Anaktuvuk Pass goes to town

Voilà longtemps que d’une manière ou d’une autre, les Nunamiut d’Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska, vont en ville et ce, avant même qu’ils n’aient abandonné, en 1949-1950, leur vie de nomades pour se sédentariser dans un village à 100 milles de la route la plus proche et à 250 milles de Fairbanks. Des années avant qu’ils ne mettent pied en ville, quelques-uns avait déjà des comptes créditeurs à la Northern Commercial Company. Au milieu des années cinquante, quelques hommes du village furent recrutés pour participer à des expériences d’adaptation au froid menées par le Ladd AFB dans les environs de Fairbanks. Ce fut leur premier vol en avion et leur première expérience de la vie citadine. Les urgences médicales —une épidémie de grippe, la tuberculose et d’autres maladies demandant soins médicaux— constituaient, dans les années cinquante, l’autre ticket pour la ville, et dans ce cas, il fallait habituellement attendre l’arrivée du vol mensuel pour pouvoir être transporté. Mais dès les années soixante, les services médicaux pour autochtones firent en sorte que les femmes d’Anaktuvuk venaient en ville pour accoucher à l’hôpital. Aujourd’hui, Fairbanks n’est pas seulement un cabinet médical, c’est aussi un centre commercial et un supermarché pour les villages isolés comme Anaktuvuk Pass. C’est encore beaucoup d’autres choses pour les Nunamiut —le site des jeux olympiques annuels eskimos-indiens, le festival des arts autochtones de l’Université d’Alaska à Fairbanks et la foire estivale de la vallée de la Tanana (Tanana Valley Fair). C’est la deuxième avenue avec sa succession de bars défraîchis. Cet article examine plus de 50 ans de voyages en ville, l’importance de la «ville» dans la vie des villageois et les associations variées que Fairbanks représente pour les Nunamiut.The Nunamiut of Anaktuvuk Pass, Alaska have been going to town, one way or another, even before they relinquished their nomadic life in 1949-1950 to become settled in a village 100 miles from the nearest road and 250 miles from Fairbanks. Some years before they ever set foot in town, a few had credit accounts at the city’s Northern Commercial Company. In the mid-1950s a few village men were recruited as human subjects for cold adaptation experiments carried out at Ladd AFB outside of Fairbanks. This was their first plane ride and their first taste of city life. Medical emergencies—a flu epidemic, TB, and other illnesses that demanded medical treatment were the other ticket to Fairbanks in the 1950s, and then one typically had to wait to be flown out until the monthly mail plane came in. But by the 1960s the Native health care system saw to it that Anaktuvuk women came to town to deliver their babies in the hospital. Today Fairbanks is not only the doctor’s office but also the shopping mall and supermarket for outlying villages like Anaktuvuk Pass. It is many other things as well to the Nunamiut—site of the annual World Eskimo-Indian Olympics, the University of Alaska’s annual Festival of Native Arts, and the summer Tanana Valley Fair. It is Second Avenue with its string of dingy bars. This paper looks at more than 50 years of going to town, the significance of “town” in villagers’ lives, and the varied associations Fairbanks holds for the Nunamiut

99721: The Place of Many Caribou Droppings

Article

Instrument development, data collection, and characteristics of practices, staff, and measures in the Improving Quality of Care in Diabetes (iQuaD) Study

Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Convalescent plasma in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 (RECOVERY): a randomised controlled, open-label, platform trial

