Over 250 years ago, a young Tlingit woman called to a glacier that displaced the Xunaa Tlingit and beckoned to the U.S. National Park Service. Today, in the midst of climate change, Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve is once again undergoing a huge transformation; glaciers are disappearing and the Xunaa Tlingit are back. In a historic collaboration, a tribal house, Xunaa Shuka Hit, was built in 2016, and has the potential to transform people, place and thought, that inform climate change solutions. Based on my positionality as Tlingit interpreter of Xunaa Shuka Hit and park ranger, my research aims to analyze the collaboration from my perspective in terms science and Tlingit art, stories, and names that reveal emergent knowledges and blur lines of division. New glacier stories and locations for interpretive opportunities emerge from putting into conversation key materials and moments such as the bones of a whale and the interior screen of the Xunaa Shuka Hit, seagull eggs and park brochure maps, and an unlikely relationship between Tlingit elder and park ranger that enliven concepts of listening, mobility, and kinship.
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