MarilynSigman: Entangled

The COVID pandemic and the cancellation of a traveling exhibit provided me with an unexpected opportunity to work with my local museum – the Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska – to co-curate an exhibit about natural history collecting in the local area. Museum curator Savanna Bradley and I selected objects from the 24,000+ specimens in the museum’s natural history collections to illustrate and explore the theme of shifting baselines in societal attitudes and museum practices on the collection, curation, and uses of natural history specimens. The exhibit opened on July 9 with COVID precautions in place and ran through September.

The exhibit focused on the “western” museum tradition that began as private “cabinets of curiosities” owned by European aristocrats. These became the nucleus of national public museums which received the scientific specimens collected by Russian and other European naturalists who first reached Alaska in the late 18th century through “voyages of discovery” by colonizing nations. After the U.S. purchased Alaska, American naturalists and scientists organized collecting expeditions on behalf of U.S. national museums to the territory of Alaska, including to Kachemak Bay, in the late 19th century. The Pratt’s collections began with the donations of private collections in the 1950s and they now serve the mission of a place-based community museum. Savanna, a talented artist, provided whimsical drawings of the “cabinets” typical of museum displays of different eras and additional artwork to tie the displays together.We gave museum visitors opportunities to ponder the future of natural history museums, as attitudes have shifted toward conservation of species once collected in large numbers and collections are beginning to serve as baselines to monitor changes related to a rapidly-changing climate.

As we were developing the exhibit during a period of heightened attention to racist and colonial aspects of institutions, including museums, we decided it was important that the exhibit include an acknowledgement of the broader context of the western museum tradition as one rife with colonialism, racism, and misrepresentation. I also wrote an exhibit guide “Diving Deeper” to provide this broader context, with emphasis on the Indigenous knowledge and languages that were largely ignored until relatively recently and cultural aspects of scientific and common naming conventions.

Exhibit-related programs included:
– A First Friday virtual event in September featuring readings from my book and one by local author Nancy Lord from her book Green Alaska about the famous Harriman Expedition to Alaska in 1899: https://www.facebook.com/prattmuseum/videos/922866088122918/?comment_id=922907694785424&notif_id=1599278252239718&notif_t=comment_mention&hc_location=ufi  
– An on-going radio series “Sound Collections” was kicked off by my interview about my own collections in my “home museum” followed by interviews of a diverse group of other local collectors.

http://www.prattmuseum.org/education/sound-collections/

A veteran biologist and longtime Alaska resident explores the region’s Indigenous and natural history.

In this debut volume of nature essays, Sigman applies the ecology concept of “shifting baselines” – essentially, establishing a new sense of normal after a significant change-to her own life and to Homer, Alaska, and the surrounding Kachemak Bay, where she has resided for many years. The book’s pieces draw on the author’s work as a researcher and environmental educator. They focus on the connections between the changing populations of fish, mollusks, and marine mammals and the shifts in the human population, both the region’s Indigenous communities and the waves of settlers who have migrated from the United States mainland to Alaska for more than a century. The essays are both informative and enjoyable reads, as Sigman does an excellent job of conveying scientific topics to nonspecialist readers. “In the Spirit of the Lamp” shows how the prehistory of a location is deeply connected to its present. In “The Silver Horde,” the author makes an effective comparison between artificially breeding salmon and driving a Prius, each solving one problem while contributing to another. The prose is vivid (“Parents exchanged nest duties with courteous butler-like bows before the
stay-at-home mom or dad flew off to forage along the north shore”), and the essays provide a clear sense of place and belonging. Readers will discover that Alaska’s environmental problems are complex and layered, with competing interests vying for supremacy and outcomes that are clear only in the long term-halibut overfishing, for instance, or the challenges of managing salmon hatcheries. “The Bidarki Story” is one of the collection’s strongest essays, following a graduate student’s shellfish research that succeeds by treating the Indigenous bidarki harvesters as scientific partners rather than passive subjects. Readers who have never been to Alaska will come away with a clear sense of the landscape and the wildlife and people who inhabit it as well as an appreciation for the work of ecologists.

A well-written and deeply intriguing collection of essays on humans and nature in Alaska. – Kirkus Review

I was thrilled to learn that my book Entangled: People and Ecological Change in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay was selected for this award given to one book a year for distinguished natural history writing by the John Burroughs Association! It joins a list of awardees that began in 1926 with William Beebe’s Pheasants of the World and which includes Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, Barry Lopez’ Of Wolves and Men, Loren Eiseley’s The Firmament of Time, and the many other natural history writers who have inspired me in my writing and conservation efforts.  The inspirational Alaskan writers who have received the award include Adolf Murie (A Naturalist in Alaska, 1963), Victor Sheffer (A Year in the Life of a Whale, 1970), the (sadly and recently) late Richard Nelson (The Island Within, 1991) and Sherry Simpson, my teacher and mentor in the UAA Creative Writing and Literary Arts MFA program, for Dominion of Bears in 2015.