SummaryBackground Azithromycin has been proposed as a treatment for COVID-19 on the basis of its immunomodulatoryactions. We aimed to evaluate the safety and efficacy of azithromycin in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19.Methods In this randomised, controlled, open-label, adaptive platform trial (Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19Therapy [RECOVERY]), several possible treatments were compared with usual care in patients admitted to hospitalwith COVID-19 in the UK. The trial is underway at 176 hospitals in the UK. Eligible and consenting patients wererandomly allocated to either usual standard of care alone or usual standard of care plus azithromycin 500 mg once perday by mouth or intravenously for 10 days or until discharge (or allocation to one of the other RECOVERY treatmentgroups). Patients were assigned via web-based simple (unstratified) randomisation with allocation concealment andwere twice as likely to be randomly assigned to usual care than to any of the active treatment groups. Participants andlocal study staff were not masked to the allocated treatment, but all others involved in the trial were masked to theoutcome data during the trial. The primary outcome was 28-day all-cause mortality, assessed in the intention-to-treatpopulation. The trial is registered with ISRCTN, 50189673, and ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT04381936.Findings Between April 7 and Nov 27, 2020, of 16 442 patients enrolled in the RECOVERY trial, 9433 (57%) wereeligible and 7763 were included in the assessment of azithromycin. The mean age of these study participants was65·3 years (SD 15·7) and approximately a third were women (2944 [38%] of 7763). 2582 patients were randomlyallocated to receive azithromycin and 5181 patients were randomly allocated to usual care alone. Overall,561 (22%) patients allocated to azithromycin and 1162 (22%) patients allocated to usual care died within 28 days(rate ratio 0·97, 95% CI 0·87–1·07; p=0·50). No significant difference was seen in duration of hospital stay (median10 days [IQR 5 to >28] vs 11 days [5 to >28]) or the proportion of patients discharged from hospital alive within 28 days(rate ratio 1·04, 95% CI 0·98–1·10; p=0·19). Among those not on invasive mechanical ventilation at baseline, nosignificant difference was seen in the proportion meeting the composite endpoint of invasive mechanical ventilationor death (risk ratio 0·95, 95% CI 0·87–1·03; p=0·24).Interpretation In patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19, azithromycin did not improve survival or otherprespecified clinical outcomes. Azithromycin use in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 should be restrictedto patients in whom there is a clear antimicrobial indication

Upside Down : Seasons Among the Nunamiut

By Margaret B. Blackman [College at Brockport emeritus].In the roadless Brooks Range Mountains of northern Alaska sits Anaktuvuk Pass, a small, tightly knit Nunamiut Eskimo village. Formerly nomadic hunters of caribou, the Nunamiut of Anaktuvuk now find their destiny tied to that of Alaska’s oil-rich North Slope, their lives suddenly subject to a century’s worth of innovations, from electricity and bush planes to snow machines and the Internet. Anthropologist Margaret B. Blackman has been doing summer fieldwork among the Nunamiut over a span of almost twenty years, an experience richly and movingly recounted in this book.A vivid description of the people and the life of Anaktuvuk Pass, the essays in Upside Down are also an absorbing meditation on the changes that Blackman herself underwent during her time there, most wrenchingly the illness of her husband, a fellow anthropologist, and the breakup of their marriage. Throughout, Blackman reflects in unexpected and enlightening ways on the work of anthropology and the perspective of an anthropologist evermore invested in the lives of her subjects. Whether commenting on the effect of this place and its people on her personal life or describing the impact of “progress” on the Nunamiut—the CB radio, weekend nomadism, tourism, the Information Superhighway — her essays offer a unique and deeply evocative picture of an at once disappearing and evolving world.https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/bookshelf/1149/thumbnail.jp

During My Time: Florence Edenshaw Davidson, a Haida Woman

By Margaret B. Blackman [College at Brockport emeritus]. This book is the first life history of a Northwest Coast Indian woman. Florence Davidson, daughter of noted Haida carver and chief Charles Edenshaw, was born in 1896. As one of the few living Haida elders knowledgeable bout the culture of a bygone era, she was a fragile link with the past. Living in Masset on the Queen Charlotte Islands, some fifty miles off the northwest coast of British Columbia, Florence Davidson grew up in an era of dramatic change for her people. On of the last Haida women to undergo the traditional puberty seclusion and an arranged marriage, she followed patterns in her life typical of women of her generation. Florence\u27s narrative - edited by Professor Blackman from more than fifty hours of tape recordings - speaks of girlhood, of learning female roles, of the power and authority available to Haida women, of the experiences of menopause and widowhood. Blackman juxtaposes comments made by early observes of the Haida, government agents, and missionaries, with appropriate portions of the life history narrative, to portray a culture neither traditionally Haida nor fully Canadian, a culture adapting to Christianity and the imposition of Canadian laws. Margaret Blackman not only preserves Florence Davidson\u27s memories of Haida ways, but with her own analysis of Davidson\u27s life, adds significantly to the literature on the role of women in cross-cultural perspective. The book makes an important contribution to Northwest Coast history and culture, to the study of culture change, to fieldwork methodology, and to women\u27s studies. - Publisher descriptionhttps://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/bookshelf/1012/thumbnail.jp