Ravenna Koenig

On Tuesday, 10 women were inducted into the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame. One of them was Marie Adams Carroll from Utqiaġvik, who stepped into a leadership role as a young woman on the North Slope during a time of crisis — when subsistence activities were threatened — and has been involved in public life ever since.

If you look at the stories being told in the world, and you don’t see your perspective reflected in those stories, what do you do? For one young Iñupiaq woman, the answer to that question was: make a podcast.

In the latest chapter of an ongoing debate over the status of Arctic ringed seals, the state of Alaska has petitioned the federal government to take them off the list of threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.

“I saw it as: I’m in a cyclic industry,” said Sydney Deering, who will be graduating this year with a B.S. in petroleum engineering. “I’m coming in in the trough. Hopefully it’s only up from here.”

In public comments made available on a federal site, most North Slope institutions didn’t express outright opposition to the plan. But they did voice concern for subsistence resources and hunters’ continued access to them.

A proposal by Alaska Gov. Mike Dunleavy would strip the North Slope Borough of its power to collect nearly $400 million in property taxes from oil companies each year. The idea gets at a longstanding question: How much money from oil should stay in the North Slope, where it’s pumped from the ground?

The first legally-binding, multilateral agreement to prevent commercial fishing in the central Arctic Ocean was signed last year. A key part of that agreement is collaboration on scientific research, which could underpin a management plan later.

In Utqiaġvik, there’s still one dog team left, and their musher has been getting around the tundra by dogsled for more than 30 years.

ASRC president and CEO Rex Rock Sr. said: “Trying to balance a state budget on the backs of the Iñupiat people across the Arctic Slope is a wrongsided attack on our region.”

“Near-deaths and freezing, running out of gas are some of the issues surrounding being able to go between communities,” said Gordon Brower, director of the North Slope Borough’s Planning and Community Services Department.