The award luncheon originally scheduled on April 6, 2020, at the Yale Club in New York City was postponed due to the COVID pandemic and is tentatively re-scheduled for April, 2021.

“How have we developed our collective salmon narratives, what are these narratives obscuring, and how can we bring these shadows into the light?” This was the call to artists and writers issued by the Alaska Humanities Forum and Alaska Salmon Fellows in March, 2018. “As Alaskans,” the call continued, “we typically tell positive salmon narratives and we often neglect the matching dark sides of our stories, like the struggles for sustainability, equity, and resource management.” The literary submissions and visual art selected will be part a traveling Salmon Shadows exhibit, with publication to follow in  FORUM magazine. 

The “Stray Hopes” essay I submitted that was accepted was an excerpt from the “The Silver Horde” chapter in my book Entangled on the history of Alaskan salmon fisheries and management. The dark side of the story told in “Stray Hopes”  is the potential for ecological consequences on stream and marine ecosystems that shadows the faith placed on hatcheries to boost Alaska salmon production.

Robert Hannon interviewed me in Fairbanks and added the interview to his 2018 Earth Day podcast in between conversations with researcher Kimberly Maher on the effects of climate change on birch sap, and with Fairbanks singer, educator, and environmentalist Susan Grace. My conversation with Robert begins about 14 minutes in the podcast at https://northernsoundings.com/2018/05/01/earth-day/.

March 9th 1:32 am | Christina Whiting   

Author explores ecological, historical and personal change

By Kat Sorenson, Kenai Peninsula Clarion                              Posted February 28, 2018

“I walked the beaches, attuning my meanderings to the tidal cycles. The rocks lurking beneath the water were exposed by the ebbing tides, and they teemed with life in glistening swaths. The many-legged and shelled creatures clung to their crevices and the last drops of moisture until the tide returned. I walked the forest trails when the plant emerged, green-legged and the flowers shifted from violets in spring to a panoply of blossoms during the summer and later as bursts of red and yellow marked their dying back under the spruce trees.”      — Marilyn Sigman

During her eleven years working as a naturalist guide at the Center for Alaska Coastal Studies in Homer, author Marilyn Sigman started looking deeper into what was going on around her.

“I became really concerned about climate change and how it was changing a place I was really attached too — Kachemak Bay,” Sigman said.

This affection and worry spurred Sigman to write “Entangled: People and Ecological Change in Alaska’s Kachemak Bay,” in which she weaves the history of the Kachemak Bay with her and her family’s own journey. Within the pages, history, science and narratives tangle into one.

“I could really see a lot of change in the places that I had been doing all my work,” said Sigman, who spent a decade working within the bay in many different aspects, from ecotourism to school field trips. “I was trying to find a way to think about climate change without being sad, without knowing what to do, so I thougt it would be interesting to look at the whole past of how people, who have been living in Kachemak Bay for over 9,000 years, have gone through climate and environmental changes.”

In the book, Sigman explores how the ecosystem impacted people, and also how people impacted the climate, how the human world shifted over to altering the ecosystem.

“I don’t think it’s a belief,” Sigman said of climate change. “I just accept it’s happening. The evidence is compelling, but I also don’t assume that the reader agrees. I go with the idea that this is what the evidence shows. It’s always changing. The environment changes and people have to respond, and they may be causing it.”

Through her writing, Sigman points to Alaska’s natural resources, and how over time, they have drawn people to the area and sent them away, creating a story of “settlement and displacement.”

“Something that became one of the themes of the book was that I started looking at my own family,” Sigman said. “I’m a third-generation immigrant and all of my ancestors came to America. Looking back at why people leave places, and why they stay in places and thinking about how when things are changing and people are asking ‘what are we going to do,’ it becomes interesting to look back at my own family and see how the environment impacts their decisions.”

Sigman said she learned a lot, and was able to focus more on her writing, while in the University of Alaska Anchorage Creative Writing and Literary Writing Program. She was able to hone her creative skills, and become more deft in her interpretation of scientific studies.

“It was an evolution of being a creative writer, but keeping the non-fiction aspect with science and history,” she said. “I had to learn the craft of that more literary and creative writing… And when you’re writing about science, you’re translating but scientists are critical about the way you interpret their science… I was always in the back of my mind wondering what the scientist would say.”

Sigman balances what a scientist would say with her own thoughts with mastery, gleaning lessons of how people interact with the world around them, starting in Homer.

“Marilyn Sigman unites her ‘science brain’ with her naturalist’s heart and an insatiable curiosity to bring us a beautifully written account of human and ecological connections,” said Nancy Lord, author of ‘Beluga Days.’ “Part memoir, part natural history, part quest into understanding the nature of change.”

