Eating Muktuk
Anna, swaddled in her white hospital blanket, was a starry-eyed creature in my arms. Her birth in Utqiaġvik (Barrow), Alaska, became the catalyst for a lasting transformation of my worldview. At twenty-four, I was a boy reframed as a function of her arrival. Life 330 miles inside the Arctic Circle looks exactly as one might imagine: sunless winters where stars are pinholes in a silky frigid dark, and summers of eternal sun. Yet, beneath this extreme geography lies a complex social fabric I never felt fully authorized to describe.
To understand Alaska is to understand the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA). Unlike the reservation system of the Lower 48, ANCSA organized Indigenous people into corporations. Paul Ongtooguk’s Annotated ANCSA notes that this was a deliberate attempt at self-determination, moving away from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) which had often served resource industries over tribal interests. By becoming corporations, Native communities claimed a structure of power that the state recognized and feared.
Regional corporations like Arctic Slope Regional Corporation (ASRC) aren't just economic engines; they are shields. They invest in housing, healthcare, and education, linking land and identity structurally. In Utqiaġvik, governance isn't just about policy; it's about subsistence, seasonal knowledge, and relational authority. ANCSA is a tool—a strategic inversion—for shaping futures on Indigenous terms.
My own integration into this world was varied. I was a night-shift grocer, a CDL-licensed tour guide for the Top of the World Hotel, and a special education assistant. I once attempted an ecotourism business funded by ASRC, which taught me that what appears as "nothing" on the tundra is actually a bounty. Dr. David Norton, a local mentor, once kneeled on the gravel isthmus to show me the "giant oaks" of the North Slope—tiny, flat-lying plants that formed a miniature canopy. This lesson in observation transformed my perspective: absence may actually be abundance.
When I learned Anna’s mother, Diana, was pregnant, my father told me I would "do the right thing." At the time, I didn't know what that meant. Holding Anna, I realized my role was to make memories possible for someone else. This realization was like light switches flipping on in my biological subsystems. I stopped being a student of the world and became a steward of hers.
In the classroom, I learned that success required listening to the community. Master teachers like Steve Culbertson held "Bring Your Gun to School Day," teaching rifle maintenance as a vital tool for survival. Paul Ongtooguk taught me about the "inverted bell curve": often, those who finished in the bottom 10% of their class became the most respected community contributors. I saw this firsthand during field trips where disruptive students like Jacob and Anthony became expert guides, navigating the n-dimensional white space of the tundra with an intuition no textbook could provide.
Sadie Brower Neakok tells an elaborate story about the home life of a man and a woman on the North Slope. A story with a recurring pattern of things that move across this arctic surface, as they disappear, and as things return, and as this motion responds to a world view of an enclosed, dome-like, self-contained, self-regenerating flow.
Nothing is more central to these communities than basketball. Coaching the Hopson Middle School Wolves, I saw the merger of Bobby Knight’s strategies with the players' cultural intuition for teamwork. In a state tournament against massive schools from the Mat-Su Valley, our small team of 200 students dismantled opponents with a 1-3-1 defense and a motion offense that mirrored the relationality of their culture. The gym became a modern qargi—a community gathering place.
Finally, there is muktuk. The first time I tasted bowhead whale skin and fat, my body resisted the oceanic pungency before finding it essential. In the deep cold, that fat fuels the bloodstream and the mind. It is not just calories; it is spirit and identity. The whale gives itself to the people. In the Iñupiaq view, life is cyclical—a child born is the return of an ancestor. As I walked the hospital halls with Anna, I wondered who had returned. Thirty years later, I am the one who returns—not as a teacher or colonizer, but as a witness and father, carrying these multiple worlds inside me.
But again, the inversion is this: the responsible stewards of the North Slope—the people best equipped to care for it—are the people who actually engage with the caribou, with the polar bears, with the bowhead whales, with the negotiation of the permafrost, frozen and unfrozen, across this undulating terrain. That stewardship doesn't come from abstract policy. It comes from living there.
Bio: David Kohen
I was born in Wisconsin, but movement shaped me more than birthplace. In my youth, I moved from Indiana to Ohio, North Carolina, Missouri, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Oregon before finding myself in Alaska, as a new father, at the beginning of my adulthood. I spent five years teaching in Barrow, Fairbanks, Eagle, and Akiachak, a small Yup'ik village near Bethel on the Kuskokwim River.
I moved from Alaska to California after those early, formative five years in Alaska. I now live in California's Delta region, where the San Joaquin, Stanislaus, and Sacramento Rivers converge and flow into the San Francisco Bay. This freshwater tidal landscape was once a vast marshland for the Ohlone; today it's a series of agriculturally rich islands, shaped by sloughs the Army Corps of Engineers dredged out.
My connection to the American West begins with distance: the physical distance between communities, the distance from conventional centers of power, and the distance required to see one's own assumptions clearly. Alaska taught me that geography is never merely a backdrop. Weather, isolation, light, labor, and the sheer scale of the land shape people. Rural life reveals how much of modern life depends on systems and conveniences most people never notice.
I have often felt outside of geographic rootedness. Moving across so many states made it hard to think of identity as belonging naturally to one place. Even after I committed myself to Alaska, I stayed attentive to the tension between arrival and belonging — between observing a place and being accepted by it. Teaching in communities as different as Barrow, Fairbanks, Eagle, and Akiachak deepened that awareness. Each place demanded attention to its own character before I could begin to understand it.
That sense of being geographically unrooted has become a source of creative exploration. I study how place enters language and how people construct consciousness when belonging is complicated or provisional or contingent. Rather than sending me searching for one fixed identity, movement has taught me to stay curious about communities and environments I encounter.
What motivates me is the possibility that creative work can make those encounters more expansive. I write to examine ways of knowing. My experience of the rural West has taught me that attention is a form of respect — it asks us to slow down, recognize what we don't know, and let a place exert itself upon us. Places are the long body of our consciousness.