For POW Creative Alliance member Brennan Lagasse, protecting the Arctic is about more than just safeguarding the landscape from fossil fuel development and drilling. It’s about preserving the culture and way of life of its human inhabitants. Lagasse is a sustainability professor at UNR at Lake Tahoe (formerly Sierra Nevada College), a writer and a backcountry ski guide, and centered his career around advocating for the climate and the people affected by climate change the most.
This commitment earned him an invitation on behalf of Indigenous Neets’aii Gwich’in Elder Sarah James to Arctic Village, Alaska, located at the foot of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Lagasse started taking Sierra Nevada College students along with him on trips to the village in 2014. While there, Lagasse and students meet with Gwichʼin elders to learn about their heritage, way of life and how they can help preserve Gwich’in culture by protecting the land they live on from climate change and fossil fuel development.
“It’s one thing to go to the Arctic Refuge and experience it. You’ll never be the same, in a good way,” said Lagasse. “But it’s another thing to be invited by the people that live there, who have their ancestry there since time immemorial, which is where my invitation lies.”
This past summer, Lagasse was invited back to the Refuge and brought along fellow POW Creative Alliance member, Ming Poon. This time the trip had the goal of spreading the community’s stories far and wide to increase awareness and inspire the masses to take action and permanently protect the Arctic Refuge.
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