Member Spotlight and Guest post: Julianne Warren
The following is a guest blog post from one of our council members, Julianne Warren (she/her, unsettling settler), about the release of her new book and how her work with FCAC and Defend the Sacred sparked the creation of the book.
Julianne is a writer, educator, and advocate with a Ph.D. in wildlife ecology and an M.F.A. in creative writing. She listens for how land and story meet. Julianne is author of "Alaska" Is Not a Blank Space: Unsettling Aldo Leopold's Odyssey (Cambridge University Press, 2025) and Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey: Rediscovering the Author of A Sand County Almanac (2nd ed., Island Press, 2016). More of her works appear in edited volumes and magazines, most recently in Arcadia and Chapter House Journal.
Julianne lives gratefully in lower Tanana Dene Lands in Fairbanks, Alaska.
I first served as an FCAC council member and Keep It In the Ground! co-facilitator in 2017-2019. In February 2019, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management held a public hearing on their Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain Oil and Gas Leasing Draft Environmental Impact Statement. The coastal plain referenced is, for Gwich’in, across time immemorial—Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit (The Sacred Place Where Life Begins). It is the calving grounds of vadzaih (the Porcupine Caribou Herd). As I cite in my new book, I often heard Bernadette Demientieff—serving as director of the Gwich’in Steering Committee—publicly explain: “We [Gwich’in] believe that we each have a piece of caribou in our heart and the caribou have a piece of us in their heart.” There was “a vow,” as she put it in a 2019 statement, “that we would always take care of each other.”
What occurred at the February hearing points to why I wrote“Alaska” Is Not a Blank Space. I listened to the many penetrating public comments in a series of Alaska Native persons defending these sacred lands. One such comment on record was by Caroline Tritt-Frank of Vashraii K’ǫǫ (Arctic Village). Tritt-Frank, whom I quote in the following passage, is a dedicated language educator whose first language is Gwich’in:
“I think if they [oil and gas extractors] interfere with the caribou,” she explained, “that will destroy their [the children’s] language, their way of talking because everything that they use on caribou is used in Gwich’in. And so every single piece of the caribou has a Gwich’in name.” And this is what is passed on by elders who “usually speak about hunting.” “So,” she said, “I think the language is a major concern for me and the caribou that the elders live on.”
I continue this passage, reflecting:
“As I listened closely to the Alaska Native persons at this BLM hearing–I understood that they would never give up courageously defending something that did not translate into ‘subsistence.’ It did not sound to me like ‘natural resources’ nor defenses of Leopoldian ‘wilderness,’ either….”
Aldo Leopold is best known as the author of the 1949 best-seller A Sand County Almanac. His ideas influenced key strategists envisioning the Arctic Refuge and retain sway in conservation arenas in Alaska, throughout the U.S., and globally. In a previous book, I had detailed the development of Leopold’s ethical-ecological concept of “land health.” I had done so because I love both storytelling and the land, the same reasons I continue both to write and serve within FCAC now.
The land health concept of Leopold was exemplified by his wilderness area ideas and other well-meaning narratives, which, however—as also enacted—violently exclude people not privileged by dominating norms. His settler-colonialist perspectives particularly oppress those also racialized as non-white, particularly Indigenous Peoples. I delve into these troubles in “Alaska” Is Not a Blank Space. This means also talking about how, in my cultural ancestor’s footsteps, I continued to uncritically manifest such harmful conceits in my own work.
As this book’s title points to, for instance, Leopold referred to “Alaska” as a “blank place on the map,” albeit “the most valuable part” for those not lacking “imagination.” Whereas, within, I now recognize how a settler-colonialist imagination is devoid, for instance, of at least twenty Indigenous languages belonging within the political bounds of so-called “Alaska.” It is devoid of understanding how, for so long, Indigenous Peoples have mapped arctic geographies, including caribou bodies. A settler imagination also does not contain the experiences of Neets’aii Gwich’in elder, doctor and reverend Gilbert Trimble who has described Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit as “the land that holds the bones of thousands of generations of my ancestors.”
Through working with FCAC, in coalition, my own uninformed imagination began populating with Gwich’in, Iñupiat, and many more Indigenous histories, perspectives, words, and persons formerly unfamiliar to me. With not knowing as part of a deepening practice, I continued learning how to listen to many Alaska Native persons—such as at the February 2019 hearing and in advocacy and decolonization trainings with the Gwich’in Steering Committee and Native Movement. I prioritized learning beyond Leopold and the associated dominating canon in which I had been educated. Perhaps readers, too, will wish to connect with many still often underheard writers and experts cited in “Alaska” Is Not a Blank Space, on their own pathways.
My ongoing educational journey has brought me into multiple actionable reflections, both painful and exciting, on which I expand in this volume. Another example of an unsettling realization was that Leopoldian conservation, it turns out, has things in common with mining industries. For starters, the geographies claimed as “Alaska” were never ceded to either Russia or the U.S. by their sovereign Indigenous Peoples. Measures protecting land from human beings versus ruinously extracting from it, crucially, are in opposition. I continue, ardently, to fight against the latter. At the same time, in sharing cultural roots, Leopoldian conservation and “natural resource”-insatiability remain two sides of the same racist-colonialist coin. Both sides of that coin are, at the very least, complicit in thefts of land from Indigenous Nations and in systemic oppression with genocidal consequences. Notably, overshadowing Indigenous histories with a racist settler-colonialist narrative and modeling land ethics and non-consensual policy processes that fail to respect Indigenous sovereignty, lifeways, and expertise, also result in more on-the-ground consequences.
Of course it remains crucial to surface differences between land protection and rapacious demolition. Less recognized has been the need to listen for crucial differences between settler-colonialist conservationist and many Indigenous worldviews. I also reflect, in this book, on this ethical and prudential calling for those wishing to avoid re-inscribing genocidal dominance that suppresses, obstructs, and/or appropriates Indigenous bodies, ethics, scientific and boundary-spanning knowledges, and intergenerational ecologies. I consider, too, how facing deep differences between Leopoldian scientific-ethical ideals and many Indigenous ecological-ethical systems supports possibilities of reparative and equitably respectful relations. This could help stabilize coalitions crucial to meeting the shared needs of all—clean, habitable lands, waters, climate, and planet. Ongoing coalition-building in Fairbanks, then, sounds exciting to me with the potential for unsettled, re-populated, restructured, and released imaginations and the further actions they may engender.
Coming full circle, I have tried to write this book “in a good way,” taking to heart, again, advice I often heard Demientieff speak from her elders. That is, I “talk back”—to both my cultural ancestor, Leopold, and my own past self—with regard and care, to surface still-harmful narratives, to support decolonization, defined in a Native Movement workshop as:
The conscious—intelligent, calculated, and active—unlearning and resistance to the forces of colonization that perpetuate the subjugation and exploitation of our minds, bodies, and lands. And it is engaged for the ultimate purpose of overturning the colonial structure and realizing Indigenous liberation.
I unlearn wilderness ideology yet keep returning to land, the conditions for health. I learn of Gwich’in liberation inseparable from that of vadzaih, from Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit, from everyone. I learn words taught to climate carers by a founding FCAC Council Member, Princess Daazhraii Johnson, who is Neets’aii Gwich’in—“Shalak naii” (“all my relations”).
