Gathering participants in Fairbanks, Alaska, speak over the webcam to participants in Inuvik, Canada.

When the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act was signed into law in 1980 it had wide-ranging impacts on national wildlife refuges throughout Alaska. One element of this law recognized the dependence that many rural Alaskans have on wild-land resources rather than on a cash economy. To abide by this law, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge provides continuing opportunities for rural residents living in or near the Refuge to use plants, wildlife, and fish for food, shelter, fuel, clothing, and tools.

One way that the Refuge does this is by participating in the Arctic Borderlands Ecological Knowledge Coop, a partnership of communities, co-management groups, and government agencies in northwest Canada and northeast Alaska. The Borderlands Coop cooperatively monitors ecological health, the impacts of climate change, and the status of the Porcupine Caribou herd to ensure that rural residents can subsist on local, wild-land resources. Partners meet each year to discuss current conditions of the land and resources. This year’s gathering was scheduled for March 29th to 30th in the Northwest Territories village of Inuvik, Canada.  However, a new border regulation requiring Alaskans to carry passports to cross the Alaska-Canada border posed problems for Gathering organizers. They could not guarantee that Alaskan participants would be allowed to re-cross the US border to return home without passports.

To overcome this challenge, the organizers arranged to have portions of the meetings broadcast via web-cameras from the tiny village of Inuvik to the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. “It was novel for some of the elders to speak in Gwich’in over the internet and share what our people are seeing on the land” said the Coop President. “We were concerned that this might be a technical or computer disaster but it turned out pretty good—our first e-Gathering.”