Sigman will be speaking at Resurrect Art Coffee House Gallery in Seward on Friday at 6 p.m. She will also be at the Soldotna Public Library on March 6 at 5:30 p.m.

Reach Kat Sorensen at kat.sorensen@peninsulaclarion.com

New book looks at the history of people and ecological change in Kachemak Bay

On January 9, 2018, Outside Magazine published the article Women Writing about the Wild: 25 Essential Authors. The list spanned centuries – from Susan Fenimore Cooper’s naturalist writings in 1850 that were consulted by Thoreau to Rachel Carson in the 1950s to Terry Tempest Williams, Ann Zwinger, poet Camille Dungy, and a slew of other historical and current writers. Not a single Alaskan women writer was included, however.

I am, of course, biassed, but I want to add my shout-out to the three Alaskan women writers who mentored me into the genre of creative non-fiction.

The first is Nancy Lord who introduced me to Creative Nonfiction in a class she taught at the Kachemak Bay campus of the University of Alaska Anchorage in Homer. I had other opportunities to learn from her in her writer/instructor role in the annual Kachemak Bay Writers Conference and in the UAA Creative Writing and Literary Arts MFA program. As a writing teacher, she has the admirable ability to deliver incisive and dead-on critiques calmly and clearly, a model she facilitates for peer reviews among “emerging” writers.

Nancy is who I want to be when I grow up – an author who lives in Homer, Alaska, (the place I am working my way back to in order to retire there) and combines fierce and uncompromising environmental and moral activism with excellent science-based nonfiction writing.  After demonstrating her mastery of the personal essay in Fishcamp: Life on an Alaskan Shore and Green Alaska: Dreams from a Far Coast (based on her participation in the 100th-anniversary reprise of the 1899 Harriman Expedition to Alaska), she turned to fiction and short stories in The Man Who Swam With Beavers. She then wrote the long-form Beluga Days: Tracking the Endangered White Whale to examine the plight of beluga whales in Cook Inlet where she and her long-term partner, Ken Castner, have their summer fish camp.

Rock, Water, Wild: An Alaskan Life compiled a decade of essays into a collection that came out in 2009, in the midst of her tenure as Alaska’s Writer Laureate from 2008-2010.  “I have written largely about Alaska, in this book and others,” she wrote in the Preface, “not only because Alaska is my home and thus the place I know best but because it’s the last place in America that big enough and wild enough to hold intact landscapes and the dreams that are so absent from almost everywhere else.” Writing about Alaska’s “remarkable beauty and examples of the  visible linkages between natural systems, history, and the present,” Nancy offered the hope “that this book will encourage readers to search their own home places for some of that beauty and connectedness, and understanding” so that they “might protect and even restore what they love.”

Her essayistic writings often involve “ride-alongs” or rather, “hike-alongs” with scientists in the manner of John McPhee, demonstrated by the essay “Fossiliferous” she wrote about dinosaur research in Denali National Park when she was the writer-in-resident there one summer. Her 2011 book, Alaska Early Warming: Crisis and Response in the Climate-Changed North,  was based on re-visiting places and people she had first encountered in western and northern Alaska several decades earlier. Not content with the response to the urgency of the message of the impacts of the rising arm of the hockey stick graph of CO2 emissions, she undertook the writing of a novel to reach a broader audience. pH, published six years after Early Warming, is about, of all things, ocean acidification. Readers are hooked and carried along, as well as effortlessly educated about chemistry that usually evokes shudders, with a well-plotted storyline about intrigue within the scientific community and its intersection with an artist.

As she worked on writing her novel, Nancy was invited to edit the anthology Made of Salmon: Alaska Stories from the Salmon Project. The anthology, published in  2016,  includes essays by twenty-one of Alaska’s best essayists, including Ernestine Hayes, Seth Kantner, and Heather Lende;  and thirty-plus more personal stories by Alaskans about their relationships with salmon.  “This is the way of Alaskans and salmon,” she wrote in the Introduction. “Alaskans . . . are quite literally made of salmon. The protein, omega oils, and calcium pass from salmon into our bodies and bones, our good health. Beyond that, our families and friendships and communities are all made of salmon – through the ways we work together, eat together, and share not just salmon but common values. Follow the circles out, and it’s easy to see that Alaska itself, our home place, is to a great degree made of salmon.”

I also knew Nancy in her role as the Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Alaska Conservation Foundation during the time I also served as a Trustee. She served on the Board for seven years and as the Chair for two, somehow balancing her writing life with her huge contributions of time and wisdom to the organization.

In future posts, I’ll feature Sherry Simpson and the late Eva Saulitis, as well as some of the Alaskan women whose writing I became acquainted with through the UAA Creative Writing and Literary Arts MFA program.