Crude Conversations

For years, Shyanne Beatty has wanted to move back home to Eagle, Alaska. It’s where everything started for her — her love for culture, language, art and music. Today, she sits on her property in Eagle, along the Yukon River, and she imagines herself as a young girl, running down the river banks with about 20 sled dogs or trapping marten out at 40 Mile or walking to school, singing to herself to ward off any curious wildlife. Reflec...

Mario Chalmers is part of a small group of Alaskans to be drafted to the NBA, including guys like Carlos Boozer and Trajan Langdon. He’s won championships at every level: Two high school championships, one NCAA championship — the one where his 3-pointer put the game into overtime, with his team taking the win — and two NBA championships. He was in the NBA for nine seasons — seven years for the Miami Heat, one for the Memphis Grizzl...

Angela Gonzalez is an artist and a writer, and through her beadwork, her blog — the Athabascan Woman Blog — and the Fish Camp Barbie dioramas she creates, she shares her heritage. She says that it’s all a reflection of the way she grew up. Fish camp was a big part of that. As a kid, that’s where she spent most of her summers, about 16 miles from her home in Huslia, along the Koyukuk River. While the adults were harvesting the fish,...

In this one, Cody talks to Robert Stark. He’s a former army infantryman and the author of Warflower, a book about his upbringing in Alaska and his time in the military. His upbringing was a turbulent one — his dad was absent, his mom struggled with addiction, his brother spent time in prison and his step-dad is serving life in prison for murder. He says he was known as the kid with the family of degenerates — people who drank alcoh...

In this one, Cody talks to Paralympic sit-skier Andrew Kurka. From the very beginning, he was pushing his limits. He was the first sit-skier to ride down Christmas Chute at Alyeska, an in-bounds run with a 45-degree pitch that narrows to about 15-feet. And he’s never been afraid to get hurt. He’s broken his back, his ankles, his wrists, ribs, arm, femur. For him, fear doesn’t factor into his process. When he’s pushing out of the ga...

In this one, Cody talks to Kaitlin Armstrong. She’s the host of The Alaska Myth, a podcast that deconstructs the stories created during the Russian settlement and European colonization of Alaska that began in the mid-1700s. Utopian settler stories, stories of the rugged outdoors, ones of monetary opportunity and ones of lawlessness. These stories — often embellished or completely fabricated — have informed the Alaskan identity and ...

In this one, Cody talks to professional basketball player Travante Williams. He says that everything in his life started with the environment he grew up in, in East Anchorage. There was good and there was bad. However, at times, the bad seemed to overshadow the good. His family, and many other people he grew up around and even looked up to, struggled with addiction and were in and out of prison. So, he had a fear of falling into th...

In this one, Cody talks to professional poker player Adam Hendrix. He learned to play poker when he was a kid, at his grandma’s house in Homer, Alaska. Every time he would visit, he’d play penny poker with his aunts and uncles, but what really got him interested in it was the first time he watched the ESPN World Series of Poker Main Event coverage. It was filled with these unique characters — boisterous and stone-faced — sometimes ...

Kristin Alford is a futurist and the director of the Museum of Discovery, or MOD., in South Australia. She says that MOD.’s main objective is to showcase innovative research that imagines multiple futures. This idea of imagining multiple futures involves anticipating where society and nature might be headed based on past and current trends. She says that it’s about understanding and recognizing opportunities, risks and downsides, a...

The premise of this conversation is based on a question that Aaron Leggett — the president of the Native Village of Eklutna and the Senior Curator of Alaska History and Indigenous Culture at the Anchorage Museum — and Cody are curious about: What happens to Alaska when oil is no longer economically viable for the economy of the state? Aaron says that his hope for the future is that people will have a better understanding about the ...

Until recently, Lizzy Bakker was the senior exhibition maker at NEMO Science Museum in Amsterdam. NEMO is all about interacting with science and technology in order to better understand the world around us, to make its visitors curious about the mechanisms that shape their lives. It turns out, exhibition design conveys a lot. Research carried out by NEMO found that if an exhibition has an unsustainable look and feel to it — ultimat...

Anne May Olii is the Director of the largest Sámi museum in Norway, RiddoDuottarMuseat. The museum manages photographs, art and information on Sámi cultural heritage. Anne May says that the museum is thinking 100, 200 years into the future, about how what they’re documenting today will affect and inform Sámi people in the future. For example, the vitality of reindeer husbandry — something the Sámi people have been practicing for ge...