies to conduct subsistence harvests, and this work will hopefully highlight what specific tools and technologies are necessary to continue subsistence and identify how renewable energy will power them. This solution is ultimately about being a seed for beginning to see how the unique culture in Metlakatla can be preserved through an energy transition.

         This solution inherently is coming from the community experts whose knowledge and practices are being documented with permission and the goal towards renewable energy made explicit. This work requires relationship building with many people in the community, providing them time to judge my skills and intentions before any interviews are conducted with community experts. If the community approves of my intent and methods, they’ll direct me to the community experts who then I share a summary of what I hope to interview about, how they would like the interview documented, and who will ultimately control that documentation after this solution is made. Respect of the community experts and their knowledge is prioritized above all else, as would be necessary in ethical documenation.

         A byproduct of documenting Indigenous Knowledge is capturing present and past stories of the land and people of Metlakatla. Speaking from my own community, I’ve found inherent value hearing the stories recorded of my now passed elders speaking Ahtna, telling hunting stories, and generally describing their experiences and lives. This work would provide that opportunity for future generations to hear about the stories of their own ancestors, much like I and other Alaska Native youth have heard from ours who have been interviewed.

I was born and raised in the Native Village of Cantwell Alaska picking berries, hunting moose, and walking the land. I understand subsistence, which is why I knew this is an important solution to work on when I joined an engineering team designing a tidal renewable energy system for use in Metlakatla’s waters. In addition to my engineering work on the tidal energy system, I have dedicated time to learning about decolonized methods of learning from the community to best address how this system and other renewable energy systems can support Alaska Native subsistence.

From this start, I was able to introduce myself, my team, and our work to the Metlakatla Indian Community (MIC) Tribal Council. They’ve given permission for us to test our system in their waters and for me to conduct interviews and engage with the community for this solution. I have been to Metlakatla twice so far, once for a week during Founders Day, an important celebration of the founding of the reservation, to introduce myself in-person to people I’ve met virtually and meet folks in the community. I returned for two months in fall of 2024 to better know the community, introduce myself to the tribal council in-person, meet people, hear their stories, interview community experts, walk their island, and help in some subsistence.

I conducted a pilot project in my home community of Yedatene na’ (The Native Village of Cantwell) exploring this relationship between subsistence and energy over the summer of 2023. This was an excellent opportunity for me to practice my full methodology in relatively short order because I already knew who and had existing relationships with the important community experts in Cantwell to interview. In addition, I already knew what subsistence is like in Cantwell, having grown up participating, and didn’t have to spend as much time developing foundational knowledge of the community and could quickly dive into my research questions. This let me practice my interview skills, how to introduce my project to people concisely, navigate data management firsthand, and do analysis. I was able to identify valuable themes in this relationship between energy and subsistence, particularly the importance of modern transportation to subsistence and how it connects to Indigenous Knowledge, that I hope to build on further in my dissertation. Most importantly, I got to contribute to the renewable energy development for a Just Transition in my own village.

I face financial barriers returning to the community, paying for housing, and paying interviewees for their time and Indigenous Knowledge expertise.

My connection to the community is professional and a shared Alaska Native experience, but I am not from this community and am only interested in doing this work with ongoing permission from the tribe and the community members who I’ve met so far. I am driven to see renewable energy be built on Alaska Native land that serves Alaska Native communities. I’ve gotten to learn a lot about Metlakatla in the past few years, I see that the community and its leadership wants to get renewable energy built for their community. I would like to support their endeavors however I can and am welcome by the community.

This solution is innovative by using Decolonized methods to learn from Indigenous Knowledge focused on infrastructure and technology design and planning for future renewable energy. This is an underutilized approach in infrastructure planning that I hope in this work will support more engineering and policy learning from Indigenous Knowledge.

I hope this solution informs and supports the ongoing renewable energy development in Metlakatla. This report would be one of many the tribe needs to make important decisions on where to build infrastructure, who will manage it, who it will impact, how it will benefit their community, win funding opportunities, and educate outside experts who will be coming into the community.

The impact goals for my solution I see in the recorded stories delivered to the tribal archive and interviewees for their descendants to listen to and learn from. The tribe is currently putting together their archive and it’d be nice to contribute to their collection from the outset. 

In addition, the report I hope will identify what these indicators are for successful renewable energy transition in rural Alaska for Alaska Native people. The amount of chest freezers powered by new wind turbines. Expanding the amount of diesel displaced by electrifying outboard motors on the skiffs used by people for hunting and fishing. This documentation and report I hope will show what outcomes from energy development, from source to use, will matter for preserving Alaska Native culture.

The core technology for this documentation is audio recording, the physical instrument that is actually capturing people’s stories for me to listen in the future alongside future generations listening to their family of the past. However, all the tools and technologies that enable modern Alaska Native subsistence are really core to this solution. The outboard motors, the all-terrain-vehicles, the chest freezers, and the chainsaws. These are the tools and technologies that pervade modern subsistence.

Cantwell and Metlakatla, Alaska

1 full-time

2 years