Episode 9: Museums & Media

To explore the how museums and media influence the Native narrative, we interview Patuk Glenn, Melissa Shaginoff, and Jacqui Igluguq Lambert.

Patuk Glenn is a Project Manager for the Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, Department of Community Economic Development (CED). She has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Rural Development from the University of Alaska Fairbanks and is currently pursuing her Master’s Degree in Mass Communications from South Dakota State University. Much of Patuk’s work in CED is capacity building for shareholders within the 8 Arctic communities of the North Slope Borough. The projects she has managed vary from technology camps to arts festivals, including cultural documentaries and tourism development. Patuk works to empower communities at the grass roots level.

Melissa Shaginoff is part of the Udzisyu (caribou) and Cui Ui Ticutta (fish-eater) clans from

Nay'dini'aa Na Kayax (the log over the river or Chickaloon Village). She grew up on the southern coast of Alaska where she learned the lifeways of her cousins the Dena’ina peoples. Shaginoff is currently the Curator of Contemporary Indigenous Art and Culture at the Anchorage Museum. As both an Artist and Curator her work revolves around identity and representation. Working within institutions Shaginoff sees her work as an act of making space. Space for others, space for change and space to be present. She has participated in the Sheldon Jackson Museum Artist Residency in Sitka, Alaska as well as the Island Mountain Arts Toni Onley Painting Residency in Wells, British Columbia. Shaginoff has work collected by the Institute of American Indian Arts, the Palmer Museum, and the Pratt Museum. Check out her website here: https://www.mshaginoff.com/

Jacqui Lambert is Inupiaq from Kotzebue with lineage in Kiana and Noorvik as well. She self-publishes a quarterly print and online magazine called The Qargizine which showcases rural and Alaska Native expressions through art, photography and stories. She has been living in Anchorage for a little over two years. Jacqui's interest in the Eskimo vs. Inuit debate sprouted from her travels across the circumpolar Arctic, where she's visited communities just like ours in Russia, Canada and Greenland. Her magazine and artwork can be accessed here.