Public Lecture in Garden and Landscape Studies with Bathsheba Demuth

This talk blends history, ecology, and personal experience to explore the long relationship between people, sled dogs, and salmon in the Yukon River watershed. In the Yukon basin, in northwestern Canada into Alaska, dogsledding and fishing have long been deeply intertwined parts of living close to the land for Indigenous peoples and rural communities. This talk looks at the stakes of a changing environment and climate—changes that could alter where we live and the animals we live with, from domestic dogs to wild salmon.

Bathsheba Demuth is a writer and environmental historian specializing in the Russian and North American Arctic, and author of Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. Currently she is writing a biography of the Yukon River watershed from the beginning of colonization to the era of climate change and has spent the last several years traveling the river by boat and dog team. She is the Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society at Brown University.

Dogsledding on the Yukon River near Eagle, Alaska, winter 2023. Photo courtesy of Bathsheba Demuth.

Alt text: Dogs pulling a sled in a wintry landscape with mountains in the background.

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