{"id":9463,"date":"2016-01-05T10:30:35","date_gmt":"2016-01-05T10:30:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fiualumni.com\/?p=9463"},"modified":"2018-05-08T20:58:39","modified_gmt":"2018-05-08T20:58:39","slug":"alumna-takes-on-alaskas-wild-side","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fiualumni.com\/stay-connected\/alumni-news\/newsroom\/index.php\/2016\/01\/05\/alumna-takes-on-alaskas-wild-side\/","title":{"rendered":"Alumna takes on Alaska\u2019s wild side"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I tell Meredith Marchioni that I\u2019ve just learned there may be a brown bear nearby, she immediately takes off.\u00a0Not away<\/em> from the bear but toward it. \u201cDown here?\u201d she turns to ask, heading toward a line of cottonwood trees on the banks of the Kenai River<\/a>, Alaska\u2019s world-renowned fly-fishing spot.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve met here so that Marchioni, who earned her Ph.D. in comparative sociology from FIU in 2009, can tell me about her work with Native Alaskan communities in remote villages. But first, she wants to check out the bear.<\/p>\n

Luckily (for me, anyway), the bear had already disappeared into the woods.\u00a0So, in another minute, I\u2019m able to steer Marchioni to a nearby picnic table, and we spend the next hour or so sitting alongside the rushing river and chatting about the path that led her from Miami to Alaska.<\/p>\n

\"On<\/p>\n

The journey has included tagging sharks in Mexico\u2019s Sea of Cortez\u2014part of her undergraduate research\u2014guiding sea kayak expeditions in the Gulf of Alaska and working as a deckhand on crab boats in Chesapeake Bay and on commercial fishing boats in the North Pacific. And the reason she was so interested in that bear? During one of her first seasonal stints in Alaska, she apprenticed with a brown bear hunter.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have rarely come upon a student at the Ph.D. level who is so engaged in extreme outdoor experiences,\u201d says FIU professor Dennis Wiedman, who served on Marchioni\u2019s dissertation committee. \u201cShe\u2019s an extreme outdoors person who then incorporates it into her scholarship.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marchioni first visited Alaska after completing her first year at FIU in 2004. A few years later, she got a job as a\u00a0deckhand on a sport\u00a0fishing boat based\u00a0out of Resurrection Bay on the Kenai Peninsula and started doing the initial fieldwork for her doctorate. That eventually led to a successfully defended dissertation\u00a0on \u201cAttitudes Toward The Marine Environment and Implications for Marine Resource Management in Seward, Alaska.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marchioni\u2019s real passion is ethnography, which, she explains, is a way of conducting research that employs participant observation and in-depth, semi-structured interviews with people in their own\u00a0environment. \u201cA lot of it is just learning through doing and really immersing yourself to get the most accurate perspective of the culture you\u2019re working with.\u201d<\/p>\n

Marchioni\u2019s dissertation fieldwork gave her the experience for the job she would land two years after receiving her doctorate: cultural anthropologist in the Alaska Department of Fish and Game\u2019s Division of Subsistence.\u00a0Marchioni explains that, in this case,\u00a0the word \u201csubsistence\u201d does not mean simply making ends meet. Instead, subsistence is \u201ca real unique right that people in the state have, and people really value it,\u201d she says of the long-ingrained interest in\u00a0living off the land. \u201cI\u2019ve never met a single Alaskan who doesn\u2019t harvest something for use in their home.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Alaska<\/p>\n

Her primary job has been to fly into far-flung Native Alaskan communities to conduct harvest surveys and ethnographic studies that document local subsistence practices such as hunting and fishing.\u00a0State policymakers use the data to develop management practices for natural resources that run the gamut from wild plants and bird eggs to salmon, whale, moose and bear.<\/p>\n

After four years working with the state, this past summer Marchioni launched her own consulting business.\u00a0She now works directly with communities to document native people\u2019s subsistence practices.<\/p>\n

One community\u00a0she\u2019s been\u00a0working with\u00a0is a Tlingit Indian tribe<\/a>\u00a0in southeast Alaska\u2019s Chilkat Valley. Their village in Klukwan is \u201cone of the most beautiful places on earth,\u201d says Marchioni. \u201cThe natural resources are abundant. The culture has been there a long time.\u00a0 You can see why the Tlingit people went there to begin with.\u201d<\/p>\n

One of Marchioni\u2019s key research findings about Tlingit subsistence practices is how not only the harvesting but, more importantly, the sharing of the wild plant and animal harvests underscores the significance of this unique right.\u00a0Sharing, she says, \u201creally is the crux of subsistence, because that is what is feeding people. But it\u2019s also what is keeping people interlocked and networked. And it\u2019s not just sharing with your family and your friends, it\u2019s sharing with your neighbors, it\u2019s sharing with an elder in the community. It\u2019s what connects so much of Alaska together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then she reaches her arm out in a gesture that encompasses the woods around our picnic table, the shining silver river and the fly fishermen on the riverbank. \u201cThis is subsistence,\u201d she says. \u201cEverything, the sport fishing, the commercial fishing. Anytime somebody goes out to get fish to bring home for their freezer, it\u2019s subsistence.\u201d<\/p>\n

And I can tell with that one gesture that Meredith Marchioni is not simply a participant observer\u00a0of what some might consider Alaska\u2019s exotic folkways \u2013 this is her life.\u00a0Sometimes when she\u2019s heading back to Klukwan to conduct more research, as the small\u00a0plane crosses over the mountains into the Chilkat Valley, she says, \u201cI feel like I\u2019m flying home.\u201d<\/p>\n

via FIU News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I tell Meredith Marchioni that I\u2019ve just learned there may be a brown bear nearby, she immediately takes off.\u00a0Not away from the bear but toward it. \u201cDown here?\u201d she turns to ask, heading toward a line of cottonwood trees on the banks of the Kenai River, Alaska\u2019s world-renowned fly-fishing spot. We\u2019ve met here so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":9464,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[369],"tags":[381],"class_list":["post-9463","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni-spotlight","tag-newsletter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fiualumni.com\/stay-connected\/alumni-news\/newsroom\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9463"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fiualumni.com\/stay-connected\/alumni-news\/newsroom\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fiualumni.com\/stay-connected\/alumni-news\/newsroom\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fiualumni.com\/stay-connected\/alumni-news\/newsroom\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fiualumni.com\/stay-connected\/alumni-news\/newsroom\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9463"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fiualumni.com\/stay-connected\/alumni-news\/newsroom\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9463\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15099,"href":"https:\/\/fiualumni.com\/stay-connected\/alumni-news\/newsroom\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9463\/revisions\/15099"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fiualumni.com\/stay-connected\/alumni-news\/newsroom\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fiualumni.com\/stay-connected\/alumni-news\/newsroom\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9463"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fiualumni.com\/stay-connected\/alumni-news\/newsroom\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9463"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fiualumni.com\/stay-connected\/alumni-news\/newsroom\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9463"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}