Palmer’s city council is asking Alaska’s attorney general to determine whether certain books violate state obscenity laws — and whether city librarians could be arrested for letting minors check out those books.

The request was sent Tuesday to Attorney General Treg Taylor in a letter signed by Palmer Mayor Steve Carrington and approved by the city council last month.

The letter comes after City Attorney Sarah Heath in late February advised the council to ask for direction rather than remove challenged books from city library shelves, a step she warned could open the city to a civil rights lawsuit. Officials said they also hope to provide support to city librarians following a call last year for their arrest.

Amy Bushatz, April 16, 2024. ADN.

In celebration of its 25th anniversary, the Petersburg Humane Association (PHA) has filled the window of Petersburg Rexall Drug with all kinds of donations for an on-line silent auction – from a full-day fishing trip for four to handmade crochet dog sweaters.

The Clausen Museum, in recognition of all the wonderful things PHA has done to help Petersburg's animal population throughout the years, went through their archives and created an exhibit: Petersburg's Pets of the Past: A photographic journey through the years celebrating love and companionship between local people and their pets.

Lizzie Thompson, April 11, 2024. Petersburg Pilot.

The Alutiiq Museum has added 11 watercolor portraits of 19th-century Alutiiq/Sugpiaq people to its collections. Created by Sugpiaq artist Cheryl Lacy, the set reinterprets watercolor paintings made by Mikhail Tikhanov, a Russian artist from Saint Petersburg who visited Kodiak in 1818. It is titled Our Ancestors. Lacy’s paintings capture the faces and clothing of Kodiak’s Native people and add scenic backgrounds. Her work transforms scientific illustrations painted on blue backgrounds into images that bring Alutiiq ancestors to life. A $15,500 grant from the Alaska Art Fund, administered by Museums Alaska with support from Rasmuson Foundation, paid for the commission.

“Tikhanov’s portraits are some of the oldest images of our ancestors,” said Alutiiq Museum Executive Director April Laktonen Counceller. “He painted individuals in great detail, capturing their facial features, clothing, hairstyles, tattoos, jewelry, and tools. He even recorded some of the people’s names and the places they were from. Unfortunately, many of his paintings show the same person from two perspectives—a front view and a side view—as if they were scientific specimens. They are an artifact of the colonial era.”

To remove the colonial perspective but preserve the faces of Alutiiq ancestors, the museum commissioned Lacy to create new paintings. Staff members provided her with photographs of landscapes tied to the homes of Tikhanov’s subjects. It took Lacy just five months to create the set. She restyled each portrait, combining front and side views of the same person into a three-quarter view.

April 16, 2024. Alaska Native News.

It’s a safe bet that Aren Gunderson’s Toyota Tundra is the only one in Fairbanks that has had its bed filled with a Siberian tiger.

Gunderson, who manages the mammal collection at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, recently accepted a dead, frozen, 500-pound former resident of the Alaska Zoo in Anchorage outside the Fairbanks museum recently.

“It filled the 7-foot truck bed,” he said.

Ned Rozell, April 6, 2024. ADN.

Angela Schmidt, Film Archivist at the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library at UAF, speaks about uses of archival films in research and shows users how to access films through the Library's databases, catalogs and websites.

Live jazz, superhero costumes and a silent auction all come together this Saturday at the Golden Eagle Saloon to support the Ester library. Badger Street Jazz will provide groovy smooth live tunes for the night starting at 9 p.m. with special guest musicians appearing throughout the evening.

Attendees are invited to dress as their favorite "superhero, sidekick, Jazz Cat, Vamp, or Lounge Lizard." While people dance the night away they can also bid on silent auction items donated by local businesses.

April 11, 2024. Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.

Stronger Together / Kammanatut Atausigun / Iknaqataghaghluta Qerngaamta: Bering Strait Communities Respond to the COVID-19 Pandemic

Edited by Amy Phillips-Chan
with contributions from RB Smith and Carol Gales

A collection of first-person narratives offering a vivid, nuanced look at the lived and shared experiences of Bering Strait communities in the COVID-19 era, Stronger Together is a unique collaboration between the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum in Nome, Alaska, and over forty community members, artists, and poets from across the Bering Strait region.

Edited by Amy Phillips-Chan, director of Alaska State Libraries, Archives, and Museums. From 2015 to 2022 she served as the director of the Carrie M. McLain Memorial Museum in Nome, Alaska, on the traditional homeland of the Bering Strait Inupiat. She is honored to partner with communities and organizations on collaborations that foster the coproduction of knowledge regarding the rich history and cultural heritage of Alaska.

Sealaska Heritage Institute (SHI) has published a book on the musings, art and wisdom of master Haida craftsman Robert Davidson, one of the greatest Northwest Coast artists of our time.

