Digital video by Hanna Craig 
6 minutes, 36 seconds 

The Anchorage Museum continues to host artist- and community-led conversations, residencies, installations, and exhibitions focused on ways we care for people, place, and planet. In this collaborative environment, we invite individuals and communities to consider both the present and the future together by examining ideas and practices of healing, wellness, listening, sustainability, caretaking, and interconnectedness.

One such project is Gifts from the Land: Alaska Native Foodways, a film by Hanna Craig, who talks with Alaska Native artists and culture bearers Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich, Joni Kitmiiq Spiess, and Robert Ahmasuk, about what it means to be able to harvest and share ancestral foods. They discuss customary and modern methods of harvesting and how those seasonal activities tie them to culture.  

Erin Ggaadimits Ivalu Gingrich is a Koyukon Athabascan and Inupiaq carver, painter, and bead worker. Her family connections are to the communities of Nome, Nulato, Utqiaġvik, and Sitka. She currently lives, works, and subsists on the Denaʼina homelands of Anchorage and Cohoe, Alaska. 

Joni Kitmiiq Spiess was born in Nome and is of Inupiaq heritage. She currently lives in Anchorage where she practices and advocates for subsistence and the environment. For Speiss, maintaining a connection between people and the land honors ancestral traditions and teachings. 

Robert Ahmasuk lives in Anchorage and travels to his homelands of Kotzebue and Nome to stay connected to his heritage. Ahmasuk is Speiss’s son. 

This film was made possible, in part, with support from Cook Inlet Region, Inc.