Estonian Fulbright winner talks about UAA and her exploration of mask-making

Anna Mossolova earned her B.A. and M.A. degrees in semiotics and culture studies from the University of Tartu, Estonia. After graduating from her “relatively theoretical” master’s program, she decided to change her disciplinary approach and methods. “I wanted to focus more on the material culture of the past and its interpretations and meanings for people nowadays,” she said. So, in 2013, Mossolova started her Ph.D. in cultural anthropology to study the past and present of mask making in Southwest Alaska. Here, she talks about the Fulbright program that brought her to Alaska, her fascination with Alaska Native culture and the technology she learned at UAA that will help her in the future.

Recording lived history, at a Hatcher Pass gold mine

The history of industry has long fascinated UAA Professor Paul White, who earned master’s degrees in historical and industrial archaeology in New Zealand and the United States before receiving his Ph.D. in anthropology from Brown University.

Now, the anthropology professor and five of his students are immersed in a field class high above the ruins of Independence Mine in spectacular Hatcher Pass, at a Depression-era compound known as Gold Cord Mine. They’ve spent two weeks there so far, meticulously measuring walls and recording every feature and component of the mine’s mill. In their off time, they live in a structure that had been the mine’s original cookhouse and administrative quarters.

A linguistic look at Anchorage and community

“My first step, when one starts to roll now, is to open the door. It’s much easier to prop one shut if you need to later than it is to try to pull on it and it’s stuck.” — a research subject discusses one of her recollections of the Great Alaska Earthquake of 1964. UAA student Yvette Pype interviewed the woman as part of a linguistics research project she devised with guidance from Dr. Clare Dannenberg, in which Pype talked with a dozen subjects from Anchorage about their recollections of the quake and 9-11. Pype will present her findings April 15 during the UAA Undergraduate Research and Discovery Symposium. Project posters will be displayed at the UAA/APU Consortium Library from April 11-14. We recently spoke with Pype and Dannenberg about their work.

Bringing it all back home: Learning a new way to highlight Alaska Native culture

"When I carried the object out of its place no one interfered, but if only one of the true warriors of that clan had been alive the removal of it would never have been possible. I took it in the presence of aged women, the only survivors in the house where the old object was kept, and they could do nothing more than weep when the once highly esteemed object was being taken away to its last resting place.”

Louis Shotridge, a Tlingit man from Klukwan who became a University of Pennsylvania Museum curator 100 years ago, explained in a journal entry how he took a shark helmet from his own clan—the “only one of its kind”—after buying it from a Kaagwaantaan clan member for $350 in 1929.