The book, “Art of the Northwest Coast and Beyond,” offers Davidson’s teachings embedded in powerful messages, which go beyond art instruction to offer advice about daily life. The volume is punctuated with stunning samples of work by Davidson, who learned Northwest Coast art by studying the creations of old masters held by museums throughout North America and Europe.

“The wise lessons he offers through his writings are jewels learned and conveyed from the art of the ancient masters and from the wisdom of our ancestors,” wrote SHI President Rosita Wor, Ph.D., in the foreword for the book. “We thought it important that they be compiled in a format that could be widely available to artists, students and the public.”

During the regularly scheduled meeting of the Matanuska Susitna Borough School District (MSBSD) on April 17, 2024, which was held at Butte Elementary School, the MSBSD accepted the Library Citizen’s Advisory Committee (LCAC) recommendations to The School Board commissioned a Library Citizen Advisory Committee (LCAC) recommendations from their March 28, 2024, the meeting, which finalized recommendations related to five additional titles.

The LCAC unanimously voted 11-0 that one book, ‘Ugly Love,’ met the elements of criminal obscenity under Alaska Law, and additionally, another book, ‘A Court of Mist and Fury,’ in “a near unanimous vote of 8 to 1 (with two pending votes),” met the elements of criminal obscenity under Alaska Law. The LCAC recommended removal and the school board voted

The LCAC also advised that three titles might meet the elements of criminal obscenity under Alaska Law. These titles were ‘Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West,’ ‘A Court of Thorns and Roses,’ and ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.’ The LCAC recommended these titles to be remanded to the MSBSD administration for a final decision if the books were ‘obscene’ and/or whether to restrict access to the title.

Katie Stavick, April 17, 2024. Frontiersman.

In 2017, a delegation from the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska flew to the Mile High City to meet with officials from the Denver Art Museum.

The dozen tribal members came to discuss the return of a 170-year-old wooden house partition, painted by a master Indigenous artist. The panels — 67 inches tall, 168 inches wide — illustrate the story of how a raven taught the Tlingit to fish.

The delegation told the museum that this screen never should have left Southeast Alaska and belonged home with its people under a 1990 federal law designed to repatriate objects of cultural significance to Native Americans.

Sam Tabachnik, April 7, 2024. ADN/The Denver Post.

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently published a Science & Technology Spotlight called Combating Deepfakes (GAO-24-107292, March, 2024). According to GAO, “Deepfakes are videos, audio, or images that have been manipulated using artificial intelligence (AI), often to create, replace, or alter faces or synthesize speech. They can seem authentic to the human eye and ear.”

This two-page handout explores how deepfakes are currently used, how they can be detected, and asks some policy questions that may be of interest to lawmakers and concerned citizens.

In the late 1980s, Ray Troll was living in Ketchikan, slowly establishing himself as an artist obsessed with the natural world and possessed with a boundless sense of humor. Inspired by the annual return of salmon to nearby Ketchikan Creek and intrigued by their life cycles, Troll had recently come up with a drawing of two of the fish, coupled with the words “Let’s Spawn.” It was, he said, “a euphemism for the dance of life.”

Around the same time, a Troll friend and fellow artist, Juneau-based William Spear, had begun selling enamel pins of his paintings. He suggested that the two collaborate, with Troll providing a piece that could be sold as wearable art to tourists traveling through Southeast Alaska.

Digging through his work, Troll returned to his salmon drawing, changed the caption to “Spawn Till You Die,” tweaked the image and offered it to Spear. “I did a very reduced version of it for the pin,” he recalled. “But the pen and ink drawing, I made it into a T-shirt. And the rest is kind of history.”

In the fall of 2020, I installed a municipal clock in Anchorage, Alaska. Although my clock was digital, it soon deviated from other timekeeping devices. Within a matter of days, the clock was hours ahead of the smartphones in people’s pockets. People figured something was awry.

But the clock wasn’t defective. It was just unconventionally regulated: I calibrated the flow of time to coincide with the flow of glacial rivers. Impacted by climate change, the rivers were flowing faster than in the past. Or from the perspective of the rivers, everything else was happening more slowly.

As I wrote in a previous Nautilus article, “Philosophy Is a Public Service,” my training is in philosophy, which I practice in public. My ambition is to engage as broad a population as possible in the realm of ideas, encouraging people to explore the world in which we live, and to chart possible futures for our cities, our environment, and our planet. I believe that collective reflection and anticipation are necessary for our survival—especially in this period of ecological upheaval—and that philosophy needs to be a public service as much as cartography and timekeeping.

Jonathon Keats, April 11, 2024. Nautilus.