If you missed the Grant-in-Aid webinar on May 3, you can now view the recording. Applications are due June 1.
The Alaska State Museum provides Alaska museums with funding to enhance museum services through the annual Grant-in-Aid (GIA) program. Mini-Grants and Regular Grants are available for projects scheduled to take place between September 2024 and June 30, 2025.
In a Ketchikan School Board meeting that focused on a massive budget shortfall, the Board also voted to keep a book in the high school library.
Superintendent Michael Robbins had already accepted the recommendation of a library review committee to retain the book “Red Hood” by Elana Arnold. But district policy allows instructional material challenges to then go before the School Board for a final say.
“Red Hood” is a 2020 novel that bills itself as “A dark, engrossing, blood-drenched tale of the familiar threats to female power — and one girl’s journey to regain it.”
A UAMN special exhibition exploring the human instinct to express thought through line, form, and color. It is an immersion in possibility and process – honoring and encouraging the practice of slowing down and spending time with an idea, an object, a place.
Perception, communication, and invention are explored through nature journals and cartoons, maps and scientific fieldnotes, architectural, art, and exhibit design – memory and sensory experience given form by the humble sketchbook.
See hundreds of sketches by engineers, artists, scientists, and Alaskans of all ages.
Create art and discover the benefits of sketching -- for everyone. Explore the exhibit media in the gallery and online.
Check out instructional videos with UAF art professor and cartoonist, Jamie Smith.
The Nolan Center is unveiling a new display this weekend featuring repatriated clan items that were returned to Wrangell last fall.
Objects in the display include xóots shákee.át, a bear headdress; tsax l'axhk'eit, a marmot mask; kéet shakee.át s'áaxhw, a killer whale hat (a replica); and gunakadeit s'eikdaakeit, a sea monster tobacco pipe.
The items were returned to Wrangell from the Thomas Burke Memorial Museum at the University of Washington.
A somewhat sunny and quite breezy Saturday didn’t dampen hundreds of Delta area residents’ enthusiasm to come out to the Delta Community Library to celebrate the annual Block Party and Basket of Books Silent Auction. The Delta Library Association Board is delighted to report that the event raised more than $17,000, which is the highest amount ever raised at the one-day event.
There is one last item at the library for silent auction – two round-trip train tickets on Alaska Railroad from Fairbanks to Anchorage. The donation was received too late to be included in Saturday’s event.
“People can bid on that at the library through May 21,” said Tiki Levinson, library director.
A historic artifact from the Rahr-West Art Museum [in Wisconsin] is going to Alaska.
A blanket that’s known as a Chilkat blanket has been in possession of the museum since it opened in the 1950s, and Executive Director Greg Vadney says there isn’t much information about its history.
A representative from the Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau, who will borrow the blanket, came to Manitowoc last Friday to retrieve it, and explain information about it.
It's getting a little crowded in the Chena Tool Library, so organizers are looking forward to the 6th annual tool swap on May 18 at Pioneer Park's Centennial Center for the Arts.
The Chena Tool Library is just like a library, only it lends tools for do-it-yourself projects. Fairbanks is filled with folks who do their own projects, from homebuilding to car repair to chicken raising. But not everyone can afford all the tools needed for these projects. Nor do they want to store them or even own them.
The Chena Tool Library is a great place to check out the needed tools and then return them.
Kris Capps, May 8, 2024. Fairbanks Daily News-Miner.
This annual community tradition celebrates reading and kicks off the library's Summer Discovery reading program. There will be community booths full of activities, live entertainment on the stage, and so much more.
Hear about the opening of the Salmon Walk, virtual and in-person museum visit options, and the museums’ YouTube channel. Erika Jayne Christian gives details.
The Delta Community Library was breezier and more exciting than usual last week. With Shona Hilton’s songs, stories, and crafts, it is usually a wonderful time for toddlers to interact and learn. However, every once in a while, we like to add some extra pizzazz to our gatherings.
Jan Wrigley brought the Wrigley Farm tractor and wagon to town, and that created quite a buzz at Story Hour. Groups of caregivers and children were briefed on safety after they cozied up on the cheerful, open-air, red wagon. Jan then took to the driver’s seat and pulled the groups around the city park.
While Wrigley was driving, Hilton was leading the groups in songs such as “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” and reading tractor-themed stories while the kids ate snacks. The event ended back at the library, where a tractor craft was created.
May’s issue of Alaska Economic Trends explores a question which is often the subject of historical research – the abandonment of Alaskan communities. The article’s author writes: “Alaska has more than 100 abandoned communities — from small encampments to towns that were once home to thousands — now devoid of physical evidence they ever existed or left as a collection of weathered buildings or ruins. Settlements have always come and gone, a cycle that continues today … While climate change and a global rural-to-urban migration trend are the modern pressures, most communities that disappeared over the past 150 years in Alaska succumbed to economic changes, forced relocations, war, natural disasters, accidents, environmental shifts, or disease.” The article explores these causes along with the “lifespans of three vacated historical Alaska towns that ended for very different reasons: Curry, York, and Portlock.”
Print copies of Alaska Economic Trends are available in State Publications Depositories as well as other libraries across the state.
The National Archives will broadcast sessions on using federal resources to do family history over five Tuesdays in May and June at 9 am Alaska Time.
May 21 Welcome from Dr. Colleen Shogan, Archivist of the United States; Passport Records: Passport Applications at the National Archives, 1790s–1925
May 28 After Their Service: Tracing the Lives of Native American Army Scouts
June 4 Captured German Records Related to American Prisoners of War During World War II
June 18 Alien Files (A-Files): Researching Immigrant Ancestors at the National Archives
June 25 World War II Enemy Alien Records Related to Japanese Americans at the National Archives; Closing Remarks
Topic descriptions, videos, and handouts are available at the 2024 Genealogy Series web page. We hope you will share this item with the genealogists in your communities, whether they’re beginners or experienced family historians.
New federal info guides for Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month (May 2024)
From our friends at the Government Publishing Office (GPO):
For Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Heritage Month, FDLP Resource Guides debuted two new guides:
For a journalist, it’s hard to imagine an entry on a public official’s calendar more enticing than four hours of woolly mammoth.
OK, it’s not actually that hard — entries like “bribe acceptance” and “V. Putin secret meeting” would also get me pretty excited. Nonetheless, it is an understatement to say that I was prettttttty curious about this item on the calendar of Doug Vincent-Lang — the guy who, as Alaska’s fish and game commissioner, would presumably retain authority and jurisdiction over anything related to that most charismatic of megafauna.
I was already vaguely aware of some Alaska-adjacent mammoth-related discussions happening in the realm of biotech. A company trying to bring them back from the dead, maybe? Russian scientists who envisioned a resurrected mammoth on a stretch of tundra somewhere in Siberia?
Nathaniel Herz, May 13, 2024. Alaska Beacon.
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