Bathsheba Demuth

Copies of Joan Naviyuk Kane’s book With Snow Pouring South Past the Window and Corinna Cook’s Permafrost is an Archive: And other Inheritances from the Alaska-Yukon borderlands

An exceptional Alaska lit mail day!

I’m heading to #AWP26 (my first AWP!) later this week, and am very excited about my travel reading.

Midway through the three feet of snow that came to Providence in the last 24 hours, overtaking the Blizzard of ‘78 record. My

Sheesh do I ever feel this!

Ooh I haven’t read it, but it sounds like I should!

A photo of a tapestry of a gray and white river cutting through yellow and green shrubs with green and blue and deep maroon hills behind. The hanger is blonde and dark wood in the shape of mountains, with cast salmon securing the tapestry to the hanger.

The world is so very bad, but this week we hung in our house a tapestry my mother wove, my father made the wooden hanger for with salmon-shaped hardware my brother cast out of copper, based on a photo I made on the middle fork of the Koyukuk River. It feels like the confluence of many homes.

That’s a great idea!

Footprints of Extraction | Hakai Magazine The Svalbard Archipelago was uninhabited until humans came searching for resources. A historian follows their tracks.

"Industry, for the growing European middle classes, first meant freedom from want—from the real tyrannies of hunger and cold—and then freedom to want. Consumption itself became a kind of liberty."

Beautifully about Svalbard and the world by @brdemuth.bsky.social

hakaimagazine.com/features/foo...

"Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait" by @brdemuth.bsky.social, Dean's Associate Professor at IBES and @brownhist.bsky.social, has been selected as the 2025-2026 Brown University Book Award 📕🏆 👏

Learn more: insite.browntextbook.com/BrownBookAward

I would add that many European ventures into the poles failed due to an inanity to appreciate Indigenous technology. Amundsen took note and it kept him alive, from not using horses to the calories needed (a stick of butter in your hot coca)

Hmm good question! “The Worst Journey in the World” has some good stuff on Antarctica, and “A Wretched and Precarious Situation” on the Arctic. Those are focused on European expeditions which are often quite a bit different than Indigenous ways of Arctic travel — happy to provide cites for those too

Gorgeous gorgeous cover!

I can endorse working with @greenleejw.bsky.social for maps if you’re looking! He helped with a whole series of custom maps for an edited volume on rivers coming out in about a year — all sorts of scales and details

Where the Language Changes ‘I am on the hunt for the Russian Empire, or what traces might still exist of its colonial enterprise.’ Bathsheba Demuth travels the Yukon river, following the history of the fur trade and the Nulato ...

@brdemuth.bsky.social's essay in @grantamag.bsky.social on time spent in the Yukon piecing together oral histories of the Russian empire. Read it to the end; no spoilers!

granta.com/where-the-la...

I’m glad it was helpful!

Thank you Surekha! That means so much

“I heard her say, ‘The love is there. The love is there. The love is there. Babe, the love is there. The love is there. The love is there.’” - Laureli Ivanoff

Black and white clipart sketch showing a dog team crossing a river or late with a setting or rising sun on the horizon.

Tanacross #Dene #Language #Alaska
Saa Dzé’edeex Dé’ "Winter Solstice"; literary when the sun divides

Wunenh Nach’ehjedh "December"

Nach’imbâal Dzeen "Christmas"; refers to an old custom of giving/receiving gifts at the darkest time of year.

Dzeen Chox "Christmas" post-gold rush term

Thank you Tina—hard to comprehend this

I’m so glad she’s safe!

I feel like this is the nightmare we all dread in the US — an active shooter in your community. Brown University is still in shelter in place 3 hours in, with 2 confirmed deaths, 8 in critical condition, and no shooter(s) in custody. One of my students had to run from the scene. Horrified.

Interesting— I’d be curious how it reads this year, given the rise in the abundance discourse that Jeff mentions

Thank you for posting! And to my co-authors @parriblue.bsky.social and Ellen Wohl

Thank you for all the suggestions in the replies! It’s really expanded this syllabus-in-progress

Oh this is excellent, thank you!

Ooh yes!

Ooh great suggestion thank you!

Yes!

This looks terrific thank you!

Ooh I love the idea of putting Smell Detectives in this mix! And Dunaway is def going on the syllabus

This looks terrific, thank you Fredrik!