I live in the town of Gustavus, on the northern part of Alaska’s southeastern “panhandle” region and right next to Glacier Bay National Park. Gustavus is a very small community—only about 400 year-round residents—spread out across a flat glacial outwash plain threaded with rivers and streams, and dotted with spruce groves, meadows, and wetlands. We watch moose and bears meander through our yards, pick strawberries and nagoonberries in the beach meadows, and ski for miles (if the snow is right) alongside the footprints of wolves and coyotes.

Known in the local indigenous language as Lingít Aaní, Northern Southeast Alaska is the ancestral home of the Tlingit people. Glacier Bay and Gustavus are the homeland of the Huna Tlingit. I’m grateful for the opportunity to live and work in their homeland, and for their millennia of stewardship.