Landscapes of Life

The concepts of physical landscapes and environment and culture are difficult ones to separate. For all of us, the environment we live in shapes our culture, and as a result, our culture must adapt to changes in that landscape, as well as changes in neighboring cultures. As Teslin Tlingit First Nation representatives Juanita Kremer and Corrine Marion Sheldon recognize in On the Yukon River, the Tlingit people have always been taught that they were an integrated part of land and water. In Living from the Land and the Sea, Paul Marks points out that the Tlingit, by living their subsistence lifestyle in accordance with the seasons and moon phases, live in intricate interdependence with the landscape. As stewards of land, it is their responsibility to sustain the food harvest and be part of management. Although these people recognize that their grandchildren have a host of career opportunities available to them in the modern world, they want them to have the option to come out and make living from river; thus, they recognize that, as scientists and stewards, they must work together to minimize changes in environment and landscape such as increasing temperatures in rivers, decreasing water levels, proliferating beaver dams, and a rising in parasite populations due to warmer waters. All these negatively affect salmon population and thus affect subsistence way of life. Salmon are not the only resource that are affected by change to landscape – migratory patterns of other animals ranging from birds to game to other fish are shifting, and the species are sometimes even disappearing altogether, because of changing landscapes and habitat.

Also important to a comprehensive view of science is an understanding of tectonic forces, which continually move and reshape the eight major plates that make up the earth’s rigid crust and more pliable lithosphere. Ultimatly, these forces reshaped the earth’s landscape from the supercontinent Pangea 200 million years ago  to the seven continents it is today. As is discussed in Tectonic Plate Movement in Alaska, our state’s location at a major boundary makes it a unique and active geological place to live. The less-dense basalt oceanic crust of the Pacific place undergoes subduction beneath the denser granite continental crust of the North American plate at a rate of about five to seven centimeters per year, causing the Aleutian Trench to widen, and the old, denser crust to subduct back into the earth’s mantle, where it will be warmed into magma and eventually recycled through volcanic mountains in the Aleutian Range and Aleutian Islands, or possibly even a mid-ocean trench somewhere else on the globe. The subduction of the Pacific plate also pushes up on the crust and lithosphere that form the Atlantic plate, causing crust-crumpling earthquakes and building mountains. Through this cyclical recycling process of plate tectonics, old geological structures are decimated and new ones rebuilt, affecting, at a slow rate, all landscape and biological and cultural life on earth. As Richard Glenn: Iñupiaq Geologist pointed out when he called ice a geologist’s “dream come true,” ice is a sometimes studied as its own geological rock formation because it undergoes these same processes as rock does in plate tectonics, but at a faster, and more observable, rate.

Rural Alaskan students face the unique challenge of becoming skilled in two sometimes differing ways of knowing, Native and Western, and then integrating what Richard Glenn: Iñupiaq Geologist  refers to as “two flashlights shining down the same path” to create one understanding of earth science.  This daunting task becomes more bearable for students when we, as teachers, endeavor to understand the interconnections between Native ways of knowing and Western scientific perspectives and then teach them to our students in an integrated manner. On their own, both ways of knowing the science of the landscape are valuable, but, as Glenn acknowledges, when processed and understood together, “the two can be the key to solving some of today’s complex problems.”  Chevak native teachers teach their community members, as well as visitors such as the teachers that came to visit, the subsistence way of life through demonstration and hands-on time to practice. Whether in a classroom or out in the landscape, allowing hands-on time for experience and practice is a valuable way to allow students to have authentic learning experiences that will become permanent parts of their developing schema. There are many resources to help teachers, especially those teachers not Native to Alaska, to connect to the powerful environment that shapes the culture of Alaska Natives and Westerners who call the incredible landscape their home. Many of them I have already mentioned, including Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies, Alaska Sea Life

Center , Pratt Museum, Alaska Seas and Rivers Curriculum, and Montery Bay Aquarium. As is demonstrated by the interactives on DiscoveryEducation.com and Mountain Maker, Earth Shaker, Tectonic Plates, Earthquakes and Volcanoes, and Rock Cycle Animation, technology can plan a vital role in allowing students to have hands-on experience with concepts they otherwise may have trouble comprehending. I used another good hands-on demonstration of the rock cycle last year, too. 

Additionally, here are some basic Power Points I developed for teaching Plate Tectonics to my 6th graders. They are part of a unit, but these are the ones that apply to this week's module. 

Wegner's Hypothesis

Seafloor Spreading

Digging the Real Dirt on Plate Tectonics
  
Plate Boundaries

Volcanoes

Rock Cycle

For all of us, Native Alaskan and Western alike, a sense of belonging and a sense of place is crucial to our development and to feeling comfortable in our own skin. In more urban settings than Alaska, where the connection to the landscape and the environment is being lost – where students literally don’t know and don’t think about where their food and shelters come from (other than the store) – a powerful part of the sense of self is lost.  Consequently, I believe it is more difficult for learning to occur because that schema of culture and environment is not there, and students cannot connect their new learning, whether it be in science or math or language arts or social studies or health, to a broader and more holistic body of background knowledge.