Hi, my English/Norwegian name is Kaare (pronounced “Cory”) Erickson, and my Inupiaq (Indigenous) name is Sikuaq. I grew up in several villages in northwest Alaska, including Unalakleet, Savoonga and Saint Michael. I’ve never lived anywhere except Alaska. My dad is a commercial fisherman and a school teacher, so we moved from village to village. My mom was raised way up in Utqiaġvik, Alaska and she traveled from Utqiaġvik to Unalakleet to go to high school in the 1980s, which is where she met my dad.
After I graduated high school in 2003, I moved from a small village to a bigger town in Alaska to go to college. I’ve earned my Bachelors and Master’s degrees in Anthropology at the University of Alaska in Anchorage. For the past several years, I have worked in Utqiaġvik, Alaska, which is the northernmost point in the United States. This place has been home to the Inupiat Eskimo peoples for several thousand years. Utqiaġvik has also been a popular place for scientists from universities across the United States to conduct Arctic research for many decades.
My job as a “Science Liaison” is to help Arctic scientists work with Indigenous communities in the Arctic. The reason this is important is because scientists use Indigenous communities as places to fly into and to base their research from.
