Coffee and Quaq: An Alaskan journalist’s podcast
It’s 8:30 a.m. in Alaska and Alice Qannik Glenn is spending her Friday morning speaking to students over Zoom 4,000 miles away in Elon, North Carolina.
Right now, Glenn is currently residing in Anchorage, Alaska, 700 miles north of the small community where she is originally from.
“I was born and raised in Utqiagvik,” Glenn says. “Which is the northernmost city in the United States.”
Glenn tends to tell people she is from Utqiagvik, but what she really means is she’s technically from anywhere above the Brooks Range in northern Alaska—the highest mountain range within the Arctic Circle.
“My ancestors were and are seasonal nomadic people,” she explains. Her people would go towards the ocean to hunt and fish during some seasons and then return inland for the other seasons.
Today, as a result of forced assimilation and colonization of the Arctic, most of Glenn’s people have settled into their own hub villages.
“I share that story because it’s not just a dot on the map for me,” explains Glenn. “This is my hometown, these are my people; it’s important to me.”
After college and moving back to Alaska, Glenn was inspired by people, place, and culture, and disappointment had been growing in her regarding the representation of Alaskan native media, she says.
“It made sense when I was at school to not be included in these larger discussions because I was in Florida,” she tells us. “But to come back home and still see a lack of representation in the media kind of bugged me.”
From Glenn’s ongoing frustration grew an idea—to start her own podcast.
Glenn’s own podcast, Coffee and Quaq, explores and celebrates contemporary Native life in Urban Alaska, with topics ranging from stories of Alaskan natives, truths of living in Alaska, discussions of native foods, and art and beauty standards.
“We also want to reach a larger audience that has no idea about Utqiagvik, or the Arctic circle in general,” Glenn shares.
In her podcast, Glenn sticks with her main goal of representing her people and herself as well as possible, as she feels a responsibility to show her community members off in a positive way.
“All of my community members are going to listen to the podcast episode, they’re going to read the story,” Glenn says. “We have to represent Utqiagvik people as well as we can, and I need to represent myself as well as I can.”
Coming back to Alaska after college with a new sense of the world and her surroundings made Glenn ask questions she would have never asked growing up. Things like Alaska’s economy and resources were something she had to become educated on in order to spread awareness through her podcast.
“I just didn’t know the basic building blocks of how to create a community,” Glenn says.
“We live in one of the harshest climates in the world, the cost of living is so high,” Glenn explains in regard to Alaska’s resource development. “No one else is going to take care of us.”
Glenn shares the startling prices of living in Alaska, “Milk is $11 a gallon.”
“We have to be hunting and whaling, but we also need to be partaking in the cash economy,” she explains, giving the example of buying gasoline for snowmobiles in order to go hunting.
Glenn is aware that the oil and gas industry in Alaska is a necessary and important part of Alaska’s economy and their own personal survival.
“It’s a rough and different kind of life,” says Glenn. “The state is not going to take care of us, so we have to find ways to take care of ourselves.”
The philosophical discussion of whether it’s right or wrong, Glenn shares, is only possible for her to take part in because she was afforded the amenities of a warm home and freshwater growing up.
“It’s obviously a nonrenewable resource, so it’s going to run out,” she says. “But we’re also living in a 2021 world, we have to do what we can in order to not just survive, but to thrive.”
Click here to learn more and listen to Glenn’s podcast Coffee and Quaq.