This talk blends history, ecology, and personal experience to explore the long relationship between people, sled dogs, and salmon along the Yukon River watershed in Alaska and western Canada. As dogsledding and fishing have long been deeply intertwined parts of living close to the land, 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 and the rivers that are their home.

Bathsheba Demuth is the Dean’s Associate Professor of History and Environment and Society, and the Director of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Initiative at Brown University. Author of the award-winning Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Straight (2019), she is an environmental historian, specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. From the archive to the dog sled, she is interested in the how the histories of people, ideas, places, and non-human species intersect.